Desperate Gambit by Phil Hanson

In the early days of America’s growing involvement in the conflict in Vietnam, a secret government project funded and operated by the newly formed Defense Intelligence Agency creates a dashing story of earned affluence, dedication to principles, government treachery, abiding love, and the triumph of ingenuity borne of desperation. Ellen Parker, a research Virologist at UCLA, and Dan Herzog, a Beverly hills plastic surgeon, the darling of Hollywood celebrities, and a Mafia face-fixer, are unwittingly trapped in a Defense Intelligence Agency plan to create a viral defoliant for use in Southeast Asia. In a sinister twist, the DIA have recovered a viable sample of the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, and without revealing the entire plan, recruit Ellen to work on the defoliant. They will combine the two into a deadly bioweapon Ellen’s co-worker is ruthlessly assassinated by the DIA to protect its secret when she deduces the truth. She is killed by Saxitoxin, a potent and untraceable paralytic poison. Her death is written off by authorities as having been caused by tainted by seafood. Ellen Parker knows this is impossible. Vicki Mueller was violently allergic to seafood, and never ate it. Dan and Ellen believe they are next, and devise a plan to completely and untraceably disappear. In a way no one would have predicted, they create an escape plan that allows them to vanish convincingly. They will forfeit their properties, and Dan will have his Beechcraft Bonanza crashed in the Mexican Desert with their personal effects and stolen cadaver parts burned beyond reasonable recognition. They will survive a rogue Pacific hurricane on the way to Vancouver in a friend’s sailboat for a harrowing 36 hours, hypothermic, exhausted and hallucinatory, and arrive in Vancouver to drive across Canada to Montreal with new identities and a residence and new jobs courtesy of the Mafia. The bioweapons, stored deep underground in Dugway, Utah, remain unused and unknown, until a seismic event devastates the storage area. It is decided to move the weapons to Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, there to be encased in steel reinforced concrete tombs and dropped into the Mariana Trench in deep secret, 34,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. The C-5 Galaxy transport flown out of the deserted Wendover AFB near Dugway, is incredibly struck by a de-orbiting KH-11 satellite whose positioning jets have jammed, and re-enters the atmosphere as a flaming debris field. The C-5 is destroyed, and the bioweapons fall into the deep ocean, settling at 29,000 feet in near freezing water. They will remain there for years, a lost secret, until an undersea volcanic eruption violently thrusts them from the ocean deep into the atmosphere, where they rupture and dispense their contents into the jet stream, causing world wide dissemination, and severe ecological and human damage, disrupting the entire world order. There are two known mass extinctions of life on earth. One 65 million years ago caused by a massive meteor strike in Mexico, and another 250 million years ago whose cause is not known. It eliminated 70 percent of life on Earth. Will this be another such event?