So I didn't post this before, but I got a story published through an Australian (/NZ) short story competition.
http://www.c-pubs.com.au/products-page/asrc-security-resilience-imprint/australian-security-nightmares-short-stories/ . Some of the other stories are pretty good but I wouldn't blame you if you turned straight to page 72.
Buy a hardcopy or download the free (!!) pdf via http://www.securityresearch.org.au//uploader/files/Aust_Security_Nightmares-Short_stories.pdf
I spent a solid few days on this one. It was fairly easy to write plot-wise as a lot of this is linked to public health emergency planning, which I am well up to speed on.
The hard part was thinking about how to present it. Writing it as a feature magazine article was a bit of a cop-out in that it removes the emotional impact, which is why I lean heavily on the "mad mullah" topic and also try to get the reader to feel some of the vicarious emotion via the wife.
It would have worked easier as a straight third-person story but I wanted to show the passage of time which is difficult in third-person in a short story, and I think by hinting at things that - in the future after the events of the story - the reader "should" know, it's a shorthand trick to make the world in the story a lot larger.
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