Spiral

“I’ll tell you what it sounds like. It sounds like mycotoxin poisoning,” Connor said. “Maybe Claviceps purpurea. Ergot. Or one of the species of Fusarium.”

Scilla nodded. “That’s why we brought you here. We’re all germ people. Bacterial. But we got nobody with a background in fungi, so we called Porton. And they sent you.”

“Anything else? Other physical signs?”

“A few of the men have spiral growths in their mouths.”

“A pale white? Like candy floss? Cotton candy?”

“That’s just the way they described it.”

“How many are still symptom-free?”

“Less than forty now.”

Liam tried to take it all in. He had never heard of virulence like this. The entire ship in four days?

Scilla grabbed a thick manila folder and dropped it on the table. The cover said TOP SECRET. “Read this. I’ll be in the comm room when you’re done.”

LIAM READ.

Inside the folder was a twelve-page report issued by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and under the signature of a Major General William N. Porter. The title was simple: Summary of the Testimony of Hitoshi Kitano, Unit 731. It was dated March 2, 1946. Liam had never heard of Hitoshi Kitano, but he’d heard rumors of Unit 731.

The report began with a short bio on Kitano. He was an officer in the Kwantung Army, the Japanese occupying force in north China. He was twenty-one years old. His uncle was a well-known lieutenant colonel, killed in the Philippines in 1944. His mother and father were killed in the atomic bomb explosion at Nagasaki. For the last two years of the war, Kitano was assigned to a biological weapons unit called Unit 731, in Harbin, China, a few hundred miles north of Peking, returning to Japan in the final days of the war. He’d been picked up by the British in Hirado, not far from Nagasaki.

From there, the report turned to Kitano’s accounts of Unit 731. The official title of Unit 731 was the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, but its true mission was germ warfare. According to Kitano’s account, Unit 731 was formed in the mid-1930s, the brainchild of a Japanese general named Shiro Ishii. He was unusually brash and aggressive by Japanese standards but undeniably brilliant, convincing key military officials that Japanese victory could be assured only by the development of new biological weapons.

Unit 731 grew into an enormous operation, Japan’s version of the Manhattan Project, researching and testing every aspect of biological weaponry. Thousands of scientists, one hundred and fifty buildings, contained within a perimeter of six kilometers, all devoted to the perfection and refinement of biological weapons. They had collected pathogens from all over the world, tested them, refined them, coaxed out the deadliest strains. It dwarfed the efforts by the British at Porton Down and by the Americans at Camp Detrick.

They also ran field tests on the most promising weapons, according to Kitano. In Baoshan, in southern China, they tested “maggot bombs.” These were ceramic containers dropped from planes that shattered on impact, spreading a gelatin emulsion filled with cholera bacteria and living flies. The flies survived the fall because of the gelatin, and then carried the cholera, landing on humans, animals, latrines, and cooking instruments, spreading the pestilence. Before the attack, Kitano said, cholera was unknown in Yunnan province. Within a month, cases were reported in sixty-six separate counties. Within two months, two hundred thousand were dead. All from a few bombs of jelly and flies, easily carried by a single airplane.

Liam was stunned. The British had run tests of anthrax at Gruinard Island off the coast of Scotland, tethering sheep and setting off anthrax bombs nearby. That seemed at the edge of what was too grisly to do. But field tests on humans? Entire cities? Hundreds of thousands of innocents killed? It was a terrible sin, far and away the most horrific germ weapons testing program in human history.

A medic knocked on the door, a tray of white tablets with him.

“What’s this?” Liam asked.

“Penicillin,” the medic said. “In case the sickness spreads here.”

“It won’t help,” Liam replied. “It’s fungal, not bacterial.”

The medic shrugged. “I have my orders. We’ve got everyone on a regimen, a pill every eight hours. You want it or not?”

Liam passed. Nothing would help. The Scotsman Fleming’s wonder drug was useless here. It would do absolutely nothing to stop a mycological infection.

The medic left, and Liam went back to his reading. The last ten pages were devoted to the crowning triumph of Unit 731, a fungal pathogen called the Uzumaki. Translation: spiral. According to Kitano, it was a doomsday weapon, to be used if the Americans threatened to overrun the home islands. Kitano was in charge of testing the Uzumaki on live subjects. It was highly virulent, spreading by the breath, spit, stomach juices, and fecal matter.