The Troop

Q: Please state your name and rank, sir.

A: Stonewall Brewer, admiral, Canadian navy.

Q: Stonewall?

A: I always tell people that my mother must have had a premonition.

Q: Very prescient of her. Admiral, when were you made aware of the events occurring on Falstaff Island?

A: About oh-three-hundred. Can’t recall the exact time on the display of the clock beside my bed—although the call was tracked, so we could get you that info if need be.

Q: What were you told?

A: That a nonspecific contagion of unknown lethality had breached containment.

Q: Were you aware of the nature of this contagion?

A: At the time, no.

Q: No idea at all?

A: You will find you’ll only have to ask me a question once, my friend. The first answer is the answer you’ll get every time.

Q: Only seeking to clarify matters for the court, Admiral. What’s your experience, if any, with the spread or neutralization of a contagion?

A: If I had no experience, I don’t imagine it would’ve been my phone ringing in the dead of night. I spearheaded the containment efforts on the SARS outbreak that hit metropolitan Toronto back in 2002.

Q: If I recall, forty-four people died during that outbreak.

A: Could have been a lot more. That was my first rodeo.

Q: And all you knew about the contagion in North Point was—

A: I hit the ground with the intel available at the time. We had one case of infection—

Q: That would be Tom Padgett.

A: That’s right, the guinea pig. Typhoid Tom. It was SOP: quarantine the area, detain all residents, set up a zone of infection. Nothing comes in and most importantly, nothing gets out. That’s how we treat icebergs.

Q: Icebergs?

A: That’s how threats like this are known internally. The idea is that only ten percent of an iceberg is visible. The other ninety percent is below the water. So when we’ve got a threat without set parameters, one that could be huge, we call it an iceberg.

Q: And containment was vital?

A: Always is, but even more so in this case. Word came down that we could be up against a three-tier bug: the virus could be carrier-borne, waterborne, or airborne. The terrible threesome.

Q: What were your orders?

A: I don’t take orders as a rule. It’s my duty to dole them out.

Q: What was your agenda, then?

A: It was full-scale. Total neutralization. Quarantine the island and all life-forms on it. Nothing comes or goes. I had to enact some very serious measures.

Q: Such as?

A: First off, we couldn’t do anything about the kids. That was rough, no two ways about it. But we couldn’t risk it.

Q: Anything else?

A: When I said nothing comes, nothing goes, I meant it. If a seagull took off from that island and tried to fly back to land, I had a recon sniper shoot it out of the sky. I had military personnel in hazmat suits fish the corpse out of the water. After the island was cleared, I ordered four million gallons of Anotec Blue to be dumped into the surrounding waters. We call that stuff Blue Death: it kills everything, indiscriminately. Marine life, plants, plankton, protozoa. The eggheads at the CDC told me I ought to make another pass just to be sure. A few earth mother types got their knickers in a twist over that. We razed the island, too. Took four separate napalm strikes—you know how hard it is to find napalm? My marching orders were to render Falstaff Island biologically sterile: not one living thing left. Maybe there’s a few amoebas still swimming around. I’m constantly amazed at the tenacity of all life on this planet. But if anything’s still alive, it’s not for lack of trying on my part.