Carl A. Posey

A quick look at The Tenth Chalice, just finished.

In March, 1991, Iraq repatriated forty-five prisoners captured during the first Gulf War. Our story imagines there was another group of ten POWs who were not repatriated until the end of April. The press dubbed them the April Ten. But to Mohammad Al-Rabiah, an Iraqi chemist, they were “ten chalices of death.”

Under his care, each had been turned into a kind of Typhoid Mary, a so-called “symptomless carrier” who unknowingly spreads but does not contract an illness. The April Ten went home as viral bombs, intended to re-infect the world with ARALSK-I, a potent, Soviet-developed smallpox virus. But as the years went by without Saddam’s order to arm those bombs, the chalices begin to fail and had to be destroyed.

By the time our story begins, Peter Gayle, a former RAF squadron leader and Tornado pilot, and Mickey Williams, his former back-seater, are the last surviving members of the April Ten. When Williams is “culled,” Gayle becomes the only survivor—the tenth chalice of the title. The execution of Saddam has led Al-Rabiah to go forward on his own with the “arming” of the Englishman. As people near him sicken and die, Gayle realizes he has been made into a monster that he himself may have to destroy.

The novel opens not with Gayle, but with Viktor Krylov, a former KGB colonel now working as a Safeguards inspector with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Krylov is lured to a cave that Americans have discovered in northern Iraq. The cavern once housed some kind of research, but now shows signs of a fire hot enough to melt rock, human remains, and a powerful gamma radiation field.

To the Americans, led by an unreconstructed Cold Warrior named Emerson, the cave can only be the site of a dirty-bomb project gone wrong, and proof that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. As Emerson begins to understand that the dirty-bomb scenery is a ruse and that the cave is where Al-Rabiah created his “chalices,” he goes after Peter Gayle, hoping to add ARALSK-I to his anti-terror arsenal.

Krylov meanwhile intuits that the dirty-bomb idea is a diversion and begins gathering the threads that link the mysterious cave to a nether world of bio-weaponry and intrigue. His odyssey, unfolding in counterpoint with Peter Gayle’s and Emerson’s, takes them to a final, deadly confrontation in the winter marshes north of St. Petersburg.

Interwoven into this drama are two love stories. The first involves Peter Gayle and Anna Nieman, the second, Krylov and Svetlana Trulova, the daughter of an old KGB colleague and friend, killed in 1983. The other major player is black smallpox..

Set mainly in Austria, Switzerland, England, and Russia, The Tenth Chalice is closely researched, its characters round, its pace compelling.