by David Poyer
“I’ll start writing it up for Drug Discovery,” she said. Started to turn away. But found her arm seized.
“Just a minute, Dr. Lenson. No. You will not publish this.”
She looked down at his hand on her upper arm until he released it. “Sorry. A transgression of social norms,” he muttered.
“Don’t we want priority?”
“You don’t recall who are we working for here. A responsibility to—how do you say—the ‘customer.’” Lukajs wrinkled a bulbous nose.
Outside the window, a buffeting wind thrashed the trees. Leaves leapt up, whirling in the gusts. She crossed her arms. “I don’t understand your reluctance, Doctor. This may save many lives.”
But the elder scientist was shaking his head. “We need tests. Protocols. Clinical trials. Far too soon to publish. Who says it cannot be toxic? Word of computer? We will be laughy stocks.”
“Meanwhile, let people die?”
“Is not pandemic yet.”
“Maybe not here, Doctor. But millions are sick in Asia.”
“In Asia.” Lukajs gave a nearly imperceptible shrug.
But the next moment he held out a hand as if to take it back. “I did not mean. No. Far beyond social norms. What I meant—we will proceed. You will meet with pharmas. Produce test quantities. Plus any isomers. I will advise the board to set up trials. Alert BARDA we might have candidate for production.” The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority contracted for drugs in public health emergencies. “But you are correct about the ferrets. Not useful subjects. Perhaps we can obtain access to better.”
Ferrets? For a moment she drew a blank. Then had a bad feeling. “Better subjects—what does that mean?”
“Perhaps, from the government. Volunteers only, of course.” The old man smiled, reached out to pat her, but paused his hand halfway. “When time comes, we will share credit. Is your discovery, yes?”
“Actually, it was Asklepios’s.” But a glow ignited at the thought. She was still only a junior researcher. After the war, funding would be far harder to come by than it was now. A success like this—again, assuming the mechanism of action worked as predicted—could make her career. Could let her pursue some of her own ideas, like inhibiting other enzymes. The ones that allowed cancerous cells to evade apoptosis, for example.
“So we are agreed?” Lukajs looked out the window, down at the tiny figures far below. At researchers strolling or tossing softballs, kicking soccer balls, taking a break from work. “We do this the right way. We will not jump the rifle. We will not post to journals. You work with the pharmas to produce. I will have Dr. Jhingan set up the trials. And when they are successful and we publish, you will both receive co-credit with me. We are agreed?”
He held out a hand, age-spotted, trembling slightly; and after a moment’s hesitation, she accepted it.
6
Xinjiang Province, Western China
THE four men huddled elbow to elbow around a fire beneath a gigantic rock. It crackled and wavered, the dry brush snapping like distant riflery. The stars glittered above them, wheeling toward morning. They were nursing tiny cups, blowing on the strong hot tea to cool it before taking sips. A brass pot seethed on a tripod over the coals.
The mountain valley stood above the town, which lay on the single paved road that circled the central desert. In summer, flocks of goats and sheep would pasture up here, but now it was just rock and snow and here and there a dried bush. From time to time a mujahideen uprooted one from between the rocks, brought it over, and dropped it on the fire. Around loomed black, razorlike ridges, impenetrable ravines, a bitter, racked Mars-scape that lay buried in deep shadow in the starlight.
Beijing had responded to the assassinations and propaganda of the Independent Turkistan Islamic Movement, and their raid on a hidden facility in the Taklimakan Desert, by sending a new internal security general to the West. An Uighur himself, the ruthless Marshal Chagatai claimed descent from the Mongol Khans. He’d quashed dissent in Hong Kong with thousands of executions, shuttering the municipal government and imposing martial law. He’d addressed Xinjiang on the radio, warning of the harshest retaliation for any further acts of terror.
ITIM would answer his threat this morning.
For the past week, three hundred guerrillas had negotiated those ridges, climbing by night, led along goat-paths and over precipices by local guides. Each muj had labored under a heavy load of weapons and ammunition. Dozens of carriers followed them—mostly women, Han and other ethnicities, captured in raids and impressed as slaves—tottering under huge sacks of rice, corn-and-apple loaves, dried goat meat, naan bread, blankets, firewood, and more ammunition.
Now they were here, and this morning it would begin.
All four men were bearded, wearing the pajama-like shalwar kameez and pancake-like mountain hats. Heavy sheepskin vests and coats kept them warm, and also reduced their visibility to drones, which scanned these mountain fastnesses in infrared.
The youngest, Nasrullah, was ITIM’s supply guy. As such, he was also the main go-between linking the rebels in the mountains to their contacts, suppliers, and recruits in the lowlands. Nasrullah had set up the network in the town whose lights, sparse though they were, glittered coldly far below. In the chill air distant generators droned a monotonous song.
The second man’s wrists stuck out from his too-short cotton sleeves. His black mustache had a white streak. A pistol belt held a military-style automatic engraved with a dense calligraphy that recounted his ancestry and his devotion to Allah. This man’s name was Guldulla, but “Tokarev” was his battle name.
The third man was older, shorter, more compact, white-bearded. He said little but gazed out watchfully from under shaggy brows. Abu Hamid al-Nashiri had fought for many years in many different countries. He’d been tortured, declared dead, resurfaced somehow, been recaptured, and spent years in an American prison before being recycled out into a fresh war. Now he fought under a new name. Qurban, “The Sacrifice.”
The fourth man’s dirty-blond beard was going gray. Scars radiated from a potato-like nose like ejecta from a lunar impact crater. His blue eyes were cold as frost, and his bronzed, exposure-roughened skin was seamed like a coal face. He wore the same threadbare shalwar kameez as the Uighurs, the same flat cap and sheepskins, but draped over his shoulders was a worn, ragged blanket, the sort that might have been issued to a prisoner of war. His long hair was braided under the hat. A strange riflelike device was propped against the rock within reach of his right hand.
This man was American. A Navy master chief, Theodore Harlett Oberg.
The four spoke in low voices in a pidgin Han, interspersed with expressions in Uighur as well as certain English phrases Oberg had introduced. Such as “machine gun” and “ambush.”
A few yards distant, out of earshot, other mujahideen squatted among the rocks, cradling AKs and RPGs.
From time to time the American checked a cell-phone-like device. He rotated it carefully, glancing up at the sky.
Teddy Oberg shifted, favoring his twisted left foot, which was lashed into a titanium brace. He was still a SEAL, but after nearly three years in the mountains, could hardly remember it. Just as he could hardly remember growing up in California, or the cop he’d been dating in LA, or that he’d wanted to make movies once.
All that was gone. Blown away like poppy pollen on the winds of war.
After breaking out of a POW camp, he and two other escapees had stumbled down out of the Pamirs to witness a mujahideen attack. The rebels had taken them captive, dragging them along when they withdrew. After a jolting ride in the back of a pickup, they’d been shoved into a hidden cave to be judged. And nearly executed.
Teddy had managed to save them by saying he was with the CIA, and could provide aid for their revolt.
Since then, he’d been working to make that lie a reality. Organizing and training insurgents was what a Special Forces A-team typically did. But he seemed to have landed the job, since it
was wartime and he was here. A raid to the westward had taken out a major pipeline and power line leading down to Pakistan. A second excursion to the east had ruined a computer center in the Taklimakan Desert with a CIA-supplied electromagnetic pulse device.
There’d been setbacks. Losses. But each year the insurgency had grown, with more effectives and wider networks. The Independent Turkistan Islamic Movement harked back to an earlier resistance the Han had crushed. But also forward, to the promise of a union of all the Turkic peoples, and their liberation from the overlords in Beijing.
This morning they would take the next step on that road.
A shadow loomed between them and the stars. It hissed, “We are ready to move, Lingxiù.”
“This will be a day of blood,” the youngest man murmured.
The older ones nodded. “Han blood,” Tokarev said, patting his pistol.
“Some of the Faithful will die as well,” Qurban added.
Teddy nodded, stroking his beard. “True. But it must be done.”
“I agree,” said the Arab. “Otherwise the Godless will continue to oppress us.”
Teddy pushed to his feet. The others stood with him. He fumbled at his neck, pulled night vision goggles over his eyes, and thumbed the stud. The world lit in shades of verdigris and olive. Nasrullah kicked gravel over the fire. It hissed to extinction with a smoky scent of burning sage.
Slinging the antidrone gun, Teddy blinked across black miles to a wall that blocked out the stars. The snow-covered, frowning Pamirs. Then he looked back down, toward the valley, and the peaceful, sleeping town it cradled below them. Trying to force the order out.
Once he spoke, all hell would break loose. And only Allah, blessed be His name, could know where it would end.
He’d spoken with Allah once, on a freezing night high in those mountains. Or something, some being, that had sounded very much like God. He still had no explanation for what he’d experienced. Hallucination? Visitation? Dream? Revelation? But he still remembered the message.
There is no such thing as choice, It had told him. No such thing as chance.
You have always done My will.
As My creature, you cannot do otherwise.
“Gai kaishile,” Master Chief Teddy Oberg managed at last. Harshly. Savagely, biting the words off.
It is time to begin.
* * *
AN hour later the advance elements were in the town. They filtered in hidden under bags of wool in carts pulled by nodding donkeys. They slid in covered by shadow, flitting from wall to wall, pausing for long periods before moving again. They trudged in surrounded by flocks of goats, weapons strapped beneath the bellies of the rams. Once inside, they linked up with groups of town dwellers, already awake and dressed, and briefed them as to their assignments. The locals had been recruited not though social media or conventional communications, which the government strictly monitored, but through more ancient methods. The subterranean murmurings of the souk; laboriously composed messages, pecked out in mountain caves on ancient balky black typewriters, passed hand to hand and carried in beneath the square traditional central Asian caps. Along with more modern ones, as the rebels’ raids had been videotaped, dubbed with stirring music, and converted with a running commentary of hate into propaganda masterpieces. Passed from bazaar to madrassa, hamlet to city by truckers and mullahs, the tapes had brought the message to the masses.
Slowly, it began.
A lookout post in a tower on the road in was taken out with a subdued scuffle, terminated by the swift flashing of knives. Then men with picks and bags of gravel went to work, emplacing mines.
Security cameras went black, shot out with suppressed rifles or cloaked with black felt by teenagers scaling their pylons.
Police vehicles sagged on deflated tires, slashed by women who crawled beneath them, screened by the night.
Throughout the town, in narrow alleys and mud-brick courtyards, rifles and grenades were pulled out of roofing thatch, dug up from under pavements, unwrapped and loaded. Extracted from a hundred hiding places, excreted like eggs of death.
The teams, assembled each under a mujahideen, took up positions atop minarets, on the upper floors of apartments, at hastily erected barricades at street corners.
The police station was ringed by thirty men with rifles, machine guns, and antitank rockets. Two hundred meters away a mortar team set up in a vacant bazaar tent, through the roof of which they would be firing.
By an hour before dawn, the rebels owned the crowded, older, Uighur half of the city. In the east, the ethnic Chinese slept on, in rectilinear government apartment blocks guarded by traffic gates and cameras, but little else.
The next phase was to isolate and secure the Han quarter. Teenagers slid through the night. They snipped the cables that fed power to the gates, then slipped black cloth bags over the monitors.
The generator station was taken, the engineers forced to kneel and their throats cut one by one. The school was occupied, and the night watchman swiftly and silently decapitated.
Fourteen men in black shalwar kameez padded through the school, down the hallway. Double doors at the back led through a deserted garden with concrete benches and trickling fountains to the lobby of a semiattached apartment building. The front desk was deserted. The man who should have been behind it was among the intruders. He pointed his comrades to the exits, and they scattered. Then, lifting a rifle, he smashed out the glass panel of a fire alarm, and yanked the handle down.
* * *
TEDDY stood in the middle of the square, behind a central plinth with a raised concrete railing. The monument was capped by a statuary group showing a huge Mao Zedong shaking hands with two smaller Uighurs in native costume. A halo of focused lights made it glow brilliantly. The police station loomed across the square, five stories of forbidding rose-tinted concrete topped by antennas and solar panels. On Teddy’s side, screened by the group’s base, one of his demo teams was packing explosive under the statues.
He checked his watch. Just about time.
The distant steady roar of the generators died. The lights on the statuary flickered, as did the others around the square. Then they winked out.
Darkness rolled across the city, plunging it into night.
The demo teams rolled out and sprinted across the square. They set up remote det Claymores outside the exits from the security headquarters, and slapped pounds of thick white explosive paste on the heavy doors. Within seconds the fuzes were set and they were scooting back into cover.
Amid confused shouting, the first shots cracked from upper windows. They spanged off the paving and zipped around the square. From around him, Teddy’s trained snipers put bullets into each muzzle flash. The shooting slackened.
The explosives went off. First under the statuary, which jolted apart and disappeared in a smoky cloud. Shards of pot metal pattered down. Then the charges on the doors blew them inward in flashes of dull red light and the thud-CRACK of C-4.
Two trucks snarled into the square. Teddy caught a glimpse of the faces at the wheel: young, determined, intent. One male, one young woman. The snipers laid down covering fire as the vans tore around the demolished central pylons, accelerating with a growl of engines. Then straightened, aiming for the blown-open entrances.
Two massive detonations shook the city. In a cloud of smoke and dust, the whole front of the station collapsed into the square. Dragon tongues of fire licked up the interior. The snipers stayed busy. Each time a figure emerged from the flames, showed itself at the sheared-off front, or tried for an exit, they nailed it mercilessly. The Claymores cracked when groups of two or three emerged. Before long dozens of corpses in the black uniforms of the security forces littered the pavements.
Nasrullah lifted his gaze from a brace of cheap walkie-talkies sewn into pockets in his sheepskin coat. “The power house is ours … radio station is ours. The school. Team leader asks … twenty-one teachers in custody. Fifteen men. Six women. What is to be done with them?”
Through a numb mouth Teddy said, “Paishè suoyou zhèxie.”
Shoot them all.
“Tamen shì women de dírén.”
They are our enemies.
Nasrullah looked away, but relayed the order.
Tokarev jogged out from a side street, leading a rifle team. A fat, short Uighur panted and coughed in their midst. Mucus drooled from his nose. His hands were zip-tied behind him. “The mayor,” the rebel explained.
Oberg shrugged. “What’s he doing here?”
“He says he is one of us. An Uighur.”
“So what? He’s a collaborator. Shoot him.”
“He says he’s on our side. Swears he provided information.”
Teddy glanced at Nasrullah. A frown, a shake of the head. “Shoot him,” Teddy said again. The official stared stupidly from face to face, then burst out bawling. Two young men kicked him in the backs of the legs, forcing him to his knees as Tokarev drew his pistol.
Leaving them behind, Teddy jogged awkwardly down the main thoroughfare. The crippled leg jabbed him with shots of agony. Men and women parted before him. The crowds were gathering. They smashed the windows of vehicles, shattered the windows of the Han shops, wrestled out bolts of cloth and boxes of food and drinks. A shop owner protested, trying to defend his goods. Four men beat him to the ground and began kicking him, shouting epithets, as others heaved bricks through his windows and began helping themselves to cookware and appliances.
The looting had begun. Good. A resident with a closetful of illegal loot was halfway to joining the Resistance already.
A local woman bent double before him, coughing as if to eject her lungs from her chest. Snot drooled from mouth and nose. But she plodded on, dragging one end of a gigantic crate of colorfully labeled infant formula.
He glanced up to note the stars were going. The mountains were still black buttresses, but the sky was graying.