@@CHAP@@ Prologue
@@CHAP@@ The Demon Germ
Day Four of This Scenario
Frankfurt, Germany
An American traveler is in Frankfurt, at a crowded disco. He has no idea that, days earlier, he became infected with a highly contagious, genetically modified, biological weapon engineered to kill human beings in the most atrocious ways. He is still in the incubation period, with the germs present and multiplying. He is not yet fully symptomatic.
He feels absolutely fantastic.
He most certainly should not.
Multiplying rapidly inside his body are loads of Yersinia pestis bacteria, the causative agent for plague. Under favorable conditions, a bacteria cell grows by copying its DNA, then splitting into two identical daughter cells, each of which can divide again, and again.
Plague has been responsible for several of the most fatal pandemics in human history, including ones in the sixth, fourteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. From around 1347 to 1352, the disease killed 150 million people. Countless men, women, and children have died an appallingly painful death from plague.
With the early twentieth-century discovery of antibiotics, plague became a scourge of the past, but with the advent of genetic engineering in the late twentieth century, plague has returned.
And now, in this scenario, it has been engineered into a biological weapon capable of exterminating humans at scale.
The American traveler sweats profusely, the dance music and the people around him thumping and pumping, everyone hot and sticky and breathing all over one another. He is sweating because he has a fever of 102 degrees Fahrenheit (38.9 degrees Celsius). Under normal circumstances, he’d feel extremely unwell—terrible enough to be at home, in bed, under the covers in isolation—but instead, he’s out here dancing hard and breathing heavily because he feels euphoric.
What makes all this so terrifying is that what is happening here is not just nature’s way. It is the nefarious work of biological weapons engineers.
A biological weapon is a living munition. A microscopic organism that causes disease. Silent, invisible, and self-replicating, it is the tiniest weapon in modern Homo sapiens’ vast war chest. Forty thousand plague bacteria can fit side by side on the head of a pin.
The biological weapon replicating in the American traveler’s lungs was first developed during the Cold War. This new, twenty-first-century variant infects the lungs with a degree of lethality so intense, and will lead to a level of unfolding pain so horrific, it is almost impossible for the mind to comprehend. And yet, in the present moment, all the American traveler feels is endorphin-induced euphoria. This particular plague weapon has been genetically engineered to initially deliver a neurochemical high.
“When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague,” says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, “we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way … to make you want to go out and socialize … this was some horrifying stuff.”
Y. pestis is shorthand for Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, and Dr. Heine is one of the world’s subject-matter experts. Starting in the late 1990s, he spent eleven years working on biological warfare countermeasures at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Maryland. USAMRIID, or “you-sam-rid” as it’s known, is the Defense Department’s flagship center for high- and maximum-containment infectious disease research and its only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. In the event of a biological attack against America, USAMRIID scientists will be at the fore.
“When you are sick [with plague], normally, you feel lethargic,” Heine explains. “You isolate. You stay at home. But if you have plague and you feel euphoric, you go out and socialize. And you contaminate a lot of other people with recombinant plague.”
Which is what is happening with the American traveler, dancing in the crowded Frankfurt discotheque. From a moral standpoint, that anyone would do such a thing seems difficult to fathom.