CDC compound, Northwest of Entebbe, 9:50 PM
Fox stared at the charred remains of the helicopter as he stood a dozen feet away. Warrant Officer Jack Hiller and he went back a few years, to the time when he was recruited into the CIA. Shit. Only God knew how many more he would lose in his quest to stop Ares. He squeezed Hiller’s dog tag in his left hand and felt the edges dig into his palm. Hiller was the closest friend he had-pals both on and off the job. In his other hand he had the envelope he nearly gave to Downing. Fuck it. And with that thought he tore up the envelope and threw the pieces into the wreckage.
“Hey, buddy,” said Walsh as he approached. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“I’m fine. You don’t have to apologize.” Fox turned away from the wreckage. But he was far from being all right. They walked towards the dome. “Any leads yet?”
“The General’s all over it. All of the airports are on high alert and there are checkpoints on every highway leading from here, but I doubt that at this point we’ll ever catch who did this.”
“Yeah, whatever. Hopefully they died along with the rest of them.” Fox couldn’t help thinking about what his superior had told him earlier about his emotions interfering with his work. Why didn’t I kill the guard that killed Sveta while I had the chance? The names and faces of every Ares operative would be known.
When they were both inside the dome, they saw Dr. Marx, in an overcoat, talking with two of the men from Entebbe Base. Their colleagues were all over the compound searching for more casualties and evidence.
As they got closer to her she turned to face them. She extended a glove-covered hand to both of them and greeted them. “I appreciate you coming so quickly.”
Walsh was the first to extend his hand to hers. “We couldn’t come any earlier, for obvious reasons.”
Marx then shook Fox’s hand. “I know. I and a few others came here first to inspect the area in HAZMAT gear. I was airborne when the SOS was sent, and I was forced to turn back. We used lab mice as a way of ensuring safety for you to come. It took close to three hours before all visible signs of Pandora dissipated. Come with me, you’ll want to see this.” She led them to the isolation chamber. After they passed through the decontamination airlock the crisp frost air hit them. “Don’t worry. We’ll be out of here long before we all freeze.”
Along one side of the floor sat four trays holding black anti-contamination bags with the yellow bio-hazard symbol on each of them. Each of the bags was about the size of a regular duffle bag. “The temperature’s being regulated at minus three degrees Celsius to help keep what’s left of these bodies in one piece.”
Walsh squinted as he looked at Marx. “In one piece?”
Marx nodded. “Precisely.”
Fox listened to her as he looked down at one of the trays. Walsh did the same with another tray. As Fox looked at the bags, he questioned their small size, seeing that they looked too small to contain an average-sized man that would have fit on the trays that they were on.
“Aside from the inorganic components of their skeletons and Pandora’s slimy by-products, all that was left of them were their clothes, and a few other personal items.”
“Jesus!” Walsh jumped back from one of the bags he had unzipped. The sight of the mess in front of him was enough to throw anyone back. Walsh hopped between the trays and around both Marx and Fox as he ran for the door, his right hand over his mouth.
If this was going to be one of many embarrassing moments with Walsh, Fox was ready to ditch him the first chance he got. He looked back at Marx who was looking down at the body bag. The woman wasn’t showing any kind of emotion.
“I should’ve warned him about that. I guess I was wrong to assume that anything with a visibly large bio-hazard symbol would be enough to keep anyone away,” said Marx with deliberate sarcasm.
“As I said, nothing much that would identify the victims was left.” Marx knelt down in front of the same tray from which Walsh had run, put on a pair of latex gloves from her coat pocket, and stretched them over her fingers. She then pinched and lifted a section of the cover before she continued to unzip it halfway.
It wasn’t what he saw that almost made him react like Walsh-he’d already witnessed unspeakable acts against human beings- but the more Marx unzipped the bag, the more he pursed his lips and squinted. Dear God was all that came to Fox’s mind. The dark and thick, slimy mass had sparse amounts of hair and bone. It clung to the inside of the bag and bubbled as more air was exposed to it. No wonder the bags were that size. It was most likely pumped through a hose.
“Zip it up!” Fox turned away.
Marx raised an eyebrow, shrugged her shoulders, and zipped it back up. She stood up, took off the latex gloves, and dropped them on the cover.
He stormed away a few paces and then doubled back. Fox knew he was not being fair to her, but it made him feel better to act as though it was her fault. How could she be so close to such a stomach-turning sight and be unaffected? She didn’t even flinch. Maybe it was an act.
“I must admit that I haven’t seen anything like this since 1987,” said Marx. “I was just starting out with the CDC when I accompanied my colleagues to Northern Canada where the first outbreak occurred in a small Inuit community. There weren’t too many deaths, since Pandora is less effective in the cold. We were able to contain the outbreak and also keep the incident out of the papers to prevent a widespread panic. But when our research revealed exactly how dangerous Pandora was, our government at the time thought they had found an alternative to the nuclear bomb. The Department of Defense had contracts with the CDC for R and D funding.”
Fox glanced at all of the body bags. “Looks to me that it didn’t need either more research or development. After what’s happened here, I’d say it accomplished what it was supposed to.”
“Only too well. You see, there was fear that if we were to release it on the enemy that it might find its way back to us because we had limited control over it when it was airborne.”
“What do you mean?”
“Once released, wind currents, for example, can blow Pandora almost anywhere. We could potentially harm a friendly nation. You’ve seen how easily it spreads.”
“Therefore, Pandora can’t be controlled once it’s released.”
“That’s exactly what all the critics said about the project. The best my colleagues and I were able to do, was to freeze its replication by immersing Pandora in liquid nitrogen. That’s how it’s stored. Before it was released, it would be fed with small doses of a protein supplement which would give it longevity before it came in contact with a potential host.”
“So it does have a weakness-starvation. That’s why none of it was found by the time we arrived, because it starved to death.”
“Correct. That’s why it was so important for us to choose this location to set up this compound, far away from any populated areas. Other than starvation, Pandora’s virtually indestructible. Unlike a regular missile, shooting down a missile containing Pandora won’t do anything but release it into the atmosphere where it will inevitably drop to earth.”
“If you were to feed it a large amount of its supplement, how would that affect its reproduction rate versus feeding it a smaller amount of the same supplement?”
“An increase in supplement is directly proportional to its reproductive rate. The more food it ingests, the more offspring it produces.” Marx then motioned in the direction of the door. “Judging from the distance between here and where the helicopter was, whomever used this weapon must have fed Pandora with a fair amount of the protein supplement in order for it increase in such numbers that it would’ve reached it so quickly.”
“But wouldn’t the force of the helicopter’s propellers be strong enough to fan away the microbes?”
“Not necessarily. As I mentioned earlier, the reproductive rate of a single Pandora microbe is directly correlated with the amount of food it ingests. If a large enough quantity of the complex protein supplement were fed to it, it would not only reproduce so extremely rapidly as to appear as a green-colored explosion.”
“Which is probably what happened here,” said Fox.
“No doubt,” Marx nodded. “And the wonderful thing about Pandora is that energy from the parent is transferred to its clones, only gradually decreasing in each generation.”
“I don’t know which school of thought you come from, but I don’t find anything wonderful about Pandora.”
Marx gasped at the comment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it that way. I was only speaking from a scientific point of view.”
Fox followed her out of the isolation chamber as she continued with the conversation. She put her hands into her pockets. “A few years ago there was a second outbreak, again up in Northern Canada, near the north pole, when two university scientists accidentally exhumed a Pandora-infected prehistoric man, buried under the ice for what could’ve been a few millennia. Their SOS was intercepted by the National Security Agency’s Echelon system. You could imagine the horror I felt when my phone rang soon after.”
Echelon was the National Security Agency’s computer program that automatically intercepted keywords in regular conversation, either on a regular phone or through cyberspace, used to track potential terrorist threats. The system had been updated to include references to Pandora.
“I flew up there with a team and fortunately arrived on time to contain the outbreak. I thought that was the last we’d see of Pandora, until now,” said Marx.
Fox ran a finger over his left eyebrow. “Pandora wasn’t created, after all.”
“Most definitely not. The ice man’s discovery suggests that Pandora is a microbe that existed in prehistoric times. It managed to survive over time by lying dormant in the ice man. My guess is that at the time that he and members of his community were infected, he either fell through a frozen lake or was buried under an avalanche while the rest were wiped out.”
They reached the doorway to the dome and exited where Walsh was.
Fox walked up to Walsh. “You all right? You’ve lost some color in your face.”
“I’ll live, and I tan easily,” Walsh replied. “What I still can’t figure out is how Ares managed to get their hands on Pandora.”
“Ares has spies everywhere, unless they discovered it on their own.” But Fox felt that the latter explanation was the least likely.
“No matter how they discovered it, whoever’s responsible for this disaster went far enough to kill everyone to cover their tracks,” said Walsh.
Dr. Marx turned when she heard a cleanup-crew member shout out to her. “Dr. Marx, we found another victim.”
“I’ll be right there,” she replied. She turned to Fox and Walsh. “I have to go. I’ll send you my results when I’m done.”
“Sure thing, Doc,” replied Walsh.
Fox nodded to her. He was about to walk away when Marx called back to him. “Oh, Fox, watch your back. You never know what or who may turn up.”
“I’ll make sure of that.” Fox checked the ground to make sure he didn’t step in anything gelatinous as both he and Walsh walked back to their transport helicopter that was outside the compound.
With no survivors or any retrievable data so far, the trail was about to run cold. And those responsible wanted it that way. Fox knew he would go sleepless for several nights knowing that a surprise attack was imminent.