Shutting down New York because a virus has been released inside it, from my novel Silent Lips (click here for more information):
"There were seven men in the room when he entered, all from Washington. Three of them were in uniform, including the five star general he had spoken to earlier. All looked concerned.
He studied General Grant. He was a tall, straight man, with a lean, fit-looking body, and he spoke in a careful, precise voice, glancing at all the attendees from time to time. He was not as young as Mcgroarty had first assumed; there were deep lines down his cheeks and his lips were thin, the grey eyes severe.
McGroarty liked the man's message even less than he had expected.
So, there had been an outbreak of some kind of Disease and several people had died in the past day or so, but there were always things happening in large cities like New York.
The way the general was putting it, somebody somewhere in Washington had a special group - formed soon after the terrorist attack on New York of 9-11 and the unsuccessful scattered bio warfare attacks that had followed it - that investigated these kinds of things, independently of the local authorities, and these people had units stationed in every city and town, often disguised as ordinary commercial firms. One such unit had started tracking the outbreak in New York as soon as the second case had been admitted to hospital.
This unit believed that the disease was a brand new one.
They weren't sure, the civilians said, but McGroarty noticed that General Grant seemed to have bought their conclusions; he did not look like the kind of man who bought crap easily.
The group also believed that the disease was growing at a rapid rate; according to their calculations it was due to start a phase of exponential growth within the next day or two, and the thing could go out of control unless it was checked, or cured.
Or contained.
Everybody had nodded when the last option had been mentioned; McGroarty didn't need to have it spelled out which option the seven gentlemen around the table thought was most feasible.
He had made his first interruption about ten minutes ago: on whose authority had they called this meeting?
It was General Grant who answered.
The President of the United States, acting on the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It was then he really started worrying.
A lot of people were taking this thing very seriously indeed. If it started to spread like they said it would, he could understand the concern about keeping order in the city. It would be a madhouse.
The civilians' computer model of the spread of the disease showed different possible scenarios, all of them of varying degrees of complexity, but all of them bad. If they were right the city was in for a tough few days or perhaps even weeks. The local police would have to control the situation; if they needed help there was a special army group trained in such things that could be called in.
They were on the way into the city now.
They had unfolded a large map and spread it on the table. It showed a series of concentric circles, based on New York.
Some were irregularly shaped, using natural lines provided by the geography of the land, such as the rivers running between New Jersey and Philadelphia and around Delaware Bay, running up the river into the Appalachian Hills, ending at Connecticut. McGroarty leaned over the table, hands astride the large map, his tunic unbuttoned because of the stifling heat. The map was a large sectioned one of the coastline on the eastern seaboard from Virginia to Maine.
They were proposing a fallback plan which assumed that a cure was not soon found and the disease did not show signs of abating: to divide the surrounding areas into five zones, with boundaries between each zone.
Guards would man the boundary crossing points."
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