Bio-Strike (2000)

by Clancy, Tom - Power Plays 04

  “Sounds like a joke,” Ricci said.

  “Yes.” Nordstrum shrugged. “It was really a procedural formality anyway. We didn’t expect cooperation but wanted our findings on record if we needed to take unilateral action, as in the airstrikes against Osama bin Laden’s supposed pharmaceutical plant. And of course we continued tracking the flow of equipment. It isn’t too hard. There’s a short list of bioprocessing equipment manufacturers worldwide. And that’s for materials used to proliferate naturally occurring germs or toxins. With a microorganism that’s the product of genetic alteration, the associated technology becomes increasingly use-specific and gets easier to chase. Our government keeps routine tabs on its acquisition and shipment.”

  Megan looked at him. “Government’s a big word,” she said. “Can we go to the FBI for the information?”

  “They’ve got the take-charge law-enforcement role in a chemical or biological incident on national soil and would have good intelligence, but it’s the Nonproliferation Center at the CIA that’s chiefly responsible for gathering the flow data and making it available to the State Department and DOD.”

  “Can you check out what’s been moving into Canada? I mean check right away?”

  “I’ll try,” he said. “You may recall that I’ve incurred the lasting disfavor of the current White House administration from President Ballard on down. But there are back doors that might still open to an old government bureaucrat.”

  That, Megan thought, was a curious way for a former deputy secretary of state who’d served as acting head of the department to refer to himself. “Don’t hesitate to mention what’s at stake while you’re knocking on them,” she said.

  There was a brief silence in the room.

  “We should get one of the Hawkeyes into orbital position over our northern neighbor,” Nimec said. “If Alex is successful in getting the dope from his contacts, it can help us choose the areas to target for GIS passes.”

  Ricci gestured toward the blackboard.

  “And help Meg work her pointer up to those three big question marks at the top of her list,” he said.

  She turned to him, held his gaze a moment, and nodded. “That’s the idea,” she said.

  “Alex, your request is way out of line. I’m very uncomfortable with this entire conversation—”

  “Come on, Neil,” Nordstrum said into his cell phone, Neil being Neil Blake, one of his former students and presently an assistant secretary of state, Foreign Affairs Bureau. “Just fax me a copy of that BW tech flow list. You’ve done bigger favors before. Without blinking.”

  “That’s right. Before. But right now I’m at my desk looking over my shoulder. I swear to God, Alex. If you were a fly on the wall you’d see that I’m serious. Over my shoulder. Somebody overhears me talking to you on the phone, I’m in the shit. At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue your name is an unwelcome utterance. And will be until the current administration leaves office.”

  “Because I opted to attend a press conference that the president felt might have stolen some of his bill-signing thunder,” Nordstrum said. “Are you listening to yourself? I was a journalist. And I’m still a free citizen. Ballard’s executive powers do not extend to canceling my First Amendment rights. I’m surprised he hasn’t just ordered me thrown into a dungeon somewhere.”

  “Let’s not get hyperbolic—”

  “I don’t have to. Or I shouldn’t. We’re potentially talking about Roger Gordian’s life.”

  Blake sighed. “Nobody holds him in higher regard than I do,” he said, easing into a semiofficial tone of voice. “And you know he’s got a legion of supporters here in the capital. Give me a day or two. I’ll figure out how to handle your request, work it through the appropriate channels.”

  “What kind of ridiculous phrase is that? It can’t wait. Not an hour or two. I need what I need. Right away.”

  “Alex, please, I’m trying to explain—”

  “Never mind,” Nordstrum kept his voice level. “How’s the new bride, Neil?”

  There was an instant’s silence.

  “Cynthia’s fine,” Blake said, thrown off stride.

  “What is it now, a year that you’ve been married?”

  “Yeah. Well, close. We celebrate our first anniversary the day after Christmas—”

  “You plan on taking her to that cozy little apartment on Euclid Street for the romantic occasion?” Nordstrum asked. “Or is it still set apart for your independent use?”

  This time the silence was much longer.

  “How come you ask, Alex?”

  “No reason in particular. I just remembered that you never let go of the place. Must have a sentimental attachment after all those good times you had there in the heyday of your bachelorhood.” It was Nordstrum’s turn to pause. “But listen, you can forget about my request. I know you’re under constraints. I’ll try some of my old pressroom cronies at the Washington Post instead. You never know, they might have something for me. With them, it’s always give and take.”

  “Alex—”

  “I need to hang up—”

  “Alex, wait, damn it.”

  He waited.

  “Give me that fax number at UpLink,” Blake said.

  In his Sacramento office, Eric Oh listened intently as Todd Felson, his colleague at Stanford, offered him the details of the initial tests he’d performed on the food samples taken from Roger Gordian’s office.

  “You know those wafers we found on his desk? Three of them are impregnated with polymer coacervates in the fifteen to twenty-micron range,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount of the stuff.”

  For the third time in a seventy-two-hour period during which he’d been swept along like a man on a whitewater run, Eric was caught breathless.

  “Microencapsulation,” he said. “Todd, I think we’ve found our activator.”

  “Looks like it,” Felson said. “The particle walls are an ethyl cellulose/cyclohexane gelatin. Highly soluble in liquids at body temperature. And very susceptible to breakdown under the high pH levels in a person’s digestive system. Or mucous membranes, for that matter.”

  “Have you gotten to examine the core material at all?”

  “Coming up next.”

  It was ten o’clock in the morning, just two hours after the closed conference room meeting adjourned, when Megan answered her office phone to hear Alex Nordstrum’s excited voice on the line.

  “Meg, I’ve got news,” he said.

  She sat up straight behind her desk

  “I’m waiting,” she said.

  “I can lay out the paper trail for you later, but the main thing now is that there’s a private outfit in Ontario, west of the Hudson Bay, that fits the bill for our germ factory in every way. Uniquely. The flow of bioprocessing equipment to it is incredible. I’ve got listed purchases of regulated biological cultures and growth media, freeze drying and containment equipment, recombinant gene tech... it goes on and on. This is a soup-to-nuts bioprocessing facility, and one that was built at great expense. I’d guess the initial cost would total a hundred million dollars. You won’t find any other operation like it in Canada, and only a few comparable facilities exist here at home.”

  Megan took a breath.

  “You mean to tell me that nobody in Washington has deemed it in our national interest to investigate what’s being developed at this place?”

  “I’ll share a bit of irony, Meg. We do business with these folks. Loads of it. They own agricultural patents that have scored them numerous federal contracts. And they recently won the bidding competition for a huge deal to develop genetically modified strains of Fusarium oxysporum—a fungus that’s proven to be wholesale murder on coca plants.” He paused. “The State Department’s been trying to persuade the Columbians and Peruvians to use it against their narco farmers, and it looks like it’s going to happen. Chew on that one for a second. Given this company’s presumed ties to the Quiros family, which derives its income primarily from the cocaine trade, it�
��s conceivable they’re creating a fungus that’s specially adapted to wipe out the crops of competing growers. And all on our government’s tab.”

  Megan was silent a moment, thinking, the receiver held tightly in her hand.

  “Tell me the name of the firm, Al,” she said at last.

  “Earthglow,” he said. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  NORTHERN ONTARIO, CANADA NOVEMBER 17, 2001

  REMOTE WAS A RELATIVE TERM NOWADAYS, PAUL “Pokey” Oskaboose was saying as he dipped his single-prop Cessna 172 from the cloud rack. “I read some magazine article by somebody a while back, and I think it said there are something like six, maybe eight places left on the planet where you can spend an hour—or maybe it’s a night, I forget—without hearing an engine noise of some kind or other.” He banked sharply toward the bunched, snow-draped hills to port.

  Seated on his right, Ricci watched the world slant down and away. “How long till we’re over the plant?” he asked, his stomach lurching.

  “Should be any minute.” Oskaboose pointed out his window. A Cree-Ojibway Indian with a wide, bony face and dark hair worn in a buzz cut, he was on loan to Ricci from the Sword watch quartered amid the radomes and communications dishes of an UpLink satellite ground station to the southwest, located midway between the Big Nickel Mine in Sudbury and Lake Superior. “You see the twin rises over there, sort of rounded, got all those wrinkles in them?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The local tribes call them Niish Obekwun. Means Two Shoulders. Past them’s a gap where a stream slices down to the White River. And then that third taller slope. Goes up pretty steep.”

  Ricci nodded.

  “Far side of it, on the west face, is our spot,” Oskaboose said. “Go ahead and check the moving map on the instrument panel. Groundhog like you, it’ll help with your orientation.”

  Ricci glanced at the nonglare video display, where a Real Time Geographical Information System map overlaid a live image of the rough, frozen vista below, plotting the airplane’s course with a series of flashing red dots, and enclosing Earthglow’s position in a bright green square. It was helpful, he thought. And precisely matched his recollection of the Hawkeye-I photos he’d seen back in San Jose. With a zoom resolution of under three centimeters, they had afforded detailed aerial close-ups of the custom biological facility and its perimeter defenses. But Ricci had wanted to get a visceral feel of the land that for him would only come with firsthand observation.

  Oskaboose leveled the aircraft. “In today’s world, Tarzan wouldn’t have to worry about being raised by apes,” he said. “You’ve got, what, a couple thousand gorillas left in Africa, that’s counting all five subspecies. And they’re more used to having their pictures snapped than models and movie stars. Some British kid in knickers being nursed at the breast of a furry mama would be spotted in no time by rich tourists on photo safaris. And brought back to civilization, heaven help him.”

  The guide’s apparent non sequitur drew a puzzled glance from Ricci.

  “Another instance of how the wilderness isn’t wilderness like it used to be,” Oskaboose said, noticing his expression.

  Ricci grunted.

  “Give you one more example,” Oskaboose continued. “People hear the name Tibet, they think robed Buddhist mystics levitating and astral-projecting in transcendental bliss. Or at least I do. But you know, it’s become just another getaway for Hollywood stars with personal problems. Donate a million bucks to the temple chest, they’ll issue you a wallet card listing the chakras, declare that you’re pure of spirit, and initiate you as an honorary monk of the order. I kid you not.” He made a sad tsking sound and motioned out the window again. “We’re about to head over the basin. You might want to take a peek.”

  Ricci looked downward. The folds of the rise they were overflying were thick with pine forest. On the almost perpendicular uplift at the basin’s far side, the growth was sparser, clinging to the rock face in stubborn, woolly tufts between wide, white expanses of snow. Directly below them now, the tributary was a crystalline blue ribbon in the midday sunlight.

  “That water frozen solid?” Ricci asked.

  Oskaboose shrugged his shoulders. “Hard to be sure from up here,” he said. “You can tell for yourself that there’s a surface layer of ice. But it only takes a little silty runoff for the crust to stay thin in patches. Especially this early in the season, when the temperature can still poke above freezing.”

  Ricci compressed his lips. “The snow on the slopes. You have any idea how deep it is?”

  “The precip hasn’t been too bad, so I’d guess about a foot, with drifts coming up maybe knee high.” He gave Ricci a quick glance. “Inexperienced climbers have to watch out for cracks in the rock that get covered by bridges of crusted snow. Fall into some of’em, and you can take quite a plunge.”

  Ricci nodded thoughtfully.

  “Okay,” Oskaboose said. “Soon as we cross that next hill, you’ll catch sight of Earthglow to your right, down on a ledge near its base.”

  “We do one pass. That’s it. No doubling back.”

  “Understood.” Oskaboose shrugged again. “The point of what I was explaining to you, though, is that the sight of a plane is nothing to make anybody suspicious around here. Pukaskwa National Park isn’t too far to the south. Rangers there use fixed wing aircraft and choppers for wildlife observation, search and rescue, and supply transport. Then you have airmail deliveries to townspeople, recreational pilots, and so on. We don’t have to be too worried about being noticed.”

  Ricci kept silent, his pale blue eyes staring out the window.

  In a large conference room at the Sudbury ground station, Rollie Thibodeau and the rest of the twenty-four-man RDT were gathered before a flat-panel wall monitor, viewing the same pictures that appeared on the Cessna’s video display as it made its flyby.

  The Earthglow facility was a low, concrete building backed directly against the almost vertical eastern slope, bounded on its other three sides by a high, industrial chain-link perimeter fence topped with multiple rows of electrical wiring. A sliding gate in the north-facing section of the fence opened onto a two-lane blacktop that curved along the base of the hill and then stretched off eastward toward the railway station at Hawk Junction—about a hundred miles distant, across rolling, heavily forested country. Small guard posts were visible at the southern and western corners of the fence. A third stood outside the gate at the terminus of the blacktop. A network of access roads branched from the gate to various building entrances.

  Watching the stream of recon images over his microwave link with the aircraft, Thibodeau muttered unhappily under his breath. He knew Tom Ricci better than he liked—would have liked not to know him at all—and could anticipate the mission plan he would present upon returning to base.

  What bothered him, in part, was that it stood to be dangerous to the extreme. But the thing that filled him with deepest distress was also knowing there was no workable alternative.

  Back at the ground station an hour later, Ricci and Pokey Oskaboose had joined Thibodeau and the others in the conference room. The lights were dimmed around them. On their screen was a bird’s-eye color still of the Earthglow building and its surrounding terrain, the key tactical points highlighted with Xs.

  “That high slope behind the building is a natural defensive wall.” Ricci indicated it from his chair with the beam of his pen-sized laser pointer, feeling queerly as if something of the wicked Megan Breen’s persona had rubbed off on him. “Our pals at Earthglow don’t have a guard post there, either on the peak or any of the ledges. And it isn’t hard to understand why. It looks like they’re unapproachable from that flank.”

  “Be the reason it’s the best way for us to come at them,” Thibodeau said. His tone was grimly resigned. “Take advantage of their overconfidence, soit.”

  Ricci nodded and moved the pointer’s red dot to the right, focusing it on a small, flat hollow between the northernmost rims
of the Two Shoulders hills.

  “We can land a chopper here. Off-load our equipment, and one of those radio-frequency-shielded tents that we can use as a command and communications center,” he said. “It’s a nice pocket of concealment. And as close to Earthglow as I want to set down.”

  “The RF-secure tents are cold-weather white, and should blend right in with the snow on the ground and slopes,” Oskaboose added. “Guess we can hide the copter under some cammo pretty easy, too.”

  “Sounds good.” Ricci’s laser dot jumped up and to the left onto the blacktop leading to the facility. “We’ll have an escape vehicle ready to roll around this area west of the bridge, not far from where the two-laner swings around the bottom of the hill toward the perimeter gate. My team’ll have to reach it on foot once we’re out of the building. Then it takes us across the bridge, the chopper picks us up on the other side, and we’re off.”

  “You catch a break, make a clean getaway, sure,” Thibodeau said. “But we can’t depend on it. Got to figure there might be somebody on your tail wants to stop that from happenin’.”

  Ricci looked at him. “So your team prepares something to stop them from stopping us.”

  Thibodeau scratched his beard.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Suppose I got me an idea or two.”

  Ricci nodded again. Then he turned back to the photo image on the wall, slid the red dot down onto the icy stream spanned by the bridge, and tracked its course through the basin that divided Two Shoulders from the larger hill.

  “Our approach is going to be what’s trickiest,” he said. “From where we strike camp at Two Shoulders, my insertion team needs to hike to the stream, ski across its banks, then climb the northeast side of the hill and go down the northwest. That’ll leave us behind the building. From there we move along its side to the guard station at the gate, take out the sentries, and carry on with the rest of the program.” He inclined his head toward Pokey Oskaboose. “I know it seems like you’d have to be a damn spider to make it up that big slab of rock, but Pokey mentioned a couple of things I wouldn’t have noticed.”