TWILIGHT FALLS
A JOE LEDGER ROGUE TEAM INTERNATIONAL ADVENTURE
JONATHAN MABERRY
1.
PHOENIX HOUSE
OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE
“They’re not chem-trails,” I said with the last fragment of patience. “They’re contrails.”
We were in the briefing room and I was pretty close to throwing my cup of coffee at the smug little bastard who hosted the conspiracy theory radio show. Jim Peabody. He had a lean, oddly angular birdlike body and looked like an affronted egret. He had the kind of face you wanted to throw a coffee cup at. Even if you like coffee as much as I do. It was very hot coffee and it would hurt. So, the struggle was real because I wanted him to shut the fuck up.
“Just listen to him, sugar,” said Joan Holliday, the head of our integrated sciences division. She looks like a six-foot-plus version of Dolly Parton. All the glam, glitter, curves, and sass of the singer, but thirty years younger and a shelf full of MDs and PhDs. She called everyone sugar. Or honey bunny. Or sweet cheeks.
“Why bother?” I demanded. “We’ve got some freaks threatening to release bioweapons in fifty countries. Fifty. Five-zero. We’re standing on the brink of the actual apocalypse. We are a couple of very bad days away from living in either a disease-infested wasteland or a dystopia in which only those entitled assholes who can afford it are going to survive. That isn’t the plot of a summer blockbuster, it’s happening right now. So excuse the living fuck out of me if I’m not all that concerned about some crackpot belief trending with the tinfoil hat crowd.”
Peabody actually recoiled from me, then took a half step forward. “Colonel Ledger, if you’d just listen to—”
“I’ve been listening,” I said. “And all I’m hearing is bullshit.”
“No, sir,” said Peabody officiously, “you’re hearing but not listening. You’re not paying attention.”
“‘Paying attention’?” I had to smile. “Do you want to know what I was doing when I got the call to come in for this briefing? I was hunting for a group of terrorists suspected of smuggling a bioweapon delivery system into Athens. Do you know how many people live in Athens? Do you know how many people we’re trying to keep alive in Athens? And Rome, and London, and Paris, and New York, and—?”
“Colonel . . .”
It was Mr. Church who’d spoken. A single word. Quiet, without emphasis.
I stopped my rant. We all looked at him. Church is a big man, black and strong. Somewhere in his sixties, but that isn’t what made him the adult in the room. He was the adult in any room. You look at him and immediately want to check your fingernails to see if they’re clean. I’ve seen generals and heads of state react that way, too.
“Every JSOC and private SpecOps team in the world is on the hunt for the bioterrorists. Our people, MHI, SEAL Team 666, Chess Team, Sigma Force . . . It’s doubtful there’s ever been a more concentrated hunt than what is currently ongoing. And, as valuable a field asset as you are, Colonel, cutting you out of that pack to deal with this is not likely to be the deciding factor in keeping the world on its hinges.”
Doc Holliday pretended to whisper, but said, “You got spanked.” And she said it in a little musical singsong. I glared nuclear death at her.
“Okay, okay,” I said with bad grace and turned back to Peabody—who, for the record, looks like a Peabody. A classic example of the type. “Chem-trails. Sure. Fine. Explain to me how that’s not a conspiracy theory.”
Peabody pushed his glasses up his nose and said, “Well, Colonel Ledger, understand that I would normally agree with you. In all circumstances. Contrails are actually condensation trails. Line-shaped cloud formations created by changes in air pressure as aircraft cruise at certain altitudes and under certain atmospheric conditions. Water vapor in the engine exhaust interacts with low ambient temperatures, leaving lines of ice crystals. And some contrails are formed by changes in air pressure in wingtip vortices. Some disappear quickly and others can last for hours.”
“Thank you, Bill Nye,” I muttered. “Get to how that equals some kind of conspiracy.”
“Regular contrails are harmless,” said Peabody. “As you say, there are plenty of conspiracy theories about chem-trails. That nonsense got started after a 1996 air force report was published in which induced weather modification theories were discussed. Alarmists like William Thomas, Richard Finke, and Art Bell stoked the fires of the belief that some contrails were actually the release of ether chemicals or biological agents intended to accomplish a variety of goals. Mind control, pacification of the population for easier rule by the Illuminati, human population control, chemical warfare, and . . . well, the list goes on and on past into genetic seeding by reptilian aliens. Any notable outbreaks of disease, higher statistics of genetic disorders, cancers, and so on in given areas are then linked to these chem-trails.”
I twirled my finger to indicate Doc Holliday, Church, and myself. “Choir,” I said. And then pointed to him. “Preacher.”
He flushed a little. “I had to establish certain things in order to tell you something that is actually happening.”
Very quietly I heard Mr. Church say, “Ah.”
Peabody had visual aids and sent images from his laptop to the big flat-screen in the conference room. The first image was a Google Maps satellite view of a stretch of nearly featureless desert. Endless sand dunes.
“This is Ténéré, a desert region in the south-central Sahara that stretches from northeastern Chad to western Sudan. One hundred fifty thousand square miles of nothing. It is ostensibly owned by Niger and Chad, but sparsely populated and of little value to anyone. You can’t farm it and there is very little water. It is, for all intents and purposes, a dead land.”
He clicked and a picture appeared of a pair of dark-skinned men dressed in white robes leading a string of starved-looking camels.
“There’s a scattering of ethnic groups, but the area in question for us is used mostly by Toubou people, who are descended from the original Neolithic inhabitants of the Sahara region. They are genetically Ethiopians, and are regarded as a tough, nomadic, and noble people. Most of the Toubou are salt miners. They live at the very edge of poverty and starvation.”
Click.
“This is one of the Toubou salt camps,” he said. The image was that of several tents clustered in the lee of a vertical pillar of natural rock that stood up from the sand. A few pine trees leaned away from the sun’s fists, and there were some handfuls of grass. “The oasis is called the Finger of God for obvious reasons. This photo was taken eleven days ago by a National Geographic photographer doing a story on nomad peoples.”
We waited, and I found myself becoming invested now. There were people in the mix and I had a bad feeling this was not going to be a story with a happy ending. In my job we don’t get to read a lot of those kinds of stories.