The Coward's Way of War by Christopher Nuttall Read Free Book Online

project administrators had complained about the location over the years, but the supervising committee had believed that a central location would work better as a command and control centre than one based outside the city.  In a compromise, many of the facilities earmarked for Wildfire’s use – if the Wildfire Protocols were ever activated – were situated outside the city, in areas that could be easily defended by the project’s security staff.
     
    Doctor McCoy took his place at the head of the table and waited for the briefing room to fill up.  Project Wildfire, unlike many other bloated government programs, had only a small permanent staff and a temporary staff that existed as part of a smart mob.  Over the years since the Project’s inception, thousands of trained and experienced personnel had been investigated, security-cleared and then recruited into the smart mob, where their talents could be called upon at will.  Few had believed that they would be summoned to the building, outside of exercises and training drills that were run once a year, but they all knew to come when called.  The nineteen men and women in the briefing room might not have been public personalities, but they were at the top of their profession, a mixture of medical staff, trained disaster relief experts and investigative personnel.  They would all be needed to handle the outbreak.
     
    He studied their faces, noting who looked concerned and who looked annoyed.  They had to suspect what was going on, yet there was no way to know for sure, not until the briefing began.  The psychologists had helped choose the recruits on the basis of who would take it seriously, rather than growing bored of false alarms and endless exercises, but McCoy had little faith in their conclusions.  In his experience, based on a career practicing medicine around the globe, there was no way to know what someone was really made of until the shit hit the fan.  As the doors closed behind the final member, he tapped the table for silence, forcing them all to look at him.
     
    “This morning,” he said bluntly, “a pair of policemen discovered a woman suffering from smallpox in New York City.”
     
    The staff stared at him.  McCoy knew that many others would have sought to sugar-coat the message, but that wasn't his way.  There was no time for panic, or even for disbelief, not when smallpox was already loose in New York and God knew where else.  They could panic later, once the crisis was under control...if they could ever get it under control.  Some of the more optimistic scenarios he’d seen over the years had included New York – or a city of choice – being transformed into a charnel house.
     
    He keyed a switch and one of the images taken at the apartment appeared on the main display.  Cally Henderson’s face, covered with ominous red pustules, stared down at them.  He ignored several people who sounded as if they were going to be sick, flicking through the pictures one by one, ending with a chart showing how many people might have been infected by the outbreak.
     
    “There is no room for doubt,” he said, leaving the display showing the final chart.  The implications wouldn't be lost on any of them.  New York was a large city, but as the old rule of thumb had it, there were only seven links between anyone in a city.  The entire city – including the Wildfire HQ – might be infected by now.  Smallpox, at least in its original form, was well understood, but from what little he had heard before the meeting had been convened, this particular outbreak wasn't behaving as it should.  It wasn't a reassuring thought.  “That poor girl was infected with smallpox and left to rot in her room.”
     
    His gaze swept the room.  They were good people, he noted, observing how they had gathered themselves and focused on the issue at hand.  There were emergency procedures for a biological hazard or a disease outbreak and they’d drilled endlessly