Set in New Zealand, CRYSTAL ICE describes the empire of two brothers who own a successful Brazilian restaurant on Auckland’s busy Viaduct Harbour. A restaurant that is the legitimate front for the manufacture of crystal methamphetamine that takes place on a small rural farm near Runciman, just south of Auckland. The meth lab is the money mine that funds the development of a genetically engineered variant of the 1918 Spanish flu. Unlike COVID-19 this is a weaponized virus so terrible that it has the potential to become a global pandemic, killing millions of people. CRYSTAL ICE also tells of an Auckland-based motorcycle gang called the Skorpions that has the distribution network that allows it to sell crystal methamphetamine in New Zealand and the mutualistic relationship that exists between the Croatian restaurateurs and the Skorpion leadership. It is a relationship that hinges on the Croatians successfully smuggling the precursor chemicals into the country and receiving 60% of the vast amounts of money generated by this illicit trade. When this relationship is threatened, by one of the Skorpion co-leaders withholding monies from the brothers, the Croatian’s revenge is both swift and brutal, resulting in the execution of the renegade Skorpion leader. The killing is the catalyst to a series of events that ultimately threatens the illicit drug ring.
Parallel to the power flux between the Croatians and the Skorpions is a young and naive New Zealand Customs officer who gradually uncovers small and sometimes, seemingly insignificant clues that eventually leads him to discover the connection between the Croatian restaurateurs who manufacture the drugs, the Auckland motorcycle gang who distribute them and finally the terrorist cell that released the virus in the United States.
Unlike Contagion written by Scott Burns in 2010 this is the story of a terrorist weaponized virus released by aerosol across the North Eastern states of America. Similar to COVID-19 the outbreak initially catches USAMRIID and the CDC off-guard. However, they soon implement the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza and initiate inter-agency field teams to investigate and identify the point sources of contagion. This novel does not detail the effects COVID-19 has had on the United States, it only details the effect the fictional weaponized virus has had before its distribution was disrupted.
