The Genesis Plague

34

‘For Christ’s sake, I could have invaded North Korea by now,’ Crawford said, glowering. ‘Are you ready yet?’ His eyes traced the fibre-optic cable from the PackBot’s rear to a large spool, which in turn patched into a suitcase-sized remote command unit, painted in desert camouflage. The unit’s unhinged hardshell cover was inset with a seventeen-inch LCD viewing screen; its base hosted a computer hard drive, keyboard and toggle controls. This space-age gadgetry was lost on Crawford. Results were the only thing he controlled. And it was high time to see some progress.

‘Almost there, sir,’ replied the bot’s technician — an attractive 28-year-old female with the sharp edges of a pageboy haircut sticking out below her helmet. Being a combat engineer, she was an expert with explosives, and was accustomed to using the bot to disarm or detonate roadside bombs and mines. But this was the first time she’d employed the gas-canister-firing apparatus, and she didn’t like the fact that Crawford was rushing things. ‘Just running the final diagnostics on the software utilities …’ She worked the keyboard and controls until the display synched with the bot’s onboard cameras. The live images panelled onscreen. She held her breath as the interface for the rotary firing mechanism came online. When no errors came back, she exhaled.

Below the mountain, Crawford surveyed the tight perimeter his marines had formed around the encampment. Everyone was on high alert after Sergeant Yaeger purported to spot an Arab watcher lurking in the high ground. Inside the MRAP, he had a pair of marines monitoring the surrounding hillsides and mountains with infrared scanners. For good measure, the airwaves were also being closely monitored for enemy chatter. An ambush could turn this whole operation into an even bigger quagmire, thought Crawford. Plus, if there were an enemy in wait, the darkness would prove a huge tactical advantage for them.

Crawford’s gaze shifted to Yaeger and his motley unit members, who were huddled around the bot’s technician watching the viewing screen. Cleverly dressed like nomadic desert dwellers, they had certainly fooled the enemy. But the fact that they had no affinity to a ‘uniform’ was deeply unsettling for Crawford. Damn chameleons, he swore inwardly.

Crawford’s appraising eyes settled for a long moment on the Kurd. Yaeger had yet to fully disclose what his sidekick had discovered during his earlier fact-finding mission. But the copilot who’d escorted the Kurd had plenty to say. He’d told Crawford about the brief visit to a restaurant in As Sulaymaniyah, which led to a second excursion to a mountaintop monastery near Iraq’s northeastern border. This confirmed for Crawford that Yaeger knew much more than he was letting on. And the implications were highly unnerving.

Where did Yaeger’s true allegiances lie? Crawford wondered. Undeniably, Global Security Corporation, Yaeger’s employer, was a huge ally for US counter-terrorism forces. The face of war was changing too quickly for federal defence agencies to adapt. Increasingly, outside firms were needed to fill the huge deficiency gaps in manpower and technology. GSC was nimble, amenable to risk, and heavily capitalized by the world’s wealthiest investors and industrialized economies (both of whom had the most to lose if terrorism ran amuck). Ironically, even Saudi and Kuwaiti oil money fed its coffers. As with any outside contractor, however, accountability was an issue, particularly when profit was the driving force.

Was Jason Yaeger an opportunist? If it came down to it, could he be bought? Or would his stubborn moral code simply get in the way and require Crawford to apply a more potent remedy to temper his growing disobedience?

Huffing impatiently, Crawford bent at the waist to inspect the bot’s rotary firing assembly loaded with miniature gas canister projectiles that contained a mixture of eye irritant and sedative. He always thought that fanciful talk of warfare without soldiers was hogwash — on a par with paperless offices, everlasting gobstoppers and wives who didn’t nag. Yet this thirty-pound motorized robot was about to perform a most perilous task that not long ago would have resulted in multiple human casualties. With remote drones patrolling the skies and unmanned fighter planes already in production, a new age of warfare was dawning.

All this technology, thought Crawford.

Yet as long as weak-minded politicians controlled the ‘utilities’ of the war machine, the terrorists would still thrive in the long run. Just like cockroaches, thought Crawford. The fact remained that war was never meant to be civil. Since the first humans attacked one another with stones, the goal of conflict had not changed. Survival was the objective. And history proved time and time again that diplomacy served only to blur the lines between the ‘victors’ and the ‘vanquished’.

The bot came online with a sudden jerk of its articulating arm, and Crawford gave a start.

‘Okay. We’re good to go,’ the combat engineer reported.

Crawford stepped back from the bot and stood next to Jason. ‘All right, Yaeger. It’s show time.’

Crawford and Jason knelt to either side of the combat engineer, intently watching the live transmissions coming back from the bot. On the command unit’s viewing screen, the tunnel branched off in both directions at a near perfect T.

‘Right or left?’ the engineer asked, bringing the bot to a stop at the end of the cave’s entry passage.

‘Go right,’ Crawford immediately blurted, before Jason could give it a thought.

Jason’s muscles went rigid, but he managed to hold back his tongue. He exchanged glances with Camel and Jam, who stood close by to feed fibre-optic cable from the spool. Camel’s jaw was grinding tobacco and his eyes were locked to Crawford’s skull. Jam was silently mouthing a string of obscenities. Hazo shared the sentiment, but chose to smile and shrug. And Meat was clenching and unclenching his fists, like a guy ready to brawl.

‘We don’t have time to take a vote,’ Crawford barked at the engineer.

Jason rolled his eyes and nodded to the engineer.

‘Okay,’ she replied hesistantly, sensing the tension. Pressing forward on the joystick control, she advanced the bot forward into the junction. Then she toggled right and the onscreen image rotated until the camera was directed down the tunnel branch. It was evident that this winding, craggy passage, approximately two metres wide according to the laser measurements coming back from the bot, had not been altered from its natural state. ‘Here we go.’

As the bot advanced beyond the dimly lit entry passage, rising and falling over the undulating ground, the light quickly melted away and the camera’s night vision automatically compensated for the darkness. On the command unit’s viewing screen, the live feeds transformed to green-tinted monochrome. The glowing airborne dust swirling in the camera made it seem like the bot was trapped inside a snow globe.

‘It’s quiet in there,’ the engineer said. She adjusted the volume slide control upwards. The only sounds coming over the audio feed were the bot’s low-humming gears and the crunching of gravel beneath its rotary tracks.

‘Too quiet,’ Crawford added.

‘God, that looks creepy,’ Jam muttered, craning his head to get a better view.

While Crawford was preoccupied with the screen, Jason glanced down at the cell phone clipped to the colonel’s belt. Why was he talking with Randall Stokes? For moral support and spiritual guidance? Highly unlikely, thought Jason. Maybe Crawford was soliciting tactical advice. Whatever the case, he was anxious for Flaherty to report back on Stokes’s shady involvement.

‘The air quality in there is surprisingly good,’ the engineer reported, after glancing at the data readings coming back from the bot’s onboard sensors. ‘Plenty of oxygen for—’

‘Wait,’ Jason interrupted. ‘Back it up a bit.’

The engineer did.

Eyes narrowed to slits, Jason attempted to discern something in the image. ‘Can you shine some light in there?’

‘Hey, hey,’ Crawford protested, throwing up his hands. ‘What about the element of surprise, Yaeger? If they see the light—’

‘It’s important, Colonel,’ Jason insisted firmly.

Crawford’s jaw jutted out. Circling his eyes at those assembled around him, he realized that his opinion was vastly outnumbered. He relented by throwing up a hand. ‘Fine. Give it some light.’

The engineer pressed a button that shut off the infrared. The screen went black for a split second before the bot’s floodlight snapped on. The refreshed image showed crisply the tunnel’s raw features.

‘There,’ Jason said, pointing to an unnatural form partially hidden along the ceiling. ‘Can you get a better shot of that?’

‘Sure.’ The engineer worked the controls to angle the camera up and zoomed in on the compact object fitting snugly into a hole in the rocky ceiling. It had an angular body and a circular eye.

There was no doubt as to what they were now looking at. ‘A camera?’ Jason gasped. ‘What the hell is that doing in there?’

Staring dumbfounded at the image, Crawford was speechless.

‘What … like a surveillance camera?’ Meat said, coming over for a better look.

‘Yeah,’ Jason said.

Meat stated the obvious: ‘That’s not good.’

Clearing his throat, Crawford finally spoke up. ‘First the metal door. Now this? It has to be a bunker.’

‘Could be.’ Jason studied him. For the first time, Crawford’s unwavering confidence showed signs of cracking. Oddly, Crawford seemed to be feigning surprise. Why?

‘Let’s kill the light and keep moving,’ Crawford suggested.

Jason concurred.

The engineer adjusted the camera and flipped back to night vision. Before she got the bot moving again, she warned, ‘We’re about thirty-five metres in, and we only have a fifty-metre cable.’

For another five minutes, they all watched in silence as the robot wound through the mountain’s stark bowels. Twice, the engineer needed to swivel the camera sideways to study openings in the wall. But both times, the floodlight revealed dead ends. Along the way, they’d spotted two more surveillance cameras.

Deeper the bot went, until the fibre-optic cable spool nearly emptied.

Then the passage’s repetitive structure changed abruptly. The jagged walls, glowing emerald in night vision, widened before falling away. Only the ground was discernible at the bottom of the screen.

‘What do we have here?’ Jason said, squaring his shoulders.

‘Looks like … a cave?’ The engineer paused the bot and its audio feed went eerily silent. Pushing another button, she said, ‘Let’s try sonar.’

Crawford was locked in constipated silence.

A small panel popped up in the monitor’s lower right corner. Within seconds, the sonar data-capture was complete and a three-dimensional image representing the interior space flashed on the screen.

‘Wow. It’s pretty big,’ the engineer said, interpreting the data.

To Jason, the sonar image resembled a translucent blob. ‘How big?’

It took her a second to put it to scale. ‘Like the inside of a movie theatre.’ She studied the sonar image five seconds longer. ‘It’s not picking up any exit tunnels. Looks like a dead end. Nothing throwing off a heat signature in there either.’

‘So no one’s in there?’

‘Nothing living.’ Her eyes narrowed as she studied the image more. ‘There’s some strange formations along the outer edges of the cave. See here?’ She pointed to the anomalies for Crawford and Jason and they each had a long look at them.

‘Probably just stones,’ Crawford said dismissively.

‘No,’ Jason disagreed. Atop the strange mounds structured like beaver dams, he could make out plenty of orb-like shapes. ‘Those aren’t stones,’ he gloomily replied. ‘If no one is in there, let’s turn on some lights.’

This time, Crawford was hard pressed to protest. He reluctantly nodded. ‘Fine. Do it.’

The engineer clicked off the infrared, turned on the floodlight.

Onscreen, the immense space came to life.

‘My God …’ she gasped.

Jason cringed. The space was indeed a cavernous hollow deep within the mountain. And heaped like firewood all along its perimeter were countless human skeletons.