Five Tribes

by Brian Nelson

  Winfred expected Sawyer to flash him a knowing smirk. This guy couldn’t be more than thirty. What could he possibly know that would be of any interest to a man like Sawyer? But there was no smirk, no rolling of the eyes, none of that. It was clear Sawyer not only respected the young man but genuinely liked him. Winfred felt a touch of jealousy. A new kid had been invited into the clubhouse and no one had bothered to tell him.

  The young man turned to him, smiled, and came closer.

  “Major Winfred,” he extended his hand. “I’m Eric Hill. I’m very glad you’ve come. Sawyer says you’re the best and that’s what we need.”

  “So it’s his fault I’m here,” Winfred said.

  Sawyer raised his hands in mock surprise. “I would never say you were the best.”

  Hill laughed. “I’m sorry to keep you in the dark on the mission details, but I’m sure you’ll find it very interesting. In the meantime, if there’s anything you need, either for yourself, your crew, or your Valor, you let me know and I’ll get it for you.”

  “Thank you,” Winfred said with as much professional courtesy as he could muster.

  With a smile and nod Hill left.

  When he was out of earshot, Winfred turned to Sawyer. “Is it me or does that guy think he owns the place?”

  “In a way he does.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Just wait and see . . . and don’t forget what I said about the gold brick.”

  It had only taken Winfred a week to become a believer. It was the day he watched the body armor tests. The bullets had somehow been dissolved in the air. It was surreal watching one man unload an M4 on another man without leaving a scratch. Winfred had stood there, jaw agape. Sawyer had been beside him and gently put a finger on his chin to close his mouth. “Told ya,” he said.

  Winfred gave a breathy laugh. “I’m feeling something heavy in my undies.”

  Then they had gone to work on the Valors. Honestly, Winfred didn’t completely understand it, but the basic idea was that they were taking concepts from biology and applying them to weapons. They had treated a decommissioned bird with these invisible machines, then punched holes in it with a .50 cal. Winfred had watched in amazement as the holes in the metal had grown over, like a wound healing itself. You could actually see it happening. When he’d inspected the circuitry and fluid hoses, those too had grown back together. And that wasn’t all. His Valor now ran as quiet as a diesel truck, was as stable as a Chinook, and felt as nimble as an Apache. He felt like he could take on an F-35 in it.

  He didn’t need to know how it worked, but he was, naturally, intensely curious. So one afternoon, he sat down with Hill in the mess hall determined to get some answers. At first the scientist was evasive.

  “I’m essentially a thief.” Hill said. “I’ve stolen a technology that’s been around for billions of years and made it work for me.”

  Winfred scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Hill paused for a moment, and Winfred was afraid he was about to say “that’s classified,” but instead Hill took a different route. “Let me try to give you a demonstration,” he handed Winfred a baby carrot. “Eat this.”

  “What?”

  “Go on. Eat it. I’m going to make you healthier and smarter.”

  Winfred bit into the carrot with a loud crack. “Now what?”

  Hill laughed. “Well, now things are starting to get interesting. At this moment billions of superfast operations are happening in your body—inside your mouth, your brain, your stomach—so many things, in fact, that it’s difficult to imagine them all. But let’s try to break it down. You already know that a carrot contains lots of minerals like potassium, niacin, and manganese, as well as vitamin C. But did you ever wonder how your body gets all that good stuff where it needs to go? How does the potassium get to your muscles? How does the niacin get to your skin and neurons? How does the manganese get to your brain?”

  Winfred shrugged.

  “The answer is that your body is full of microscopic machines—biologists call them enzymes and proteins, but I call them machines. They’re an invisible workforce that keeps you alive, working every day and night, and they are very, very fast.”

  “How fast?”

  “Every second a single enzyme can do close to a million operations.”

  “Bullshit,” Winfred said, and he began to laugh. “Nothing in my body moves that fast.”

  “Sure it does. The proof is already in your stomach. An enzyme in your saliva called amylase digests about thirty percent of all the starch you eat before you even swallow it. In the time it took you to chew and swallow that carrot, billions of complex operations occurred inside your mouth. That’s also what you saw today on the test range when you watched the aircraft ‘heal.’ Those nanosites were doing close to fifty million operations per second.

  “That’s why I say I’m a thief. I’ve just copied what nature does in order to make my own microscopic workforce. We don’t call them enzymes, we call them nanosites. And ours are actually better than anything in nature.”

  “Better?”

  “Yes, because life on earth is based on the protein model. Once our DNA began using protein as a building material in some primordial pool, it couldn’t switch to steel or copper, which is why our bodies need just the right conditions to survive. But nanosites are made out of what is essentially diamond. They’re very tough and they don’t stop working when it gets too hot or too cold. Is it starting to make sense?”

  Winfred nodded.

  “Good, but that’s only the nanotechnology part. There are two other parts: replication and AI. We’ve used advances in genetic engineering to allow the nanosites to make copies of themselves. Then we use AI to guide them.”

  “It sounds like you are saying they’re alive.”

  “According to most people’s definition of the word, they are.”

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  Hill laughed. “When you create a large swarm of nanosites or a combination of swarms with different programs, there isn’t a whole lot that you can’t do. A camera, a radio transmitter, a synthetic virus, body armor . . . There’s really no limit.”

  Hill told him they’d soon make a new generation of aircraft that were manufactured by swarms—lighter, stronger, and all but invisible—but there wasn’t time right now to do all the designing and testing (and no way this Congress would pass a defense bill to make them) so they were using a proven airframe, the Valor, and enhancing it.

  Winfred was beginning to understand why Sawyer held Hill in such high regard. He was smart, for sure, but he was also driven. Hill was trying to think of every contingency they might confront in battle and find a solution for it. That was the type of egghead you wanted on your side, because his answers could save your life. In fact, Winfred noticed that Hill behaved like someone who had actually been in combat. Because, as he well knew, an experience like that changes you forever. And, like a veteran, it seemed personal to him. Especially when it came to China.

  Winfred asked Sawyer about it.

  “Let’s just say that Hill is essentially a former POW.”

  That’s when it clicked for Winfred. Hill had a score to settle.

  Now Winfred was on his first mission with the new team, hovering over the African jungle. This was the real deal.

  So far everything was going as planned. The only thing that worried him was a report they’d gotten this morning that the Liaoning, one of China’s two aircraft carriers, had arrived in the area, most likely because they were curious about what the Americans were doing here. He hoped it was nothing, but if the captain of the Liaoning figured out they were messing with the mining camp, it could get ugly.

  Winfred pushed the thought out of his mind. His only job right now was to keep his holding pattern. Seven miles was close enough to the mining camp to provide an uninterrupted conn
ection between Hill, the operators on the ground, and all of Hill’s little toys, but too far away for anyone to see them.

  Hill had wanted to stay on the Valor that delivered the SEALs to the landing zone, just five hundred meters from the prison camp, but Captain Everett vetoed that idea. Hill was just too valuable to the navy. Winfred was amazed Everett had let the scientist off the carrier at all. It was only Hill’s insistence that he had to have perfect communication with the swarms that had persuaded the captain.

  In the back of the Valor, Eric swiveled between three separate workstations arranged in a tight semicircle. One held a real-time map of the compound, with his swarms overlaid like bubbles, the second was filled with smaller images—the footage from each of the nanosites cameras—and the last screen held his code and command prompts for controlling each swarm.

  He expanded the camera for Cellblock Eight. He’d been monitoring the camp for weeks, learning the routines, listening to the guards, understanding how the whole operation worked. A laogai camp, he discovered, held few real criminals. Most were serving time for political reasons. Many were intellectuals—professors and lawyers and scientists, those who were often quickest to criticize China’s one-party rule. Others were religious prisoners—Christians, Tibetans, Muslims, Falun Gong. There were, of course, real criminals, too. But in the laogai there was no distinction between the gravity of a crime, so political prisoners, drug users, and sex workers often served the same sentences as murderers and rapists.

  Cellblock eight was where they kept the troublemakers. The Lifers. Those who the party deemed beyond rehabilitation.

  Three days ago, Hill had inserted nanosites clusters into all of the men’s brains. Now, on his command, they entered each man’s hypothalamus and induced a rapid increase in vasopressin, oxytocin, and corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF). This caused a chain reaction in each brain. The pituitary responded by releasing adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which, in turn, caused the adrenal glands to flood the inmates’ systems with corticosteroids. Instantly, their blood pressure surged, and their heart rates climbed. They woke with goosebumps as their skin constricted in order to send more blood to the major muscle groups. Their nonessential systems (like digestion and immune) shut down and they could no longer focus on small details; their brains were now wired to focus only on a potential threat.

  Mok Enlai sat up with a start, suddenly filled with a strange rage. His eyes were wide, his mouth dry. He looked down at his trembling hands.

  Around him, the other inmates were suddenly awake and on their feet. They felt it, too. Some began shouting.

  “We’ve had enough!”

  “I can’t take it anymore.”

  “Open the door!”

  Four guards came to the metal cell and told them to be quiet. They held up their electric batons and threatened to shock them through the bars. “Get back! All of you!”

  But the inmates didn’t back down.

  “Let us out! Let us out!” They chanted.

  Enlai was struck by an overpowering claustrophobia. The smell of sweat and urine and dried mud that he lived with every day was suddenly unbearable. He had to get away from it! He surged toward the door with the mass of inmates.

  The leader of the guards, Lieutenant Hee, gave an order and, in unison, the soldiers drove their electrified batons though the bars. Nothing happened. There were no shouts of pain, no one fell. Some of the prisoners snatched the batons from the guards, and one guard who resisted was pulled up to the bars and his neck was quickly broken.

  The inmates surged again and somehow the weight of their bodies knocked the metal door open. There was no snap of the lock or bending of metal; it was as if the U-shaped bike lock that held the door had simply disappeared.

  Enlai saw the confidence in the guards’ eyes disappear—replaced by shock and fear. They turned to flee but only made it a few steps before the prisoners were on them, clawing, tearing, literally trying to rip the men apart. Enlai grabbed one and forced him down, a moment later he was gripping the man’s hair and smashing his face into the cement over and over. Never in his life had he felt such rage, such an overwhelming need to hurt. His veins were full of jet fuel, his muscles tight as steel. The sense of release he felt at letting it out, at hearing the thud of the man’s skull hitting the ground until he finally heard the bone crack, was pure elation, a deep orgasmic release.

  He heard other guards screaming in pain, underneath the angry curses of the convicts. He heard one guard plead, “My eyes, no, not my eyes!” The prisoners were showing no mercy. In the past, guards had often used the electric batons to sodomize the prisoners. Now the guards were being paid back in kind.

  More guards arrived, some with electric batons, others with AK-47 rifles, unaware that neither would help them. Nine guards with batons fell on the prisoners, giving a battle cry and swinging down in unison. Once again the batons didn’t work, and only a few blows fell before the guards were consumed by the mob.

  The second wave held back, holding their rifles, ready on the firing line. “Get back in your cells or we’ll kill all of you!” There was a moment of hesitation among the convicts. Enlai was now in front, ready to charge the riflemen.

  “Fire!”

  He heard the firing pins click metal on metal, but nothing happened. The convicts rushed forward. Enlai reached the guard named Gou first, but others soon joined him. Gou was one of the most sadistic guards, the inventor of the Corpse Squad, and he often led the torture of the prisoners. Five or six of them kicked and stomped on him, then they clawed at his face and groin. When Enlai stood up, his hands and forearms were splattered with blood. At his feet was one of the Kalashnikov rifles. He inspected it and rechambered a round. The other men had moved on, leaving Gou on the ground, moaning, spitting up blood, both arms and legs clearly broken. Enlai pointed the rifle at his chest and pulled the trigger. The rifle jumped in his hands, sending three rounds into Gou’s body.

  “Get the rifles,” Enlai called. “Get them! They will work for you!”

  Chapter Three

  Drawn Lines

  Five hours earlier

  The Pentagon, Ring B, Washington, DC

  “I can’t believe this,” General Walden’s face was pink with rage. “It’s treasonous! A major event concerning global security and you intentionally hide it from me?”

  Curtiss knew he had to choose his next words carefully. “I reported the facts to my commanding officer,” he said. “It was not in my purview to inform anyone else, unless I was so ordered.”

  That had been the decision of CNO Michael Garrett, who was also sitting in the room. Walden glanced at the big man, then back at Curtiss. It was clear to Curtiss where Walden preferred to focus his ire.

  “And did you brief Carlson?”

  General Ellis Carlson was the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  Curtiss looked to Garrett, and Garrett nodded.

  “Yes,” Curtiss replied.

  “And the president?”

  Again the glance and the nod.

  “Yes.”

  Walden shook his head in disbelief. “I’m the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

  “Yes, sir,” Curtiss said. “And I understand your recent promotion is the reason why we’re here.”

  Curtiss hated kowtowing to a prick like Walden. But he knew he had to be diplomatic. This was a very delicate situation. Yes, Walden was an asshole and a liar and ladder-climbing bureaucrat. But he had just been given a lot of power. If the briefing went badly . . . no, it was going to go badly. That was inevitable. It was just a matter of how badly.

  The real problem was that it didn’t matter how diplomatic Curtiss was now, because he and Walden had a long history of being at odds, and for most of that history Curtiss had gotten away with openly displaying his scorn for Walden. That had worked out fine because Curtiss had always outranked Walden
and had more powerful friends.

  Not anymore. The tide was changing. The outgoing head of the Joint Chiefs had been a sailor, like Curtiss, but the new chairman was not. He was an aviator, just like General Charlie “Chip” Walden.

  For Curtiss it felt like a bad dream. Within the armed forces, he couldn’t think of anyone who was more different from him. Where Curtiss was a combat veteran, Walden was a career bureaucrat. Where Curtiss hated politics, Walden was a master of the game and knew how to squeeze every bit of nectar—every travel voucher, per diem expense, and Disney World discount—out of the DOD. He was the kind of rear-echelon pogue who would fly to Kuwait for three days every month—on the taxpayer’s dime—so he could qualify for combat pay. He’d briefly been a B-52 pilot, but by 9/11 he was already a full-time pencil pusher and had spent the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syrian Wars at the Pentagon.

  Even in appearance they were strikingly different. Curtiss was Native American, short and with a crooked nose. Walden, although the same age, still looked like he belonged on a recruitment poster—tall, blond hair, a square jaw, and striking green eyes.

  Curtiss had known Chip long enough to know that he always played it safe, never exposing himself or showing initiative unless he was certain of victory. In real war, that was a luxury you rarely had. Sometimes you had to enter a house not knowing what was inside; not knowing if you were outgunned. It was a problem that the air force rarely had to deal with. In fact, Walden was extremely proud of the fact that he’d never lost an airman in combat. But to Curtiss, he was missing the point.