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After absorbing the other information that Hawkins had gotten from the sick men, Greet said, “We’ll get pictures of Scott and Catton to airport security for every airport in the country, and Canada andMexico. We’ll do that right now, paper those places by tomorrow morning. But you can’t let these people get on a plane.”
And they heard her calling to somebody there with her. When she came back to the phone, she asked, “How are the checkpoints working?”
“We don’t know,” Lucas said. “We’re still at the ski mountain.”
“Get down to Taos where you can talk to the cops,” Greet said. “Be careful about what you say. We’re walking on the edge of a panic.”
Lucas: “You should tell airport security to send officers into all the areas outside all the departure gates, before anyone goes through security. If Scott and the others see extra security precautions, they could try to contaminate people headed overseas, when they’re still outside the security lines.”
“We’ll get that going,” Greet said. “But God help us if they’ve gotten out of Taos. They could already be in Albuquerque. Heck, they could already be in Phoenix or Denver or Dallas-Fort Worth, if they got a plane out of Santa Fe.”
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I believe they’re still with us,” Lucas said. “If they were in the cars that Alec noticed, they wouldn’t have had time to get all the way to the north-south highway. We choked off the exits pretty quick. I believe they’re hiding in Taos, or around Taos. What’s the incubation period for measles? Or Marburg?”
“Prodrome averages eleven days or so for measles…that’s first symptoms, but can be as little as seven days,” Greet said. “With Marburg, it’s shorter, two to seven days on average.”
“So our problem is, if they’re cornered, and if they can even spread the disease in Taos, and stay in hiding, and people go streaming out…I mean, Covid started in a single Chinese city. Taos is a touristtown, there are people here from all over the country. They’ll be flying home, and since there aren’t any big airports nearby, with direct flights, a lot will be flying through hubs.”
“I’ll put that on our pile of nightmares,” Greet said. “You’ve got to kill them before they do that, before they figure that out.”
The biological response team had loaded the samples into the Firehawk and Letty said to Lucas, when he got off the phone, “Alec should come with me. There should be two of us to ask questions, and you and Rae will work best with the cops.”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah.” He turned to Rae: “What do you have in extra handguns?”
“Got a decent Ruger .357.”
“Perfect. Give it to Hawkins, and let’s get them on the way.”
Hawkins was shaking his head, but Lucas said, “Take the gun. You needed one earlier today, and you came through. You might need another, and I don’t think you’d want to be carrying that M4 around town.”
“No, but I don’t think…”
Letty said, “Take the gun, Alec. If we get in trouble, you can hand it to me.”
—
He took thegun, a five-shot revolver, with a box of ammunition. He’d fired pistols in the Army, at firing ranges, but wasn’t familiar with a revolver. Rae gave him a thirty-second lesson, said, “That’s about all you need. Point it, pull the trigger and keep pulling. No safety to worry about. The trigger’s gonna feel really stiff compared to an auto-loader, so unload it and try it out. Letty can tell you anything you need to know.”
As they were getting on the chopper, Greet called again and said, “I told them to drop you off on the way, instead of going to the airport first. Won’t slow them down by more than five minutes, and you’ll get to this Lamy place in daylight.”
And with that, they were on the helicopter and gone, Letty and Hawkins with their bags, and one of the biological team members to handle the sample packs; a crew chief sat in the back with them. With a clatter and a groan, the Firehawk climbed over the lowest of the mountain peaks and then swooped down over the Taos plain.
They couldn’t talk much, even with the doors closed. Hawkins unloaded the .357 and dry-fired it a dozen times, while the biological team member watched with a worried look on his face.
“I’d feel more confident if I had seventeen shots instead of five,” Hawkins shouted at Letty.
“Basically, all you need is one,” she said, and smiled at him.
“Okay, Wild Bill.”
—
The chopper huggedthe Sangre de Cristos to their east, following the Rio Grande rift, overflew Santa Fe, picked up I-25 and followed it to a junction of another highway, followed that one, then broke left and descended toward a beat-up-looking village on a set of railroad tracks.
To the west, a white-orange sun was dropping toward a low blue range of mountains, the same range that held Los Alamos.
“Got a police officer,” Hawkins said, peering out a side window. Letty leaned over him to look and saw a police car in the parking lot of what might have been a railway station. The car’s flashers wereworking and a cop was standing beside the car. The chopper circled down toward it, finally landing in a patch of dirt across the highway from the station, in front of a restaurant. The crew chief pulled the door back and they picked their bag up and bailed out, under the turning helicopter blades, into a storm of dust.
They ran away from the chopper toward the cop car, and when they got to the cop—a state police officer, as it turned out—the helicopter lifted off again, in an even bigger storm of dust.
