Arisen : Genesis (8 page)

But, hey, better safe in here than out there…

* * *

He’d only just gotten back into his document, when everything went to shit again. And everything in their intelligence and operational worlds went mental.

11/11 happened.

And the sons of bitches pulled it off on Remembrance Day
, Zack thought. He was still a child of the Commonwealth, those former British colonies who along with Britain still took armistice day very seriously.
Cheeky bastards…

He was at least grateful that it wasn’t America that got hit this time. Though it looked like there were plenty of Americans on both flights. And it just had to be triple-sevens…

They had been two BA 777s on approach to London Heathrow. One ditched in the Channel and came apart on entry, with almost definitely no survivors. That whole preflight thing about “in the event of a water landing, your seat cushion will act as a flotation device” always made Zack laugh. If your plane is ditching in water, that means it lacks one of two things – either thrust or control. And without both of these there’s a 99% chance that when your aircraft hits water it will shortly after be tumbling end over end, breaking into a million fragments under spectacular torsion forces, and nearly instantly, but perhaps not quite instantly enough, killing everyone aboard.

But at least that first aircraft had only its own blood on its hands. Because the second had gone down west of London, in the suburb of Slough. Luckily, there is no hell, and Zack wasn’t going to it for remembering the immortal couplet, which he had learned at his English school: “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! / It isn't fit for humans now.”

This morning’s attacks were a million miles from Hargeisa. And Zack knew they would be 97% not the Agency’s problem. They would be the problem of MI5 and MI6, and the Met, and BTP, and UKCAA – and maybe even Hereford, if they unraveled the plot and found some safehouse in Bradford or Walthamstow to raid. But it still fucked up the rest of Zack’s day, and probably his whole week.

Of course the Brits would get total cooperation from every U.S. agency with three letters. But for right now Zack’s official job, in a foreign station, would simply be to batten down the hatches. Any major terrorist incident brought a lockdown of all overseas gov and mil facilities. Luckily, the safehouse wasn’t an embassy, with juicy targets like ambassadors. They were just a bunch of Company cowboys, who would be missed, but not embarrassingly or cripplingly so.

Zack didn’t need to hit the all-hands buzzer to get the others in there. All of them were already getting secure messages on their devices, as well as cleartext ones from buddies and family members back home – many of whom knew that they were deployed, and wrote to tell them to stay safe. They all clomped into the TOC within seconds of one another.

Zack turned his chair to the center of the room, and briefed them on what SOP would be now. Basically, they were on lockdown. Which mainly meant they’d be living on tinned food for days or weeks – no roaming the market stalls for fruit and vegetables, nor roaming any of the streets for that matter. And the only intel they could deliver would be gathered on the phone, from UAVs – or with binoculars looking out the upper-floor windows.

“No problem, Zack,” Dugan said, speaking for the others. “We’re well-provisioned. Bob and I will put up the storm shutters and door braces, then take overwatch positions upstairs. And we’ll all hide out until the all-clear comes down.”

Zack nodded. He knew these two had learned the lessons of the men who fell in Benghazi – Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Those two had swept almost the whole consulate staff to safety across a mile of hostile city, then fought off 400 assholes for hours – but then both died when an asshole with a mortar tube made a lucky shot on the rooftop of the CIA safehouse. They had been up there manning a heavy machine gun and lasing targets on the ground. All to cover the withdrawal and recovery of the consular staff.

Zack noticed Dugan and Bob almost never went on the roof.

“I don’t have any expectation that anything’s going to kick off,” he said. “Though things have been weird enough around here without this. Anyway, let’s just tighten up, lay low, and do our jobs. And keep ourselves safe.”

Baxter strapped into his station, and the SEALs marched off to man the ramparts.

And it was only as Zack mentally reviewed what he’d said that he took a look inside his head and recognized that what he was feeling was…
relief
. He was relieved not to have to go out there for a while. And he was having one other emotion, as well: he was spooked. Even more so now.

Though there was, he knew, or should be, no shame in that.

He just had to keep it to himself.

Gamma Rays

Zack and Baxter spent much of the day dealing with Liberty Crossing.

As those not in the game have little reason to know, Liberty Crossing is the home of NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center, located near Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. It consists of a large, nondescript white office building, with bullet- and blast-proof windows and with every office literally a vault, with a coded lock for entry. NCTC had their own staff, plus attachments from CIA, FBI, DIA, and JSOC. They also shared the complex with the Pentagon’s Joint Intelligence Task Force-Counterterrorism.

Within seconds of the 11/11 attacks, Liberty Crossing was all hands on deck, working like Pharaoh’s slaves to figure out if there was anything headed America’s way next. This involved capturing and cross-referencing oceans of data, from anywhere and everywhere – including from Zack’s patch.

It was dot-connecting on a massive scale.

NCTC was essentially set up to be the single clearinghouse for CT-related intel. Never again with the CIA having the names and photographs of two al-Qaeda guys who had been learning to fly large jets… and the FBI knowing they were both in the U.S. on September 10th… but with nobody knowing both things.

Today, later in the day of the attack, Liberty Crossing guys got interested in grilling Zack about the latest/greatest on the movements, activities, and plans of a-S and AQAP. And they had exactly zero time for hearing about a strange flu going around. If it wasn’t weaponized, and wasn’t actionable intel, they had bigger shits to take. Zack knew, because he tried to bring it up.

I don’t know
, he thought wearily.
Maybe they’re right.

“Britain’s locking down,” Baxter said from across the room, as Zack got off the line.

“What, their overseas facilities?”

“No, their country. Starting with air traffic. All of it. They’ve diverted inbound flights, and canceled outgoing ones.”

“Everything? For how long?”

“They’re not saying.”

Zack knew that was a lot of aircraft. Just rerouting and landing the ones aloft would bring a whole new set of problems and risks.

“But get this,” Baxter said, swiveling to face him. “They’ve also shut international ground traffic. Trains and ferries. They’re being turned away – back across the Channel, or back down the Chunnel.”

Zack squinted. That was something different. “You think they know something we don’t? About a bigger plot, maybe?”

“It’s possible.”

Zack shook his head. “Hell.”

“What? Something else?”

“No. I was just thinking that the world’s really going to shit.”

“You just worked that out?”

“Nobody likes a twenty-three-year-old smart-ass, Baxter.”

But Zack smiled at him. He knew he wouldn’t want his first assignment to be out there in Assville working for a burnt-out case like Zack. And with killer SEALs, and their wicked senses of humor, wandering the halls.
Hell
, Zack thought,
it was a miracle Baxter had found his feet as well as he had
. And to the point of being able to throw it back at them. That was a good sign.

Baxter looked at Zack across the quiet and gently blinking room. They seemed to have hit a lull in the storm. “You really think it will be a virus that gets us in the end?” Again, he looked as if he were in a senior seminar.

Zack shrugged. “I maintain a sort of mental leader board of apocalyptic threats. After 9/11, for a while, I thought it would be suitcase nukes.”

Baxter nodded. “I’ve read that was the nightmare scenario back then – same attackers, but with unconventional weapons. Hence the Iraq War.” As he said this, Zack realized with a shudder that Baxter had been a little kid in 2001.

He shook his head and spoke. “During the Cold War, both the Soviets and the U.S. had tactical battlefield nukes. Including backpack-size ones. Only ours are totally accounted for. To be clear, I didn’t think it would totally end civilization, much less wipe out humanity. But if you look at the economic cost, and follow-on social effects, of 9/11, it ran to the trillions – and launched us into a decade and a half of non-stop war. But if you think that was dramatic, just wait until nuclear weapons go off in a few western cities. It would make 9/11 look like a fire drill.”

Baxter just nodded, looking sad.

“But more to the point, if at any moment the whole joint can incinerate in a nuclear fireball, it basically makes western civilization impossible. Commerce, trade, civil liberties, development, science – it’s all out the window. If we’d gone down that road, we weren’t coming back. It would have been teotwaki.”

“Teot-what?”

“TEOTWAKI. Not the end of the world – just The End Of The World As We Know It. The effective end of modernity, and all the prosperity, security, freedom, and economic growth modernity has enabled. The end of a few centuries of modern western civilization.”

Baxter paused. “If you watch the movies, you’d think killer asteroids were the biggest threat to human survival.”

“No.” Zack shook his head, legs stretched out. “There are no big ones imminent. We’d have spotted them by now.” He seemed unaware that he was responding seriously to what Baxter had intended as a joke. “We’ve gotten through the real danger period when we couldn’t see killer asteroids coming. Odds are good that by the next time we’ve got a big one inbound, we’ll be able to reliably take it out. No, it’s gamma rays that are the real horror show.”

“Gamma rays?”

“Yeah. Every time a star goes supernova, it sends out a killer blast of gamma radiation. And we literally wouldn’t see one coming, because they move at exactly the speed of light. It would just be an enormous wave of lethal radiation slamming into us.”

“No warning?”

“Not really. We’d see a huge second sun in the sky as it was happening. And then every living creature on Earth would sicken and die over the next few days.”

“Makes everything seem kind of pointless.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a reminder that all
this
…” and Zack waved his arm around at the TOC, “is totally contingent. There’s absolutely no guarantee any of it will go on. Hell, as far as we know, human culture is the weirdest thing ever to appear in the universe. It’s a miracle that it came about at all, never mind made it this far. And, if anything, it makes all of it even more precious and wonderful.”

“So you think we’re alone in the universe?”

Zack considered this, then decided to deflect it. “Who knows? All I know is we have to labor on in hope.” He turned back to his station, voice growing more matter-of-fact. “Anyway, it probably won’t be gamma rays. It would have to be a star really close by, and pointed right at us, and right at that exact point in its multi-billion-year lifespan. It’s literally astronomically unlikely.”

Baxter just nodded, then turned back to his work as well. He was smart enough to know how very, very little he knew, and that his major job in this place was simply to learn – to become incrementally less useless. And he’d gotten where he was by being a good student, a learning creature. But he wondered if this existential stuff was the kind of thing he should be learning.

Maybe it was.

* * *

At his station, pretending to work, Zack mulled the follow-on lecture he had queued up but had decided to skip. Even he knew that some lessons are better not delivered; some intel best not acquired. Lately he had been thinking a lot about the fact that as unconventional weapons – nuclear, bio, cyber, nano – got smaller, hugely more destructive, and, inevitably, more democratic… there would be no possible defense against them.

And he said this as one of the guys responsible for the defense. Protecting us from those threats was the exact job of the intelligence community, as well as the enormous and unrivaled American military, and the sprawling research, development, and manufacturing apparatus that backed it all up.

But deep down, Zack figured it was going to avail us nothing.

Because remorseless technological progress meant that, one day, sooner or later, a single isolated asshole was going to have the power to kill everyone. Whether it was backpack nukes, or a bioengineered virus, or a self-replicating nanobot swarm, or a crippling cyber-attack… one day, and he thought it worth repeating,
a single isolated asshole
was going to have the power to kill us all.

And so the only way anybody was going to be safe was if no one any longer
wanted
to fuck anybody else up. Unfortunately, that was probably going to require an overhaul of human nature, which itself was the product of six million years of hominid evolution. It was also going to require – and Zack thought this as an unreconstructed hawk and neo-con – that the U.S. stop pissing people off. Because, in the end, defenses, no matter how good, simply weren’t going to cut it.

And that was the optimistic take.

The other take was that
there was always going to be a single isolated asshole
. Someone who nursed a grudge against the world, or existence itself. Or just somebody whose neural wiring had shorted out. There would always be someone twisted or broken enough to want to flip the off switch for humanity.

And if that were true, it would be enough to explain the Fermi Paradox. Often abbreviated to “Where is everyone?” this was the fact that, with the quadrillions of stars we see in the visible universe, statistically, the universe ought to be abuzz with the activity of untold millions of advanced civilizations.