Forty-Eight X

by Barry Pollack

  Krantz came ashore at An Naquarah. He had been in the small fishing village years before during the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon. That had been a frustrating time. The Israeli army was sent there to put a stop to Hezbollah’s shelling of Israeli cities and incursions by suicide bombers. But Hezbollah melted in with innocent Lebanese civilians, who often had to be displaced or suffered in the line of fire. The incursion raised the ire of the international community and was unpopular with many Israelis as well. That was one of the reasons that Krantz had moved on to another career. He was actually fed up with democracy. My God, they were at war with madmen and you couldn’t fight madmen with words. The fact was, bullets killed. While they were aimed at the enemy, they unfortunately often killed the innocent. He resented that the world wanted apologies from Israel all the time simply because Israel was trying to defend itself. He had thought 9/11 would awaken Americans and Europeans to the realization that victory in a war against Islamic terrorism did not come wrapped up in morality. How could there be morality in war, particularly against an enemy who fought, as all armies did, with God on their side, but with the added conviction that death and martyrdom were to be sought after, and prized? Death was their goal, not life. America was now mired in the same ethical quagmire Israel had dealt with for generations. They agonized over the loss of innocent lives, flagellated themselves over small moral lapses in their armies, all the while fighting an enemy that gloated over innocent death and sought their own. How could they win that battle?

  Krantz sat quietly sipping coffee at a busy café in Tyre. He knew that the best way to remain inconspicuous was not to hide but to become part of the crowd. He eyed his new watch every now and then and, at the last minute, hurried to catch the bus to Beirut. From Beirut he flew to Qatar, then to London, finally arriving in the U.S. in New York. From there he would head to Los Angeles.

  “Are you here on business or pleasure?” the customs officer in New York asked, looking over an exquisitely forged Egyptian passport.

  “I am here to learn,” Krantz replied. Among the many lies he was prepared to tell, that was the only truth.

  Man, however well behaved, at best is but a monkey shaved.

  —Gilbert and Sullivan

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Dr. Jaymes had been a very amiable host. He had given Fala a thorough tour of the research facilities and, even without an escort; she was allowed free rein of the island of Diego Garcia. There were no electric fences, no walls, no moats, no guard dogs, no armed security keeping tabs over her. She was free—but she was not. She was on an island surrounded in every direction by hundreds of miles of water. No cruise ships or recreational boats stopped there. No commercial flights flew in or out. Passage to and from the island was only by consent of its military overlords. It was still, in effect, her prison.

  “This is paradise,” Dr. Jaymes said after they first met, trying to make her feel comfortable. How could anyone be disenchanted with paradise?

  While he was forthright in answering her questions about their work on the island, every other question she asked was the same. “When will I be able to leave?”

  By the end of their first day together, Jaymes had become more curt. “For the time being,” he responded to her persistent inquiry, “you will be our guest.”

  He provided her with a cell phone.

  “Call me if you need anything or if you have any more questions.” He added one caveat in an effort to put an end to her annoying quest for freedom. “Unfortunately, I won’t have all the answers.”

  Phone communication on the island was available. But phone and Internet access that allowed communication off the island was well secured.

  They were desperately trying to be gracious hosts, Fala thought. There was the initial faux pas of offering her pig meat, or sausages, for breakfast, but clearly they were making every effort to treat her if she were a VIP at some luxury resort rather than a captive, which in reality she was. They provided for her every need. Her closet was stocked with every garment she could want—from bathing suits to shorts to modest Arab chadors.

  In the shade of a beachfront cabana, Dr. Jaymes had candidly explained the Lemuria Project. Although the Americans had thought she and Colonel Krantz were close to knowing the truth, Fala now knew they were so very far off. She smiled to herself, somewhat bemused and saddened. Joshua was probably desperately searching for her and perhaps still searching for the Right Hand of God. If, instead of rushing off on his mission, he had only stayed in their hotel room to recover from the jet lag of a long flight as she had, he, too, would probably have been kidnapped and would be sitting alongside her now—sipping margaritas and fine-tuning his tan. And, of course, resenting his imprisonment.

  After their morning chat on the beach, Dr. Jaymes had walked Fala through the modern research facility in the middle of the island. Every building looked new—all stainless steel, concrete, marble, and glass. And army engineers were busy building more. White-jacketed doctors and technicians in surgical scrubs were busily meandering through the halls. When they arrived at Dr. Jaymes’s office, she noticed the nameplate on his door: Major Joshua Jaymes.

  “You’re a major in the U.S. Army?” Fala asked. “I thought you were a doctor.”

  “I am a doctor. I have a PhD in embryology and biogenetics and was chair of my department at MIT. But everybody here is in the army. It was part of the deal. As soon as I signed on, they made me an officer. No basic training. No marksmanship tests. I just had to raise my right hand and ‘solemnly swear.’ They just want us under their chain of command, to understand that while we’re free to do our work, we’re still subject to taking orders.”

  “And I suppose, if you don’t,” Fala added, “they can shoot you.”

  Jaymes just smiled. “No one’s been shot yet.” Clearly he didn’t take his military role seriously.

  “No regrets then?” Fala asked.

  “Just sometimes I think,” Jaymes joked, “I should have held out for being a colonel.”

  On the way to his lab, they passed several huge, windowed rooms. Inside were dozens of caged chimpanzees that appeared to be in various stages of pregnancy. In another room, she saw caregivers playing with chimps like children in a nursery school. When they arrived at Dr. Jaymes’s lab, his staff was ready for him. He was about to demonstrate his personal expertise.

  Staff brought in a female chimp that had already been sedated. They set the animal on an examining table and then, in the ignominious way that woman are always examined “down there,” they spread the animal’s legs over the stirrups of the gynecological table. Jaymes turned on an ultrasound machine and manipulated an instrument into the animal’s vagina.

  “We’re doing a transvaginal oocyte retrieval. I’m using this sonographically guided needle to maneuver through the vaginal wall to the ovaries, and there, you see, we recover her eggs. We prep the animal a few weeks before by giving fertility drugs, and then do blood tests and ultrasounds so that we know the optimal time to retrieve the eggs from the ovaries—just before ovulation when the oocytes are primed for fertilization.

  “We use chimpanzees because they’re so similar to us physiologically. The statistic they like to throw around is that we have ninety-eight percent of the same DNA. And even though our two species branched off the evolutionary tree six million years ago, they’re like us in many ways psychologically, as well. They’re intelligent, and they cooperate for mutual benefit. They’re very smart. They pass on knowledge—like herbal self-medication and how to use tools to find food. They have families. They adopt orphans. And they mourn their dead.”

  Later, under a dual high-power microscope, Fala watched him inject those same chimp eggs with what he called “designer DNA.” With a micro-needle in one hand and a glass pipette in the other, Jaymes pressed the tip of the pipette against the egg and with a subtle poke of the needle, pierced the membrane of the chimp’s egg. Then, pushing farther with the pipette, he prodded the ce
ll until the nucleus oozed out like jelly from a doughnut. The nucleus from a specially prepared stem cell line was then removed from its membrane and slipped through the tiny tear in the emptied egg cell. Out with the bad, in with the good. A small electrical charge was enough to patch the hole and fuse the new nucleus and engineered DNA into the egg. The fertilized eggs were then placed in petri dishes with special nutrients designed to duplicate the nurturing environment of fallopian tubes. These were placed in large incubators, perfectly set to the body temperature of a chimpanzee.

  “In a few hours,” Jaymes explained, “the cell will divide, and later divide again, and again. In about four or five days, it will enter its blastocyst stage with enough cells so that we can pick out which embryos are most likely to thrive. That’s when we implant them in our fertile female chimps.”

  “And, inshallah, you end up with healthy baby chimps that you can use for spare parts,” Fala said cynically.

  “We don’t do that,” Jaymes rebutted. “We’re not part of that scientific community that butchers animals. Look, we treat these animals as if they were people.”

  “You treat them like people, but eventually you do kill them. Or torture them.”

  “We don’t.”

  “Dr. Jaymes, I have a PhD in archaeology. Part of my study was learning about animal anatomy, especially mammalian anatomy. I have to be able to identify a monkey’s bones from a man’s. And I know what the biomedical community does. I know that chimps are physiologically similar to humans and that the experimental findings on them are likely to apply to us, as well. That’s why for years they have used these animals. They give them AIDS. They transplant their organs. They give them spinal cord or brain injuries. They give them cancer and try new chemotherapy or radiation treatments. And now, you’re doing gene therapy—the latest paradigm of modern medicine. How is that any different?”

  “We are not harming these animals. We are creating a better species.”

  “You said that these animals are ninety-eight percent like us.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I suppose you’re working on making that closer to ninety-nine percent.”

  Dr. Jaymes smiled wickedly. “I firmly believe that someday one of our chimps might engage you personally in answering that question.”

  He was being facetious again, Fala thought. She had more to say and more questions to ask. Where were these soldiers who were being trained to use the battle scythe of Alexander? Were they chimpanzees, too? Chimps different from those baby chimps or their mothers that she had seen? She had come very close to alienating her host and decided to hold her tongue. She would now play the demure Arab maiden and bide her time. After all, this was her first day as a prisoner in “paradise.”

  Fortune does not change men; it only unmasks them.

  —Riccoboni

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  On the other side of the island that General Mack Shell called Lemuria but the world knew as Diego Garcia, there was another research center called ATAA—the Advanced Training, Acculturation, and Analysis Center. This was a training ground for the mature animals. There were no high-tech multistory research centers there. The place looked more like a World War II bivouac area with a multitude of pup tents and a few larger tents for officers. There were specialized canteen vehicles that provided meals to troops on the move. And there were cages, of course. They were McGraw’s version of a brig. Having spent some time himself in a cage, he was loath to use them, but there were occasional discipline problems. There had never been a human-chimpanzee conflict—only those of chimp versus chimp. And in an army, that could not be tolerated. Soldiers had to work together, or they would die together.

  Chimpanzee newborns, like human babies, were helpless at birth. But just a few days after birth, they could hold on tight to their mother’s hair, and in a few months, they were riding jockey-style on her back. By two years they were walking. They reached puberty in about seven years. When the Lemuria-bred animals reached that milestone, they were brought to ATAA.

  General Shell’s nascent genetic research on Diego Garcia had been making progress for almost a decade, since its inception shortly after 9/11. Unhampered by the usual government or academic oversights, or financial constraints, the research involving the manipulation of the chromosomes of man’s closest relative, the chimpanzee, had advanced rapidly. But it was only in the last year that their “research product” had matured. Each new birth had been a refinement of the past. The animals were maturing sooner. They were progressively bred physically larger and, with each new genetic modification, they were subtly more complex creatures.

  “The chimpanzee is a naturally aggressive mammal,” McGraw would often explain to scientists new to the project or military or political brass who had a need to know. “In fact, in their natural habitat, they can and do kill other animals. They also often kill their rivals, sometimes even their own children. Here in ATAA, we don’t aim to remove that aggressive bent. We just want to control it by creating a human-dominated leadership. Our goal is that they kill our enemies, not theirs.”

  Colonel Link McGraw was just stepping into his trousers when he heard a knock on his door. He looked at his watch. It was six a.m. and his adjutant was right on time. The young captain had been handpicked by General Shell for the job. He had combat experience and had once been a veterinarian. He did a good job, but McGraw had no illusions. He knew his adjutant reported directly back to the general. That never struck him as a problem. After all, they both had loyalty to the same man.

  Another day of training was about to begin. It was a short walk from McGraw’s modern, modular beachfront cabana to the bivouac area where several dozen orderly tents housed his troops. It was dawn. A morning mist hung over the ground. He could hear the surf pulsating nearby, but the shore was hidden by incoming fog. He wore well-pressed combat fatigues; his boots had a spit-and-polish shine. His shirt was adjusted to a tight tuck, and the silver eagle of his rank glistened on his garrison cap. In a few months, his command had grown from a few platoons to a company. More than a hundred troops were under his authority now. McGraw also knew how breeding was progressing on the other side of the island. In another few months, he would be commanding a thousand—a regiment-sized force. And soon, an army.

  As he walked past each tent, with his adjutant trailing obediently behind, he could hear the murmurs of his troops. They were rising and knew their commander was passing, by the sound of his step and by his smell. Link had studied the ways of war and warriors during his academic years at the Citadel. He knew about the swagger of Patton, the calm demeanor of Eisenhower, and the camaraderie fostered by Napoleon. But of all the great military leaders he’d studied, it was Alexander the Great who most excited his passion.

  “Another perfect day,” his adjutant said, making small talk.

  “Yes.” McGraw nodded. “It’s time.”

  The adjutant waved his hand and a bugler blew assembly, a sound familiar to every soldier, a tune perfectly fit for that lyric: “There’s a soldier in the grass, with a bullet up his ass, take it out, take it out, like a good Boy Scout!”

  In less than a minute, nearly two hundred chimpanzee soldiers were standing stolidly in front of their tents, and McGraw slowly began his review. He was surprised each time he saw these creatures, his troops. At first, he had difficulty telling them apart. They had all looked alike. But no longer; he now knew them all, by their character, as well as by their names. Many had already been given names by their earlier handlers. Some names, he found need to change. Their personalities called for it.

  “Look thee out for a kingdom equal to and worthy of thyself,” McGraw said aloud.

  “What’s that, sir?” his adjutant inquired.

  “You know, Captain, I once rode alongside Alexander the Great.”

  “I’ve heard those stories, sir,” his captain smiled.

  “There are a lot of legends about Alexander,” McGraw began, walking slowly be
fore his troops. “Plutarch, the great Greek historian, created many of them. ‘It was in 344 BC,’ he wrote, ‘when a ten-year-old Alexander watched the most skilled horsemen in his father’s kingdom try and fail to ride a great steed named Bucephalus. The horse was untamable. Alexander begged his father for his chance. Reluctantly, King Phillip agreed. And, with a soothing voice, a kind touch, and some firm urging, Alexander succeeded in riding Bucephalus.’”

  “King Phillip,” McGraw went on, “is said to have told his son, ‘Look thee out for a kingdom equal to and worthy of thyself for Macedonia is too little for thee.’ And so, Alexander set out astride Bucephalus to conquer the known world.”

  “Do you think of this as your little kingdom, sir?” his adjutant asked, somewhat impolitic.

  “Do you know the tale of the Gordian Knot?” McGraw said, ignoring any affront.

  “Yes, sir,” the captain replied quickly, from habit. Then he corrected himself. “Not really, sir.”

  “Another tale of Alexander was the legend of the Gordian Knot. According to that fable, the ancient land of Phrygia had lapsed into civil war. The elders of the land were unable to decide which faction should lead them until a great oracle came before them and predicted that the next man to enter the kingdom would be riding an oxcart. That man, he declared, would put an end to their bickering and become their king. While the Phrygian high council was discussing the oracle’s prediction, Midas, a peasant farmer, rode into town on his father Gordias’s oxcart. With the prediction having come true, Midas was anointed king. In gratitude, he dedicated Gordias’s oxcart to Zeus, set it in the center of a temple, and tied it to a post with an intricate knot made of bark. The oracle then prophesied that whoever untied that knot would someday rule all of Asia. Years went by and the bark of the knot grew together. Though many tried, no one could untie it. And so, the legend of the Gordian Knot, the unsolvable puzzle, grew. In 333 BC, Alexander came to Phrygia and attempted to untie the knot himself. He could find no end to the knot, and it seemed that he would fail, too. Then, with a single stroke of his sword, Alexander sliced the knot in half, revealing its ends.”