Chapter 41VIKTOR WAS EXCITED. HE never understood, nor cared to consider, what drove him to see this killer work its magic in a human population. When he fled Soviet Russia, he had forced himself to desert his work and tried in vain to forget what they might have achieved: to weaponize a virus, to enhance its destructive ability by shortening the incubation period, to combine it with other viruses, to increase its resistance to temperature and humidity, and above all, to make it resilient enough to ride along on a long-range rocket to its target.
At first, they had made hundreds of pounds of Variola major by injecting embryo eggs and then harvesting the virus. With substantial stocks accumulated, they found ways to incubate the virus without the need of embryonic eggs.
Since General Ramo
