Last of the April Ten

In March 1991, Iraq repatriated forty-five prisoners captured during the first Gulf War. Last of the April Ten imagines there was another group of ten POWs who were not repatriated until the end of April.

The press calls them the April Ten. But they are not what they seem. During their captivity they have been turned into viral bombs, intended to restore smallpox to a world with little remaining immunity from that ancient scourge. As the years go by without a presidential order to arm these human bombs, they begin to fail and are destroyed.

Peter Gayle, a former RAF squadron leader and Tornado pilot, and Mickey Williams, his former back-seater, are the last surviving members of the group. When Williams is “culled,” Gayle becomes the only one left—the last of the April Ten, and the only one to have been “armed.” As people near him sicken and die, Gayle sees he has been made into a monster—one that he himself may have to destroy.

The novel opens with Viktor Krylov, a former KGB officer now working as a nuclear Safeguards inspector in Vienna. He is lured to a cave the Americans have discovered in northern Iraq, a cavern that once housed some sort of research, but now contains only a powerful gamma radiation field, human remains, and signs of a fire hot enough to melt rock.

To the Americans, led by an unreconstructed Cold Warrior named Emerson, the cave can only be the site of a dirty-bomb project gone terribly wrong—and proof that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. But Krylov, aided by his Soviet-era contacts, infers what really happened to the April Ten, and resolves to destroy both the weapon and the ability to re-create it. Thus begins an odyssey toward a deadly confrontation in the winter marshes north of St. Petersburg.