by Mark Alpert
But Supreme Harmony wasn’t out of danger yet. General Tian, the Guoanbu commander, could still shut it down. The network wouldn’t be safe as long as humans controlled its servers and wireless communications systems. The only solution was to wrest control from the humans. Supreme Harmony was reluctant to use violence—the network, after all, was composed of former human beings—but its very existence was at stake. It was engaged in a mortal struggle with Homo sapiens, the species from which it had evolved. And in a mortal struggle, only one combatant could survive.
SIXTEEN
Layla and Angelique waited until nightfall. At 10:00 P.M., while the Athena was just five hundred yards from Barro Colorado Island, the yacht’s crewmen lowered the Zodiac into the waters of Gatun Lake. Angelique sat in the stern of the rubber craft, next to the outboard, while Layla crouched in the bow, clutching the precious flash drive in her palm. The moon was up and almost full. Layla heard the helicopters still hovering overhead, but there were no Canal Zone patrol boats nearby. This part of Gatun Lake was empty except for the Athena and a huge Panamax freighter heading for the locks on the Caribbean side of the canal.
Angelique, who wore a Lycra bodysuit now instead of a bikini, let the Zodiac drift away from the yacht. Then she started the outboard but kept the engine running at a low purr. They were hoping to get away unnoticed, but after half a minute one of the helicopters aimed its spotlight at them.
“Halt!” A man holding a megaphone shouted from the chopper. “Cut your engine!”
“Hold on to something,” Angelique told Layla. Then she revved the outboard and the Zodiac leaped forward.
In seconds they were roaring across the lake, speeding toward the dock on Barro Colorado’s moonlit shore. The helicopter followed them, swooping low. The man with the megaphone shouted, “Halt!” again, but there was nothing else he could do. The chopper couldn’t land on the heavily forested island. Exhilarated, Layla squeezed the flash drive in her hand. All she had to do was find a computer at the island’s research station and upload the files to the InfoLeaks Web site. In just five minutes, the news about the lobotomized Chinese dissidents would be racing around the globe.
Then she turned around and saw something odd in the moonlight. The crewmen on the Panamax freighter were lowering a smaller boat into the water. It was a speedboat, long and sleek. As soon as it hit the lake’s surface, the crewmen untied the ropes and the boat turned toward them. Layla belatedly noticed that the freighter had Mandarin characters painted on its hull.
Angelique gunned the outboard, but the speedboat gained on them. The moonlight was so strong that Layla could see the men in the boat, four of them, all dressed in black. Guoanbu agents, most likely. As she stared at them, Angelique threw something at her. It was a plastic bag.
“Put the flash drive in it!” she yelled. “You’re going swimming.”
“What?”
“When I get to the cove up ahead, I’m going to turn the Zodiac around and you’re going to jump into the water. If we’re lucky, they won’t see you go in. They’ll keep following me while you swim to the island and find a computer.”
“But what are you going to do? How—”
“There’s no time! Get ready!”
Layla put the flash drive in the bag and stuffed it into her pocket. Then she hunched low against the rubber side of the Zodiac. Angelique made a sharp turn, and as the Zodiac banked and pivoted, Layla dove into the lake.
She went down deep and stayed under as long as she could. When she came up, she saw Angelique racing away in the Zodiac and the speedboat following close behind. At first, she thought the plan had worked. But then she saw two heads in the water, their wet hair reflecting the moonlight. The Guoanbu agents weren’t fooled. They’d split up so they could follow both her and Angelique.
The agents were less than a hundred feet away, so Layla swam like mad. Gasping and sputtering, she scrambled onto the island’s muddy shore and headed for the cluster of low buildings by the dock. These were the offices and labs and dormitories of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Layla sprinted toward the largest building, yelling, “Help! Help!” at the top of her lungs. After a moment, the building’s front door opened and a bearded man poked his head outside.
Then a gun went off behind her. The front door splintered and the bearded man screamed. Layla screamed, too, and cut to the right, away from the buildings. She couldn’t stop at the research station. She couldn’t upload the files. The Guoanbu agents were right behind her. She had no choice except to run into the rain forest.
She plunged into the undergrowth, fighting her way through the branches. The thick canopy of foliage blocked the moonlight, and after running a few hundred feet Layla couldn’t see a thing. She stopped for a second, disoriented, and as she spun around she felt a jab in her left forearm. Squinting, she saw what had pricked her—a black palm tree with sharp, six-inch-long spines jutting from its trunk. If she hadn’t stopped, she would’ve impaled herself.
Then she heard a noise that scared the shit out of her, a guttural bellow. It sounded like a lion’s roar, but that couldn’t be right. Must be a monkey, she thought. A howler monkey. A moment later, she heard another bellow coming from a different direction. Then she heard the Guoanbu agents crashing through the vegetation behind her. She turned away from the black palm and ran deeper into the forest.
A pair of bullets whizzed overhead. The agents were taking potshots at her, firing in the direction of the noise she was making. Another bullet streaked past her and smacked into a tree trunk. More howler monkeys started bellowing, disturbed by the gunfire. Then a third bullet punched through the leaves, and something heavy fell from the branches. It was one of the monkeys. It fell to the forest floor and writhed on a patch of moonlit ground, its stomach torn open by the stray bullet. No, no, Layla thought, stop it, stop it!
She darted to the side, leaping away in horror. At the same moment, one of the agents rushed into the shaft of moonlight and stumbled on the thrashing creature. In its death throes, the monkey latched onto the agent’s leg and sank its teeth into his calf. Cursing, the man slammed the butt of his gun against the animal’s skull, and without even thinking Layla hurled herself against him. She caught the agent off balance, and he tumbled backward against a tree trunk.
The man let out an awful scream. He was impaled on the spines of a black palm.
The second agent heard the scream. He yelled something in Mandarin as he crashed through the jungle. Layla ran away from the noise, but by now she was dizzy with exhaustion. She tripped over a root and slid down a muddy slope, landing in shallow, marshy water.
She realized with a start that she was back at the island’s shoreline. The placid surface of Gatun Lake stretched in front of her and on her left and right, too. She was trapped at the end of one of the island’s peninsulas. Frantic, she wheeled around, looking for an escape route. Then she saw the second agent at the top of the muddy bank, leveling his gun at her.
But in the next instant there was a flash of movement beside him, the sweep of a long slender leg. Something smacked into the agent’s skull, and he tumbled down the slope, insensate. Then Layla saw Angelique standing in his place.
The French marine leaped down to the lake’s edge, “Over here, quickly! I hid the Zodiac under the mangroves.”
“What? How did you…?”
“I cut the engine and lost them in the shallows. Their boat is circling the island now, looking for me. Come on, get in.”
They launched the Zodiac and headed back to the Athena. The yacht had motored across the lake and was now close to the Gatun Locks, the section of the canal that led to the Caribbean. Although the Athena was at least two miles away, Layla could see the lights on its twin hulls. Angelique ran the Zodiac as fast as it could go.
They were halfway there when the Athena exploded.
An enormous fireball burst from the starboard hull. Five seconds later Layla heard the explosion, and then a second fireball erupted on the p
ort side. The yacht’s lights winked out and a cloud of smoke spread across the lake.
Then another speedboat emerged from behind the Chinese freighter. It crossed in front of the ship’s prow and came at them from dead ahead. As Angelique slowed the Zodiac and tried to turn it around, Layla spotted four more Guoanbu agents in the speedboat. One of them lifted a long, slender rifle and aimed it over the bow.
“Angelique!” Layla yelled. “Get down! Get—”
Then she heard a loud crack, a miniature sonic boom, and Angelique collapsed.
SEVENTEEN
The Monitor Room at Camp Whiplash was aptly named. Located in the basement of the compound’s largest bunker, all four of its concrete walls were covered with flat-screen video monitors. Jim tried to count them, but quickly gave up—there were dozens, maybe a hundred. What’s more, the screen of each monitor was divided into sixteen smaller squares, each displaying a separate video feed. Below the screens, long tables had been placed end to end so that they lined the room’s perimeter. On each table were several laptops connected to the monitors. About twenty analysts from the CIA’s Science and Technology division sat at the tables, alternately tapping the keyboards of their laptops and glancing at the screens.
Hammer led Jim and Kirsten to the center of the room. The analysts paid them no mind. Their eyes were fixed on the screens, intently following the video feeds from the thousands of cyborg insects that had just been released. Jim didn’t understand how the analysts could make sense of it all. The array of images flashing on the monitors seemed utterly chaotic.
Hammer sensed Jim’s confusion. “A little overwhelming, huh? That was my first impression, too.”
Kirsten frowned. “It’s a fucking circus, that’s what it is. You got the world’s worst case of information overload.”
Hammer gave her an icy smile. “Maybe we’re not as smart as you geniuses at Fort Meade, but we’re not idiots. We use software to organize and filter the video.” He turned to Dusty, who sat in front of one of the laptops. “Tell ’em about the software.”
Dusty nodded. “As the video feeds from the drones stream into our servers, the software picks out the ones that are worth watching. The program can recognize the shapes of buildings and vehicles and people, and it automatically highlights the feeds containing those objects. And our facial-recognition software can match the people we observe with the insurgents and terrorists in our database.”
“But new jihadis join the Taliban every day,” Kirsten noted. “And the new ones aren’t in your database.”
“That’s where the human element comes in,” Hammer said, pointing at the twenty agents sitting at the tables. “We rely on our analysts to eyeball the sons of bitches to see if they’re doing anything suspicious. Like planting bombs under the roads or cleaning their assault rifles.”
Jim stepped forward and surveyed the crazy quilt of videos. On one screen, a scrawny cow chewed its cud. On another, two boys ran across a field. On a third, an antiquated truck jounced along a dirt path. It was a mass of disjointed images, random snapshots of the poor Afghan village of Golbahar. “I don’t see anything suspicious,” he said.
“Hold on. We haven’t started hunting yet.” Hammer gazed at the bank of monitors, then turned back to Dusty. “Let’s get a closer look at that farmhouse on Feed 107. They got a Toyota HiLux parked in their yard. That’s the Taliban’s favorite ride.”
Dusty tapped the keys of his laptop. He was sending radio instructions to the drones, Jim realized. The signals would travel to the tiny antennas mounted on the cyborg flies, and then the implanted chips would deliver jolts of electricity to the insects’ flight muscles, which would maneuver the drones toward the specified target. “How do you coordinate them?” Jim asked. Despite his better judgment, he was fascinated by the technology. “Do you send the same instructions to all the drones?”
Dusty shook his head. “If we did that, they’d crash into each other. No, the system relies on swarm intelligence. The chips on the drones communicate with one another, and each keeps track of its neighbors. When we send them a target, the microprocessors plot their paths so that the drones move together like a swarm of real flies. Check out the screen over there.”
He pointed at one of the monitors. Each of the sixteen squares on the screen showed a different part of the farmhouse. The images in the squares grew larger as the swarm approached the target. One square showed the Toyota HiLux, another showed a wooden privy, and a third showed a chicken pecking in the dirt. Several others showed the house itself, a one-story mud-brick structure with tattered curtains in the open windows. The analyst tapped his keyboard again, and three of the cyborg flies landed on a windowsill. The insects entered the house and their video feeds displayed the interior: a room with no furniture, just a Turkish carpet on the floor. An old man slept on a pallet in the corner. The drones hovered over the sleeping man and the video feeds showed his weathered face.
“He doesn’t match anyone in our database,” Dusty reported, turning to Agent Hammer. “Should we reroute to another target?”
Hammer mulled it over. “As long as we’re here, we might as well check out the other rooms.”
Kirsten let out an exasperated grunt. “You should end this test right now. You’re out of your depth.”
“She’s right,” Jim said. “You got all this surveillance video coming in, but no way to systematically analyze it. That’s why this mission is turning into a wild-goose chase.”
Hammer ignored Jim and focused on Kirsten. “You know what, Chan? I think you’re jealous. You wish the NSA had a system like this, don’t you?” Then he turned back to Dusty and pointed at the screen. “Send the drones into the room behind that door. Maybe the jihadis are eating breakfast in there.”
The cyborg flies descended to the gap under the door and crawled through. Their video feeds showed a tin washtub in which a young woman was taking a bath. An older woman sat on a stool next to the tub, helping the young woman wash her hair. Dusty maneuvered one of the drones closer so it could focus on the women’s faces. Their lips were moving. “Well, well,” Hammer said. “Here’s a scene right out of a porno flick. Do we have audio pickups on these drones?”
“Yes, sir,” Dusty answered. He tapped a few keys and the sound of a conversation in Dari came out of the laptop’s speakers. “Should I plug in the translation program?”
“No, that won’t be necessary. The picture’s more interesting than the words, don’t you think?”
Jim glanced at Kirsten and saw her face turn red. Hammer was deliberately provoking her. Furious, Jim raised his mechanical hand, thinking how easy it would be to crush the agent’s throat. But he restrained himself and simply pointed at Hammer’s chest. “Stop this. Now.”
Hammer wasn’t intimidated. “Are you kidding? At least Chan has some pull. You’re just a ‘technical adviser.’ Why should I take orders from you?”
“If you don’t stop this test in the next—”
“What are you gonna do? All your Ranger buddies are outside in the courtyard, and I got twenty agents in this room who—”
A loud, high-pitched crack interrupted him. It came from the speakers of Dusty’s laptop, which meant that the sound had been picked up by the drones inside the mud-brick house in Golbahar. “What the hell was that?” Hammer asked. “It sounded like a slap.”
Jim stared at the video monitor. One of the squares on the screen had gone black. The square next to it showed the older Afghan woman holding a homemade fly swatter. She’d just smashed one of the cyborg insects and was now stalking the other two.
“Jesus!” Hammer yelled at Dusty. “Get the drones out of there!”
But the old woman was fast. She managed to cream another drone before Dusty could maneuver it away. The third drone hovered out of reach, and its camera showed the old Afghan woman staring curiously at the fly she’d just killed. She bent over to pick it up from the floor.
“No,” Hammer groaned. “Don’t—”
Th
e old woman suddenly retracted her hand, as if she’d been bitten. Then she fell on her side and started convulsing on the floor.
The young woman in the tub screamed. The shrill noise blared from the laptop’s speakers. Within seconds her relatives came to her aid. The drones outside the house showed several men running across the fields and calling for their neighbors.
Ignoring Jim and Kirsten, Hammer spent the next ten minutes shouting orders at his agents. As the analysts withdrew the swarm from Golbahar, the screens showed dozens of turbaned men gathering in the center of the village. Many of them carried AK-47s. The entire male population was up in arms.
Hammer turned to one of his bodyguards. “Contact Special Operations and tell them to send a team to Golbahar,” he ordered. “We got a clusterfuck in progress.”
“What happened to the old woman?” Jim asked. “The drones aren’t weaponized, are they?”
“It’s built into the electronics,” Hammer replied. “The Chinese didn’t want their dissidents to find out about the surveillance system, so each drone carries a heat-sensitive dart. If someone tries to pick up one of the bugs, the dart injects a nerve agent that incapacitates the unlucky bastard until the security forces arrive at the scene.”
“Oh, that’s great.” Kirsten shook her head. “That’s just wonderful.”
“It’s not such a big deal. It happened a few times before in our earlier tests. We just send Special Ops over there and they clean up the mess.”