“Christ,” Jack said. “That’s two football fields!”
Naomi smiled. “Now you’re getting the idea of how big this place is,” she told him. “Okay, so the antenna complex is the only thing on that section of the main tunnel, which runs straight here to the junction. Connecting directly to the junction are the command dome, where we just came from, and the dome that contains the lab and our generators.” She pointed to a large blast door, directly across the junction from the command dome entrance. “The portal to the surface also connects to the main junction.” She nodded toward a set of massive blast doors that had been painted in a glaring yellow and black striped pattern, “I’ll show you the portal sometime later when we have a chance to go topside, but I wanted you to know where it is in case we have to evacuate.
“Following the main tunnel north past the main junction,” she went on, “you first come to what used to be the old missile fuel storage terminal, which is basically a huge cylindrical tank. We use it for liquid nitrogen storage now.”
“What do you need that for?” Jack asked, looking at the diagram. The tank looked huge. “And how much does this tank hold?”
“The tank holds about forty thousand gallons,” she told him. “Like everything else here, it’s big. As for what we use it for, it’s coolant. You see, what used to be the three missile silos, we’ve converted to huge deep-freeze storage units.” She pointed to three sets of three huge cylinders, silos, which were connected to the main tunnel at the north end. “These used to be the launch complexes. There was a missile silo, a propellant terminal, and an equipment terminal for each one. As I said, we’ve converted the missile silos into huge freezers. We turned the propellant terminals, which used to store fuel for the missiles, into support systems for the silos. The equipment terminals, we converted into living space, like apartments.” She turned to look at him, grinning. “Just don’t head off to the silo at the end of the main tunnel without taking everything you need with you, or it’ll be a long walk back: it’s seven hundred feet from here.”
“So what’s so big that you need to use missile silos as freezers?” he asked, puzzled.
Naomi smiled. “You’ll see,” she answered.
Jack sighed, rolling his eyes in frustration.
Pointing on the map to what looked like another junction on the main tunnel, she went on, “The first two silo complexes are connected to the main tunnel by what are called blast locks, which were supposed to help contain the damage from a missile if it exploded. We don’t have to worry about that now, but we normally keep them closed for physical security.”
“Security against what?” Jack wanted to know.
“You’ll see,” she answered cryptically.
“Great,” Jack muttered as he looked at the diagram. The silos were the end of his virtual tour.
“Wait a second,” he told her. “When you mentioned the portal earlier, you said ‘when we go topside.’ Does that mean we’re underground?”
“Yes,” she said. “The top of the control center dome is about twenty feet below ground. The tunnels here are almost fifty feet down.” She glanced at him. “Remember, these bases were built to withstand nuclear detonations on the scale of megatons.” She shrugged. “Everything here is built tough, Jack. The concrete is several feet thick in most places, heavily reinforced with steel.”
“Perfect for your little war,” Jack said.
“It’s not our war, Jack,” Naomi snapped. “It was thrust on us by an enemy who doesn’t know the meaning of diplomacy or negotiation, or even surrender.”
“Sorry,” he said sheepishly.
Naomi shrugged. “It’s okay. I don’t expect you to understand. Yet.” She pointed to the left as they walked on, where there were two huge vestibules in the junction with small access hatches. “That’s our primary fresh water storage,” she told him. “Two tanks holding thirty-three thousand gallons each. They’re supplied from two deep water wells in the power house.”
“Good God,” Jack said. “That’s enough for a small town!”
“Yes, it is. But that’s not the way we found it, believe me.” She shook her head. “This place was a disaster area when Gregg bought it. Asbestos, PCBs, lead paint: everything that’s been banned as environmentally hazardous in the last thirty years was down here in appalling abundance. It was a fright to clean up.”
“How the hell did he find it?”
She laughed. It was a sound that Jack thought he could definitely get used to. “Would you believe he bought it from an on-line auction site? The government sold it to a private owner years ago, and it had changed hands several times. The last owner couldn’t get rid of it – no one wanted to deal with the hazardous waste down here – and Gregg picked it up for a song.”
Jack’s jaw dropped in amazement. “You’re kidding, right?” He looked around him as they continued through the junction toward another blast door marked “Main Lab.”
“No,” she said. “It’s absolutely true. I imagine the seller must have fallen to the floor in surprise when Gregg bid on it, and then actually paid!”
“But how did he...I mean what did he say he was going to do with it?” Jack asked, perplexed. “I imagine he didn’t pay for it with a check that said ‘Earth Defense Society.’”
“No, no,” she told him. “He bought it through one of our front companies, a trucking business that needed some property to expand. It’s completely legitimate, and helps us get around a lot of logistical problems supporting our operations here.” She looked up toward the surface. “We’re sitting under about a hundred or so trailers, with semi trucks coming in around the clock to drop some off and pick up others. That’s how we get our food, supplies, and equipment brought in without us standing out like a sore thumb to anyone who might be looking for us.” She looked at Jack and grinned. “They bring in our people, too.”
Jack looked up, trying to imagine tractor trailer rigs moving around somewhere above his head, and said, “I don’t hear a thing.”
“Like I told you, Jack,” she said, “we’re buried deep.”
Stepping up to the door to the lab, she took hold of the badge that Jack had noticed hanging on a lanyard around her neck. She swiped it across a magnetic reader next to a small keypad, entered a six-digit code, then looked into a retinal scanner. “What’s in here is really what this whole thing is about.”
With two loud warning beeps, the foot-thick blast door was slowly pushed open by a set of hydraulic rams.
Jack followed her into the lab dome. “Good Lord,” he breathed, wondering how this had all been built. “This place is huge.”
The dome they were in now was one hundred and thirty feet across and more than fifty feet high. Painted white and brightly lit, the lower level where he and Naomi were standing was a maze of medical and scientific equipment, with two dozen people in white lab coats sitting at or moving among the various work stations. The room had a second level over fifteen feet above them, a mezzanine that ringed the dome and extended about twenty feet in toward the center, and was open to the lab area below.
Similar to the command center, roughly a quarter of the lab dome’s area to Jack’s right was walled off, and he saw a sign over a huge door that read, “Power Room.”
“Backup power,” Naomi told him, following his gaze. “For us, electricity is life for our operation, everything from the lab equipment to the air filtration units that keep the air breathable. We can’t even get to the surface without power to open the blast doors. An outage, even a brief one, would be a disaster. The main power room here supplies our backup power with two eight-hundred kilowatt diesel generators. We really only need one to keep our critical systems up, but we have two for redundancy. This dome used to be the site’s power house, and had four gigantic generators that turned out a megawatt each, but we don’t need nearly that much electricity.” She pointed up to the mezzanine level above the power room, and Jack could see another tunnel mouth beyond the stacks of supplies that took up mo
st of the space on the upper level. “That tunnel houses the fuel for the generators. The original site had two sixty-seven thousand gallon diesel tanks, twelve feet in diameter and eighty feet long, plus a smaller five thousand gallon tank.” Jack shook his head in wonder at the scale of things in this underground fortress. “We only use the small one and one of the big ones now; that’s enough fuel to provide diesel power for over two months. We converted the space used by the other big tank to an emergency battery array that can keep us in business for a week. But we normally just use local power that we lease from another one of our front companies, a small regional wind turbine farm. That way nobody asks questions about why a trucking company uses so much electricity.”
“What about fresh air and exhaust?” Jack asked, knowing that running any sort of internal combustion engine in a confined space like this, huge as it was, would quickly asphyxiate everyone down here.
She pointed toward the tunnel mouth above the power room, and Jack saw a set of large pipes snaking up from where the generators were, disappearing down the tunnel. “The exhaust goes out through the tunnel in the direction of the fuel and battery storage, drawn by a huge fan and blown out an exhaust vent at the surface level,” she explained. “Fresh air comes in over there,” she pointed to a tunnel on the opposite side of the mezzanine, “through a nuclear-biological-chemical filter. Normally both the intake and exhaust vents are closed by massive blast valves. We only open them when we have to run the generators.” She gestured around the mezzanine. “Up there is our main storage area. Pretty much everything that isn’t perishable or hazardous is stored up there. Sometimes it’s not very convenient, but there’s plenty of space.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, again shaking his head in wonder. “No kidding.”
“But this,” she told him, leading him into the lab area, “is the heart of what we’re doing here. We’ve got one of the most advanced genetics research labs in the world under this dome. We can do any type of karyotyping, we’ve got FISH stations–”
“Fish?”
“Fluorescence in situ hybridization,” she explained. “FISH is one of the ways that we study chromosomes. We can do virtually any type of gene-related analysis here, from DNA sequencing to tailoring DNA and injecting it into cells with a gene gun. ”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he told her as they walked up to the outer periphery of the equipment-laden workstations arranged around the huge lab. He couldn’t recognize most of what he saw, but even in his ignorance he could tell that Jerri’s lab at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico hadn’t been this well-equipped.
Several people waved at Naomi, who waved back while Jack gawked.
“They’re working on the corn samples you brought,” she told him, nodding toward a cluster of seven people on the far side of the lab, “matching it against the blueprints in the data Sheldon sent you.”
“What do you expect to find?” Jack asked as he watched. “You’ve told me how devastating this stuff could be, but I still don’t really understand why.”
Naomi looked at him. “How much do you know about genetically modified organisms,” she asked him, “especially crops like soybeans or corn?”
Jack shrugged. “Not much, really,” he told her. “It’s not something I’ve given any thought to. I never saw any reason to before my world blew apart.”
“They’re in almost everything, Jack,” she told him. “At least here in the U.S. Some countries in Europe and in Asia grow or import them, too, but here it’s hard to find crops now that aren’t genetically engineered.” She shook her head. “Over eighty percent of all the corn, soybeans, and cotton grown here are engineered strains, and almost all of it is controlled, directly or through license arrangements with other conglomerates, by New Horizons. There are also strains of rice and wheat, but they haven’t gained a majority share of the market yet, thank God.”
Figuring that Jack had seen enough of the lab, she led him back toward the blast door and repeated the same steps to open it as when they’d come in.
“Many of the crops are engineered to be more resistant to insect pests and herbicides, or to have a higher yield,” she went on as they stepped back out into the main junction. “The original idea was to create crops that wouldn’t need a lot of pesticides or herbicides, and when they did have to be sprayed to kill bugs or weeds, the chemicals wouldn’t harm the crops. And some strains were engineered to produce more, so you could get more cotton, for example, per hectare of land.”
She sighed as she led Jack through the junction and entered the tunnel that would take them to what used to be the base’s three missile silos. Jack couldn’t make out the end of it, it was so far away. “It was a good dream, Jack,” she said wistfully. “I devoted my life to making that dream come true.”
“I take it that things didn’t work out like you’d hoped,” he said.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “At first it was my dream come true: I was a young star on an all-star team, doing some of the most cutting-edge research on the planet and being paid a mint for it. But I had no idea what was really going on, or that I and the others in my field were being used to fulfill an agenda we never could have guessed at.” She looked up at him. “The crops have had lots of problems, Jack,” she told him. “Have you ever heard of the law of unintended consequences?”
He shook his head.
“It basically says that any intervention in a complex system may or may not have the intended result, but will inevitably create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.” She sighed. “That’s what’s happened. DNA is a very complex system in itself, not to mention the biosphere that the plants are in, and the place they occupy in the food chain with respect to livestock and ourselves. It doesn’t matter if you believe what people say about the problems, ranging from food allergies to overt toxicity,” she told him. “What matters is that the government relies on the companies to provide proof that the crops are safe, without any independent verification.”
A sudden realization hit Jack as he remembered what Naomi had told him earlier. “And a lot of the senior people in the government who would be responsible for giving the green light are in New Horizons’ pocket,” he said.
“Very good, Jack,” she told him with a wry smile, but her expression sobered quickly. “So, New Horizons and a couple of other biotech conglomerates now control most of the world’s food supply. In many places, farmers can’t even buy non-GMO seeds, because they’ve been wiped out of the local market, or are so expensive the farmers can’t afford them. And even if they could, the farmers around them are probably spraying herbicides that will kill the non-GMO crops. Not to mention that the chemicals are also toxic to humans and livestock.” She stared down the tunnel. “There have been a lot of unintended consequences, Jack, that all could be written off as more of humanity’s hubris, seasoned with corporate greed.
“But the truth is that those companies have positioned themselves to be the perfect vector for the next generation of genetically engineered organisms that will be marketed as the be all and end all for farmers everywhere, resistant to insect pests and to several different types of herbicides, plus a little extra twist.”
“And it’s the twist that’s the big catch,” Jack surmised.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “This new line is being called Revolutions, Jack. And it will do everything that the company claims it will. I should know. I helped create it.” She frowned. “They also plan to share the technology with the other conglomerates under liberal licensing agreements. We even know from our sources in government that there are congressmen lined up to support federal subsidies to make these particular crops affordable to the most destitute of foreign countries.” She walked along in silence for a moment before saying, “And the twist is this: embedded in this particular line of crops will be a retrovirus capable of modifying the DNA of the host that consumes it.”
Jack stopped and stared at her. “So what does that mean?” he asked. “That you
eat some of this new corn or whatever, and it’ll just start changing your DNA?”
Naomi nodded, and Jack felt a shiver run down his spine at the pain etched on her face. “That’s exactly what I mean, Jack,” she told him bitterly. “We were never able to do anything quite like this before. Gene therapy is an up and coming medical technology that’s enjoyed some success, but it’s still in its infancy. Revolutions could have really lived up to its name. And then I learned what it was really for.”
Jack watched as she blinked tears from her eyes before going on.
“I was on a small, highly secret project at LRU that was working on this, and we had a tremendous breakthrough,” she went on. “We were able to saturate corn cells with what you might call a retrovirus placebo, and were able to engineer a delivery system for it that allowed it to be absorbed into the host during digestion. It would even survive cooking and other types of processing commonly used in the food industry if it wasn’t too prolonged or at too high a temperature.
“After the host consumed it, it was carried throughout the body in the bloodstream, and wherever it wound up, the retrovirus particles successfully penetrated the host’s cells. The placebo didn’t alter any DNA, but it proved what we could do, that the delivery system would work.” She wiped her eyes again as she started to walk onward down the tunnel.
Jack barely understood what she was saying and wanted to disbelieve every word of it, but he remained silent.
“Just think, Jack: we could have targeted genetic defects or cancer with tailored retroviral packages delivered through food. We could have done nearly anything, and not through expensive treatment of a single individual: we could have treated entire populations. Humans, livestock, fish – anything. The possibilities were endless. As were the potential horrors.
“The night that the breakthrough was made,” she told him, “three of the team members died in a car accident. They’d been out celebrating, and the police report said that the driver, Dr. Jaswant Singh, had been drunk and drove the car off an embankment. I was sick that night and didn’t go with them. I never thought that I’d be saved by the flu.” She shrugged. “I knew Singh well, and he didn’t drink anything but water and tea. The police report was a fabrication, or the autopsy was doctored. With those three dead, only myself and Dr. Kempf were left.”
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