The Doomsday Infection by Martin Lamport Read Free Book Online Page B

that have been a coincidence, or had the virus spread already? What would happen if infected people got onto an airplane? What would happen if an infected carrier had gotten on this airplane?
    Was there someone else on the airplane who had visited the island hospital? What was the incubation period? How many people had visited the island in the previous three days? How many had they interacted with? Alternatively, had it started elsewhere and that person infected the hospital. It was an easy target after all, with the patients’ immune systems already in a weakened state.
    Sophie had told him a sneeze, or something as innocuous as touching a door-handle could pass on the disease. He looked around and could not see a likely suspect, but then what does a person in the early stag es of the virus look like?
    A fat man sit ting across from him did not look well; he sweated profusely, and rubbed a handkerchief across his face. He sneezed loudly, and then engaged the button that slowly reclined his chair into the lying position. Luke could see massive sweat stains under the man’s arms, yet the air conditioning worked fine, keeping business class at a comfortable temperature. Luke jolted forward as he saw the fat man scratching under his armpit. He recalled Sophie telling him a major sign of the Black Death were the buboes under the arm. Oh, maaan. The realization hit him like a punch to the face. The Bubonic Plague was on board the airplane.
    He watched as the man jack-knifed and had a convulsion that ended in an almighty sneeze. Luke imagined that he could see the microscopic droplets propel from his mouth spreading to the aisle , covering the unsuspecting flight attendant, who in turn sauntered down the airplane spreading the virulent disease to the other passengers. The confined space was the worst place for a contagion, he thought. This was not the environment for a carrier to be on board, as the re-cycled air pumped throughout the craft, fatally infecting all three hundred and fifty passengers and crew. Should he tell them? Would they believe him? Even if they did believe him, what could they do about it?
     
     
    09:00 AM
     
    The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense and named after its five sides, a fact that had driven conspiracy theorists nuts for years. It’s a pentagram after all, they said, and the number five had significance amongst occultists. It had five sides, five floors above ground, five circular corridors, how could it not be sinister, they speculated. The fact that the five-sided inner forecourt covered five acres was the final proof. The forecourt was known as Ground Zero, years before President Bush had coined the phrase, in the aftermath of the World Trade Center Twin Towers attack of 9/11. The terrorist attack upon the Pentagon being exactly sixty years to the day that building work on the pentagon began.
    Ground Zero, t he term coined during the height of the Cold War with Russia, because in the event of a nuclear attack the first warheads would target that very spot.
    Across the Potomac River from the White House the Pentagon is the world’s largest office block, containing over thirty thousand military and civilian staff, seventeen miles of corridors and twenty fast food franchises including McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell to name a few.
    The structure , so enormous that President Dwight Eisenhower, while still army chief of staff after WWII, managed to get lost in its vastness, when out for a stroll and had to ask a group of stenographers the way back to his office.
    Deep within its bowels, the Joint Chiefs of Staff gathered in the War Room, hastily assembled by President Burgess. The war room was a hive of industry, a multitude of personnel buzzed around in the background, fielding telephone calls and tapping away at computers.
    The leaders of the different branches of the armed forces watched a debate between the disembodied surgeon general on the small