God of War

by Jeff Rovin

  But she did not cough. She touched her nose, her ears. There was no blood. She tasted none in her throat or mouth.

  Looking down at the dark shape of the bag, Katinka Kettle smiled.

  She was alive.

  Her find, her treasure, was secure. For the first time she had a taste of the kind of self-assurance Foster himself must possess. So much so that one thing more entered her brain.

  He did not know how many core samples were taken from Ship Rock. No one alive did, but her. They were from the same spot, within inches … were identical.

  There was no need to turn them all over.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The White House, Washington, D.C.

  November 11, 9:05 A.M.

  Five people in the Oval Office had been listening to the exchange. They had been gathered around the rectangular conference table, eyes on the black speakerphone, expressions grave as the saga played out.

  Only three of those people were present at the moment: President Midkiff, Chief of Staff Trevor Harward, and Angie Brunner. The forty-nine-year-old intellectual property attorney was heading President-elect Wright’s transition team and was expected to be his chief of staff. She had been invited to spend several days with the outgoing president.

  Angie had not expected to be faced with a crisis, which was the point.

  Two other key persons were listening in: Dr. Rajini and Surgeon General Becka Young.

  Matt Berry had walked into the chilly Rose Garden to call Williams. Secretary of Homeland Security Abraham Hewlett had gone to make a call, with permission, in the president’s private antechamber. The adjoining office was warmer, but not by much, than the Western Colonnade. The sun only set on the West Wing.

  President Midkiff was perched on the corner of his desk, looking down at the silent phone. Finally, he stood and walked toward the table.

  “Becka, thoughts?”

  “My first reaction is that the symptoms that were described are consistent with radiation poisoning,” Surgeon General Young replied. “Sudden, excessive bleeding, nausea and vomiting.”

  Harward was sitting on the couch with his leg crossed, foot shaking.

  “Radiation—from where, Dr. Young?” he asked. “I think if there were a leaking nuclear reactor or submarine in the region, we would have heard about it.”

  “Matt said he had someone looking at radioactivity in the region regarding the plane crash,” the president said.

  “Is there evidence that those passengers were also ill?” Dr. Young asked.

  “No,” the president replied. “Just an angle of a terror investigation. In any case, there have been no official alerts. Shahrukh?”

  “I am very concerned about that core sample,” Dr. Rajini replied. “Drilling in Antarctica has brought up living microbes from time to time, not all of them familiar to us.”

  “That’s Antarctica,” Harward said. “This is the South Indian Ocean.”

  “Something may have been there since the land masses were joined, or been released by ice melt or calving and drifted,” she said.

  “The dread Antarctica Strain, plaything of the climate change fanatics,” Harward said dismissively.

  “Hypothetical does not mean nonexistent,” the woman pointed out.

  “I want to hear about it, Shahrukh,” the president said.

  The chief of staff fell silent. He went to work on his laptop.

  “It is a hypothesis about the potential danger represented by some incredibly hardy, anaerobic infectious agent that is capable of a long dormancy,” the science advisor said. “The theory holds that such a microbe may essentially have been freeze-dried in the past and released today, as lethal as ever.”

  “To infect a brontosaurus, which they will be hard-pressed to find today,” Harward said. He read from a file on his laptop. “Mr. President, the white paper South Polar Core Analysis Microbial Study, dated January 20, 2020, dismissed as very remote the idea that a germ trapped before there were people on Earth would suddenly emerge to infect people on Earth. The report cited the unlikelihood of a long life in the open atmosphere, without a mechanism to feed or reproduce or whatever microbes do—”

  “Exotic problems are always remote until they happen,” Dr. Rajini said. “Over twenty years ago, scientists with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center found ancient microbes in a core sample from the Russian Vostok base at the South Pole. Neither American nor Russian scientists could dismiss the possibility that unfamiliar germs such as these were capable of cross-species transmission.”

  “What year was that discovery? Exactly?” Harward asked.

  “June 1998,” Dr. Rajini replied.

  “Right,” Harward said. “A period of decreased funding for NASA. Scaremongering is always a solution for that. But all right, Doctor, let’s follow that theory. How deep was the Vostok core?”

  “Just over four thousand feet,” the science advisor replied.

  “The better part of a mile,” said the national security advisor. “If these clowns we just heard went ashore somewhere and came back an hour and a half later, the sample was probably—what, a few yards at most? Those islands are environmentally protected, I believe. The squatters would have been in a hurry.” As he spoke, Harward’s fingers flew across his keyboard. “There’s a South African naval outpost there doing daily sweeps of the region. No time for deep drilling. Or noisy drilling, for that matter. They may have used a hand-turned auger.”

  “A sample need not be deep to be potentially deadly,” Dr. Rajini said. “Permafrost in polar and even subpolar regions is what we call a ‘highly conducive medium.’ Microbes like the water and decay.”

  “The plane was in the air and so was most of that boat,” Harward noted.

  “Trevor,” the president said, “can you suggest an alternative cause?”

  “Sir, I’m just devil’s advocating so we don’t jump to wrong and embarrassing conclusions that waste time.”

  The president was distracted as Hewlett returned.

  “I just spoke with Jim Grand at the FAA,” the secretary said. “He wants to restrict American carriers from flying all southern routes that come near the polar easterlies or lower westerlies until we have a handle on this. Mr. President?”

  “Reasonable precaution,” he said.

  Hewlett texted those words exactly to Grand. Berry stepped back indoors just then, blowing on his phone hand to warm it. His thoughts seemed to be stuck outside.

  “Matt?” the president asked.

  Berry took a moment longer than necessary to make sure the old doors were firmly shut. The president likely knew that Berry had called Williams. Midkiff himself had already told John Wright about Op-Center. The others did not know, nor did they need to. He turned, expressionless, still not sure what he was going to say.

  “I was talking with an associate who knows something about the region,” Berry said. “He has a feeling that this may be biological in nature.”

  “Thank you,” Berry heard Dr. Rajini say.

  From Harward’s sour expression, Berry could tell he had obviously missed something, no doubt one of Harward’s contrarian diatribes. The man was a professional skeptic, as befit his years in a foreign policy think tank before becoming an undersecretary at the State Department.

  “Is this associate a scientist?” Dr. Young asked.

  “A sedimentologist,” Berry replied, pleased to say the word as if he had actually heard it prior to five minutes ago.

  “I thought you were talking to someone about radiation?” Harward said.

  “That came up dry,” Berry informed him. “My geologist has some additional thoughts. He, uh—he believes that in addition to releasing helium gas that would have shot into the air, some kind of clandestine drilling could also have released some very old and unknown superbug.”

  Harward made a face. The president stood over the phone, looking at Berry, but remained silent.

  “Mr. Berry,” said Dr. Rajini, “did your associate speculate as to t
he origin of a biological cause?”

  “He did,” Berry said, hesitating once again. “My source believes that the ancient sediments may contain biological matter from prehistory or, possibly—these are his words, not mine—from space.”

  “War of the bloody worlds,” Harward scoffed predictably.

  The president sat stone-faced for a moment, then said, “Doctors?”

  “Mr. President, it’s fitting that Matt said what he did,” Dr. Rajini said. “It’s possible that microbes from another world—in a torpid state in the cold vacuum of space—came to Earth on meteors either recently or in prehistory. Or they may be homegrown, prehistoric. It’s possible that there are microbes inside the Earth that have not been to the surface in millennia. I’d like to read something I pulled from the shelf. It’s an essay written by the Greek historian Thucydides.”

  “Mr. President, do we have time for lectures?” Harward implored. “Dr. Rajini, if you want to talk about bioterror, an Ebola patient, a Typhoid Mary—”

  “To find such a one, Mr. Harward, everything must first be put on the table,” the doctor said.

  “Not when it’s a morgue table we’re talking about. Lots of them.”

  Midkiff scowled him to silence. “Go on, Doctor. But do make it brief.”

  “Yes, sir. Thucydides recounted a plague that struck Athens in the summer of 430 BCE. He called it an ‘infernal fever’ and wrote, ‘The disease descended into the bowels and there produced violent lesions; at the same time diarrhea set in which was uniformly fluid and passed gradually through the whole body.’ He goes on to explain in detail how portions of the body literally came apart. This is a famous account, sir, and medical science has not yet found a disease to match what this respected scholar described.”

  “Nor any corroborating data, I’m guessing,” Harward said.

  “You’re not quite right,” Dr. Young contributed. “According to our own geologic database, volcanoes have regularly erupted in the region as far back as one hundred and sixty thousand years ago, and intense earthquake activity there dates back to at least 226 BCE. Any of them could have coughed up ancient microbes.”

  “This was a soil sample, Doctors! Not Mount Vesuvius!” Harward said.

  “That’s in Italy,” Angie Brunner contributed.

  Berry was suddenly sorry he had not voted for Wright.

  “You know what I’m saying,” Harward snapped.

  “Let’s assume that Matt and the doctors are correct,” Midkiff interrupted. “What do we do?”

  “Obviously, we have to notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at once,” Dr. Young said.

  “Agreed. Brief them, Doctor,” the president said. He looked over at Hewlett, who had just finished his call. “Everything good?”

  “The FAA is acting, but so is the State Civil Aviation Authority in Russia and the Civil Aviation Administration of China. So, sir, are our respective navies.”

  “So everyone knows,” Midkiff said without surprise in his voice.

  Trevor checked his laptop to see if the secretary of the navy had filed a command protocol brief. It had just come in, based on intelligence provided by Carl Vinson. There was also an urgent request for a meeting from General Paul Broad, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Harward rose and showed Broad’s e-mail to the president.

  Midkiff nodded and looked at Berry. “Matt, you and I are going to talk. Everyone else, please give us a few minutes. Doctors, let me know if you hear anything from the medical community, however speculative.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” the women replied.

  Except for Harward pausing to shoot Berry a look of disapproval, the Oval Office was cleared without delay. Midkiff punched off the speakerphone. He sat on the couch. Berry was still standing and the president motioned for him to sit across from him.

  The deputy chief of staff sat heavily, found an unused china cup, and poured coffee from a thermal carafe.

  “I assume your geologist was someone Chase Williams talked to?”

  “At Tufts University, his alma mater.”

  The president nodded. “I’m not going to bother to talk to the Joint Chiefs about this. I know where they would stand. If this is a bacteria or a virus, someone—no doubt a number of someones—are going to go in and look for samples.”

  “Sir, to weaponize a thing like that—”

  “I know.” Midkiff cut him off. “It’s insane, not to mention illegal. But God help us, we have to have it, if only to find a cure. Fast. Do you disagree?”

  “Not with that particular action under the vaccine and immunogenicity guidelines, sir,” Berry said.

  “Fair enough. What do you think about giving the acquisition deployment to Black Wasp?”

  “They’ve proven themselves both covert and adaptable,” Berry said. He did not add “and expendable,” though that would have to factor into the president’s thinking. Any branch of the military would gladly undertake a mission like this, but then there would be oversight and accountability.

  Midkiff nodded slowly. “Get Williams’s people on it ASAP,” he said. “We need assets in motion.”

  “I’ll take care of it, sir,” Berry said.

  The deputy chief of staff took a swallow of coffee and went back out to the Rose Garden. He had no idea what Midkiff would tell Harward, if anything. A president was not required to share all things even with his closest staff. Often, omission served to temper an aide’s rhetoric.

  With things set in motion, Berry finally had a moment to contemplate everything that had happened. The Oval Office was usually so thoroughly caught up in managing an event that the shock of it never found purchase deeper in the soul.

  Now, suddenly, this one did. As he considered the possibility of an instantly fatal airborne contaminant quickly sweeping the globe, Berry was suddenly very afraid.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Headquarters Battalion, Fort Belvoir

  November 11, 9:14 A.M.

  There was a time when Major Hamilton Breen loved his life and every day that comprised it. That time ended just three months and one week ago. Sitting in the back of a nondescript white van on a dirty, winding street in Little Afghanistan, Breen could not believe how his life and outlook had fallen into such a gloomy state.

  It’s a good thing you are, above all, a patriot and a professional, he thought.

  Breen had loved, deeply, where he lived and worked at the University of Virginia campus. He adored the woman he was dating, an American history professor who challenged if rarely changed his traditional views. They both enjoyed his motorcycle on the weekend—a Yamaha Star Eluder, big transcontinental job, not a Harley. They loved the feel of the wind in their faces. Breen was excited by his work, teaching. An attorney and a criminologist, he had joined the Judge Advocate General’s Corps because he loved his country and took its laws and responsibilities very seriously. He wanted to have an active hand in shaping the next generation of Constitutionalists.

  So what did the United States Navy do with me, he thought. They sent me on a mission where we executed a man without a trial.

  Maybe they sent him as a counterbalance. A conscience in a business that did not need or want one. Without being asked, he was made an essential part of a fledgling dark ops team known as Black Wasp. Not that the thirty-seven-year-old wasn’t given a choice. Either he participated in the open-ended prototype counterterrorism project known as WASP—Wartime Accelerated Strike Placement—or he went on a sabbatical and did nothing until the army forgave him.

  The navy was not forgiving.

  The transfer wasn’t quite that cut-and-dried, but that was the heart of it and it was abrupt. The team needed a law-and-forensics member and he was it. Of course, he was not told, at first, that he would be seconded to Fort Belvoir as a “tenant organization.” The Black Wasp unit was attached to the Headquarters Battalion, where they were listed as “support personnel for worldwide military contingencies.”

  Maybe the a
rmy did not know that at the time. If Black Wasp’s first mission had failed, the team would probably have been disbanded and forgotten.

  Cut down by success, he thought bitterly.

  Success had meant moving to Virginia—away from his dear Inez, away from JAG, away from everything except the two warriors who made up the rest of the team. He had always missed Inez Levey when she went on her field trips to explore some forgotten part of history. Soon the FaceTime sessions slowed and then … stopped.

  Stop thinking about it, he reminded himself. It didn’t help.

  Right now, those two soldiers were busy. Lieutenant Grace Lee, twenty-six, of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, Airborne, and Marine Lance Corporal Jaz Rivette, twenty-two, were making their way through a courtyard house built on a slope of Sher Darwaza mountain. Breen watched their progress via a link with the heads-up display in their helmets. Metal was automatically outlined in red by the threat detection system, a variation of facial recognition software. So far, the TDS had identified keys, an old flip-style cell phone, and a grapefruit knife.

  Rivette was on the right, Grace on the left. Their mission was to free a Sikh family—parents and two young daughters—who were held hostage by bandits searching for jewelry and cash.

  The major’s job was to watch for any outsiders who might be coming their way. He was not to lend any other tactical support. He eyeballed passersby, visible through video cameras hidden around the vehicle and providing a 360-degree view of the exterior. In case Grace and Rivette were trapped, or in the event the enemy sent out a “moving hostage”—someone who could reconnoiter but also be shot in the back if they tried to flee—his job was to help extricate them. If something went wrong, his only job was to extricate himself.

  The day was bright and cloudless and the two had approached on the shadowed courtyard side of the home. That was the side overlooked by the mountain. Using an acoustic receiver designed as a windshield sunscreen, they had ascertained that the captive family had been divided. The children were in the tiny kitchen and the parents were in the living room, tied and gagged. The sounds were extremely muffled, suggesting they were also lying on the mattresses that would typically cover the floor.