“They could,” Wells said. “But the thing is, I don’t think they’re going to go up in this weather. They’d lose effectiveness by thirty, thirty-five percent. Which they can’t afford. It’s the same as with crop-dusting. It’s all weather-dependent. The aerosol goes much farther and faster with a wind,” he said. The muscles in his neck flexed involuntarily. “But it has to be the right wind.
“So we have to go for maximum impact tonight. Neutralize the two tanks. And, if we do, and we’re lucky, some of them may crawl out of their holes and let us see what they look like.”
“Targets,” Mallory said.
“There’s a fuel tank on the airfield,” Wells said, pointing to it on his print-out. “Close enough to the fencing that Nadra or I can get an explosive in there. The actual damage may not be huge. But that will divert attention from the hangar, where the viral tanks are.”
Chaplin’s brow was furrowed again. “But is there any sort of collateral risk—the aerosol viral property blowing up and getting loose?”
“No. We’re pinpointing very specific targets. Primary objective: neutralize.”
“And what happens after the first night?”
“We won’t know until it happens.”
Charles Mallory smiled. He had been thinking about Jason Wells’s plan ever since leaving the Blue Star Cafe.
“How are they looking at this?” Nadra asked. “What’s in their heads?”
“They’re planning on it happening. The virus will spread within hours to the borders, where vaccine and anti-viral supplies are in place. Health centers on the border will form a buffer zone. Travel will be immediately shut down. Media outlets cut off. The damage will all happen after dark.”
Charlie nodded. It was a logical assumption that the planes would go up at night. They had done it that way during the trials in Sundiata. Nighttime would make the actual operation almost invisible. Nothing would be seen by the light of day, except the aftermath. Eight hundred thousand in Mungaza alone.
“I think I saw part of the clean-up plan yesterday, coming in on the train,” Charlie said.
They all looked at him.
“Oh?” Jason said.
“There’s a huge open-pit copper mine northwest of the city,” he said. “Five or six miles. Chain-link fence around the perimeter. Train tracks leading in and out.”
“Copper mine?” Chaplin said.
“Yeah. Except I’m pretty sure that it’s not a copper mine.”
WITHIN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, they had agreed on the details of the first night’s mission. Mallory, Wells, Chaplin, and Nadra Nkosi would be the operations team. Okoro would monitor them from his rented room. The operations team would meet again at twelve minutes past ten. Night one objectives: Seven targets as diversions. And neutralize the two tanks.
Charlie walked to his designated apartment, another one-room affair, where he lay on a short, stiff mattress and closed his eyes for a few minutes. He thought about his brother and his father. Heard their voices. Saw their faces.
Then he went back to work, studying the aerial images. He recognized the surveillance apparatus around the airfield and on the edge of the woods: electronic towers equipped with long-range radar and high-definition cameras. Possibly linked to underground sensors—sensors and heat detectors that could pick up motion through the trees, sending an alert to lookouts who would then focus their cameras on the subjects’ locations. That was going to make it difficult for them coming at the airfield through the woods.
The surveillance set-up was sophisticated, not dissimilar from the system created to guard the United States’ two-thousand-mile border with Mexico. A system that, in theory, was foolproof, although in practice highly flawed. The problem with next-generation stuff, Charlie knew, was that the kinks were never all worked out. The primary weakness with this type of set-up was weather, as the U.S. had found after spending billions of dollars on the Mexico project. When it rained and the wind blew, the sensors became confused and the surveillance was worthless.
But this system was probably more effective. Weather-proofed, developed with an eye toward avoiding the troubles of the Mexican border surveillance. There was another, simple way to disable it if the weather didn’t, though—an idea he had thought about even before Jason Wells suggested it: well-placed sniper bullets could disable each of the five cameras. Charles Mallory finally lay back and allowed himself a brief nap, setting the alarm clock by the bed to nine o’clock.
From his office at the Gardner Foundation complex, Perry Gardner played a feed from the foundation’s weekly executive committee meeting that morning. Routine business. Status reports on projects from the various divisions: a proposal to establish two dozen polio clinics in Kenya and Somalia; partnerships with several East African governments that would teach villagers to filter waterborne parasites from drinking water; the ongoing initiative to find a vaccine for malaria; the distribution of underused vaccines to poor children in East Africa.
More and more, Gardner skipped these meetings, which were run very effectively by his wife, and most other foundation business. As he fast-forwarded through the presentations, he glanced at the clock again. Six minutes to go.
Finally, at 10:20, he clicked off the monitor and walked toward the most remote wing of the Gardner Institute, an underground compound known as Building 67, or the New Technologies Wing. A structure only eleven people were authorized to enter.
Scanners picked up Gardner’s full-body image as he approached, prompting vertical doors to slide open. On the lower level of the building, he entered a ten-foot-by-ten-foot chamber called a DTE, or Data Transfer Environment. The room resembled a steel cube: four walls, ceiling, floor, and the digital immersion unit. Gardner sat and stared straight ahead at the tiny D-I sensors, which scanned his face and irises, detected the vascular patterns in his neck and hands. Once the verification was complete, he gave his verbal cue and the DTE went dark.
Moments later, a smoky light began to drift into the room. The man known as the Administrator stood. As he walked forward into the coalescing light, he smelled the familiar warm evening scents of deep woods and river water on an African breeze.
Isaak Priest was waiting for him in a room at “the Palace” near Mungaza, a spacious old pine-walled lodge room with two wicker chairs and a large open window that afforded a view of moonlight in the eucalyptus trees, and on the swirling waters of the Green Monkey River.
The two men exchanged hellos as if they were in the same room, although in fact they were still 9,200 miles apart. Then they sat in the wicker chairs facing each other, seemingly six feet away. Gardner studied Isaak Priest’s face for a long time.
Eventually, the technology that enabled him to make this visit would be commercially available. The Gardner Foundation’s NTW, which had developed it in tandem with a half dozen other firms, was the only operator of what he called Digital Immersion Technology—a digitized, three-dimensional, holographic environment that realistically mimicked sights, sounds, and smells, allowing the participants to seemingly interact. Eventually, the technology would be used in offices, research labs, medical centers.
“Are you all right?” Gardner finally said.
“Of course. What do you mean?”
“I just want to know that everything’s on schedule.”
“Yes. As we discussed. The viral agents have all been delivered. The vaccines have been distributed. The initiatives, as you know, are proceeding ahead of schedule. One hundred and thirty-seven wind turbines are currently operational. Three solar farms under construction. Everything is set for the World Series.”