Case:Black - 9. Chapter 9

Homeland Security Command Post

Carlsbad, NM

August 30, 2005

It had been a hard week for McGrath. He had seen some of his worst nightmares about Pandora come true.

He had painfully reconstructed the last few weeks around the White Sands Lab but no one was exactly sure what had gone wrong.

Jerry Fowler from the New Mexico National Guard entered the Command Post and said, “Do we have anything new?”

McGrath shook his head and said, “Things went to hell so fast there is just no way to tell. It’s obviously a lab accident but we can’t be sure who patient zero was. Any one of twelve people might have been it but we just can’t be sure.”

There was a TV image of hurricane Katrina with a talking head from CNN showing floodwaters in New Orleans. Fowler said, “I never thought that I’d be happy about a hurricane but we needed it to keep the media out of here. Any idea what our cover is going to be.”

McGrath said, “We got lucky. We’ve only lost a couple of hundred people. The bosses are spinning it as an outbreak of a local variant of the Hantavirus.”

Fowler said, “Hantavirus Alamogordo: will that fly? The conspiracy nuts are already calling this a zombie outbreak.”

McGrath shook his head. “CDC and USAMARID are playing ball. It’ll sell.”

“In a way, it’s worse than the conspiracy nuts think”, McGrath groused. “If people knew how close we came to losing it here, there would be brown trousers all over the country, maybe the world. We won’t really be out of the woods for months. We aren’t sure that we have accounted for all of the infected and if mosquitos are spreading it around we could have a whole new wave of infections.”

“You’re just full of good news”, Fowler muttered. “I have to see the Governor this afternoon. What do I tell him?”

“Tell him that we are cautiously optimistic that it’s over but we will have to monitor the situation closely for the next sixty days. After that, we should be completely out of the woods.”