Red Tide by G. M. Ford Page B

said.
    “Doomsday indeed,” Belder said, taking in the room with a bemused smirk on his face. “Game? I’m not so sure.” He cast another glance at the colonel. “I seem to recall that your organization took part in the project, Colonel.”
    Hines nodded gravely. “Yes…we did.”
    “Perhaps it would be instructive for these ladies and gentlemen if you would help them recall the results of this…”—he searched for a word—“of this game, as you people like to call it.”
    Hines took a deep breath and then began to speak. “The idea was to simulate a terrorist attack using smallpox spores as the agent. The exercise was conducted by the CDC, the CSIS, the MIPT, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies…” He noticed he was losing his audience and waved an impatient hand. “The best people we had at the time.”
    “Still the best you have,” Belder added.
    “Anyway…” Hines continued, “as I recall…the scenario went like this. They picked three cities. I think they were Atlanta, Philadelphia and Oklahoma City.” His eyes made a quick sweep of the room. “This takes place in the weeks immediately preceding Christmas, so everybody’s out and about. Anyway…they picked three shopping malls in the holiday season. Had three teams of terrorists posing as maintenance men go into the malls and spray smallpox onto the potted plants.”
    “You must understand…” Belder interrupted, “technically speaking, smallpox no longer exists on the planet. It has been eradicated in its natural state. The only known sources for the virus are the CDC in Atlanta and the Vector laboratory outside Novosibirsk, in Russia.”
    “So what we did…” the colonel said, “was to program everything we knew about smallpox, everything we were prepared to bring to bear on an epidemic…”—he used his fingers to count—“our vaccine supplies, our health care system, our emergency response agencies—all of it was programmed into a supercomputer, which was then asked to give us the most likely scenario of what would happen under those circumstances.”
    “The results were…” Again Belder searched for a word.
    “Ignored,” Hines said quickly. “The results were ignored.”
    Belder nodded. “For the most part…yes.”
    Hines reddened slightly. “All they did was to start vaccinating health care workers.” He cut the air with the side of his hand. “Which lasted until one of their unions decided they didn’t like the risk and then they stopped that too.” He looked over at Belder. “God forbid we inconvenience anyone…embarrass anyone…” He shook his head in disgust. Closed his mouth hard.
    “Tell them the results,” Belder prompted.
    “It went something like this,” Hines said. “Two days into the game, the CDC had one confirmed case of smallpox in Oklahoma City and suspected about twenty more. Eight hours later, they’d confirmed the twenty cases and had fourteen more under the microscope. Similar results started coming in from Atlanta and Philadelphia.”
    Across the room, the phone buzzed. Gardener walked over, picked it up and began to whisper into the receiver.
    Hines kept talking. “By the time a week had gone by, tens of thousands were showing symptoms. Hospital emergency rooms were overwhelmed by the volume.”
    Belder held up a finger. “Interestingly enough, in the early stages of an epidemic such as this, it does not much matter whether the symptoms are real or imagined. Both strain the system in precisely the same manner.”
    “Ten days in, we’ve got two thousand cases in fifteen states with more showing up in Canada, Mexico and Britain. Two weeks in, it’s sixteen thousand cases in half the states in the country. A thousand people have died and we’re completely out of vaccine. The health care system is a shambles. Violence is rampant in the streets.”
    He paused, as if inviting someone to contradict. “By February one…the computer estimates we’ve got three