Free The Gulf Conspiracy by Ken McClure Page A

to help out and take it a stage further. See what you can come up with. Miss Roberts will give you what little information we have on Sebring.’
    Rose Roberts looked up when Steven emerged from Macmillan’s office and held out a brown foolscap envelope. ‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Dr Sebring’s work at Porton was secret so we have to go through the usual channels to get information and that, as you know, might take time. If you think you really need to know what he was working on let me know and I’ll see what I can do to speed things along.
    Steven accepted the envelope and said, ‘Thanks Rose; I think maybe we should start pushing about Sebring’s time at Porton right away. I’ve a feeling it might well be relevant.’
    ‘ I’ll get the application in to the MOD this afternoon and mark it top priority,’ said Rose Roberts. ‘I’ll let you know when we get something back but don’t hold your breath. They do like holding on to their secrets.’
    Steven decided to spend what was left of the afternoon in the library. He needed to do some background reading on the Gulf War so that he had more of a feel for it. His knowledge at the moment was painfully thin. First though, he read through the file that Rose Roberts had put together on the dead man.
    Sebring, the son of a Church of England vicar, had studied medical sciences at Edinburgh University, graduating with a first class degree in the summer of 1985 before moving to the University of Oxford where he had spent the next three years working for a D.Phil. on the cloning of viral pathogenesis genes. He started work as a post-doctoral research associate in the labs at Porton Down in January 1989 but left in June 1991 after suffering a nervous breakdown. He made a tentative return to work but decided to resign. He went on to make a complete recovery however, and was appointed to the teaching staff of Leicester University in October 1991 as a lecturer in molecular biology; had been there ever since. He was married to Jane Manson, a teacher, whom he met in 1993 and married in May 1994. They had no children although they had recently applied to be considered as adoptive parents. Steven copied both home and school addresses into his notebook.
    He put away the file and started to work his way through a succession of articles on the Gulf War and issues arising from it. It wasn’t something that he had thought about in a long time, although he had been aware of an ongoing battle between government and war veterans over the existence or non-existence of Gulf War Syndrome. After a couple of hours he had to admit to having some sympathy with the establishment view that there could be no such thing. No one single condition could possibly have so many differing symptoms. On the other hand, he was taken aback at the sheer number of soldiers who had come down with illness after service in the Gulf – and the number of deaths among them was nothing short of alarming. He felt sure that there had to be some middle ground.
    It seemed to him that the troops had been subjected to a number of different but nonetheless harmful factors, all of which had caused illness and which had combined in the minds of sufferers to give the impression of a syndrome linked to war service in the Gulf.
    If nothing else, Steven felt that his appetite for knowledge had been whetted by his afternoon in the library. He resolved to continue his search for information at home on the internet. By nine in the evening he had amassed a pile of print-outs that would keep him going for the rest of the evening and probably through all of the following day.
    Steven had downloaded documents from a wide variety of sources including official Ministry of Defence sites as well as those run by Gulf War veterans’ associations and from individuals who felt they had something to say on the subject, usually posting some personal experience of their time in the Gulf on the web. He noted that many of these