The Year of the Locust, page 51
He turned to the glass-walled control room and saw that the supervisor had abandoned the TV and was standing on the walkway, looking down in astonishment and fear at the mayhem. Kazinsky called to him: “With that much flesh on you, my whip will really cut you up. Or you can get out now and never return.”
Moving surprisingly fast for his size, the supervisor grabbed his jacket and headed down by a different set of stairs, giving the whip the widest possible berth.
Kazinsky turned to the rest of the men, motioning the devout to also come closer. “Listen hard,” he said. “There was once a great prophet revered by the Christians. He went into the temple in Jerusalem, overturned the tables of the moneychangers, and cast out the wicked. Why? He was doing the work of God. I am not a carpenter from Nazareth but I am truly blessed by Allah and I, too, do the work of God.”
Nobody said anything. “Who am I?” Kazinsky continued. He pointed to his tattoos and recounted their meaning. “Spetsnaz… a colonel… the battlefields where I fought… the black flag of ISIS I marched under…” A ripple passed through the ranks—they were accomplishments to be feared. Kazinsky half turned so that they could see the locust, slick with sweat and flecked with the whipped men’s blood, on his back. “And the locust—a plague sent by God to cleanse the earth. You will call me the Emir.”
He walked away and ripped a sheet of filthy canvas from a set of tall windows, letting light penetrate the darkness. A few men at first, and then the others, joined him and started to strip away more of the sheeting.
As they moved aside, one of the CCTV cameras had an uninterrupted view through the glass walls of the sealed environment. Inside the huge chamber, the remote-controlled scoops were loading the unsanitized off-Earth ore onto conveyor belts, and for a moment, lit by a single shaft of light coming through the grime-stained windows—more than likely never observed in the gloom of the facility—the camera captured something strange.
A host of pinpoints of light were floating in the air around the ore, glowing and hauntingly beautiful. They looked like the smallest dandelions in the universe and were smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
CHAPTER 49
In time—very soon—the spore would be given the name siber. While the identity of the person who coined it will never be known, they got it right: siber means “the sleeper” in Russian.
God only knows where it came from—some galaxy far away probably, carried by the cosmic wind until it landed on an asteroid, where it would lie, seemingly asleep, for millions of years—just the blink of an eye in a universe formed fourteen billion years ago.
And there the spore would have stayed, not alive but not exactly dead either, until an unmanned vehicle from a depleted and extravagant planet began to mine for rare earth minerals. There is no doubt the spores were not a virus, they were something far more mysterious than that, but they were close enough to remind me of a definition I had heard when I was studying for my science degree. “A virus is simply a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein,” the Nobel winner Sir Peter Medawar once said. “No virus has ever been known to do any good.”
As the sun climbed higher over Baikonur, that shaft of light shifted and the fragile siber disappeared from view. As a result, only one other thing of interest remained in the sealed environment of the glass-walled chamber—a rat.
By nature, they are burrowing animals and they can squeeze through a space the size of a coin. Perhaps the chamber wasn’t completely sealed after all, because a normal-looking rat emerged out of a tiny fissure in the floor, looked around with curiosity, rose up on its hind legs, and stared out at the processing plant.
Of course, it breathed in the dust, the air, and anything else that happened to be floating inside the forbidden zone.
CHAPTER 50
The records of the harbormaster at Diego Garcia showed that the Leviathan slipped its mooring, traveled down the underwater rails, and was free of the oxygen bubbles at 3:21 p.m. on a day no one will ever forget.
As it headed, unseen, into clear water, I was standing behind the other six observers in the sub’s command center, watching the skipper and his team—the navigator, the officer of the deck, the pilot, the sonar and communications techs—follow the cardinal rule of all submariners no matter which flag they sailed under: to run silent and to run deep.
To that end, the depth finder showed we were diving fast, and that helped create the otherworldly feeling I remembered so well—of being alone in a windowless world, of plunging into a twilight zone surrounded by a silence so complete that there wasn’t a sound as the officers moved from one workstation to the next; in common with all subs, everybody was wearing special rubber-soled shoes that allowed the boat’s complement of 168 men and women to pass through the corridors without even a muffled footfall. For submariners, noise has always been the enemy of stealth.
The sub’s command center was in semidarkness with only the glow from computer screens and the tiny LED lights on racks of equipment to illuminate the faces of the crew. The gloom was deliberate—numerous psychological studies had shown that the brighter the light, the greater the anxiety and fatigue among the sailors and officers.
And there was plenty to worry about in the Indian Ocean—underwater currents that plunged into apparently bottomless canyons with the force of huge waterfalls, unmapped mountains, hidden wrecks, transocean communication cables, and abandoned fishing nets—all compounded by traveling in zero visibility at almost forty miles an hour with just the instruments and a thin skin of metal to protect you. Outside that fragile barrier, the water pressure was deadly—if the Leviathan fell through the two-thousand-feet mark, it would reach “collapse depth,” where the pressure of the seawater, more than sixty times higher than at the surface, would be so great the craft would be crushed like an aluminum can in a giant fist.
At least in such a situation death would be instant. On the other hand, any accident or catastrophic equipment failure that resulted in near-freezing water flooding in or causing the nuclear reactor to shut down would mean the crew’s chances of survival or rescue would still be negligible. If any of them did manage to seal themselves into a watertight compartment, they would face the prospect of the craft icing up as the heating elements failed and the air becoming increasingly poisonous once the oxygen generators began to run out of cartridges.
It wasn’t theoretical—several decades earlier, the nuclear-powered Russian sub Kursk, with a crew of 118, was badly damaged when a faulty torpedo exploded while the vessel was submerged in the Barents Sea. Twenty-three sailors took refuge in a watertight compartment and managed to hang on for hours in a waking nightmare, banging on the hull, praying for rescue, before their oxygen finally ran out. As in nearly all of the other eight instances of a nuclear submarine sinking, nobody survived.
It was little wonder then that the Leviathan’s skipper, Commander Rick Martinez, a good-looking guy of thirty-eight with olive skin and dark eyes, was leaning over the electronic plotting table and its huge map, his face creased with worry. Born in the buckle of the Bible Belt, just south of Memphis, Tennessee, he had by virtue of hard work and superlative academic scores made his way from the streets of the barrio to the shores of Chesapeake Bay and the historically WASP-ish environment of the US Naval Academy. His achievements did not stop there, though—out of the three hundred and fifty thousand people on active duty in the navy, he had become one of the elite seventy-four, the men who commanded a nuclear-powered US submarine.
Only when he was certain that his craft was on course and traveling through safe water did he turn to the observers. “A submarine is different from a surface ship for one primary reason,” he said. “When things get really bad the skipper can’t throw himself overboard.”
He smiled and we laughed; a commander of any boat has almost unbridled authority and it was good to be in the company of someone who didn’t appear to take himself too seriously.
“And it will get bad,” he warned. “You have probably seen on the plotting table that our destination is New York. It isn’t—that’s a notional destination entered to initiate the navigation computers—but we still have a long way to travel into very difficult waters.”
He turned to the large table—an electronic slab—tilted it toward us so that we could see the map clearly, and circled an area of ocean south of Australia and South Africa.
“We’re heading to a vast and empty stretch of water, home to the Roaring Forties and the largest whales in the world. As you may know, we will be testing a revolutionary form of stealth technology. Once the experiment begins, it will be our mission to avoid detection and the task of the best assets the US military can muster to try to find us.”
He was right about the assets that were being sent to locate us; I had seen them. While he was explaining the scale of the pursuit to the rest of the room, I thought of sitting in the briefing room at Langley and watching a live feed of the huge number of sub hunters racing to rendezvous with us. I saw two of the country’s eleven aircraft carriers—both surrounded by their battle groups of a cruiser, two destroyers, and ammunition and supply ships—plunging through the heavy swells of the great southern seas. Even the carriers, a thousand feet long and with a crew of five thousand—one of them boasting its own McDonald’s—were doing it the hard way, their bows throwing up huge sheets of spray and sending them onto the flight decks sixty feet above. On one of them, a Poseidon—a submarine-hunter aircraft—was catapulted off the pitching runway and, as the launch team stared in horror, veered abruptly to port, barely managing to get airborne.
The Poseidon was just one of the seventy-five aircraft on board each carrier, all of which could be used to find the Leviathan. To that end they would be aided by the seven hunter-killer submarines accompanying the fleet, the two satellites that had been repositioned for the mission, the underwater microphones dropped by the Poseidons that would listen for a sub’s propeller or an unmuffled footfall, and teams of data analysts and strategists working at the NSA. By any reasonable standard, sub-hunting experts would have said that the craft code-named the Leviathan would have had no chance of avoiding detection.
There was just one problem, though: none of those experts had seen what had taken place on the sunbaked streets of an obscure town called Zahedan.
CHAPTER 51
It was well before dawn—the streets of Washington were almost deserted and a leaden sky was pressing down on the White House—when Falcon got out of his SUV and walked briskly toward the entrance to the West Wing.
Any experienced observer would have known that something serious was afoot: the director’s shirt was crumpled and it clashed with his jacket, as if he had grabbed the first clothes that had come to hand.
He deposited all of his electronic devices in the lead-lined box and entered the Situation Room to find that the president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the few other cabinet members privy to the secret cloaking technology had already arrived. “Apologies,” he said. “I was out running when I got the message. What’s happened?” For a beat, nobody answered.
Four days had passed since I had stood in the Leviathan’s command center and listened as Rick Martinez briefed us about the mission. During that time, the sub had sped beneath rolling seas, heading for the waters surrounding the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, a group of uninhabited islands scattered across a huge expanse of water, home to colonies of penguins and the breeding ground of wandering albatrosses, the largest birds on earth, the lonely voyagers that ancient mariners thought were the souls of lost sailors, a belief that had convinced them that killing one would curse a ship and its crew. I never got the chance to ask if anyone on the Leviathan had brought one of the majestic birds down, but maybe I should have.
I had spent the four days roaming the sub and allowing myself to sink into a host of memories. As revolutionary as the Leviathan had looked from dockside, she was based on what was called a Block VII Virginia-class fast-attack sub—an updated version of the craft on which I had served and close enough in its layout to feel familiar to me.
During all those explorations I was barely ever alone. Baxter—not a sailor but a lost soul himself, someone whose grief was not close to touching bottom—was my companion, and because I had never considered myself a particularly kind person, I was surprised at how much pleasure I found in helping him keep his loneliness at bay.
Together, Baxter and I started at the rear of the sub, close to where the pump-jet propulsor—a more modern and silent replacement for a conventional propeller—was powering us fast through the silent underworld, and we slowly made our way toward the bulb at the front that served as the Leviathan’s eyes, its hugely complex system of sonar arrays. As we climbed, squeezed, and crouched from one compartment to the next, I discovered a quality in my companion that I had always admired in people: despite his age he was endlessly curious, and I soon realized that it was one of the primary reasons he was such an outstanding physicist. Just how outstanding I didn’t discover until we were in the secondary command post, when he mentioned—just casually—that he had been nominated three times for the Nobel.
I nodded as if I knew all about it—I didn’t have a choice, I was supposed to be working in a similar field at Oak Ridge—and it was only later, thinking back, that I realized he had looked at me with something bordering on curiosity. Suspicion, even.
Instead, I concentrated on the secondary command post. It was something I had never seen before—an innovation for the Leviathan—that meant if the primary command center was damaged or inaccessible, members of the crew would have a chance of controlling the vessel. Mentally, I filed the new development in the same category as the sub’s three escape hatches: included more for comfort than practicality.
From the secondary command post we made our way through the galley—a chaos of activity—and into the wardroom. As I had everywhere else I had been on the boat, I sat quietly and listened or engaged the crew members in conversation and seemingly innocent questions. During that time I neither heard nor saw anything that could remotely be termed a security risk or hinted at a plan to sabotage the vessel—not even among the two people who were of Chinese heritage and that the agency, in time-honored fashion, had immediately racially profiled. I had quickly come to share Falcon’s view that the fire at Diego Garcia was an accident and any other explanation was dead out of gas.
On the third day of the journey south, Baxter and I entered a deserted area that I was unfamiliar with. I soon realized that the Virginia-class hull had been extended by a hundred feet in order to include what was known as a multipurpose platform. Judging by the equipment, it was earmarked—once the Leviathan was operational—to accommodate a contingent of Navy SEALs. Several Zodiac inflatables were stacked against a wall, brackets to hold weapons were bolted nearby, and behind a dozen narrow bunks were large blast-proof cabinets for explosives and grenades. Far more impressive than any of those things, even more remarkable than the high-powered Jet Skis clamped to the floor, was a SEAL Special Delivery Vehicle: a minisub.
Twenty-eight feet long and able to carry eight SEAL combat divers and a crew of two, it occupied a circular section of flooring that would lower the craft hydraulically into a lockout chamber below, allowing it to be launched—underwater and unseen—within minutes.
As Baxter and I circled it, intrigued, I glanced across and saw four state-of-the-art decompression pods standing in a bay crammed with monitors, gauges, valves, and dials. Bright yellow, the machines were startling in the white, antiseptic environment. The chambers were the only way to save lives in a medical emergency—one that was caused when divers surfaced too quickly and nitrogen bubbles entered their bloodstream.
“To treat decompression sickness?” Baxter said. “The bends?”
I nodded. “It can kill or paralyze you.”
I watched as Baxter, ever curious, walked over to the pods. “Some equipment,” he said admiringly, running his hand along the steel side, pointing first at the airtight Perspex domes that covered a single bed and then indicating a host of inlets and monitors located inside the futuristic cylinder. “A totally independent oxygen supply, its own power source—huge batteries by the look of it—precise temperature regulation, IV drips for fluids… who designed and built it? NASA?” He was kidding.
“That’s what they say,” I replied; I wasn’t—kidding, I mean.
He stared at me, about to answer, when a watertight door into the area opened and three men and two women—junior ratings—entered. They nodded a greeting, and as they conducted a daily maintenance check on the equipment and Baxter continued to examine the pods, I found myself alone and watching them. More diverse in gender and race than any naval group I had ever encountered, they worked like a machine—familiar and totally at ease in each other’s company.
More than any other branch of the military, at least to my mind, the warriors who fought in the underwater battle space were a true brotherhood—a sisterhood now, too—and as I stood quietly six hundred feet below the surface, I realized something about myself—call it a small epiphany, if you will: I did not belong in that world.
Being washed out of submarines when I was young had cut me to the bone, a wound that had never completely healed, but I saw clearly now that I was someone best suited to walking alone. Maybe it was because I was an only child, but whatever my skills were, I certainly was not suited to being a member of any team.
I had returned to submarines in unusual circumstances and I could say now that I had no regrets about what might have been; I was blessed—I had found my place in the world—but no credit was due to me. Strange as it was, the CIA had known me better than I knew myself.
