Executive orders - Tom Clancy [550]
One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic, Ryan said finally.
Yes, sir. I know that one. The good news didn't make Alexandre all that happy. But how else to tell people that a disaster was better than a catastrophe?
Iosef Vissarionovich Stalin, SWORDSMAN told them. He did have a way with words.
You know who did it, Alex observed.
What makes you say that? Jack asked.
You didn't react normally to what I told you, Mr. President.
Doctor, I haven't done much of anything normally over the past few months. What does this mean about the no-travel order?
It means we leave it in place for at least another week. Our prediction is not carved in stone. The incubation period for the disease is somewhat variable. You don't send the fire trucks home as soon as the last flame disappears. You sit there and watch for another possible flare-up. That will happen here, too. What's worked to this point is that people are frightened to death. Because of that, personal interactions are minimized, and that's how you stop one of these things. We keep 'em that way. The new cases will be very circumscribed. We attack those like we did with smallpox. Identify the cases, test everyone with whom they've had contact, isolate the ones with antibodies, and see how they do. It's working, okay? Whoever did this miscalculated. The disease isn't anywhere near as contagious as they thought-or maybe the whole thing was just a psychological exercise. That's what bio-war is. The great plagues of the past really happened because people didn't know how diseases spread. They didn't know about microbes and fleas and contaminated water. We do. Everybody does, you learn it in health class in school. Hell, that's why we haven't had any medics infected. We've had lots of practice dealing with AIDS and hepatitis. The same precautions that work with those also work with this.
How do we keep it from happening again? van Damm asked.
I told you that already. Funding. Basic research on the genetic side, and more focused work on the diseases we know about. There's no particular reason why we can't develop safe vaccines for Ebola and a lot of others.
AIDS? Ryan asked.
That's a toughie. That virus is an agile little bastard. No attempt for a vaccine has even come close yet. No, on that side, basic genetic research to determine how the biologic mechanism works, and from that to get the immune system to recognize it and kill it-some sort of vaccine; that's what a vaccine is. But how to make it work, well, we haven't figured that one yet. We'd better. In twenty years, we might have to write Africa off. Hey, the Creole said, I got kin over there, y'know?
That's one way to keep it from happening again. You, Mr. President, are already working on the other way. Who was it?
He didn't have to tell anybody how secret it was: Iran. The Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei and his merry men.
Alexandre reverted to officer in the United States Army: Sir, you can kill all of them you want, as far as I'm concerned.
IT WAS INTERESTING to see Mehrabad International Airport in daylight. Clark had never experienced Iran as a friendly country. Supposedly, before the fall of the Shah, the people had been friendly enough, but he hadn't made the trip soon enough for that. He'd come in covertly in 1979 and again in 1980, first to develop information for, and then to participate in, the attempt to rescue the hostages. There were no words to describe what it was like to be in a country in a revolutionary condition. His time on the ground in the Soviet Union had been far more comfortable. Enemy or not, Russia had always been a civilized country with lots of rules and citizens who broke them. But Iran had ignited like a dry forest in a lightning storm. Death to America had been a chant on everyone's lips, and that, he remembered, was about as scary as things got when you were in the middle of the mob singing that song. One little mistake, just contacting an agent