If that failed, there would be a moat of water, lined with concrete, dug completely around Pine Gap by the Army corps of engineers.
And inside that, a second moat filled with gasoline that could be set on fire if needed.
Similar defenses would be built around Alice and her airport, as best they could.
They had eleven days.
It wasn’t much time, but now they were playing in Todd’s domain.
He had available to him a veritable arsenal of chemical weapons to use against the ants.
He had the potent combo of cyfluthrin and bifenthrin derivatives. They were like a pair of sharpshooters, taking out ants without harming innocent bystanders. They were safe to use around livestock, and had been recently approved for use in Australia. So no resistant ants had yet arisen.
But he also had a brand new N-phenylpyrazole variant, which got him very excited. It was related to, but more potent than, what he had used in Mexico City. Where the other compounds used finesse, this new chemical was like an atom-powered Attila the Hun. It was almost out of control, destroying everything. Not just ants, but grasshoppers, ladybugs, protozoans and all sorts of worms, both flat and round. It wasn’t yet approved for use. He was dying to see its devastating effects.
Which one would they use? Would the Aussies let Attila out of his cage?
And which attractant?
The idea is that worker ants would eat the poison, and pass it to other ants, who would eventually pass it to queens, killing them.
But first they had to trick the ants into taking the poison by mixing in a bait.
But what would the local ants prefer? Light corn syrup? Honey? Peanut butter?
The American lieutenant put a dozen of her soldiers at the scientists’ disposal. They went into the field, collecting thousands of ants, which were divided into groups of hundreds and treated to poisons and sweets.
As Todd collated the data, counting dead ants and calculating mortality rate and LD50. He was in the zone, zeroing in on the perfect magic bullet.
A few nights later, the science team decided to take their first break in almost a week.
Shorty went into Alice, ostensibly to get some stubbies, but really to give Todd and Vauna some time alone.
They sat together on a log, watching for meteors. Comets regularly hit the Moon, Vauna explained, knocking off rocks that land in Australia in the form of meteorites.
Maybe someday they would find one together.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” Vauna asked.
“Sure, anything,” Todd said.
“You’re religious, eh?”
“Yeah,” Todd said, “I like to think of myself as Christian but not crazy. Is that ok?”
“Oh, yeah, Todd,” she said. “When I was growing up, the only education we got was from a missionary.”
“Nice to know we did something right.”
“So my question is this…I thought you were supposed to be stewards of this land.”
Todd nodded. “Yeah, we are.”
“Then how do you reconcile that with preparing chemicals to kill millions and millions of God’s creations?”
“Yeah,” Todd said, slowly and pensively. “Good question. I once calculated how many ants I’ve killed. Twelve billion, more than one for every man, woman and child on the earth.”
“That can’t feel good.”
“No,” Todd said. “But you know what’s even worse? The torture. For science. I’ve chopped off legs and antennae, or else crossed the right and left antennae and glued them in place, to see what will happen. It really messes them up.” He exhaled deeply. “I’ve also pulled off their heads to see how long they’d keep biting and gnashing.”
“That’s pretty gruesome,” Vauna said. “As a summer intern in a micro lab, the first time I autoclaved a flask of bacteria—a hundred billion individuals—I felt pretty bad. Does it make you feel like you’re committing genocide against the ants?”
“Oooh,” Todd said. “That’s a powerful word.”
“Yeah, as a member of a race that’s been on the receiving end, I don’t use it lightly.”
“Nor I,” he said, “as a member of a race that’s doled it out.”
“So, as a Christian,” Vauna asked, “how do you feel about all the killing God commands in the Old Testament? How do you reconcile that with Jesus as a symbol of love?”
“Oooh, heavy questions.” Todd was silent for a few moments. “This is something I’ve thought about a lot.”
“Your conclusions?”
“I once heard a sermon about deciding what Bible character you wanted to be like,” Todd said. “And I chose Joshua, who travels to another country to do God’s work.”
“Really?” Vauna was shocked. “The guy who committed most of the atrocities?”
“No, no!” Todd protested. “Let me explain. People don’t like the idea of what happened in the Old Testament, because they don’t like the idea of sin. The bible isn’t like what happened in Rwanda…”
“Or here in Australia?”
“Right!” Todd exclaimed. “There’s no justification for that. But…In the Bible, it’s not about the color of your skin. It’s about the color of your soul. In the Bible, death works both ways. Cities of sinners are destroyed. But when the Israelites, God’s own chosen people, go off the rails, they’re destroyed, too, and God sends the Chaldeans to smite them. And God destroyed his own Son when He took on the sin of the world.”
“So…” Vauna asked, “are the ants sinners?”
“Well, yeah!” Todd thought for a moment. “They kill, they steal, they covet their neighbors’ homes and storehouses. When fire ants sweep in, they wipe out ninety-eight percent of the native ant species. That’s genocide.”
“Brutal.”
“Yeah, nature is brutal.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, staring at the sky.
“We are the Chaldeans,” Todd said. “We’re the scourge of God, weeding the garden, putting things right. We are at war.”
Vauna was silent.
She cuddled up against him, but he wondered if she really thought his words merely proved him insane.
The river of ants came.
The desert ants came, with bristles on the backs of their heads to keep sand off their necks. The imported turtle ants came, with their huge dish-shaped heads. The leaf cutter ants came, with tiny minim ants riding on their heads to ward off predators.
The ants came, in a river five miles long and a mile wide.
And Pine Gap was ready for them.
Todd had settled on the sharpshooter chemicals, having not received permission to unleash Attila the Hun. The U.S. military picked up canisters of these compounds from his lab in San Diego, then flew them across the ocean to Sydney, and then to Alice.
The black plastic traps were not available in sufficient numbers, so they used disposable Petri dishes, sent up from Adelaide and down from Darwin.
The toxins were mixed with honey and blackberry extract and dispensed into the dishes, which were hand-placed in the sand every few feet, by soldiers walking the outskirts of Pine Gap and Alice.
Lieutenant Osborne was worried that all this effort was like pouring a single cup of coffee into the ocean. Wouldn’t the poisons be too dilute?
No, Todd reassured her. A hundred parts per million should be enough.
He didn’t have to wait long to see if he was right.