"Richard Preston - The Cobra Event" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

except for a small, strange-looking pod. They watched. In the evening light they saw it:
something bleeding into the air from the wing pod. The wing pod was known as a
dryline-source disseminator, and the way it worked was highly classified. What was coming
out of the pod was a living weapon in the form of a dry powder.
It was a whitish haze that almost instantly dissipated and became invisible. The particles
were very small, and they had been treated with a special plastic to make them last longer in
the air. They were between one micron and five microns across, the ideal size for a
weaponized bioparticle. It is the size particle that can be inhaled deep into the human lung, a
particle that will stick naturally to the membrane of the lung. To get an idea of the size of
such a particle, you can think of it this way: about fifty particles lined up in a row would span
the thickness of a human hair. One or two such particles trapped in the lung, if they are a
weapon, can cause a fatal infection that kills in three days. Particles this small do not fall out
of the air. They stay aloft. You can't smell them, you can't see them, you don't know they are
there until you start to get sick. Not even rain can wash them out of the sky -- they don't
get caught by raindrops. Rain actually improves the effectiveness of a bioweapon in the air,
because rain clouds block sunlight. Bio-aerosols don't do well in sunlight. It destroys their
genetic material and kills them. Biological laydowns are best done at night.
The jet shrank and seemed to vanish into the disc of the sun, leaving a departing rumble. It
was doing a streakout across the Pacific Ocean. The streakout line was fifty miles long.
'Beautiful,' someone said.
'Incredible.'
The talk among the watchers grew technical.
'What's the dissemination rate?'
'One gram per meter.'
'That's all?'
'A gram per meter! Holy Christ! That's nothing.' The jet was spraying only one kilogram of
hot agent per kilometer of flight.
'If it was anthrax,' one of the scientists remarked, 'they'd have to shovel it from a dump
truck to have any effect on the monkeys.'
'There's only about eighty kilos of agent in that pod.' Less than two hundred pounds.
'Yow. And he's laying it for fifty miles.'
'What is the agent?'
'It's the Utah cocktail. You didn't hear me say that.' The identity of the material was
classified.
'The Utah cocktail? That's Utah he's laying down? Man, a fifty-mile laydown.'
The streakout line was downwind of Johnston Atoll.
The hot agent would drift away from the island. As the line of particles left by the jet
moved along with the wind, it would sweep across a huge area of sea. The laydown worked
along the same principle as a windshield wiper making a stroke across an area of window,
except that the line of bioparticles moved straight across the sea, without turning.
'That could create, what -- two thousand square miles of hot zone?' one of the scientists
said.
'If the stuff works. It won't work.'
'Two thousand square miles of hot zone with just two hundred pounds of agent. Jesus.
That's two ounces of weapon per square mile. That will never work.'
 'That's a laydown the size of Los Angeles!'
'I wonder what it'll do to our Russian friends out there?'
'Poor saps.'
'Ask the doctor here what he thinks.'
'I think it's going to work,' Mark Littleberry said.