Funny how these groups present a model of a societal golden ideal that is any rational person’s concept of a dystopia.
And the three of us seemed to be in the wrong damn place for the fight. Church said this was worth doing, and I had to take him at his word. But it felt like we were throwing punches at the wrong chins out here. Top and Bunny and I shared a long look, each of us knowing what was in the others’ hearts.
“Let’s get it done,” I said, “so we can go back to the war.”
The target was twenty-nine miles south by east from the LZ. We saddled up without a word and were gone.
3.
FINGER OF GOD OASIS
TÉNÉRÉ
SOUTH-CENTRAL SAHARA
As we drove, we each reviewed the intel. Details were sent to the left lenses of our Google Scout glasses, a proprietary bit of tech designed for Mr. Church by one of his friends in the industry.
Our destination was called the Lab. Nice and generic. Whoever owned it was doing a pretty damn good job of hiding behind fake identities and shell corporations. Had to be some money in play for them to swing that. Had to be some sophistication, too. Our computer team, headed by Bug, usually brushed aside most obfuscation, but these people were tricky bastards. Bug chopped through the underbrush all the way back to a nonspecific start-up in South Africa. There were no computer records of any kind to explain what they had started up to do. And the identities of the key players were nearly perfectly hidden, as Bug explained to us via radio as we drove.
“We tracked down two of the people involved,” he said. “Bongani Jiba, a woman from the Xhosa tribe, and Thabo Mahao, a man from the Sotho people. Jiba graduated from the University of Cape Town. Top of her class. Mahao earned a PhD in engineering from Stellenbosch University, having gone through school on a series of scholarships. Both of them are brilliant. Mahao’s family were carpet merchants and the Jiba family were bakers. No known political connections.”
“Anything suggesting they might be with this Silentium cult?”
“Nope. Not a whiff of that. No religious affiliation of any weight. No criminal records. And no clear connection between them.”
“Two black twentysomethings with advanced degrees from white-dominated schools,” mused Top. “Could have been radicalized on campus.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Bunny, “but radicalized to do what? The Toubou were black, too. And poor as balls. What’s the win in killing them?”
“To be determined,” I said. “What else do you have, Bug?”
“Nothing. The facility you guys are heading to is on a patch of ground leased by the government of Chad to the dummy corporation. We can track some money exchanges, but it’s from the government side. Cash deposits, so that’s a dead end. All of the equipment must have been trucked in by private companies, or they did it themselves, because there’s no record.”
“What about the plane?”
“It’s a ONE Aviation Eclipse 550,” said Bug. “A light commercial jet. Cheap. About three mil. Top speed of four thirty. Fifteen-hundred-mile range, crew of one or two, with room for up to five passengers. Weighs thirty-six hundred empty and has a max takeoff weight of six thousand.”
“Doesn’t leave a lot for payload,” said Bunny, “’specially if they’re carrying full tanks of liquid. Water’s eight pounds a gallon, and those look like fifty-five-gallon drums under the wings. That’s another nine hundred pounds.”
“So,” said Top, “figure a pilot and a tech, plus the payload. Everything else stripped out.”
“Sounds right,” I said. “Bug, can we pin down who might have bought it?”
“Working on that. They only made thirty-three of them before they stopped production in 2017. I have someone running down ownership. Not a successful model, though, and a lot of them have gone to second or third owners. Get me some numbers off the engine house or tail and I’ll get you some names.”
“Roger that.”
The photos of the oases and the compound where the jet was parked were taken by Buzz Clark, a seasoned photojournalist whose articles on African tribal cultures had won him three Pulitzers over the twenty-five years of his career. He was a pragmatic guy, by all accounts, and wasn’t the type to merely be a witness to events but instead took some action when there was a need. Clark was discreet about it, though, because he didn’t want to lose credibility with local contacts. That said, when warlords in Somalia were hijacking shipments of vaccines for a TB outbreak, he made a call. When he caught wind of a sex trafficking ring smuggling tween girls out of Malawi, he sent an email. He was stand-up. A lot of reporters won’t for fear of ending a story they want to follow.
Clark contacted a buddy in the WHO, who contacted someone who contacted Peabody, who—despite my personal and totally unfounded dislike of him—contacted Church. Clark was nobody’s idea of a ranting conspiracy theorist, so we all took him more seriously than we would virtually anyone else.
Since then, though, Clark had gone off the radar. He was supposed to be our man on the ground, but he hadn’t responded to the last few attempts to reach him. None of us felt good about that.
The three of us drove on and reached the oasis called the Finger of God. A bunch of buzzards took reluctant flight, circling high above us as we parked and dismounted. We stopped upwind from the oasis and unpacked the backpack Bunny wore. In it were two lightweight hazmat suits, which Top and I pulled on. Bunny took a roll of duct tape and sealed our wrists and ankles. Then Top removed other items from the pack, including a BAMS unit, which he handed to me. He took a biological sample collection kit, and together we moved off, leaving Bunny well behind to guard our backs.
As we approached the bodies, I switched the BAMS unit on and began waving it around. The device was a bioaerosol mass spectrometer. It had a vacuum function that drew in ambient air and hit it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key molecules like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells were identified and assigned color codes. Most of the BAMS units on either the commercial or government markets were unreliable because they could only detect dangerous particles in high density. This version had been designed by Dr. William Hu, the former head of the DMS Integrated Sciences Division, and then seriously upgraded by Doc Holliday. If everything was copacetic, the little lights would stay a comforting green.
They were green until I got about four feet from the body of an adult woman, and then the lights all flashed red.
“Fuck me,” I said.
Top stood next to me as I passed the unit over the body in order to capture as much of whatever was triggering the BAMS sensors. It was uplinked to a satellite and sent data to Doc Holliday all the way the hell back in Greece. I heard her gasp as if she stood between me and Top.