Biological War: A Scenario

The narrative’s fourth day opens on Skid Row in Los Angeles, where police conducting a drug bust are alerted to four dead bodies in a tent. Unaware that pneumonic plague is present, the officers handle the scene without biohazard gear. The pathogen, a genetically modified airborne plague, arrived in the city a day and a half earlier in the lungs of a premed student from Koltsovo, who is now dead in his single dorm room on the UCLA campus in Westwood. Simultaneously, the plague spreads globally through other infected individuals from the Siberian hunting trip. On the Diamond Princess cruise ship, an 80-year-old German judge has already been spreading the disease among 3,700 passengers and crew; on day four he collapses and is taken to the ship’s infirmary, where the doctor misdiagnoses him with norovirus, with the superspreader event already well underway. In Da Nang, Vietnam, two U.S. sailors contract the disease and carry it aboard the 5,000-person aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, setting up another outbreak aboard the warship.

The book explains that this weaponized plague has a genetically modified transmission rate, or R-naught (R₀), of 11—akin to chickenpox and far higher than COVID-19’s initial 2.