Click.
The next shot was of the same camp. Clearly days later. Had to be days, because even in the brutal heat of the Sahara, bodies don’t bloat that much. They don’t warp and expand into grotesque parodies of the human form. Doc Holliday made a soft gagging sound. I walked over to the screen and stood looking at it for a long time.
Men and women. Children. Even the camels.
All of them dead.
Sprawled in the sand. Covered in blowflies. Mouths thrown wide, but if with screams or prayers to an unheeding god there was no way to tell. Fingers knotted into fists on stilled breasts, or clutching handfuls of sand, or entwined with those of children. Reaching to each other for help, for support, or to make sure that when the darkness took them, they fell together.
None of us spoke.
Click.
The next image was of a plane flying high above, leaving a double trail of silver-white vapor.
“That was taken by the Nat Geo reporter the same day the first oasis picture was taken,” said Peabody. “The other picture . . . well, that was forty-eight hours later.”
I turned.
“It doesn’t prove a connection,” I said.
“No, no . . . but . . .”
Click.
It was an aerial view of another oasis. A substantially bigger one, with many healthy palms, a big pen of goats, and a sophisticated building whose pitched roof was lined with solar panels. Several pickups and Jeeps were parked in the shade of an angled canopy, and beyond the house were several acres of land covered with sand-colored cloth tarps. But what caught my eye was what was behind the building. There, at the end of a short, flat stretch of hard-packed sand, was an aircraft. A small, tidy jet.
Sticking out from beneath its wings were large chemical tanks.
“That’s not proof,” I said.
“Show him the rest,” said Church.
Peabody nodded. “There are three other oases in the same area.”
Click.
The same jet, flying at a height of maybe four thousand feet, dragging white lines behind it.
Click.
Another camp. More tents. More trees. More bodies.
Click.
That jet again.
Click.
The third oasis. The third horror show.
Click.
Click.
Into the silence I said, “Tell me about the people who own that jet.”
2.
UNDISCLOSED LANDING ZONE
TÉNÉRÉ
SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA
We had no idea what kind of tech our potential bad guys had. The days when a radar unit was some big obvious thing were long gone. Now that stuff was small, easily mounted on a Jeep or pickup.
So we did a HALO jump to get in.
High altitude, low open. That’s three of us—Top Sims, Bunny, and me—throwing ourselves out of a perfectly good airplane at thirty thousand feet. Wearing goggles and breathing bottled air, and falling six fucking miles before we deployed our chutes. Yes, I was an Airborne Ranger in the army. Yes, I’ve done scores of combat jumps. No, I have never liked a single one of them. I have a good game face, especially in front of my men, but inside, my nuts crawl up into my chest cavity before I’m out the door, and they do not descend until about half an hour after I’m on the ground.
We didn’t die, though, so . . . there’s that.
We gathered up our chutes and kicked sand over them. Bradley “Top” Sims is the oldest member of Havoc Team. Pushing fifty, but clearly made out of boiler plates and scrap iron. Dark brown skin, eyes that missed nothing, and a patchwork of earned scars all over his tough hide. Beside him was Harvey Rabbit—sadly, that’s his actual name. Everyone calls him Bunny. He’s six and a half feet of Orange County white boy with a surfer tan and more muscles than anyone reasonably needs. They were my right and left hands. We’d joined Church’s little gang of science geeks and shooters together. I trusted them more than anyone else I knew.
The equipment had landed a few hundred yards away, and we jogged over and uncrated three sound-suppressed dirt bikes. Very high-end stuff. Not as fast as regular motorcycles, their speed topping out at forty, but the engines purred like kittens. The cases were sand-colored and with the easterly wind blowing they’d be covered and invisible in a few hours. There were no markings of any kind on any of the gear we brought. No badges or rank insignias on our clothing. We were ghosts.
Top glanced at me, then up at the sky in the direction from which we’d come, and then down at the blowing sand. “World’s going to shit and we’re a long damn way from the fight,” he said.
It was true enough. The bioterrorists had already begun limited releases on towns in Europe, Asia, and North America. A weaponized version of the Shanghai flu in Duoyishu, a village in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. A superstrain of tuberculosis in Otranto, Puglia. And a dreadfully hardy strain of Yersinia pestis in a Navajo village in New Mexico. Right now the death toll was low. Comparatively low, anyway. Seven hundred infected, with seventeen deaths. No one was actually encouraged by those numbers. None of us believed that the death toll was going to stay low.
The threats about these attacks had been coming in via anonymous snail mail, social media posts from dummy accounts, and emails sent from internet cafés and fake profiles. The first one we knew about was nine months ago, and it wasn’t taken seriously—except in retrospect. It was directed at the government of India and was filled with political and quasi-religious histrionics. All about how the current world is corrupt and that overpopulation is proof of a deliberate desire to pollute and destroy the world. The viewpoint of the group amounts to the belief that humanity has become a kind of thinking virus on the skin of the living earth. What was once a symbiotic relationship, back when humanity could be counted in the tens of thousands, has been thrown out of balance by industrialism and overpopulation. The group consider themselves to be the voice of reason.
Their “reasonable” suggestion, sent via email to the heads of state of the fifty most populous countries, was for the leaders to initiate a lottery to pick ninety percent of their populations and systematically euthanize them. Failure to do so would result in the group launching a program of bioweapon releases. How they planned to do that, and where they would get these bioweapons, was something we were working on figuring out.
The limited releases were incentives. Kicks in the ass.
That’s why everyone with a gun was out hunting these freaks.
All we had for the group was a name—Silentium. Latin for “silence,” which didn’t tell us much. However, from the rhetoric in their messages it was pretty clear they were some kind of millenarian cult. Their rants were all about how mankind was corrupt and how a new age was going to dawn after the manufactured cleansing program. There were going to be seven years of violence, struggle, and death before the population was whittled down to a number in harmony with the earth.