Genocide of One: A Thriller (21 page)

Fires like this in the midst of deep jungles were themselves an astounding thing.
No wonder wild animals didn’t come near, Yeager thought. Fire was the sign of living
creatures who had taken one step beyond the world of nature. It was a heartwarming
scene, one that called up tender, nostalgic emotions.

Once the Mbuti had finished eating, they took out homemade musical instruments and
began singing and dancing. They had an amazing talent for music. Singers’ voices layered
over the sounds of flutes, drums, and primitive harps, with multiple melody lines
intertwining to form a wonderful harmony. These joyful voices asserted the existence,
in the midst of the dark, wild jungle, of creatures called human beings.

Yeager watched carefully to see if there was anything to suggest they were on their
guard, but all these tiny people were just enjoying singing and dancing, with no indication
whatsoever that they were preparing to do battle. At one point children who were dancing
pointed up to the sky and started to say something. Yeager looked in the direction
they were pointing and saw a star in the night sky speed from south to north. He wondered
how this artificial satellite orbiting the globe appeared in their eyes.

Nigel Pierce, the target of their kidnapping, went into his dwelling while the dancing
and singing was still in full swing and didn’t reappear. They tried looking in with
infrared imaging equipment, but boxes stacked up inside interfered and they couldn’t
get a bead on Pierce.

At 2300 hours the lively party ended, and the women and children went back to their
huts. The only ones left were eight men who stayed behind, talking in the open gathering
space in the middle of the compound.

A new day came, and it was 0200 hours when the men finally went to bed. The mercenaries
waited another hour, until all forty of the Kanga band were asleep. Yeager made a
final check before they swung into action. With their night vision equipment they
would have a decisive upper hand if they needed to fight in the darkness. They checked
where the two dogs were sleeping, but the animals were such scrawny specimens it was
hard to envision them being effective watchdogs.

Yeager stealthily climbed down to ground level from the treetop. He nodded to Meyers,
on guard duty, then pushed the button on his radio twice to signal the other two to
start approaching the camp.

Yeager and Meyers circled the camp from the south side to the east side, then stood
still and removed the headsets from their ears. From several spots along the U-shaped
line of huts they could hear snoring and the sounds of people sleeping. Good, Yeager
decided. Most everyone’s asleep. He turned his night vision goggles to Pierce’s hut,
the one on the far end, and saw Garrett and Mick coming up from the rear.

Yeager lowered his AK-47, attached it to a sling hanging from his shoulder, and picked
up the Glock with the silencer. He had a towel stuck in the front pocket of his tactical
vest, which he intended to stuff in Pierce’s mouth so he didn’t make any noise.

Yeager signaled everyone to take their positions. The other three moved into position,
taking up a defensive circle, backs to the hut. The sleeping dogs on the other side
of the clearing didn’t move.

Yeager slowly made his way to the side of the hut. He listened carefully but couldn’t
hear anyone asleep. Pierce might still be up. But they’d planned for this eventuality.
Point a pistol at him, and he wouldn’t resist.

Yeager crouched over, checked his grip on the pistol, and slipped to the front of
the hut. The entrance was open, and the electronic image in the night vision goggles
showed the inside of the dwelling. No need to search for their target: he was right
there. Nigel Pierce, beard and all, was straight in front of him. Pierce was seated
on the dirt floor, staring right at Yeager. Yeager didn’t flinch but aimed his pistol
right between Pierce’s eyes. “Don’t move,” he ordered in a low voice and began to
step inside the hut. But in that instant he froze.

A weird sight appeared in his night vision goggles, and the hair stood up on the back
of Yeager’s neck. In Pierce’s arms was a kind of creature he’d never seen before.

The most striking characteristic of this creature is that you’ll know as soon as you
spot it that it’s a totally unknown type of being
.

This unknown creature stared back at him. Its hairless body and short arms and legs
made it look like a human child. But that just made the strangeness of its head stand
out all the more.

It might confuse you when you see it, but the point is not to think about it
.

This creature, so like a human child, had a disproportionately large head. The front
of it was a large round protuberance, and the rest of it tapered off sharply from
the forehead down to the chin, like an inverted triangle. Its body was like that of
a three-year-old child, but its facial features were even more infantile. Its face
was slender, like a newborn baby whose skull had not yet hardened, and only its body,
from the neck down, was developed.

Don’t ask yourself what sort of creature it is
.

But there was something in its face—with its large eyes slanting upward—that set it
far apart from a human infant. In these upturned eyes fixed on him Yeager could sense
a clear awareness and intelligence. But what was the sharp light from those eyes trying
to convey? Caution? Curiosity? Madness? Maliciousness? In the face of this enigmatic
being Yeager felt fear. This was like a human, but it wasn’t human.

Once you see it, just shoot it
.

Coming to his senses, Yeager pointed his pistol at the creature. “What the hell
is
that?” he asked.

Trying to avoid being tempted by the sweetly smiling beauties in the slick periodicals,
Kento took up the eighteenth magazine and at last found the article he was looking
for.

Contemporary Politics Quarterly
, the summer 1975 issue. A small magazine, more like a pamphlet. The opening pages
consisted of a special report entitled “Research at US Think Tanks.”

About halfway through the article he read, “Below is the entire text of a report from
the Schneider Institute to the White House entitled the Heisman Report.” Kento sat
up in his chair and eagerly began turning the pages.

A title leaped out at him:
Research into Factors Leading to the Extinction of the Human Race, and Policy Proposals
. This was the formal title of the Heisman Report. The author was Joseph R. Heisman,
PhD, senior researcher at the Schneider Institute.

After a short introduction was an explanation of the report’s aims and an explanatory
note.

“This report does not refer to factors for extinction on an astronomical or geological
time scale—for example, the end of the earth in five billion years, when the sun burns
itself out, or the disappearance of the human Y chromosome tens of thousands of years
in the future, which will make reproduction impossible.”

Makes sense, Kento said to himself, and went on to read the main part of the text.

The first section discussed the collision of an asteroid with earth and the collateral
damage this would cause. What Kento found unexpected was the fact that Dr. Heisman
called attention to what was, thirty years ago, an issue seen as lying on the border
between science and science fiction. In his words, it was “an event that could occur
in the near future, one we must not overlook.” Heisman went on to say, “Recent geological
investigations have revealed that other cosmic bodies have collided with the earth
much more often than previously imagined.”

Dr. Heisman was nothing short of a visionary. Nowadays countries all over the world
keep a close watch on near-earth objects, and there had been several near misses involving
asteroids big enough to destroy a city.

The second section dealt with issues Kento hadn’t been aware of, i.e., the reversal
of the north and south magnetic poles. Evidence pointed to a reversal of these north
and south poles several times in the earth’s past; one theory held that the extinction
of the dinosaurs occurred because of such a reversal. At first glance this seemed
like an issue in the distant future, a problem on the scale of geologic time, but
the Heisman Report had the following warning: “In the past two hundred years terrestrial
magnetism has weakened considerably, and it is believed that it will disappear completely
in a thousand years. Afterward there will most likely be a reversal of the magnetic
poles, but before this occurs, when terrestrial magnetism has disappeared, the magnetosphere
protecting the earth will be lost, and solar rays and other harmful cosmic rays will
fall on the unprotected earth, leading to the extinction not just of mankind but of
most other forms of life as well.”

Would scientists in the thirtieth century have developed technology to avoid this
crisis? Do your best, Kento thought, sending out a word of encouragement to his descendants
a thousand years from now.

This section took up most of the pages of the report. The report warned that all kinds
of nuclear war—limited nuclear war, all-out nuclear war, and accidental nuclear war,
in which missiles are fired by mistake—would lead to the destruction of the human
race. “Once a nuclear attack occurs, the balance that has been maintained through
the nuclear deterrent will collapse, inevitably leading to a series of retaliatory
strikes.” The report went on: “Even a limited use of nuclear weapons will create a
deadly layer of ash covering the entire earth, which will damage the ecology, or it
will increase the density of nitric oxide, damaging the ozone layer and leading mankind
to the edge of extinction. Further, food resources will be dealt a serious blow, which
will lead to mass starvation and the outbreak of a new war. Then a Third World War
will be unavoidable, and this conflict will quickly become mankind’s final war.”

Joseph Heisman did a thorough job of arguing against nuclear war. Perhaps a bit of
self-recrimination was included in this, given the fact that it was scientists themselves
who had developed these very nuclear weapons.

This section was right in Kento’s father’s field, and he found this unexpected. His
father had been most interested in section 5 of the Heisman Report, and Kento had
been expecting that section to contain a discussion of the threat of viruses.

“We conclude that it is not possible for naturally occurring epidemics to wipe out
society. The Black Plague and Spanish influenza brought massive numbers of deaths,
but they did not lead to our extinction. It is still unclear how the limited number
of genes within human beings counter the countless number of antigens in the world,
yet it is clear that we have obtained sufficient genetic diversity to resist many
kinds of pathogens.”

Didn’t a Japanese scientist win the Nobel Prize for solving this riddle? Kento tried
to recall.

“No matter how dangerous the epidemic, there will be individuals whose immune systems
can defeat the disease. Those of us alive now are living proof that over the last
two hundred thousand years
no
epidemic has arisen that can wipe out mankind.

“But the one remaining worry is the appearance of a virus that will directly attack
the immune system.”

Kento instinctively leaned forward. That virus had already appeared. The HIV virus
that causes AIDS.

“According to congressional testimony given in June of 1969 by the assistant head
of research and development at the Defense Department, ‘In five to ten years we will
create a pathogenic microorganism unaffected by the immune process.’ If such a biological
weapon is used in a regional conflict or escapes from a research facility, and if
the infection spreads, the continuation of human beings as a species will be at risk.”

Dumbfounded, Kento tried to recall what he knew about AIDS. The disease was first
identified in the United States in the early 1980s. If plans had progressed as the
person from the Defense Department testified, this “pathogenic microorganism unaffected
by the immune process” would have been developed in the 1970s. Allowing for a latency
period for the virus, the development of biological weapons and the appearance of
AIDS overlapped exactly in terms of time period.

Was the AIDS virus a biological weapon developed by the United States?

There was one more reason this possibility occurred to Kento. Ten years ago, his father
had gone to Zaire, as it was then called, where the AIDS epidemic was becoming ever
more serious. He was part of an epidemiology investigation team funded by the Ministry
of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology that was charged with determining
whether the HIV virus had spread to the Pygmy tribes. But as soon as they got to Zaire
a civil war broke out, and Seiji barely escaped with his life back to Japan.

His father. An epidemiologist. The Heisman Report. An FBI investigation. Put them
all together and the outlines of what was going on became clear. Seiji had gotten
hold of proof that the HIV virus had been developed as a biological weapon and that
the US government was trying to cover this up.

Wait a second, Kento told himself. He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the
ceiling. No good to blame everything on a plot devised by the United States. There
have been many investigations into the HIV virus by specialists, and most of them
concluded that the virus originated in Africa. Plus, when Seiji went to Zaire—which
became the Democratic Republic of the Congo after a change of government—he didn’t
come back empty-handed. He was able to collect blood samples from one Pygmy tribe,
the Mbuti, and determined that not only weren’t they infected by the HIV virus, they
weren’t infected by any type of virus at all. The virus that would have helped show
that HIV was a biological weapon was missing.