Nobody’s Hero (Ben Koenig #2)

Chapter 106

‘Partition led to twelve million people being displaced in the Punjab alone,’ Carlyle said. ‘Overnight, Muslims found themselves in India, Sikhs and Hindus found themselves in Pakistan. People whose identities had been rooted in geography, not religion, found themselves mixed up in the biggest population exchange in history. An unprecedented number of refugees poured across the Radcliffe Line to regions completely foreign to them.’

‘And I guess these new countries weren’t expecting it?’ Koenig said.

‘Weren’t expecting it, weren’t ready for it,’ Carlyle confirmed. ‘How could they be? They’d had five weeks’ warning. The Brits drew a line on an out-of-date map, then left the subcontinent so quickly they only lost seven soldiers. But in the short period that followed their withdrawal, two million people died. There was an incredible amount of bloodshed at the border. Hundreds of thousands never even made it across. And those who did found themselves in a country that simply didn’t have the resources to feed or house them. This caused conflict with the people who already lived there, which led to even more migration.’

‘You looked at how a mass migration event would impact the US?’ Koenig said.

‘We already study mass migration. We have to. It’s rarely contained to one country. An event in Bangladesh will spill over to India, which leads to tension at the Chinese border, and so on. And although it wasn’t technically a future threat – there have been two mass migration events in recent US history, the California Gold Rush and the Great Migration – it’s what the Acacia Avenue think tank landed on. We thought about what might cause millions of Americans to flee one part of the country and seek refuge in another part.’

‘War is the obvious one,’ Koenig said.

‘But war doesn’t happen overnight. There’s a buildup. Attempts at diplomacy. There are skirmishes and a whole bunch of other things that happen before we declare war. Ultimately, war is predictable unpredictability. We ignored climate change for the same reason. Whether it’s drought in the south-west, tropical storms in the south-east or flooding in Louisiana, it doesn’t happen overnight. We’d have time to adapt. To find room for the displaced and make them our neighbours.’

‘A Chernobyl-type event?’

‘Certainly. Whether it’s a catastrophic system failure or a terrorist attack, a nuclear incident would be sudden, devastating and long-lasting. But it’s not a future threat. We know our nuclear plants are high-value targets. Measures are in place to protect them, and drills are well practised should a plant go into meltdown. It would be serious. It might even trigger mass migration, but it wouldn’t be a surprise. We were looking for that one thing we hadn’t thought of. The thing we didn’t have contingencies for.’

Koenig considered it from the think tank’s point of view. He reckoned they’d have focused on the basics. What did humans need? Not want, need . They probably used Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a starting point. It was something her academics would have been familiar with. Maslow’s five-tier model was often depicted as a pyramid. The bottom tier were physiological needs. Food and water. Clean air. Clothing and shelter. The next tiers were psychological needs like friendship, employment and intimacy. Important, but nothing that would cause a stampede.

‘The food chain can be vulnerable,’ he said. ‘If a well-resourced group managed to simultaneously introduce mad cow disease, foot-and-mouth, swine fever and avian flu into our farms, most food animals would have to be culled.’ He stopped to think through what he’d said. ‘But although that would cause untold economic and logistical problems, it wouldn’t cause a mass migration event.’

‘No, it wouldn’t,’ Carlyle said. ‘Food can be imported. For the eighty per cent of Americans who live in urban areas, it is imported. There would be no reason for anyone to move. Certainly not in the numbers we were looking for. But you are on the right lines.’

‘Air, then,’ he said. ‘If something happened to the air. Say it went bad. That would cause a migration event.’

Carlyle nodded. ‘Bad air would cause a mass migration event. What else?’

‘Water,’ Koenig said. ‘Water’s not like food. Sure, we provide water trucks and bottles in severe droughts, but they’re temporary measures. If the water dries up, or if something leaches into it, the population has to move. Look at what happened in Flint. The population is less than half what it used to be, and a large part of that is due to water crisis.’

‘Good. What else?’

‘I can’t think of anything.’

‘That’s because there isn’t anything,’ Carlyle said. ‘Not really. We considered air and we considered water. And after much discussion, we discounted water. While some parts of the country are reliant on a small number of sources, these lakes, springs and rivers are so vast, there’s nothing practical that could contaminate them. Even if you dropped a shipping container full of poison into the Mississippi, the effect would be negligible and short-lived. Even the Deepwater Horizon spill got cleaned up.’

‘You focused on air.’

‘We concluded the only viable way to trigger mass migration would be a biological attack on a geographically close group of major cities.’

‘Something like smallpox?’

‘Not smallpox. All that would trigger is a mass vaccination programme and a local lockdown. We wanted panic. We wanted people running for the hills.’

‘What then?’

‘We decided one of the mycotoxins would work best.

They’re naturally occurring in fungi, they can cause death and cancers and a whole bunch of horrible stuff, but mostly you get very sick.’

Koenig nodded. He could see how that would work. Stay-at-home mom wasn’t going to stay at home for long when her little darlings were breathing in deadly spores. She was going to load up the station wagon and drive to her sister’s. Or to her BFF from college. Anywhere the funky mushrooms weren’t. Koenig hadn’t studied the psychology of mass hysteria, but he figured it wouldn’t take too many people upping sticks before everyone was upping sticks. Sure, there’d be the contrary whack jobs who’d enjoy the attention they got from staying put. And you couldn’t move the ‘back in my day, things were much worse’ crowd from their prefabs with a block and tackle. But most people would move.

Then Koenig thought about who they had strapped to a table in the back of the Gulfstream. Nash hadn’t been involved in a plot to poison the air with funky fungi. She’d been paid to kill people with very specific jobs.

‘You didn’t stop there, though, did you, Bess?’ he said. ‘Triggering a mass migration event was the start, not the finish.’

And Carlyle said, ‘Do you know how to make a fruit salad, Ben?’

Out of left field.