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“How many of you are there?” Lucas asked.
“We think…think…about seven hundred forty of us includinga few support troops. Not here yet. And we lost a couple of vehicles due to breakdowns on the way, so part of the convoy had to fall out to help them along. Then, some people were on leave, and so on. But…about seven hundred forty of us. We’ll be staging over in a park across the highway. We have another crew coming up with tents and meal service equipment; we’re eating off MREs for the time being.”
“What are MREs?”
“Meals Ready to Eat. Packaged rations,” the major said.
“Also known as Meals Requiring Enemas,” Mellon said.
Foley smiled and said, “Ex-military?”
“Yup.” To Lucas: “That guy from Fort Detrick—Underwood?—I called him, too. He’s on his way, should be here in ten minutes.”
Foley: “I’ve been told that later in the morning, we got a helicopter battalion coming in. They’ll fly out of Santa Fe because they need the refueling facilities. They can stay on station up here, for a couple of hours before they have to go back for fuel. If we stage them correctly, we should always have a couple in the air.”
Mellon: “There are God-only-knows how many ATVs and four-wheelers around here, probably want to keep the helicopters circling the built-up area and look for runners.”
Vincent said, “The colonel and I…we’ve never seen anything like this. There’s this virus…but what do you know about that? How do we handle it?”
Lucas looked from one to the other, nodded at Mellon, and said, “I’m sorry, I’m still a little unfocused. Yesterday was intense. To begin with, so you understand how serious this is, we’ve shot and killed three people attempting to spread the virus. We shot another guy, probably an innocent civilian, wounding him, who thought we were ‘active shooters’ in a supermarket. He had a gun and took a shot at us.He’s in serious condition at the hospital but will make it. If he was a better shot, I’d be dead and so would he. We have three very sick people confined to an RV up at Taos Ski Valley until the big brains at Fort Detrick figure out what to do with them. We don’t think they’re contagious, but we can’t take any chances.”
“But how bad is this thing…”
“Up to eighty percent death rate, in one outbreak. The man behind it, who’s sort of a mad genius, has hitched the Marburg virus to the most infectious virus known, the measles virus. Could even be an enhanced measles virus…We could be talking about a worldwide plague like nothing seen before. Covid would be a walk in the park compared to this.”
Foley looked at Lucas for a moment, then around the small office. “Let’s get some chairs…”
Everybody sat.
“Quick question before we get into the details,” Lucas said. “Do your guys have live ammo? Or are they more set up for crowd control?”
“We can do both,” Foley said. “I’d hate like hell to have to shoot somebody.”
“I understand. You’ll change your mind by the time we’re at the end of the briefing.”
—
Lucas told themwhat he knew about the virus, and outlined the fundamental difficulty, which was to locate two people hiding among the seven thousand residents of Taos, and probably several hundred more tourists. He explained that they had photos, but that the allowable failure rate was zero.
“They cannot get out. They can’t be allowed to turn the virus loose. If they manage to infect any number of people in Taos, we have to…sequester…those people whether they want to be sequestered or not. If we believe that a particular person or group of people may have been infected, and they refuse to be contained, we kill them.”
“I don’t know if we can do that,” Foley objected.
“Talk to your chief of staff. If he’s not important enough, we can ask the President to have a word with you.”
Vincent: “Really?”
“Really,” Lucas said.
“There’s another problem here, Marshal,” Vincent said, brushing a hand through her short-cropped hair. “Have you ever worked for a regular police department? My father was a cop in San Diego and I’m pretty familiar with civilian cops. You marshals are sort of elite…”
“I started on the street in Minneapolis, was an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Lucas said. “With the BCA and as a marshal, I’ve coordinated with police departments all over the country.”
“Then what I have to tell you is that our MPs are no better qualified intellectually or emotionally to make life-and-death decisions than an average beat cop,” Vincent said. “Some are solid, reliable troops. Other ones, not so much.”
Lucas shook his head. “I can’t help you with that. You’ll have to sort them out yourselves. Put the dummies backing up the Taos cops on checkpoints, where the cops can supervise. We can use the smart people running their own checkpoints. I’m thinking we need to link your troops up to the outer checkpoints…”
“If you’re talking about an eye-sight perimeter, seven hundredtroops aren’t enough to do that, not if they have to do it over three shifts,” Mellon said. “We’d be talking about a thirty- or forty-mile perimeter…”
