Spiral

The whole journey over, he’d been wondering why. They’d grabbed a lieutenant and shipped him across the globe. Now he was starting to understand. At Porton, they’d spent months preparing for what they believed inevitable, the use of germ weapons by the Nazis. The Germans had been the first to use poison gas on a large scale in World War I-few at Porton doubted that this time around, the Nazis would use germs. They’d been wrong. It was the Japanese.

LIAM’S POINT OF CONTACT ON THE USS NORTH DAKOTA WAS a gangly major named Andy Scilla. He was a microbiologist from Mississippi who’d trained at Harvard but kept his accent. Scilla was from Camp Detrick in Maryland, the American center of chemical and germ warfare, their equivalent of Porton Down. “I’ll be your date while you’re here,” he said, his drawl at first difficult for Liam to follow. But he got used to it, got to like it. It reminded him of some of the boggers back home.

Liam spent his first hour with Scilla in a small cabin three doors down from the communications room. Here, Scilla said, they had copies of the medical records of the men on the infected ship, the USS Vanguard, along with a series of files they’d brought from Tokyo, giving background on what was happening. They were stored in a series of metal lockers to keep out the ever-present saltwater. Scilla gave Liam the chain of events: “Five days ago, the ship those men came from, the USS Vanguard, picked up a distress call from the Japanese sub out there, the I-17. No one could figure it out. Hell, it’s been six months since the end of the war. Where’s a Jap sub been hiding all that time?

“Once the Vanguard arrived, they found the I-17 dead in the water. They tried to establish radio contact, but they got zip. Absolutely nothing. But they could see a single Japanese soldier on the bow of the sub. Just sitting there. They hollered at him, but he didn’t move a muscle. So they sent a team to board.

“What they found was a nightmare. The entire crew, maybe a hundred men, sliced open like gutted fish. From the looks of it, they had committed hara-kiri en masse. All except that one Japanese soldier, alone on the bow of the sub. He looked catatonic, cross-legged, back straight, staring forward like a statue. The leader of the boarding crew, a chief petty officer named Maddox, thought he was in traumatic shock. But that wasn’t it. Not at all. He waited until they were practically next to him. Then he sliced himself open, shoved a grenade in his belly, and blew himself to bits.”

“Suicide?” Liam asked. The Japanese were cultish about their honor and death-surrender was a mortal sin.

“Not exactly. That took a while to figure out. Why blow yourself to bits right when the soldiers get there? If he was a kamikaze, he would’ve attacked, thrown the grenade at the boarding crew. Plus, they had plenty of weapons below, plenty of guns, lots of ammo. He could have killed quite a few of our men.

“No one really got it worked out for about twelve hours. The key was the boarding crew, the sailors that had been there when the bastard blew himself to bits. The leader, Maddox, took a pretty good whack to the head. He woke up two hours later in the Vanguard’s sick bay, asking about his men. Everyone was more or less fine. But eight hours later, in the bed next to Maddox, Smithson begins to display unusual symptoms. A depressed temperature, an unpleasant smell about him. An hour later, Smithson is scratching wildly at his skin and has to be physically restrained. He is incoherent, raving. Twenty hours later, Maddox is no better. He is certain that iron-skinned snakes are living in his belly, feeding on his intestines. From these two, it spread throughout the ship.”

Liam understood. “The Jap was a vector. A germ bomb.”

“Got it.”

“And the rest of the boarding crew?”

“Maddox is dead. He got loose, grabbed a knife, and stabbed himself to death. Just kept shoving it in his gut again and again until he bled out. The doc on the Vanguard counted twenty-two separate entrance wounds. Smithson’s still alive, but he bit off his own tongue. Spit it out on the floor in front of him, laughing madly the whole time. Reports say it’s a complete nightmare over there. A day or two after infection, you begin to completely lose it. Go violently crazy. One guy seemed perfectly normal until he locked himself in the galley with four sailors, shot them in the guts, then stomped on their skulls until a few others broke in and put a bullet in him. Everyone is paranoid. As soon as you show any symptoms, they tie you down. They ran out of beds and are roping men to their bunks, to piping on the walls, everything.”

“Holy Christ. How many are infected?”

“One hundred eighty-eight,” Scilla said. “Of those, thirty-two have died. And they’re losing a few more each hour.”

“Clinical symptoms?”

“Their temperatures run a couple of degrees low.”

“And their smell? You said there was an odor?”

“Yes. Sour.”

“Ammonia? Like urine?”

“That’s it.”