The Nightmare Scenario (30 page)

AUGUST 16
^TH
5 PM, LOCAL BBC OFFICE, JALAN IMAM BONJOL 80, JAKARTA, INDONESIA

S
imon Angleton, the local head of the BBC, was alone in the office. None on the staff had shown up that morning, heeding the government-imposed curfew. Simon looked out over the streets of Jakarta. The panoramic windows of the office offered a splendid view of the surroundings, with the Grand Hyatt Hotel on his left and the large Jalan Bundaran roundabout just behind it. It was the same view he took in every morning, apart from one thing. The streets were empty – completely empty.

The building in which the office was located had its own diesel generator, which was the only reason Simon could even get in. Most of the rest of Jakarta was dark.

He had covered areas of societal breakdown before: the Los Angeles riots in 1992 and the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But he’d
never seen anything even remotely as desperate as what had transpired in Jakarta the last week. It had moved so fast – unbelievably fast. Jakarta had gone from a regular developing world capital to a war zone in days, and from that to a ghost town after just a few more.

He reflected on the role he and the other news organizations had played in this and whether they were partly to blame. He’d wrestled with this issue many times during the last days, but once again concluded that they weren’t responsible. His job was to report the news and people were better off having more information than less. Keeping silent in order not to alarm the public wouldn’t have prevented the infection from spreading, or stopped the panic that accompanied it.

Nine days ago, when the flu was first confirmed, there was little reaction among the residents of Jakarta. Sure, some people got worried, and some, who had followed the developments in the Maluku Islands, left the city, but in general people continued to go about their daily lives.

The closing of the airport was a topic of discussion around many a dinner table, but didn’t arouse fear. Rather it provoked anger – anger with the Americans for once again meddling in the internal affairs of a Muslim country.

Two days later, when the number of hospitalized had reached 117, the government issued a decree urging people to avoid non-essential visits to public places, such as markets. It was taken in relative stride.

In the central parts of Jakarta, a number of ATMs ran out of money as people withdrew cash to stock up
on goods at home, in anticipation of a worsening situation. A small, local paper covered it in a sensationalist fashion painting the classic scenario of banks running out of funds. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the rumor spread like with lightning speed, and the people who had bank accounts emptied them. Little did they know how useless paper currency would become in not much more than hours. But they were still only concerned about losing money. They did not yet fear for their lives.

The following day, people started stocking up in earnest and goods ran scarce in the stores and at the supermarkets where the rich shopped. But there was still order. People were still paying for their supplies and were queuing in an orderly fashion. The street vendors still had fruit, rice and meat on offer, and the death toll yet hadn’t topped two.

It was the fourth day after the arrival of what was now being called “the Black Flu” that the collapse truly began. The infected now suddenly numbered in the thousands, and as they poured into the medical centers together with their relatives, the rapid unabated stream of patients became too much for the hospitals to handle. Outside of the Medistra Hospital, for instance, there were at least a hundred people waiting to be let in and processed. And as the day continued, the crowd of backlogs grew steadily larger.

In the midst of the waiting, there were several patients had very visible and frightening symptoms, each worse than the other. There were people lying in pools of red-stained vomit, bleeding from their eyes
and ears. I was a picture of this on the front-page picture in the
Jakarta Post
that ignited the real panic.

The government quickly intervened and chained the newspapers in the bonds of censorship, ensuring that subsequent coverage wouldn’t cause more fear. Now the articles explained how the government was dealing with the situation effectively, and how the best way to protect oneself and one’s family was to stay indoors. If a family member became sick, the instructions were to keep that person isolated inside and hang a white cloth out the window. An ambulance would pick them up in due course. No one ever came. The maneuver was just the government’s way to keep the infected off the streets and avoid overcrowding the hospitals, while providing a visual estimate of the flu’s spread.

That evening, there was widespread looting. Part of it was driven by people who hadn’t been able to get money from the banks the previous day. Part of it was driven by people who lived hand-to-mouth in the slums and couldn’t afford to stock up. And once it started, everyone took to stealing. It seemed to be the only way to secure supplies. At this point, money lost its value. There was nothing you could buy. The only system of trade was barter. A bag of rice for a set of mouth covers. A prime cut of rib eye for a box of penicillin.

At the same time, people started leaving the city in masses. In cars, on scooters, on horse, ox, donkey or foot, they fled the plague in Jakarta, carrying what belongings they could. Once the exodus started, the numbers fleeing grew exponentially by the hour as panic fed panic like oxygen feeds a fire.

The government declared martial law and a curfew, but it turned out to be impossible to enforce. All exits from the city were gridlocked. It wasn’t clear exactly how it happened, but eyewitnesses described people falling so ill while driving that their vehicles simply stopped. In addition, the roads were blocked by army tanks. As a result, people abandoned their vehicles and started fleeing by foot. Jakarta was locked in by thousands of cars, cars without drivers. The main roads in the city were blocked by abandoned vehicles, free-roaming animals and the masses on the streets. To make matters worse, the crowding of people only served to accelerate the flu’s spread.

The following day, the situation calmed as those who had not yet left gave up hope of doing so, opting instead for isolation in their homes. White pieces of cloth started to appear with unnerving frequency throughout the city. It was impossible to say how many, but it was at least in the tens of thousands. This was when the basic services broke down entirely. It started with the electricity. At first, it was just blackouts in isolated areas, such as the slums, but within twelve hours, the whole city had gone dark.

Then the cellular phone network broke down and shortly after that the landlines and the Internet. People isolated themselves in their homes. Only a small minority of dutiful showed up for their jobs. They weren’t enough to keep the lights on. For the first time since the arrival of Islam in the sixteenth century, the mosques were close to empty during the Friday prayers.

It was on Saturday that death started to catch up with the infection. There were thousands of dead, and
no capacity to bury them. Families left their dead relatives on the streets outside their homes. That day, in his final report to the head office, Simon had quoted Boccaccio’s eyewitness account of the Black Death from
The Decameron
on the breakdown of the social order:

“Such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle his nephew, and the sister her brother, and very often the wife her husband… Nor, for all their number, were their obsequies honored by either tears or lights or crowds of mourners rather, it was come to this, that a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat would be today.”

And this was when the worst part began. The children came out on the streets. Simon didn’t know why children were affected to such a lesser degree than adults. Regardless, there they were, on the streets, in the thousands. Crying, scouring the streets for food – abandoned by parents who had either died or become too sick to tend to them.

They roamed the city streets in packs. A ghost city, where the facades of houses were covered in sheets, once white, but now turned gray in the polluted air, fluttering in the wind like ashen flags of surrender.

Simon had never developed any symptoms. He was one of those who was immune the Black Flu. He probably should have counted himself lucky, but he didn’t. He knew that he’d been visited by a terror so inescapable that it would forever visit him in his sleep, as well as during his waking hours. The children’s cries of despair would never leave him.

MALUM QUOD HOMINES FACUIT

(The evil that men do)

AUGUST 18
^TH
, MIDMORNING, DIRECTOR-GENERAL’S OFFICE, WHO HEADQUARTERS, GENEVA

A
eolus swore aloud as his hand slipped, knocking over the inkwell. The deep-purple bespoke ink quickly spread in a pool over his mahogany desk, while a scent of musk and sandalwood filled the room.

Aeolus was clumsy. He’d been told it had something to do with a complication during his birth. Re-filling the ink of his Montblanc pen was, because of this, a high-risk maneuver. In spite of his ever-recurring accidents, he continued to do it.

Few men used fountain pens these days. Even fewer had their own bespoke ink. It used to be different. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, wrote all his poems in his personalized green ink, a fact that was later used to establish the authenticity of poems discovered after his death.

These last few days, Aeolus had found himself with less to do. The world was still falling apart, but the WHO
was firing on all cylinders. Rebecca was firmly in charge of Southeast Asia, bullying politicians with the occasional support from Roger via phone in Burma, as forcefully and effectively as if Aeolus had done it himself.

The effort to find containable micro-zones on the Eurasian continent was progressing well under Ed and Kevin’s leadership. Only a few had been quarantined so far, but that would change as the epidemic spread further west, preceded by the inevitable tidal wave of fear.

Aeolus’s instincts screamed at him to take charge personally, but experience had taught him not to. His role now was to be available to his staff and put his weight behind them when they needed it. Otherwise he’d only disrupt what was now a well-running machine.

He spun around in his chair to fetch an Irish linen handkerchief from the walnut bookshelf behind him. His gaze fell on the three pictures that hung on the wall behind his desk. These were the role models who represented the three characteristics of leadership that he cherished as his highest principles.

The first was Ulysses S. Grant, the American president who, while a general in the Union army, drank so heavily that the other generals complained to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln judged his generals not by conformity, but by results, something Grant was delivering, and told his aide, “Find out what that man is drinking and send a case of it to all my other generals. At least that man fights!” The picture reminded Aeolus that delivering results was more important than fitting in, no matter how much people told you otherwise.

The second picture was of Baroness Thatcher. For Aeolus, she personified determination more than any figure of the last century. Here was a woman who rose to the top of the British Conservative Party, a bastion of male chauvinism, and pursued an agenda of reform so radical, that not only the opposition, population and press, but also her own party turned against her, begging her to “make a U-turn.” Her only response to this massive display of resistance to her program of action, in her speech at the first Conservative Party Conference under her leadership was, “You turn if you want to. The lady
is
not for turning.” Thatcher’s history told everyone who was willing to listen that the responsibility of leadership means maintaining one’s own views of what the right course of action is, and pursuing those convictions regardless of their popularity. History will pass the ultimate judgment on one’s actions, not the contemporary court of public opinion.

The last picture was a drawing of Alexander the Great pouring liquid out of a helmet, as he allegedly did when his army, after days of marching through the desert without water, had presented him with a helmet filled with all the water they’d been able to gather. According to the myth, Alexander poured out the water in front of his troops, saying that if his men couldn’t drink, then neither would he. This lesson, the idea that you cannot hold the people you lead to a higher standard than you hold yourself, was something Aeolus constantly reminded himself. Unfortunately for the people under his command, the standards he set
for himself were so high, many considered them inhuman, and consequently, so were his expectations on others.

There was a knock on the door and his team of lieutenants entered. Ed, Kevin, Stan, Walt and even Richard. Kevin said, “Dr. Hughes, we have a problem.”

“No, Kevin,” responded Aeolus, “we have about a million problems and it’s going to be a couple hundred thousand more tomorrow. Although, I must say, it’s refreshing to hear you as the harbinger of apocalyptic news, and not, as usual, your brother-in-arms.”

“No, I mean, we have a new problem.”

Aeolus set down his pen, and raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

“I think you need to listen to what this man has to say.”

A very short man stepped out from behind Kevin. It was the young geneticist that had spoken to Ed in the lobby after Aeolus’ address to the staff. He was a vertically challenged man and Aeolus had not noticed him standing behind Kevin.

“I’m listening.”

The geneticist cleared his throat. “Sir, I assume you remember that the influenza the in 1977 was a bit of an anomaly?”

“Yes, I do. The Russian flu was peculiar in that it infected mostly children and adults in their early twenties. The older population had an immunity to it, since it was so similar to the strains that struck between 1947 and 1957.”