Angry shouts came from behind them. Another silversuit came up, firing backward with a silenced pistol. The shouts stopped.
They all trotted down the corridor and Ajax hit his hand-held trigger. The blast was deafening. Fragments slammed into his carbon-fiber body armor.
Jean stepped through the yawning frame, a smell of something burnt curling up into his nostrils. Six bodies were slammed against the walls, clad in kaftans. Blood trickled from their ears. He had to check three before he was sure that they had the Head. The leathery face was contorted, gray foam oozed at the mouth, and Jean reflected that this did not look like someone who had ordered the deaths of thousands. Now it was just a shriveled little man.
The third silversuit was a surgeon, his ID patch glowing in the UV. Jean pointed and the surgeon knelt beside the Head.
“Pretty bad,” the surgeon said.
“Dead?”
“Not yet, but he may have injected himself.” Up came the sleeves of the kaftan and there was a plain needle mark. “Damn.”
“How long have we got?” Jean asked.
“Maybe ten minutes.”
Out came the tool kit and quick hands started to work.
It took only five minutes. Jean stared at the Head’s face and thought about Montclair Boulevard. Then they started out, carrying the body in a sling.
There was fighting outside but it died down. He monitored the operation on a screen in his left eye lens, watching the support troops come in from all sides. Green motes circled and lit on the mosque grounds—choppers and ultralights. Some automatic weapons fire rose to greet them. The return fire lanced down, computer-directed by juddering robot guns in mini-aircraft.
It had been easy enough to take out the Islamic Front guards. Just attacking was simple, but experience showed that you got very little information that way. Jean had learned from their battles in Lyon, where the Front had many tendrils. Yet they had few ways to trace the Byzantine network that decades of immigrant communities had established.
A sour truth emerged from those years. The Front had learned that they could keep no database without risking its loss, so the only systematic memory was carried around in a few leaders’ heads, encoded and rote-memorized. So there was only one way to get it.
They hauled the body out on a stretcher. Halfway out the one thing they could not defend against struck Ajax—low tech.
Ajax had the lead. A small bomb’s sharp thump cut through him. It may have been triggered by his passage, armed sometime in the last few minutes. Acrid fumes filled the passageway.
Jean knelt in the iron scent of spilled blood. The charge had slammed down from the ceiling, punching in from above. The head was all blood and shattered white bone.
He could see Ajax was gone. A sour cough erupted from his throat, anguish throttled down. No time to rage, not now. We came to kidnap a mind and Ajax lost his head for it.
He used hand signs to get them moving again. He put Ajax out of his mind for the moment, a habit he had learned since his brother’s death.
Army troops were securing the rest of the mosque, small arms rattling far down the hallways. There were still no lights and everyone was operating in the infrared, moving carefully.
The chopper waited just outside, squatting on the square with its ultra-rotors purring. Jean went with the surgeon. There was a lot of medical gear in the chopper bay and the specialists got the body into it while they lifted off. Jean looked out across the square at the maze of running men and bodies, the scene moving in an eerie hush except for the working machines.
Half an hour later he got to see the results. They had the entire top floor of a hospital. Jean went into the bare white clean room wearing whites and stood at the end of the operating theatre. They were all quiet here, too.
The Head was talking, in its way. The body lay spread out, heart machine chugging, the lungs heaving to the steady stroke of a breather-driver. The Head was certainly dead but the cowl of leads blossoming from his shaved skull was working. There were subtle ways to drive post-mortem synapses and force a memory to make its connections.
On the screens around the operating theatre the data flowed like syrup. Images, faces, cross-correlations like thickets of yellow-green vines. The entire Islamic Front was there, layered and bunched in cords and streams.
“This guy was a real savant,” a specialist said nearby. “Look how his memory was organized—like a multi-layered filing cabinet.”
“Too bad he used it to store such merde,” Jean said. He saw flicker across the screen a scene retrieved from the Head’s recollections, the farmer’s market in Lyon. Off to the left were the maple trees of Montclair Boulevard, where Jean’s brother had been torn to shreds by the car bomb.
Swimming up from cloudy, static-filled memory came the scene before the explosion, too, frozen in dead memory. The car, moving forward into the crowd, seconds before the detonation. The point of view swiveled and there in the room were the faces of the plotters, three bearded ones. Their lips were thin and pale with compressed anger, their eyes sharp.
Jean memorized them in a moment. He turned and walked out, getting ready for the next attack, knowing now who to look for and thinking again of Montclair Boulevard.
Editor’s Introduction to:
SEVEN KILL TIGER
by Charles W. Shao
Technology can be created on demand, as Stefan Possony and I showed in The Strategy of Technology. This does not mean that all technologies should be created, merely that once something is possible, it is only a matter of time before it becomes real. There will be war; there will also be technologies that can only be deterred, not defended against.
SEVEN KILL TIGER
by Charles W. Shao
Zhang Zedong stared at his screen in disbelief. The monthly production numbers had fallen again, down from the previous quarter’s low that had already led to one alarmingly polite video call from the Vice-Chairman of the Central Military Commission. General Xu was not technically in his formal chain of command, but as the largest individual shareholder in the China African Industries Group, the general’s opinion was of considerably more concern to Zhang than that of his immediate superior, the Executive Vice-President for East Africa.
The damned hei ren were going to get him replaced, he thought bitterly. If he was fortunate. In the event General Xu decided that the growing gap between the region’s quarterly objectives and the actual results achieved was the consequence of excessive greed rather than Zhang‘s inability to make the natives work, his family would be receiving a bill for the price of the bullet used to execute him before long.
But he hadn’t diverted any significant resources into his own pockets, not any more than was expected of an executive in his position. He didn’t have more than eleven or twelve million dollars safely stashed away in his American bank accounts, and if his son was studying at the University of California, Berkeley, so were fifty other children of high-ranking Party members. Still, it would be enough to see him shot if the general was looking for an excuse.
What he needed was more reliable workers. What he needed was more Han people. In Zambia alone, there were now 750,000 Chinese living in what amounted to a small colonial city, but they lived in walled enclaves almost under siege from the thieves, robbers, and rapists who preyed upon them daily despite the best efforts of CAIG’s security forces to protect them. The police were useless, worse than useless, actually, as they were often among the worst thieves and sexual predators of all.
He sighed. Africa would be a glorious place were it not for the Africans. He’d been warned before coming to Lusaka that ninety percent of the hei ren were thieves, but he discounted that warning as the customary Han superiority complex. After seven years of futility in attempting to turn CAIG’s $35 billion investment in the country into something resembling a reasonable return, he was beginning to wonder if that estimate had been on the low side.
Lusaka had always been known for its crime, but of late the crimina
l gangs were getting bolder. Just last week, ten young hei ren armed with AK-47s shot dead the two African security guards outside a gated Chinese complex, raped four young Chinese girls, and kidnapped two mining company executives. The company had paid the ransoms, which were trivial, and gotten its executives back, but the fear and outrage in the business community was palpable. Then, to make matters even worse, one of the girls committed suicide in shame at having been violated by hóuzi, and now the hunger for revenge in the expat community was threatening to get out of control.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the local police proved unable to identify the perpetrators, let alone arrest them. As far as Zhang could tell, they genuinely had no idea which of the eight gangs actively operating in the city might have been responsible.
If only the National People’s Congress had followed through on its original plan to send 100 million colonists to Africa! But that plan had met with intense international criticism, and it wouldn’t necessarily be enough anyhow; the problem wasn’t limited to the dearth of Han labor. Bringing in more proper workers would solve the production problem, but it wouldn’t solve the crime problem or the growing fraternization problem either. Far too many Chinese girls had fallen for the blandishments of persistent African suitors, failing to understand why the locals had so much time to pursue them or realize that the liaisons were unlikely to go anywhere in the long term. Even on the rare occasions a marriage did come to pass, what resulted was seldom what the average Chinese girl understood to be marriage.
African men thought of themselves as lions, and they lived like kings of beasts, entirely content to lounge about living off the labor of one or more of his lionesses. And the girls who succumbed to their exotic appeal could not return to China, not those who bore half-African bastards anyway. It was a growing problem, and even if it wasn’t Zhang’s responsibility, as CAIG’s Senior Vice-President and Director for Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Tanzania, there were many looking to him to find a solution. But what was he supposed to do, ban interracial relations? Temporarily sterilize every Chinese woman between the ages of 10 and 40? Forbid Chinese firms to hire locals for even the most menial jobs? Any action that might make a substantive difference would generate a hailstorm of international protest that would focus very unwanted attention on him from General Xu, and perhaps even the Central Commission.
What he needed, he decided, was new ideas. Everything he had tried to date had failed. Positive incentives, negative incentives, threats, bribes, and shouting, everything had failed. The Americans had a curious phrase he’d heard once on a visit to California, the “Come to Jesus” meeting. He didn’t quite grasp what it meant, exactly, but he decided it would serve as his inspiration for the staff meeting he intended to call tomorrow morning. Because if they didn’t come up with something that at least had the potential to lead the way out of this utter debacle, he fully intended to rain fire and brimstone down upon them all.
He might not be able to avoid going down himself, but he could damn well ensure that he didn’t go down alone.
***
Philip Thompson was reading a report of a small measles outbreak in Ecuador when a knock on the open door to his office disturbed him. He looked up and saw it was Scott Berens, one of his junior analysts, standing in the doorway.
“You heard about Ecuador, Dr. Thompson?” the younger man asked.
“Reading about it now. Looks as if the government has it under control.”
“They caught it early enough. It’s the Tungurahua province again. That’s been a problem area for the Ministry of Health since 1996. The vaccination program misses too many of the indigenous children.”
“Understandable.” Thompson put the report down on his desk. “What’s on your mind, Scott?”
“Do you remember that unknown outbreak in northern Zambia we started tracking six months ago?”
“I thought that was a false alarm.”
“It was, insofar as we were able to determine that it wasn’t Ebola, which was the initial concern. And there were only 142 cases and 26 deaths before it burned itself out, so we didn’t even bother sending anyone over to investigate.”
Thompson clicked his tongue against his lower lip, wondering where Berens was going with this. The young man was a bright young doctor and had graduated in the top ten percent of his class from Johns Hopkins, so he assumed Berens must have a good reason for bringing such an obscure incident to his attention.
“Are you saying we should have?”
“No, it’s just that I was reading over the statistics, as part of a paper I was thinking about writing on east Africa, when I noticed an anomaly.”
“What’s that?”
“The population of the nearest town. It’s mostly Chinese. I think they have a big mining camp up there.”
Thompson shrugged and spread his hands. “It’s hardly a secret that China has been moving into Africa in a big way for the last two decades. They have hundreds of such towns.”
“True, but that only explains why the Chinese were there. It doesn’t explain why most of the cases, and all of the deaths, were African. Only five Chinese were affected and all five recovered. Beyond the basic statistical odds involved, you would think the native population would be more resistant to whatever virus makes its way out of the jungle, not more susceptible to it.”
Thompson frowned. Berens was right. It was an anomaly. And if there was one thing he had learned after 22 years at the Center for Disease Control, it was to pay particular attention to anomalies.
“Good catch, Scott. Dig into it and see if it’s really just a mining town or if the PLA happens to have any laboratories or science facilities in the area. Not necessarily where the outbreak took place, but anywhere in the surrounding area. They went dark on the bio-war front a few years ago, and it may be that some of their test facilities were moved from Xi’an to Africa. This just might give us some insight as to where they went.”
“Do you think someone got careless and a bio-weapon escaped the lab, Dr. Thompson?” There was an eager glint in the younger man’s eyes that made Thompson smile despite himself. Such a discovery, even if it was never published in any of the public journals, could be the making of Berens's career, and both of them knew it.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Scott. Go and see what you can find about this mining town, what is it called?”
“Mpolokoso.”
“Right.” He didn’t even bother trying to pronounce it. “Look into what the Chinese are doing there and we’ll see if it could have any connection to this mysterious outbreak. Write it up and email it to me; I’ll call you when I’ve had a chance to read it and think it over.”
“Will do, Dr. Thompson!” Berens made a mock salute with the paper and disappeared from the doorway.
Thompson leaned back in his chair, reflecting on the unwelcome news. Unlike his young subordinate, he already knew they weren’t likely to find any evidence of laboratories, research facilities, an escaped bio-weapon, or even anything that was conventionally considered to be a bio-weapon. Conventional bio-weapons didn’t discriminate between Asian and Sub-Saharan haplogroups. Genetic weapons, on the other hand, were designed to do just that. And he very much doubted that whatever it was had been released accidentally.
After consulting his contact list, he tapped in the number for Fort Detrick. A young enlisted woman answered the phone.
“US-AMRIID. How may I direct your call?”
“This is Dr. Phil Thompson of the CDC. Get me Colonel Hill, please.”
“Right away, sir.” She paused. “The CDC… is this urgent, sir?”
He smiled grimly. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to determine.”
***
It was the massacre that convinced Zhang to take action. After a Chinese entrepreneur’s young daughter in Kapiri Mposhi was raped and killed by a pair of copper miners, the man took his vengeance by tracking the perpetrators down and shooting them dead at the New Kapira Mphoshi railwa
y station. The shootings were caught on closed-circuit television, and before Zhang or anyone in Lusaka even knew about the incident, the images had spread all over Zambia and Tanzania, inflaming the African community, and in particular, the Nyanja-Chewa tribe to which the two miners belonged.
Within a week, all 87 Chinese residents of Kapiri Mposhi were dead. Some had been shot, some had been necklaced, but most had fallen to the knives of the Nyau, a masked secret society known for black magic and channeling the spirits of the dead. The pictures had been horrific. Zhang stared at them for a long time.
Black magic. I will show them black magic. I will show them their worst nightmares!
The Kapiri Mposhi massacre had been six months ago. Now the time to unleash the spirits of righteous vengeance had very nearly come, Zhang thought, as a tall young scientist entered his office. Gao Xing was humble and diffident. Despite his height, he could have walked down the street in Weinan or Xi’an without anyone taking notice of him. Only his eyes gave any sign that he might be unusual. They were coldly arrogant, and conveyed little in the way of warmth or humanity. He was in his middle twenties, and his pale skin indicated that he spent very little time outside under the Zambian sun.
The perfect scientist, Zhang thought wryly. The poor kid had probably never had a girlfriend. But the young girl in Kapiri Mposhi, the very first one to die, had been his cousin. He might not know how to love, but assuredly, he knew how to hate.
“They tell me your most recent test of Huáng Hu was successful.”
“Yes, Director. The terminal rate is now in excess of 80 percent. Based on the most conservative spread models, the pseudo-epidemic will cross the Angolan border within two weeks. Within nine months, the continent is expected to be clear of all undesirable populations. The task of disposal will obviously be enormous, and will create considerable additional health hazards, but I would expect that it would be safe to begin the settlement programs within 18 months of zero day.”
There Will Be War Volume X Page 2
