Forty-Eight X (30 page)

“Training has progressed with my second company at a pace far faster than the time required by the first force. Their peers have been instrumental in teaching them the required behaviors and preferred techniques. Recently, however, several of the animals have made dramatic adaptations to their training that have clearly improved the team’s performance. They are no longer copying behaviors; they are inventing new and better ones.”

“What other animal can do that?” McGraw wanted to say in his report. But he didn’t. He knew the obvious answer already—humans.

General Mack Shell had been ordered to appear at a secret session of a joint congressional oversight committee. He sat alone at a mahogany desk whose edges had been gouged by the fingernail scratches of the myriad of people who had nervously sat there before him to face scrutiny. Congressional oversight committees have existed since the Revolutionary War, ostensibly to weed out abuses in government. They were formed when the flames of scandal became public and disbanded when they smoldered away. But since 1976, in the wake of the Nixon Watergate abuses, congressional oversight committees had been made permanent as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Their interests had stepped beyond just monitoring the intelligence community and began intruding on other committee jurisdictions, like budgets, military appropriations, and homeland security. Many of the folks in the intelligence community and most in the military felt that congressional oversight was counterproductive. Members of the oversight committees were elected officials who acted out of partisan political interests and were swayed by the winds of fickle public opinion. Serving the national interest most often seemed secondary to serving their own.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the committee chair began, “we are here to seek a vigorous review of military activities and expenditures that have not been privy to the vast majority of our colleagues or to the public.”

Shell looked about the room. There were a dozen congressmen on the dais. He was the only witness. No one was in the gallery behind him except security guards at the door. This was a secret session of a congressional committee, and yet its chairman was speaking as if he was talking to the press. Shell locked his jaw and again reminded himself to hold his temper and give a reasoned explanation and review of his project. But he knew he sat before a bunch of shortsighted meddlers in a business they didn’t understand. And he knew that what was said here—in secret session—would not be secret very long.

The questions were fired at him rapidly, and he was frequently interrupted. These men and women seemed more interested in making a point than in listening to his explanations.

“It has come to our attention,” one began, “that you are not just doing genetic research, but rather creating chimeras—composite animals.”

“Are you introducing animal genes into humans?”

“Are you crossing spiders with chimps so that they can weave webs?”

“By introducing human genes into animals, aren’t you creating an entirely new being with a significant human component?”

“Why are we spending billions of dollars for the army to play God?”

General Shell had formulated his answer in a fashion he thought they would understand most—dollars and cents.

“I didn’t make up these numbers, Mr. Chairman,” the general began. “These are conservative figures from a Nobel Prize winning economist. In 2006 dollars, it cost $400,000 annually to put a soldier in the field. For every casualty sustained in combat, it costs $2,000,000 for care and rehabilitation. What is the cost to your communities when we call away your firemen, policemen, salesmen, and farmers? When a soldier is sent abroad to fight our battles, what does that cost in the damage done to marriages and families? The cost in lost productivity, lost life, and the renting of our social fabric? I would measure it in the trillions.

“Gentlemen, what is the essential quality of humanity? How do we differ from other animals? I’ll tell you how. We have the ability to make rational decisions, to reason. We have the ability to use our brains and not just our brawn. Over the years, humans have all agreed that it is unreasonable for a man to do the work an animal can do, and so we had oxen pulling plows. As technology evolved, we made machines to do the work. But to fight our political and economic battles, we still use and bloody young men and women. What a waste. We made the ox pull our plows. Why not have a distant relative, the chimpanzee, fight our wars? Patton said it best: we go to war not to die for our country, but to make the other guy die for his. I’m in the business of winning wars, and the Lemuria Project is one way to win.”

There were a lot of nods of assent about the room. But after listening quietly for most of the session, the senator from South Carolina, who had served longer than most of his colleagues had been alive, made his remarks, his accent exaggerated with buttery smooth long vowels, and agonizingly slow.

“General, I remember other generals who have come here. Long ago, they said the tank would win our wars, then the airplane, the aircraft carrier, then missiles. It was always a new technology. And now you have another new technology of sorts—the genetic manipulation of an animal to fight our battles. But you have talked about this ‘new technology’ using interesting words. Let me see, I have it here, you say these new soldiers are ‘smart, adaptable, determined, decisive.’ They have some innate intelligence. Maybe they don’t have a system of ethics, or morals, religion, a written word, or a spoken language yet, but they think. Do they not?”

“Yes. But they’re trained and bred to—”

The South Carolina senator interrupted. “This is the same debate we’ve had for years about what’s more important, ‘nature or nuture.’ But I want to cut through the rhetoric here. I want us all to remember that regardless of this genetics business, or breeding, or training, what we as humans do in life is still determined by something else. And what we decide here is determined by that something else. And that’s free will. I don’t care if you’ve been born in a ghetto or born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Each of us has free will to decide what’s right and wrong. And so I want to know, General, before we exercise our free will here, what happens if your chimps ever come to have free will? Who wins, if they ever think about fighting us?”

Shell was used to being decisive. After all, he was a general who made decisions that put men’s lives at risk. When he spoke, his answers had to be unequivocal. Men don’t fight well, and certainly don’t fight to die, when their leaders express doubt.

“Who wins?” the senator asked again.

“We do,” Shell finally answered, after some hesitation. “We win, sir.”

But Shell could tell he had left doubts in the room, and some of them were his own.

T
he Gulfstream 350 filed a flight plan from Van Nuys Airport in Southern California to Pretoria, South Africa. The only passengers listed were Sulli Key, his pilot, his bodyguards—two lovely black transvestites—and Nate Stumpf. Although Sulli had a pilot’s license and was instrument rated on his jets, he preferred to copilot the business jet so he could socialize with his guests whenever he wished. The private plane cruised at 45,000 feet, flew nearly Mach 1, had a range of 3,800 miles, and could accommodate a dozen passengers in decadent, beyond-first-class luxury. Sulli had his own aft stateroom with exercise bikes designed to handle two-G bank angles. The cabin was soundproof. You could speak in whispers. There were wide plush leather armchairs and couches that folded out into beds, multiple flat-panel video monitors and a surround-sound entertainment system, and a full bar and galley suitable for preparing gourmet meals. Not bad for a kid born in a small brick row house in northeast Philadelphia. As a child, his mother removed him from the temptations of the streets by taking him on long, tedious bus and subway rides to a charity arts school downtown. There he learned to play piano and guitar, to sing and dance. He even took art and fencing lessons. The more talents he acquired, his mother admonished, the better his chances for success in life. He performed in cafés and bars, on street corners, anywhere people would watch and listen. And just as his mother had promised, fame and fortune arrived. He had been a “star” for more than thirty years, and still everything he touched turned to gold.

No one ever said no to Sulli Key. He could do whatever he wanted and most always have whatever or whomever he wanted. It wasn’t that he particularly fancied the swarthy good looks of Joshua Krantz, but these people desperately wanted something else and he was curious to learn what it was. Money? Introductions? A part in a movie?

When he walked into his living room, Sulli found Joshua Krantz standing over that slimy detective who had worked for his ex-wife. It looked like he was about to pummel the guy.

Krantz was quick to speak up. “My friend here may have given you the wrong impression. There are issues of great importance that we wanted to speak to you about.”

Sulli recognized the accent. He had performed in Israel many times. And the Israelis were always a good audience, always interesting.

“Slikha,”
I’m sorry, Sulli said in Hebrew, quickly breaking the ice and putting the Israeli at ease, “but you’re just not my type. So tell me, what’s so important?”

After more civil introductions, Joshua Krantz and Maggie Wagner did most of the talking. Sulli listened, fascinated by their story. It was like a movie, he thought, full of twists. There was the murder of a Nobel Laureate, clandestine genetic research, military secrets, and kidnappings, all wrapped up with code words and ancient myths. It didn’t matter that some picayune LA private detective had gained entrance to his home with titillating photos. He was being invited to participate in a great adventure. How could he not go?

It was a long flight—halfway around the world. They refueled in Anchorage; again in Sapporo, Japan; Bangkok, Thailand; and Mumbai, India. They departed Mumbai at dawn. From Mumbai, it was a straight hop to Pretoria. It got earlier and darker as they headed west. After two hours, they were over the middle of the Indian Ocean with the Chagos Archipelago below them. Chagos was made up of fifty-two tiny islands—the largest of which was the seventeen-square-mile atoll called Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory called BIOT.

In the day before their departure, Krantz had driven up to a small airport in Lompoc, just north of Santa Barbara. They advertised a sky-diving experience there. For two hundred dollars, you could jump in tandem, strapped to an instructor who, after a brief free fall, pulled the rip cord. Krantz had done dozens of jumps as an Israeli army officer, but none in a decade. But jumping was easy, like falling out of an airplane. He had not driven to Lompoc for jump lessons; he had gone to buy a used tandem chute.

“Why not new?” Maggie asked with some dismay. “Used means worn, and isn’t a parachute one thing you’d want to buy as brand new?”