The Cobra Event Read Free Page A

laydown.
    “I feel sorry for those guys on the tugboats,” one of the scientists remarked.
    “I feel even sorrier for the monkeys,” another scientist said.
    Each person on the beach was holding a gas mask, in case the wind shifted unexpectedly.
    “The men will be all right,” Littleberry said. Mark Littleberry was a medical doctor in the United States Navy, a tall, handsome African-American with a crewcut and gold-rimmed spectacles. He was a medical officer for the Johnston Atoll Field Trials, and he was regarded as brilliant by the other scientists in the program, but perhaps too ambitious, a man who seemed determined to rise high and do it at a young age. Littleberry had a degree from Harvard University and a medical degree from Tulane University. His Harvard degree did not make him very popular among the military people, but they listened to him because he knew the science. He had made valuable contributions toward explaining the exact ways in which the weapons they were testing entered the lungs, and he was bringing in crucial data from monkey dissections. But Mark Littleberry was becoming unhappy with his success. He had begun to ask himself what, exactly, he was doing.
    “Here it comes,” someone said.
    All heads turned to the left. They saw a Marine Corps Phantom flying low and straight, about two hundred meters above the water, traveling just under the speed of sound. It flew parallel to the beach, heading west toward the setting sun. It carried no stores underwing except for a small, strange-looking pod. They watched. In the evening light they saw it: something bleeding into the air from the wing pod. The wing pod was known as a dry line-source disseminator, and the way it worked was highly classified. What was coming out of the pod was a living weapon in the form of a dry powder.
    It was a whitish haze that almost instantly dissipated and became invisible. The particles were very small, and they had been treated with a special plastic to make them last longer in the air. They were between one micron and five microns across, the ideal size for a weaponized bioparticle. It is the size particle that can be inhaled deep into the human lung, a particle that will stick naturally to the membrane of the lung. To get an idea of the size of such a particle, you can think of it this way: about fifty particles lined up in a row would span the thickness of a human hair. One or two such particles trapped in the lung, if they are a weapon, can cause a fatal infection that kills in three days. Particles this small do not fall out of the air. They stay aloft. You can’t smell them, you can’t see them, you don’t know they are there until you start to get sick. Not even rain can wash them out of the sky—they don’t get caught by raindrops. Rain actually improves the effectiveness of a bioweapon in the air, because rain clouds block sunlight. Bio-aerosols don’t do well in sunlight. It destroys their genetic material and kills them. Biological laydowns are best done at night.
    The jet shrank and seemed to vanish into the disc of the sun, leaving a departing rumble. It was doing a streakout across the Pacific Ocean. The streakout line was fifty miles long.
    “Beautiful,” someone said.
    “Incredible.”
    The talk among the watchers grew technical.
    “What’s the dissemination rate?”
    “One gram per meter.”
    “That’s all?”
    “A gram per meter! Holy Christ! That’s
nothing
.” The jet was spraying only one kilogram of hot agent per kilometer of flight.
    “If it was anthrax,” one of the scientists remarked, “they’d have to shovel it from a dump truck to have any effect on the monkeys.”
    “There’s only about eighty kilos of agent in that pod.” Less than two hundred pounds.
    “Yow. And he’s laying it for fifty miles.”
    “What
is
the agent?”
    “It’s the Utah cocktail. You didn’t hear me say that.” The identity of the material was classified.
    “The Utah cocktail?