Manny picked up his glass of Diet Coke and took a gulp. The burn of the carbonation helped a little, but what he really needed was that sweet surge of caffeine. He let his eyes shift to Steph then back to the group sitting around the conference table. A quick glance was enough for him to see that the president wasn’t in a hurry to jump in. She was good that way, willing to let people talk and argue before she stepped in, and usually even then her first forays were to ask questions, so that when she did decide on a course of action she knew what she was talking about.
Alex took a cup of coffee from a staff member’s tray with a polite nod and then, without raising her voice, looked directly at Ben and said, “I didn’t say we were overreacting by scrambling troops and thinking about deployment. I said it was the wrong reaction.”
Ben opened his mouth to speak but then stopped. It was actually kind of comical, Manny thought. Ben was not the kind of man to hold himself back or to second-guess, and the sight of him with his mouth hanging open would have been, at another time and under different circumstances, worth laughing at. But it wasn’t another time and different circumstances. It was the day after China accidentally dropped a nuclear weapon on one of its own villages. Except the problem was they still weren’t entirely sure if China had accidentally dropped the weapon or if they had “accidentally” dropped the weapon.
“That’s what I’m trying to say.” Alex put her cup down and pulled her tablet out and put it on the table. “I’m sorry for being late, and I’m sure Billy and Ben did an excellent job of explaining the rationale behind deployment decisions, but all those decisions are based on the idea that this nuclear explosion was either just an accident, as the Chinese claim, or part of some sort of wider, deliberate strategy. But the thing is, from the information I have, I’m willing to say it wasn’t an accident, and that it wasn’t planned either,” Alex said. She tapped the tablet twice and brought up a picture. “The important thing is that the information we have leads me to believe that while this wasn’t a strategic decision, there was a reason the Chinese set off the explosion. They were trying to cover something up. The images we have aren’t great, but look here. There just isn’t much going on in that part of China on a regular basis, and even though we have satellite coverage, it’s limited. Frankly, this part of China isn’t considered important, and it hasn’t been a real priority with imaging. Tech has enhanced, but there’s a limit to the resolution and to how much we can blow things up.” She spun the tablet so that it was facing the president. The men—and everybody else in the room other than Steph and Alex was a man—leaned forward so they could see the picture. “Blow things up is maybe the wrong phrase given what happened, but this is from five hours before the nuke.”
Manny had seen enough of these sorts of military satellite pictures that even if he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at, he could recognize the pattern of cars and trucks in a parking lot, the layout of buildings. He turned to the aide behind him. “Get this up on the big monitor.”
The young man nodded, took the tablet, tapped it a few times, and then the image was on the wall.
“Here,” Alex said, standing up and tapping against the monitor. “This is the entrance to the main mine. Primarily rare earth metals, the kind of stuff you’ll find in your cell phones and your tablets. They do most of the refining on-site, here, in this large complex of buildings.” She tapped another spot. “As far as we can tell, all of this over here is just garages, maintenance, that sort of thing. I mean, it looks so damn regular it’s almost comical. There are a couple of factories in the village, some chemical processing stuff, but basically, if this mine weren’t here, the village wouldn’t be here. The mine is the center of things.”
Ben Broussard was standing now, leaning over Manny’s shoulder and staring at the image on Alex’s tablet instead of looking at the monitor on the wall. “Military? You’re saying this is a hidden military facility?”
“Not exactly,” Alex said. “That’s the thing. If it were a standard military, chem, or bio research facility, we would have better pictures. I mean, obviously, it’s possible we just whiffed. We all know how much we’ve struggled with getting agents on the ground in China, particularly in the rural areas, but I don’t think that’s what we have here. I think it’s something small. Maybe biological weapons. Maybe chemical. But almost certainly only a couple of scientists, a few rooms, the sort of thing that could stay hidden because nobody, including the Chinese, think it’s important. I mean, this is the ass end of China. The analyst for this region is young, uh,” she looked over her shoulder at her aide who said something under his breath, “Terry Zouskis, but she’s sharp. She knows what she is talking about, and, well, here’s the thing. Something was going on, something that scared the shit out of the Chinese.”
“Bioweapons?” Billy looked rattled when he said it, and Manny couldn’t blame him. Conventions and treaties be damned, they all knew the Chinese were researching biological agents, and sooner or later there was going to be a breach. The only question was how big a problem it was going to cause for the Chinese. And the world. Was it a “drop a nuke on it” kind of problem?
“We don’t know what it is yet,” Alex said. She walked back to her seat. “As far as we can tell, it looks like a mine and a refinery and maintenance buildings because, well, it is a mine and a refinery and maintenance buildings. But there is plenty of space to hide a few offices and a small lab without raising any eyebrows. There’s no question there was something going on inside, out of sight of the satellites. If you look here, near the entrance of the mine,” she said, and flicked her fingers on the screen, zooming in until they could all see that what had appeared to be simply part of the building was actually a group of figures. Maybe two dozen in all. “Soldiers. Or something to that effect. You can see here and here, automatic weapons, but the thing that made us start thinking this might not be a military or research facility that we’d missed is what the soldiers are doing.”
“Their guns.” The president sat up and gestured toward the screen.
“Yep,” Alex said.
Manny didn’t see it. “What about them?”
Steph pointed hard at the screen. “They’ve got their guns aimed toward the building, not away from it. The soldiers aren’t trying to keep people out, they’re trying to keep people in.”
There was a buzz of voices in response to the president, but Manny saw that Alex wasn’t trying to speak yet. She was sitting up straight and looking around the room, and as she did so, Manny watched her and saw the way Alex seemed to be counting who was in the room. She was hesitating. Manny looked around the room and tried to figure out who she was seeing that made her not want to speak, and then, after a moment, he realized it wasn’t a single person, but the simple fact that there were too many people in the room. She looked at him and raised her eyebrows. Nobody else noticed, but he tilted his head toward the door and Alex nodded. Okay, Manny thought. She wanted the room cleared. He had to trust her.
He stood up and clapped his hands twice. The room quieted. Steph was looking at him with a smirk, but she’d missed the transaction between him and Alex. She thought he was just trying to quiet the room down.
“Everybody out. Billy, Ben, Alex, you stay; everybody else out.” He gave them only half a second to look confused before he yelled it. “Out! Get the fuck out of here!” The aides and staff scrambled, and suddenly it was just the president, the national security advisor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretary of defense, and all of them were staring at Manny and waiting for him to speak.
Alex looked at him calmly. Even if he didn’t actually know the specifics of why he’d done it, why he’d cleared the room, it was what Alex had been waiting for: whatever it was she was about to say, he’d been right that she hadn’t wanted to say it to everyone in the room. She turned to address Steph. Manny, just for a moment, thought that Alexandra Harris had arrived a generation too soon; she was somebody who could have held the presid
ency if she’d been born at the right time.
“Look, I don’t have anything here,” Manny said, “but Alex clearly does, and she can correct me if I’m wrong, but it is something she didn’t want to say in front of a crowd.” Everybody turned to look at Alex, and she didn’t correct Manny. “You all know me, and you know I don’t hold back, and if this was politics or whatever, fine, but the Chinese just dropped a nuclear fucking bomb. This is one of those ‘history is going to look back and judge us’ kinds of moments, and I, for one, think we better get it right. Or, maybe more importantly, we can’t afford to get it wrong. I have no clue what the deal is, but there is clearly something Alex knows that she needs to share with us but doesn’t exactly want to say.”
Steph cleared her throat. “Just tell me it isn’t zombies. Did you catch that asshole on the news saying there was a possibility that the nuke was to cover up a zombie outbreak?” Manny had watched the news with Steph and had actually been kind of amused at the earnestness of the commentators. He’d long ago gotten used to talking heads who made their livings bashing the administration. They were the ones who never seemed to let facts or journalism stand in their way. “I swear to God, if I hear the word ‘zombies’ out of anyone’s mouth, I’m ordering the Secret Service to take you out to the Rose Garden to have you summarily executed.” Ben Broussard and Billy Cannon both chuckled, but Alex’s expression didn’t change.
“Bugs,” Alex said. Her voice was soft.
“Pardon me?” the president said, and she wasn’t smiling anymore.
“I said bugs. It’s not conventional, and we don’t think it’s chemical weapons. The Chinese used the word bugs, or insects, and we don’t really know exactly what it is, so we’ve been calling the weapon ‘bugs.’ A nickname. Because the thing is, you’re right about the guns. The soldiers are there to keep everybody inside the building. Zouskis, the analyst, pulled pictures from the satellite for the past six months, and until six days ago, there was nothing of note. Nothing. I mean, zip, zilch, nada. Malls in Lincoln, Nebraska, have more security than this place had. No men with weapons, no soldiers, no security guards. There wasn’t even a fence around the mine. This was not a place that had any kind of priority for the Chinese government. There was nothing to protect. And then, six days ago, a couple of army trucks showed up. It’s the sort of thing we wouldn’t pay any attention to if this part of China hadn’t just been turned into a radioactive crater. But we go from nothing to, six days ago, a fence going up around the town and an entire fucking battalion, six or seven hundred troops, streaming into the area. Most of the strength focused around the mine and the refinery area, but it wasn’t clear at first they were doing anything other than guarding it. You know, making sure nobody got in. But there were also enough troops left to keep an eye on the village as a whole, to make sure nobody was coming or going except through the main gate, and even then, as near as Zouskis could tell, it’s only troops coming in. No one leaves. The first picture where we figured out they are worried about something coming out of the mine is this one,” she said, leaning forward and pointing to the photo on the tablet, “five hours before the nuke.”
Billy Cannon leaned back against his chair. He was looking at Alex, not at the tablet. “Bugs?”
“I’m getting there,” Alex said. “So we don’t have satellite coverage again for two hours, but what we have next is video. Details aren’t great, but watch.”
She closed the picture and opened a video file. There wasn’t any sound except for the five of them breathing. It was the same buildings and parking lot from the satellite photo, though the angle was slightly different. “So you’ll want to look here,” Alex said, “near the entrance to the mine again. It’s grainy, but here, those pinpricks of light are muzzle flashes. The soldiers are firing their weapons.”
“They’re running,” Billy said. “They’re running away.”
“You can’t really see much with all those shadows,” Steph said.
Alex touched the screen and paused the video. “Madam President, those aren’t shadows.”
Steph went pale. She stood up and pointed at the frozen image. “Right there. Not all of it, but the shadows covering where the soldiers ran.”
Manny felt his stomach hollowing. He was pretty sure he didn’t understand everything, but this did not seem good. Alex, who tended to keep a neutral facade, never too hot or too cold, looked exceedingly grim. He stared at the stopped video, but all he was seeing were shadows.
Alex dragged the slider backward and Manny realized the shadows retreated with the video. “Those aren’t shadows,” Alex said again. “Watch here, where these two soldiers stop firing and start to run. See how they’re in the lit area?” She hit the play button and the group watched the two figures move away from the building. A finger of shadow moved with them and then overtook them. The soldiers didn’t emerge from the darkness.
“Bugs?” the president said, looking at Alex.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Manny blurted out.
Alex sighed. “You can see why I was hesitant to say anything when there were more people in the room.”
“Come on, Alex,” Ben said. “How are you making the leap from this to bugs?”
“That’s the word they’re using. We ran it past three translators and they all agreed on some variant of insects. There isn’t much.” She pulled a sheet of paper from her bag. “Here. We caught ‘No longer contained. The insects are,’ and then it’s cut off by static, and then we get another chunk that says, ‘not stopping the insects,’ before we lose it altogether.” Alex put the paper on the table but nobody made any motion to pick it up. “I haven’t lost my mind. I’m not trying to argue that we are faced with some sort of plague of flesh-eating locusts. I don’t know what it is. Bio? Maybe nano? Whatever it is, it has some characteristic that is making the Chinese compare the weapon to insects. And whatever it is, it got out of hand. At this point, I’m pretty sure the Chinese nuked themselves to keep it under control.”
Steph took a deep breath. “You’re telling me you think China dropped a nuke on itself, on purpose, because of some shadows and because you picked up the mention of ‘insects’ a few times? Seems a little out on a limb. Are you sure about this?”
“No,” Alex said. “And you should have seen Zouskis when she was telling me her conclusions. She might be smart, but she’s still green enough that she was stuck on the ass end of a region in China. The sort of place she could learn the ropes without having to worry about dealing with anything of importance.”
“Like China setting off a nuclear explosion,” Manny said.
Alex nodded. “Like that. But the thing that really spooked her and made her stick to her guns even though her supervisor clearly thought she was killing her career, was the Internet.”
Stephanie sighed. “I know I said I’d have anybody who said ‘zombies’ taken out to the Rose Garden and shot, but if this is some sort of crazy Internet conspiracy theory, if you tell me the message boards are full of chatter about bugs, I’ll have you shot for that too.”
Alex smiled, but everybody in the room knew she wasn’t the type to screw around. “That’s the thing, Madam President. There’s nothing on the Internet.”
Billy leaned his head back. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Alex, just spit it out.”
“The Chinese government shut down the Internet for the province three days before the attack. Three days. All access to the Internet. Cell phone towers and all landlines too. Everything. Not just in the village. The entire province. I mean, if you could use it to spread information, it was shut off. They did a good job of it too—such a good job that we didn’t even figure out everything was shut down until Zouskis went back to see if she could find any sort of chatter leading up to the explosion. I mean, an entire province? All the communication shut down for three days? That would be like us shutting down phone and cell towers and Internet for Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Can you imagine doing that? Based on that alone, even if the Chinese h
adn’t set off a nuke, I’d expect a serious listen no matter whether the conclusion was insects or bugs or,” she glanced at Manny and had the balls to wink, “zombies.”
The president didn’t rise to the bait. She leaned forward and pressed the play button on Alex’s tablet. “So,” the president said. “Bugs.” They watched the pinpricks of light and the soldiers running from the shadows and then disappearing in the darkness. “What does that mean? Bugs? Insects? I mean, not like smallpox or other viruses you can’t see, but what does it mean that they were calling the weapon, if that’s what it was, insects?”
“We don’t know,” Alex said, “and I’m not trying to argue some sort of horror-movie answer. I think we can rule out blood-hungry cockroaches, but whatever was going on over there, it spooked the Chinese enough to drop a thirty-megaton nuke.”
The president rubbed her eyes and then let her head hang. “Bugs?”
“Bugs,” Alex said.
“Honestly,” Ben said, standing up, “this seems kind of crazy. We should be focusing on the Chinese government and figuring out if this really was an accident, or if it was some sort of rogue thing. Or, and this would explain why they keep stonewalling us on information, the other plausible scenario, which both Billy and I believe, that this is a move toward something bigger.”
Alex leaned back in her chair, and Manny realized she looked tired. Had she been up all night with her analysts? He hadn’t gotten much sleep either. Part of the job, but even more so when there was the chance of nuclear Armageddon. Which he understood. Nuclear war was one of those remote possibilities you had to consider when you were the White House chief of staff and the president’s closest friend and advisor, but he was having trouble coming to terms with the idea of Chinese military insects. Apparently, so was Alex, because she shook her head.
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