The Hatching: A Novel (16 page)

“Bugs,” Alex said. Her voice was soft.

“Pardon me?” the president said, and she wasn’t smiling anymore.

“I said bugs. It’s not conventional, and we don’t think it’s chemical weapons. The Chinese used the word
bugs
, or
insects
, and we don’t really know exactly what it is, so we’ve been calling the weapon ‘bugs.’ A nickname. Because the thing is, you’re right about the guns. The soldiers are there to keep everybody inside the building. Zouskis, the analyst, pulled pictures from the satellite for the past six months, and until six days ago, there was nothing of note. Nothing. I mean, zip, zilch, nada. Malls in Lincoln, Nebraska, have more security than this place had. No men with weapons, no soldiers, no security guards. There wasn’t even a fence around the mine. This was not a place that had any kind of priority for the Chinese government. There was nothing to protect. And then, six days ago, a couple of army trucks showed up. It’s the sort of thing we wouldn’t pay any attention to if this part of China hadn’t just been turned into a radioactive crater. But we go from nothing to,
six days ago, a fence going up around the town and an entire fucking battalion, six or seven hundred troops, streaming into the area. Most of the strength focused around the mine and the refinery area, but it wasn’t clear at first they were doing anything other than guarding it. You know, making sure nobody got in. But there were also enough troops left to keep an eye on the village as a whole, to make sure nobody was coming or going except through the main gate, and even then, as near as Zouskis could tell, it’s only troops coming in. No one leaves. The first picture where we figured out they are worried about something coming
out
of the mine is this one,” she said, leaning forward and pointing to the photo on the tablet, “five hours before the nuke.”

Billy Cannon leaned back against his chair. He was looking at Alex, not at the tablet. “Bugs?”

“I’m getting there,” Alex said. “So we don’t have satellite coverage again for two hours, but what we have next is video. Details aren’t great, but watch.”

She closed the picture and opened a video file. There wasn’t any sound except for the five of them breathing. It was the same buildings and parking lot from the satellite photo, though the angle was slightly different. “So you’ll want to look here,” Alex said, “near the entrance to the mine again. It’s grainy, but here, those pinpricks of light are muzzle flashes. The soldiers are firing their weapons.”

“They’re running,” Billy said. “They’re running away.”

“You can’t really see much with all those shadows,” Steph said.

Alex touched the screen and paused the video. “Madam President, those aren’t shadows.”

Steph went pale. She stood up and pointed at the frozen image. “Right there. Not all of it, but the shadows covering where the soldiers ran.”

Manny felt his stomach hollowing. He was pretty sure he didn’t understand everything, but this did not seem good. Alex, who tended to keep a neutral facade, never too hot or too cold, looked exceedingly grim. He stared at the stopped video, but all he was seeing were shadows.

Alex dragged the slider backward and Manny realized the shadows retreated with the video. “Those aren’t shadows,” Alex said again. “Watch here, where these two soldiers stop firing and start to run. See how they’re in the lit area?” She hit the play button and the group watched the two figures move away from the building. A finger of shadow moved with them and then overtook them. The soldiers didn’t emerge from the darkness.

“Bugs?” the president said, looking at Alex.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Manny blurted out.

Alex sighed. “You can see why I was hesitant to say anything when there were more people in the room.”

“Come on, Alex,” Ben said. “How are you making the leap from this to bugs?”

“That’s the word they’re using. We ran it past three translators and they all agreed on some variant of
insects
. There isn’t much.” She pulled a sheet of paper from her bag. “Here. We caught ‘No longer contained. The insects are,’ and then it’s cut off by static, and then we get another chunk that says, ‘not stopping the insects,’ before we lose it altogether.” Alex put the paper on the table but nobody made any motion to pick it up. “I haven’t lost my mind. I’m not trying to argue that we are faced with some sort of plague of flesh-eating locusts. I don’t know what it is. Bio? Maybe nano? Whatever it is, it has some characteristic that is making the Chinese compare the weapon to insects. And whatever it is, it got out of hand. At this point, I’m pretty sure the Chinese nuked themselves to keep it under control.”

Steph took a deep breath. “You’re telling me you think China dropped a nuke on itself, on purpose, because of some shadows and because you picked up the mention of ‘insects’ a few times? Seems a little out on a limb. Are you sure about this?”

“No,” Alex said. “And you should have seen Zouskis when she was telling me her conclusions. She might be smart, but she’s still green enough that she was stuck on the ass end of a region in China. The sort of place she could learn the ropes without having to worry about dealing with anything of importance.”

“Like China setting off a nuclear explosion,” Manny said.

Alex nodded. “Like that. But the thing that really spooked her and made her stick to her guns even though her supervisor clearly thought she was killing her career, was the Internet.”

Stephanie sighed. “I know I said I’d have anybody who said ‘zombies’ taken out to the Rose Garden and shot, but if this is some sort of crazy Internet conspiracy theory, if you tell me the message boards are full of chatter about bugs, I’ll have you shot for that too.”

Alex smiled, but everybody in the room knew she wasn’t the type to screw around. “That’s the thing, Madam President. There’s nothing on the Internet.”

Billy leaned his head back. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Alex, just spit it out.”

“The Chinese government shut down the Internet for the province three days before the attack. Three days. All access to the Internet. Cell phone towers and all landlines too. Everything. Not just in the village. The entire province. I mean, if you could use it to spread information, it was shut off. They did a good job of it too—such a good job that we didn’t even figure out everything was shut down until Zouskis went back to see if she could find any sort of chatter leading up to the explosion. I mean, an entire province?
All the communication shut down for three days? That would be like us shutting down phone and cell towers and Internet for Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Can you imagine doing that? Based on that alone, even if the Chinese hadn’t set off a nuke, I’d expect a serious listen no matter whether the conclusion was insects or bugs or,” she glanced at Manny and had the balls to wink, “zombies.”

The president didn’t rise to the bait. She leaned forward and pressed the play button on Alex’s tablet. “So,” the president said. “Bugs.” They watched the pinpricks of light and the soldiers running from the shadows and then disappearing in the darkness. “What does that mean? Bugs? Insects? I mean, not like smallpox or other viruses you can’t see, but what does it mean that they were calling the weapon, if that’s what it was, insects?”

“We don’t know,” Alex said, “and I’m not trying to argue some sort of horror-movie answer. I think we can rule out blood-hungry cockroaches, but whatever was going on over there, it spooked the Chinese enough to drop a thirty-megaton nuke.”

The president rubbed her eyes and then let her head hang. “Bugs?”

“Bugs,” Alex said.

“Honestly,” Ben said, standing up, “this seems kind of crazy. We should be focusing on the Chinese government and figuring out if this really was an accident, or if it was some sort of rogue thing. Or, and this would explain why they keep stonewalling us on information, the other plausible scenario, which both Billy and I believe, that this is a move toward something bigger.”

Alex leaned back in her chair, and Manny realized she looked tired. Had she been up all night with her analysts? He hadn’t gotten much sleep either. Part of the job, but even more so when there was the chance of nuclear Armageddon. Which he understood. Nuclear war was one of those remote possibilities you had to
consider when you were the White House chief of staff and the president’s closest friend and advisor, but he was having trouble coming to terms with the idea of Chinese military insects. Apparently, so was Alex, because she shook her head.

“I know, Ben.” She looked at the president. “I know it sounds crazy, but Zouskis makes a really good case here. Our first impulse was the same as yours, but it doesn’t add up. There has been no amassing of troops, no inflamed rhetoric, nothing to signal a political move or a territorial expansion, even when we look at it in retrospect. Things have been pretty good with China. So we looked at other avenues, all the things that come easily to mind like some sort of civil protest that got out of hand, but that’s not the kind of thing that the Chinese would drop a nuke over, and unrest of the scale requiring nuclear pacification isn’t really the sort of thing they could keep entirely quiet. We would have heard rumblings.”

Alex sighed. “I suppose it’s possible there was a full-scale secret military facility on the site and we just missed it, and it was a rogue faction of the army that had to be pacified with a nuke, but if that was the case, then we need to give the Chinese a hell of a lot more credit in their ability to hide themselves. No. As much as it sounds like a bit of a stretch, I think the most likely explanation is that there was some sort of a small lab. Really small. Just a scientist or two tinkering around. Off the reservation. I don’t mean a lab that is completely off-the-books, but a lab that just wasn’t considered important enough to be kept on a military facility site. Small-scale. A sort of boutique kind of shop with a mad scientist. Small enough that they weren’t prepared for the kind of success they had in coming up with a new weapon. The kind of lab where they threw a couple hundred thousand dollars at the scientists and sent them off to go fail in peace. We do the same thing here. Do you know how many crazy, speculative projects we fund, both on and off the books?
Nano parasites and sonic lasers and death rays and all that sort of crap? Look, I’d be really happy to come in here and say our information points to it being an accident or that the Chinese dropped a nuke out of political motivation, but that’s not what we’re seeing.” She paused and looked at each of them.

And then she said, “I think it’s something worse. I think it’s worse than whatever we are actually thinking right now.”

Alex stood up and pinched the touch screen, pulling back to a map that showed the entire province. “We aren’t seeing soldiers fighting soldiers on the ground, and we aren’t seeing the kind of troop movement that would indicate outward expansion. Maybe it’s the use of the word
bugs
that’s throwing you here, but when I say ‘bugs’ think of it as just a nickname for something. Our best bet—with what little intelligence we have right now—is pointing toward some sort of bioweapon that they lost control of. Right now, whatever it is, it’s something we don’t understand, and that something scared the shit out of them. It scared them enough that when trying to contain it they failed, and they were willing to drop a thirty-megaton nuke in order to clean up the mess they made. Whatever it is, I don’t think we’re looking down the barrel of a conventional ground war. I mean, Madam President, what would scare you badly enough that you’d be willing to nuke one of our own cities?”

“Okay.” The president stood up and walked over to the monitor showing the map. “Bugs. A bioweapon. Whatever. The point is that our analyst . . . ?”

“Zouskis.”

“Zouskis has given us information that shows something was going on. So can we agree, at this point, that we are ruling out the Chinese explanation, that it was simply an accident?”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” Manny said. “On some level the
idea that the Chinese just accidentally turned part of their country into a glowing wasteland is actually more disturbing than the idea that they did it on purpose.”

The president nodded. “Okay. So we’re already in the process of deploying troops outside the country based on the idea of containment if the Chinese are planning to use the explosion as a gambit to make a move for territory,” she said. “But what if Alex is right? Because I have to be honest, as crazy as it sounds, and as much as there is no fucking way we can whisper a word of this to the press—can you imagine the civil unrest if word leaked that there was some sort of Chinese bioweapon experiment gone wrong that required a nuke to contain it?—I think there is a compelling argument here that this might have been pure panic on the part of the Chinese. So the real question is, what do we do?”

“Madam President,” Ben said. He smoothed the folds in his uniform with his palm. “With all due respect to Alex and her little analyst, this is ridiculous. Two sentences that use the word
insects
, a couple of grainy photos, and a few seconds of jerky video? Based on that, we’re going to assume there is some sort of new, virulent superweapon out there?”

Manny watched Steph stare at Ben. That was one of the things he liked about her. She wasn’t afraid to make everybody wait on her if she needed to think about something. She looked away from Ben to the map that showed troop deployments and then back at Ben.

“Get them back,” she said.

“Ma’am?” Ben looked confused.

“Get them back,” Steph said. “All the troops we started shifting outside the country. Boots back on the ground.”

Billy, who had been quiet for most of the past ten minutes, perked up. “You want us to pull all the troops who are OCONUS back home?”

“Not all of them,” the president said. “Just the ones we sent in reaction to the nuke. And I want it done now. Immediately.”

Manny saw Ben roll his eyes and struggle to keep from yelling. Ben looked like a teenager on the verge of throwing a temper tantrum because he had been told he couldn’t get a new cell phone. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs firmly believed the only appropriate response was to keep the Chinese in line with a show of troop strength, and he’d spent most of the last twenty-four hours trying to make sure it happened. Interestingly, Billy didn’t look too put out. The secretary of defense merely seemed curious.