The Hatching: A Novel (15 page)

The engine. Three shots to stop the engine, and then they could outrun the Zodiac all day. He moved the rifle fractionally, putting the engine housing in the middle of his sights. The boat was moving so goddamned fast, he had only a few seconds. The first shot was wide. He saw the plastic on the housing splinter. The second hit home, however. The buzz of the Zodiac’s engine went quiet and he lowered the rifle, one bullet to spare.

His wife came up to his elbow.

“Where are . . . What is that? I don’t understand.”

The boat continued to glide toward them, the motor dead but its momentum still moving the Zodiac slowly through the water.
The black mound in the boat rising and falling in waves, as if it were an ocean unto itself, but in a different rhythm. Even from where the boat stopped gliding, nearly thirty feet from them, he could hear the sound of whatever it was scraping and clicking on the rubber and wood of the boat.

He turned to his wife. “I need to use the radio.”

He turned and went belowdecks. His wife ran after him, peppering him with questions.

Neither of them saw the bloom of silk that started to rise from the mass of spiders, the white threads whispering and twisting in the gentle wind, spiders drifting into the air.

“T
wo more to Germany. Wheels down in a couple of hours.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stabbed his thick finger against the map on the touchscreen monitor.

Manny was listening, but he was also looking at the press release one of his aides had prepared for him on the plane crash that had apparently killed Bill Henderson. The director of the agency had a man in place and a team on the way to make sure it wasn’t anything other than an accident. Just another headache for Manny. Of course the nuclear explosion was the big news of the day, but the president was going to have to say something about Henderson, and she’d have to go to the funeral. Christ. Minneapolis. This was not what Manny needed. Bill Henderson had been a pushy asshole—which was one of the reasons he’d become a billionaire—but he’d also been an unabashed ally of their party in general and Steph in particular. Even if he hadn’t rounded up his richest friends to donate, his own contributions to their campaign coffers had been what put them over the top. It wasn’t that easy to replace a billionaire with deep pockets, and while the other guys each had a clown car full of buffoons driving them to the convention, sooner or later one of them would emerge. It was a miracle they hadn’t
figured it out yet as it was. With the loss of Henderson’s money and the fucking Chinese dropping nukes, Manny was suddenly thinking there might be a real race. He knew that’s not what he was supposed to be preoccupied with right now. That was the lie of politics: that they were there to serve the common good. But it was a lie Manny believed—or maybe used to believe?—and that Steph believed. This wasn’t the time for politics. There was a crisis and a real worry here. Nukes weren’t something to be discounted. No. He had to think about the Chinese.

He sighed and watched Ben Broussard finish his presentation.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs looked at the president and then at the rest of the people in the room. “We’ll have them on the ground and operational by eighteen hundred tomorrow, and from there we can have a rapid response here and here as needed,” he said, tapping the map again. “Any questions?”

There were none, so Ben took his seat. The president stared at the map for an uncomfortable second and then she turned and said, “Any comments?”

Manny saw that Alexandra Harris, the national security advisor, had slipped into the room sometime in the last couple of minutes, and at the president’s question, she didn’t hesitate. “It’s the wrong reaction.”

“You think we’re overreacting? To a nuclear bomb?” Ben slammed his hand on the table. He didn’t look pissed. He looked furious. For the first time, Manny considered that maybe the problem with Ben was simply that he was one of those old-guard military men who, no matter what he said, couldn’t quite stomach the idea of having a woman as the commander in chief. Or, in this case, the national security advisor. Billy Cannon, the secretary of defense, didn’t react like that when Alex challenged him, but that’s probably because Billy looked at Alexandra Harris and saw the national
security advisor, while Ben looked at Alex and saw a woman. The thought made Manny want to chuckle a little, because really, Alex looked like nothing other than a grandmother. She was sharp as hell, but there was always a part of him that expected her to pull some hard candies out of her purse.

Manny picked up his glass of Diet Coke and took a gulp. The burn of the carbonation helped a little, but what he really needed was that sweet surge of caffeine. He let his eyes shift to Steph then back to the group sitting around the conference table. A quick glance was enough for him to see that the president wasn’t in a hurry to jump in. She was good that way, willing to let people talk and argue before she stepped in, and usually even then her first forays were to ask questions, so that when she did decide on a course of action she knew what she was talking about.

Alex took a cup of coffee from a staff member’s tray with a polite nod and then, without raising her voice, looked directly at Ben and said, “I didn’t say we were overreacting by scrambling troops and thinking about deployment. I said it was the
wrong
reaction.”

Ben opened his mouth to speak but then stopped. It was actually kind of comical, Manny thought. Ben was not the kind of man to hold himself back or to second-guess, and the sight of him with his mouth hanging open would have been, at another time and under different circumstances, worth laughing at. But it wasn’t another time and different circumstances. It was the day after China accidentally dropped a nuclear weapon on one of its own villages. Except the problem was they still weren’t entirely sure if China had accidentally dropped the weapon or if they had “accidentally” dropped the weapon.

“That’s what I’m trying to say.” Alex put her cup down and pulled her tablet out and put it on the table. “I’m sorry for being late, and I’m sure Billy and Ben did an excellent job of explaining
the rationale behind deployment decisions, but all those decisions are based on the idea that this nuclear explosion was either just an accident, as the Chinese claim, or part of some sort of wider, deliberate strategy. But the thing is, from the information I have, I’m willing to say it wasn’t an accident, and that it wasn’t planned either,” Alex said. She tapped the tablet twice and brought up a picture. “The important thing is that the information we have leads me to believe that while this wasn’t a strategic decision, there was a
reason
the Chinese set off the explosion. They were trying to cover something up. The images we have aren’t great, but look here. There just isn’t much going on in that part of China on a regular basis, and even though we have satellite coverage, it’s limited. Frankly, this part of China isn’t considered important, and it hasn’t been a real priority with imaging. Tech has enhanced, but there’s a limit to the resolution and to how much we can blow things up.” She spun the tablet so that it was facing the president. The men—and everybody else in the room other than Steph and Alex was a man—leaned forward so they could see the picture. “Blow things up is maybe the wrong phrase given what happened, but this is from five hours before the nuke.”

Manny had seen enough of these sorts of military satellite pictures that even if he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at, he could recognize the pattern of cars and trucks in a parking lot, the layout of buildings. He turned to the aide behind him. “Get this up on the big monitor.”

The young man nodded, took the tablet, tapped it a few times, and then the image was on the wall.

“Here,” Alex said, standing up and tapping against the monitor. “This is the entrance to the main mine. Primarily rare earth metals, the kind of stuff you’ll find in your cell phones and your tablets. They do most of the refining on-site, here, in this large
complex of buildings.” She tapped another spot. “As far as we can tell, all of this over here is just garages, maintenance, that sort of thing. I mean, it looks so damn regular it’s almost comical. There are a couple of factories in the village, some chemical processing stuff, but basically, if this mine weren’t here, the village wouldn’t be here. The mine is the center of things.”

Ben Broussard was standing now, leaning over Manny’s shoulder and staring at the image on Alex’s tablet instead of looking at the monitor on the wall. “Military? You’re saying this is a hidden military facility?”

“Not exactly,” Alex said. “That’s the thing. If it were a standard military, chem, or bio research facility, we would have better pictures. I mean, obviously, it’s possible we just whiffed. We all know how much we’ve struggled with getting agents on the ground in China, particularly in the rural areas, but I don’t think that’s what we have here. I think it’s something small. Maybe biological weapons. Maybe chemical. But almost certainly only a couple of scientists, a few rooms, the sort of thing that could stay hidden because nobody, including the Chinese, think it’s important. I mean, this is the ass end of China. The analyst for this region is young, uh,” she looked over her shoulder at her aide who said something under his breath, “Terry Zouskis, but she’s sharp. She knows what she is talking about, and, well, here’s the thing. Something was going on, something that scared the shit out of the Chinese.”

“Bioweapons?” Billy looked rattled when he said it, and Manny couldn’t blame him. Conventions and treaties be damned, they all knew the Chinese were researching biological agents, and sooner or later there was going to be a breach. The only question was how big a problem it was going to cause for the Chinese. And the world. Was it a “drop a nuke on it” kind of problem?

“We don’t know what it is yet,” Alex said. She walked back to her seat. “As far as we can tell, it looks like a mine and a refinery and maintenance buildings because, well, it
is
a mine and a refinery and maintenance buildings. But there is plenty of space to hide a few offices and a small lab without raising any eyebrows. There’s no question there was something going on inside, out of sight of the satellites. If you look here, near the entrance of the mine,” she said, and flicked her fingers on the screen, zooming in until they could all see that what had appeared to be simply part of the building was actually a group of figures. Maybe two dozen in all. “Soldiers. Or something to that effect. You can see here and here, automatic weapons, but the thing that made us start thinking this might not be a military or research facility that we’d missed is what the soldiers are doing.”

“Their guns.” The president sat up and gestured toward the screen.

“Yep,” Alex said.

Manny didn’t see it. “What about them?”

Steph pointed hard at the screen. “They’ve got their guns aimed
toward
the building, not away from it. The soldiers aren’t trying to keep people out, they’re trying to keep people in.”

There was a buzz of voices in response to the president, but Manny saw that Alex wasn’t trying to speak yet. She was sitting up straight and looking around the room, and as she did so, Manny watched her and saw the way Alex seemed to be counting who was in the room. She was hesitating. Manny looked around the room and tried to figure out who she was seeing that made her not want to speak, and then, after a moment, he realized it wasn’t a single person, but the simple fact that there were too many people in the room. She looked at him and raised her eyebrows. Nobody else noticed, but he tilted his head toward the door and Alex nodded.
Okay, Manny thought. She wanted the room cleared. He had to trust her.

He stood up and clapped his hands twice. The room quieted. Steph was looking at him with a smirk, but she’d missed the transaction between him and Alex. She thought he was just trying to quiet the room down.

“Everybody out. Billy, Ben, Alex, you stay; everybody else out.” He gave them only half a second to look confused before he yelled it. “Out! Get the fuck out of here!” The aides and staff scrambled, and suddenly it was just the president, the national security advisor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretary of defense, and all of them were staring at Manny and waiting for him to speak.

Alex looked at him calmly. Even if he didn’t actually know the specifics of why he’d done it, why he’d cleared the room, it was what Alex had been waiting for: whatever it was she was about to say, he’d been right that she hadn’t wanted to say it to everyone in the room. She turned to address Steph. Manny, just for a moment, thought that Alexandra Harris had arrived a generation too soon; she was somebody who could have held the presidency if she’d been born at the right time.

“Look, I don’t have anything here,” Manny said, “but Alex clearly does, and she can correct me if I’m wrong, but it is something she didn’t want to say in front of a crowd.” Everybody turned to look at Alex, and she didn’t correct Manny. “You all know me, and you know I don’t hold back, and if this was politics or whatever, fine, but the Chinese just dropped a nuclear fucking bomb. This is one of those ‘history is going to look back and judge us’ kinds of moments, and I, for one, think we better get it right. Or, maybe more importantly, we can’t afford to get it wrong. I have no clue what the deal is, but there is clearly
something Alex knows that she needs to share with us but doesn’t exactly want to say.”

Steph cleared her throat. “Just tell me it isn’t zombies. Did you catch that asshole on the news saying there was a possibility that the nuke was to cover up a zombie outbreak?” Manny had watched the news with Steph and had actually been kind of amused at the earnestness of the commentators. He’d long ago gotten used to talking heads who made their livings bashing the administration. They were the ones who never seemed to let facts or journalism stand in their way. “I swear to God, if I hear the word ‘zombies’ out of anyone’s mouth, I’m ordering the Secret Service to take you out to the Rose Garden to have you summarily executed.” Ben Broussard and Billy Cannon both chuckled, but Alex’s expression didn’t change.