The bald man took hold of the inner door. "Get back or I'll open it."
"You can't," Ilse said, "not while this one's ajar. The interlocking won't let you." The Boer turned. "You," he said, staring at her. He held the space-suit hood under one arm.
"Otto," Ilse said, covering him with her gun. "I somehow knew you'd be behind all this." The man grabbed a ring hung by a chain from the ceiling and pulled. Nothing happened.
"Come on, Otto," Ilse said, "use your head. The alkali hot bath won't work now either.
Or do you use liquid nitrogen?"
"How did you get here?" Otto snapped. "Who did you come with, the Special Air Service? A parachute drop on the airstrip?"
"No," Ilse said as Jeffrey and Clayton came up behind her. "U.S. Navy SEALs."
"I should have known," Otto said, dripping venom. "You always were too close to American culture."
"Come out of the air lock," Ilse said.
"No," Otto said. "You'll have to kill me first."
"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Ilse said. "Another martyr for the cause, and all your secrets die with you … Not a chance."
Jeffrey and Clayton went past Ilse and grabbed Otto by the arms. He struggled, but Nine moved in and gave him a shot of morphine in the neck.
"You filthy sons of bitches," Otto cursed. "You racially polluted scum!" He looked right at Ilse. "You miscegenating whore! I'll tell you nothing!" His voice was already slurred, his eyelids drooping.
"No, Otto," Ilse said, patting him on the shoulder as he slumped to the floor. She gave him a great big smile.
"You don't know U.S. Naval Intelligence. They have ways to make men talk."
"Commander, Ilse, check this out," SEAL Eight said. He was still covering the other prisoners with his machine pistol. Jeffrey and Ilse came over. Eight pointed to another TV monitor and VCR.
"It's a kid," Jeffrey said. "He's having convulsions."
"The archaea," Ilse said. "This must be what they were watching."
"Get the tape," Jeffrey said. "At least we'll have it as data."
"Wait a minute," Ilse said. "It's on record, not play. This is live feed we're seeing."
"It's happening now?" Jeffrey said.
Ilse turned to the air lock. "Somewhere in there."
SEAL Eight handed Ilse a partly burned research diary, then did a radar scan through the wall. "Yeah," Eight said, "in there. No one else, he's alone." Ilse eyed the pages, the binding scorched and still warm through her flameproof gloves. Base gene sequencing homology, initiation codons GUG, UUG, CUG, and so on. Grams dry weight per mol-hour culture growth rates, and substrate uptake kinetics.
"Isn't there something we can do?" Clayton said, staring at the monitor.
"Nothing that would save him," Ilse said. "See the way his face looks melted, how his limbs flop? He's lost all muscle tone. The infection's far advanced."
"Can't we.," Jeffrey said. He had to clear his throat. "Can't we go in and help him? You know, a morphine overdose, anything?"
"The procedures to get in there safely," Ilse said, "the decontamination afterward. " The child was shivering and writhing, more like a rubber dummy than a human. Pink foam oozed from his mouth, and his chest heaved erratically. He made animal grunting sounds that came over the speakers in stereo.
"Christ," Jeffrey said, "his eyeballs keep jerking in different directions. They aren't even in sync."
"He's in some kind of inner chamber," Ilse said. "Look." The child was strapped to a bare metal gurney, under robotic grapnels hung from the ceiling. He soiled himself once more and the upper-intestinal effluent dripped to the floor. There was a sump in the white tile floor, in one corner next to autopsy tools— hoses, saws and knives, retractors. Beside them were the mechanical hands and thick viewport of a glove box.
"It makes sense," Ilse said, "a higher biosafety zone past BL-4. Biosafety level five."
"We just have to watch this?" Jeffrey said.
"What do you want me to do?" Ilse snapped. "Suit up and go through the air lock, move the stretcher to the waldoes with the grapnels, then reach in and grab a scalpel and cut his throat? He can't last long now anyway."
Electrodes were taped to the boy's forehead and over his heart. Ilse ransacked the level three work area near the monitor, trying to find the readouts. She gasped when she saw his EEG traces — his brain waves were wild, chaotic and jagged.
As Ilse flipped through more research papers, Clayton turned to the prisoners. "Did you do this to him?"
No one answered.
"Did you do this to him?" Clayton screamed.
"He told us to," one Boer said, pointing to Otto asleep on the floor. "The whole project was his idea."
"They threatened our families," another pleaded. "Did they?" Ilse said. She'd seen enough in the notebooks. "I don't believe you, any of you. You all look too well fed, too pleased with yourselves. You were burning the records too eagerly." The way their posture slumped showed she was right. "You're all guilty of war crimes." None of the Boers spoke.
"What do we do with them now?" Clayton said.
There was a gurgling scream from the monitor. The child had chewed through his tongue. Blood spurted from his mouth — he was drowning in it, and his skin was gray, not brown. His eyebrows and jaw worked violently and his lips and nostrils flared and spasmed, a caricature of someone making silly faces. He couldn't be more than ten.
"Commander Fuller," Ilse said. "These notes clearly document systematic efforts to genetically engineer a lethal strain of archaea. Successful efforts. Are you satisfied by what you see? Have the rules of engagement been met?"
"Yes," Jeffrey said quietly.
An electronic tone sounded. Ilse looked at the monitor. The child lay totally still. Ilse glanced at the life signs equipment. His electrocardiogram was flat. Ilse turned to the enemy scientists. "This is for him and my brother." She opened fire at the Boers, shooting each of them twice in the head.
CHAPTER 14
Jeffrey watched as Clayton studied the South African nuclear physics package. Clayton used a handheld fluoroscope and an ultrasound probe, leaning over the access hatch near the front end of the missile. SEAL Eight took pictures with a digital camera and took notes for Clayton. Clayton's instruments were hooked up to a laptop they'd brought with them, kept a safe distance from the fluoroscope emitter. Imagery flickered on the laptop screen.
"This the first enemy warhead you've ever seen?" Jeffrey said. He had to bend his head down while he stood, because of the low bare concrete overhead in the bunker.
"This is the first one anybody's seen," Clayton said, "so far as I know. Okay, here we go.
… One sophisticated design. Compact, lightweight, uses very little fissile material. Eight, write this down in case the laptop's damaged later."
Jeffrey saw Clayton glance again at SEAL One, being ministered to by SEAL Two and Ilse at the other end of the bunker. "Commander," Clayton said, "you pay close attention also. In case I don't make it back."
"Understood," Jeffrey said.
Clayton cleared his throat. "The active ingredient, the fissile material, is a seven-centimeter hollow sphere of uranium 235." He ran some calculations. "That would weigh five kilograms."
"That's all?" Jeffrey said.
"This design achieves critical mass by density compression."
"What's the fuel enrichment?" Jeffrey said.
Clayton eyed a special radiac. "Ninety-three percent."
"That's high," Jeffrey said.
"Higher's more efficient."
"Did we guess right, three KT?"
"I'll tell you in a minute," Clayton said.
Jeffrey glanced at the laptop screen. He saw the different warhead layers: initiator at the very core, tamper, shock buffers, neutron reflector. "What's this shading here, around the edges of the image?"