Plague Ship (51 page)

“Calm down! They don’t know anything. The FBI is using their Gestapo tactics to intimidate us. If they knew about our plan, they would have arrested everyone in California and coordinated with Turkish authorities to raid this facility.”

“But it’s coming apart. I can feel it.” Severance sat heavily on a chair and buried his face in his hands.

“Get ahold of yourself. This isn’t a big deal.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Severance spat like a petulant child. “You’re not the one under arrest. You get to hide in the shadows while I take the fall.”

“Damnit, Thom. Listen to me. The FBI has no idea what we are trying to accomplish. They might have an inkling that we are plotting something, but they don’t know what. This is a—what’s that expression?—a fishing expedition. They issued a generic warrant to see our records in hopes of finding something incriminating. We both know there isn’t.

“We’ve made sure from the very first that our records are clean. The Responsivist organization is a nonprofit, so we don’t pay taxes, but we have filed our financials with the IRS like clockwork. Unless you and Susan have done something stupid, like not pay your income tax on the salary you’re paid, they have nothing. You’ve paid your taxes, right?”

“Of course we have.”

“Then stop worrying. There shouldn’t be anything at the house that could possibly lead them here. They might discover that we had an operation in the Philippines, but we can say it was a family-planning clinic that didn’t attract any visitors so we closed it down. The Philippines is predominantly Catholic, so that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.”

“But the timing of the raid, so close to when we release the virus?”

“Coincidence.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in them.”

“I don’t, but, in this case, I am certain of it. The FBI simply doesn’t know anything, Thom. Trust me.” When Severance’s grimace didn’t soften, Cooper went on. “Listen. Here’s what we are going to do. You are going to issue a press release demanding these scurrilous charges be dropped immediately and calling the FBI’s actions a violation of your personal and civil rights. This is pure harassment, and you are already preparing to file a civil suit against the Justice Department. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. The helicopter we’ve been ferrying in personnel on is still here on the island. I will go to Izmir, where the jet is waiting. Tell Susan that she should get out of California. I will meet her and her sister in Phoenix and bring them back. We hadn’t planned on moving into the bunker until shortly before the virus manifests itself, but coming a few months early is no great hardship. Afterward, I guarantee that a bogus charge against you will be extremely low on the federal government’s priority list.”

“What about sending the broadcast?”

“It is an honor I leave up to you.” Cooper crossed the room so he could lay a gnarled hand on Severance’s shoulder. “It’s going to be all right, Thom. Your man Kovac will eliminate whoever killed Zach Raymond on the
Golden Sky
, and, in a few short hours, all of our teams will be in position with the virus ready for disbursal. We’re here. It’s our moment. Don’t let something like this ludicrous raid upset you, okay? And, listen, even if they seize the house and everything in it, our movement will have already achieved its greatest success. They can’t take that away from us, and they certainly can’t stop us.”

Severance looked up at his father-in-law. It was disconcerting at times to look at his middle-aged face and know he was in his eighties. Lydell had been more than an in-law. He had been a mentor, and the driving force for all Thom’s success. Cooper had walked away at the pinnacle of his career so he could protect what he’d created from the outside, tossing away his very identity in order to bring them to this point.

He had never doubted Cooper before, and, while errant thoughts niggled at the back of his mind, he would trust their relationship more than his gut. He stood, gently placing his hand over Cooper’s arthritis-ravaged, gloved claw.

“I’m sorry. I was putting my petty fears above our goals. What does it matter if I am arrested? The virus will be released and will spread all over the globe. The scourge of overpopulation will end, and, as you’ve said before, humanity will enter a new Golden Age.”

“In time, we will be seen as heroes. They will erect statues of us for having had the courage to find the most humane solution to our problems.”

“Do you ever wonder if, instead, they will hate us for making so many of them sterile?”

“We will be hated by individuals, sure, but humanity as a whole understands that drastic change is necessary. They already see it with the global-warming debate. Things cannot go on the way they are. You may ask, by what right do we alone do this?” Cooper’s eyes glittered. “And I say, it is by right of being rational rather than emotional.

“We do it by the right that we are right. There is no alternative. I wonder if Jonathan Swift was really being satirical when he penned
A Modest Proposal
in 1729. He saw then that England was being overrun by homeless urchins and that the country was going to be ruined. In order to save themselves, he said they ought to just eat the children and the problem would vanish. Eighty years later, Thomas Malthus published his famous essay on population growth. He called for ‘moral restraint,’ meaning voluntary abstinence, to reduce humanity’s swelling numbers.

“Of course, that would never work, and now even after decades of cheap birth control our numbers multiply. I said that change was necessary, but we won’t change. We haven’t yet, so I say to hell with them. If they can’t curb their instinct to procreate, I will give in to my instinct of self-preservation and save the planet by doing away with half of the next generation.”

Cooper’s voice became a strident hiss. “And, in truth, should we even care if the great sea of unwashed out there hate us? If they are too stupid to understand they are destroying themselves what does their opinion matter to us? We are like a shepherd culling a flock. Do you think he cares what the rest of the sheep think? He knows better, Thom. We know better.”

CHAPTER 34

ERIC STONE’S STOMACH WAS TOO KNOTTED TO EAT the traditional astronaut’s breakfast of steak and eggs. He wasn’t nervous about the upcoming suborbital flight. In fact, he was eager for the experience. It was the fear of failure that cramped his body and turned his mouth as dry as the desert outside the hangar. He was all too aware that this was the single most important mission of his career, and, no matter what happened in the future, nothing would top it. He was facing a life-defining moment, with the fate of humanity resting in his hands.

And as if that weren’t enough, he also couldn’t get out of his mind the fact that Max Hanley was trapped on Eos Island.

Like Mark Murphy, Eric had been catapulted by his intelligence to early success without giving him the time to properly mature. Mark hid it by playing at being a rebel, growing his hair long, blaring loud music, and pretending to flout authority. Eric had no such persona. He remained shy and socially awkward, so it was little wonder that he had always needed mentoring. In high school, the mentor had been a physics teacher, at Annapolis, an English instructor, who, ironically, he’d never had a class with. After he was commissioned, he couldn’t find someone to take him under his wing—the military wasn’t structured that way—and he was ready to leave after putting in his mandatory five years.

Eric hadn’t known it, but his last commanding officer had gotten word to an old friend, Hanley, that Stone would make an excellent addition to the Corporation. When Max made the initial approach, Eric agreed to join almost immediately. He recognized in the former Swift Boat commander the same things he had seen in his old teachers. Max had this calm, steady demeanor and endless patience, and he knew how to nurture talent. He was slowly molding Eric into the man he always wanted to be.

This was the other reason Eric couldn’t eat and had slept only fitfully the night before. Success today would mean he had killed a man who had been more of a father to him than the man who had raised him.

“You okay, son?” Jack Taggart asked as they were putting on their flight suits in a locker room behind the hangar office. The space plane’s cabin was pressurized, so the suits were little more than olive drab overalls. “You look a little green around the gills.”

“A lot on my mind, Colonel,” Eric replied.

“Well, I don’t want you to worry none about the flight,” the former Shuttle pilot drawled. “I’ll get us there and back, no problem.”

“I can honestly say that the last thing I’m concerned with is the flight itself.”

A technician stuck his head into the room. “Gentlemen, you’d better shake a leg. Flight director wants
Kanga
rolling in twenty minutes.”

Taggart snatched up his helmet from his locker and said, “Then let’s go light this candle.”

There were two reclined seats behind the pilot’s position in the sleek space plane, ’
Roo
. Eric had spent the early morning hours securing his computer and the transmitter into one of them. He eased himself into the second and kept his hands away from his chest, as workers belted him in as secure as a Grand Prix driver. Above him was a pair of windows, through which he could see the underside of the mother ship. There were small windows on either side as well. Taggart was in front of him, talking to flight director Rick Butterfield.

Eric jacked his helmet into a communications port and waited for a pause in Taggart’s conversation to do a radio check on the flight frequency, before switching over to another frequency, though he could still hear the pilot in one ear.

“Elton, this is John, how do you read me? Over.” Hali Kasim had picked the code names from the Elton John song “Rocket Man.”

“John, this is Elton. Reading you five by five. Over.”

“Elton, prepare to receive telemetry on my mark. Three, two, one, mark.” Eric hit a key on his laptop so that Hali could monitor the flight and the Russian satellite in real time aboard the
Oregon
. He’d even rigged a webcam so his shipmates could see what he was seeing.

“John, signal looks good. Over.”

“Okay, we’re about ten minutes from rollout. I’ll keep you updated. Over.”

“Roger that. Good luck. Over.”

The big hangar doors rattled open, bathing the cavernous space in the ruddy light of a new day. There were enough workers on hand to push
Kanga
out onto the apron. On the edge of the runway sat a ramshackle mobile home that was the flight director’s control center. Its roof bristled with antennae and a pair of revolving radar dishes.

“How you doing back there?” Taggart called over his shoulder.

Before Eric could reply, the two turbojets mounted on the top of
Kanga
’s fuselage roared into life. Taggart repeated the question over the radio, because it was too loud to speak comfortably.

“Getting a little excited,” Eric confessed.

“Don’t forget, I’ll flash a red light on your console when we’re ten seconds from the end of the burn. It’ll turn yellow when we’re at five and green when the rocket motor cuts out. At that moment, we’ll be at an altitude of roughly seventy-five miles, but once the motor runs dry we start falling immediately. So do your thing fast.”

“You got it.”

“Here we go,” Taggart announced as
Kanga
started to taxi.

The gawky mother ship, with its droopy wings, rolled onto the runway and turned sharply to align with the center stripe. It began to accelerate immediately, the engines keening at full power. Designed for the sole purpose of getting ’
Roo
up to its launch altitude of thirty-eight thousand feet,
Kanga
wasn’t the most dynamic aircraft in terms of performance. It used up nearly the entire runway before transitioning into the air to start its long, stately ascent. Out the side window, Eric could see its bizarre shadow racing across the scrub desert. It looked like something out of a science-fiction movie.

It took an hour for the plane to spiral up to altitude. Eric spent the time double-checking his equipment. Taggart merely sat quietly in his seat, playing a Game Boy flight simulator.

They were ten minutes early, according to Eric’s timetable, so the plane carved lazy figure eights in the sky. High above them, the Soviet satellite was fast approaching. Unlike the Shuttle or the International Space Station that orbited parallel to the equator, the Orbital Ballistic Projectile weapon swept over the globe from pole to pole. In this way, it crisscrossed every square inch of the planet in fourteen days, as the earth revolved beneath it. It was currently over Wyoming, coming on at almost five miles per second. In its present orbital track, it wouldn’t arrive over Eos Island for another week, which was why one of the signals Eric had to send was to fire its maneuvering rockets and change its vector. If everything went as planned, the satellite would be in range to fire one of its rods in less than eight hours.

“Coming up on T minus one minute,” Eric heard Butterfield announce. “All boards are green.”

“Roger that, Ground. Sixty seconds.”

A timer on Eric’s console began to click backward, while the digital speed indicator mounted on the dashboard remained pegged at four hundred miles per hour.

“Thirty seconds . . . Ten . . . Five, four, three, two, one. Go for separation.”

The pilot aboard the mother ship released a lever that held ’
Roo
clamped to the aircraft’s belly. The space plane fell free for a few moments, to get distance from
Kanga,
before Taggart toggled the liquid-rocket motor.

To Eric, it felt as if every one of his senses was assaulted at the same instant. The roar of the engine was like standing at the base of a waterfall, a palpable sensation that beat on his chest. The airframe’s vibrations forced him to clutch the armrest while he was slammed back into his seat, as if by a giant fist. His body shook inside his skin so much it felt like someone was rubbing him with sandpaper. His mouth had gone dry from the dose of adrenaline sent shooting into his veins. Focusing hard on the speedometer, he saw that, in seconds, they were nearing the sound barrier.