The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(37)
He stood up and clapped his hands twice. The room quieted. Steph was looking at him with a smirk, but she’d missed the transaction between him and Alex. She thought he was just trying to quiet the room down.
“Everybody out. Billy, Ben, Alex, you stay; everybody else out.” He gave them only half a second to look confused before he yelled it. “Out! Get the f*ck out of here!” The aides and staff scrambled, and suddenly it was just the president, the national security advisor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretary of defense, and all of them were staring at Manny and waiting for him to speak.
Alex looked at him calmly. Even if he didn’t actually know the specifics of why he’d done it, why he’d cleared the room, it was what Alex had been waiting for: whatever it was she was about to say, he’d been right that she hadn’t wanted to say it to everyone in the room. She turned to address Steph. Manny, just for a moment, thought that Alexandra Harris had arrived a generation too soon; she was somebody who could have held the presidency if she’d been born at the right time.
“Look, I don’t have anything here,” Manny said, “but Alex clearly does, and she can correct me if I’m wrong, but it is something she didn’t want to say in front of a crowd.” Everybody turned to look at Alex, and she didn’t correct Manny. “You all know me, and you know I don’t hold back, and if this was politics or whatever, fine, but the Chinese just dropped a nuclear f*cking bomb. This is one of those ‘history is going to look back and judge us’ kinds of moments, and I, for one, think we better get it right. Or, maybe more importantly, we can’t afford to get it wrong. I have no clue what the deal is, but there is clearly something Alex knows that she needs to share with us but doesn’t exactly want to say.”
Steph cleared her throat. “Just tell me it isn’t zombies. Did you catch that * on the news saying there was a possibility that the nuke was to cover up a zombie outbreak?” Manny had watched the news with Steph and had actually been kind of amused at the earnestness of the commentators. He’d long ago gotten used to talking heads who made their livings bashing the administration. They were the ones who never seemed to let facts or journalism stand in their way. “I swear to God, if I hear the word ‘zombies’ out of anyone’s mouth, I’m ordering the Secret Service to take you out to the Rose Garden to have you summarily executed.” Ben Broussard and Billy Cannon both chuckled, but Alex’s expression didn’t change.
“Bugs,” Alex said. Her voice was soft.
“Pardon me?” the president said, and she wasn’t smiling anymore.
“I said bugs. It’s not conventional, and we don’t think it’s chemical weapons. The Chinese used the word bugs, or insects, and we don’t really know exactly what it is, so we’ve been calling the weapon ‘bugs.’ A nickname. Because the thing is, you’re right about the guns. The soldiers are there to keep everybody inside the building. Zouskis, the analyst, pulled pictures from the satellite for the past six months, and until six days ago, there was nothing of note. Nothing. I mean, zip, zilch, nada. Malls in Lincoln, Nebraska, have more security than this place had. No men with weapons, no soldiers, no security guards. There wasn’t even a fence around the mine. This was not a place that had any kind of priority for the Chinese government. There was nothing to protect. And then, six days ago, a couple of army trucks showed up. It’s the sort of thing we wouldn’t pay any attention to if this part of China hadn’t just been turned into a radioactive crater. But we go from nothing to, six days ago, a fence going up around the town and an entire f*cking battalion, six or seven hundred troops, streaming into the area. Most of the strength focused around the mine and the refinery area, but it wasn’t clear at first they were doing anything other than guarding it. You know, making sure nobody got in. But there were also enough troops left to keep an eye on the village as a whole, to make sure nobody was coming or going except through the main gate, and even then, as near as Zouskis could tell, it’s only troops coming in. No one leaves. The first picture where we figured out they are worried about something coming out of the mine is this one,” she said, leaning forward and pointing to the photo on the tablet, “five hours before the nuke.”
Billy Cannon leaned back against his chair. He was looking at Alex, not at the tablet. “Bugs?”
“I’m getting there,” Alex said. “So we don’t have satellite coverage again for two hours, but what we have next is video. Details aren’t great, but watch.”
She closed the picture and opened a video file. There wasn’t any sound except for the five of them breathing. It was the same buildings and parking lot from the satellite photo, though the angle was slightly different. “So you’ll want to look here,” Alex said, “near the entrance to the mine again. It’s grainy, but here, those pinpricks of light are muzzle flashes. The soldiers are firing their weapons.”
“They’re running,” Billy said. “They’re running away.”
“You can’t really see much with all those shadows,” Steph said.
Alex touched the screen and paused the video. “Madam President, those aren’t shadows.”
Steph went pale. She stood up and pointed at the frozen image. “Right there. Not all of it, but the shadows covering where the soldiers ran.”