The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(39)
“I know, Ben.” She looked at the president. “I know it sounds crazy, but Zouskis makes a really good case here. Our first impulse was the same as yours, but it doesn’t add up. There has been no amassing of troops, no inflamed rhetoric, nothing to signal a political move or a territorial expansion, even when we look at it in retrospect. Things have been pretty good with China. So we looked at other avenues, all the things that come easily to mind like some sort of civil protest that got out of hand, but that’s not the kind of thing that the Chinese would drop a nuke over, and unrest of the scale requiring nuclear pacification isn’t really the sort of thing they could keep entirely quiet. We would have heard rumblings.”
Alex sighed. “I suppose it’s possible there was a full-scale secret military facility on the site and we just missed it, and it was a rogue faction of the army that had to be pacified with a nuke, but if that was the case, then we need to give the Chinese a hell of a lot more credit in their ability to hide themselves. No. As much as it sounds like a bit of a stretch, I think the most likely explanation is that there was some sort of a small lab. Really small. Just a scientist or two tinkering around. Off the reservation. I don’t mean a lab that is completely off-the-books, but a lab that just wasn’t considered important enough to be kept on a military facility site. Small-scale. A sort of boutique kind of shop with a mad scientist. Small enough that they weren’t prepared for the kind of success they had in coming up with a new weapon. The kind of lab where they threw a couple hundred thousand dollars at the scientists and sent them off to go fail in peace. We do the same thing here. Do you know how many crazy, speculative projects we fund, both on and off the books? Nano parasites and sonic lasers and death rays and all that sort of crap? Look, I’d be really happy to come in here and say our information points to it being an accident or that the Chinese dropped a nuke out of political motivation, but that’s not what we’re seeing.” She paused and looked at each of them.
And then she said, “I think it’s something worse. I think it’s worse than whatever we are actually thinking right now.”
Alex stood up and pinched the touch screen, pulling back to a map that showed the entire province. “We aren’t seeing soldiers fighting soldiers on the ground, and we aren’t seeing the kind of troop movement that would indicate outward expansion. Maybe it’s the use of the word bugs that’s throwing you here, but when I say ‘bugs’ think of it as just a nickname for something. Our best bet—with what little intelligence we have right now—is pointing toward some sort of bioweapon that they lost control of. Right now, whatever it is, it’s something we don’t understand, and that something scared the shit out of them. It scared them enough that when trying to contain it they failed, and they were willing to drop a thirty-megaton nuke in order to clean up the mess they made. Whatever it is, I don’t think we’re looking down the barrel of a conventional ground war. I mean, Madam President, what would scare you badly enough that you’d be willing to nuke one of our own cities?”
“Okay.” The president stood up and walked over to the monitor showing the map. “Bugs. A bioweapon. Whatever. The point is that our analyst . . . ?”
“Zouskis.”
“Zouskis has given us information that shows something was going on. So can we agree, at this point, that we are ruling out the Chinese explanation, that it was simply an accident?”
“Maybe that’s for the best,” Manny said. “On some level the idea that the Chinese just accidentally turned part of their country into a glowing wasteland is actually more disturbing than the idea that they did it on purpose.”
The president nodded. “Okay. So we’re already in the process of deploying troops outside the country based on the idea of containment if the Chinese are planning to use the explosion as a gambit to make a move for territory,” she said. “But what if Alex is right? Because I have to be honest, as crazy as it sounds, and as much as there is no f*cking way we can whisper a word of this to the press—can you imagine the civil unrest if word leaked that there was some sort of Chinese bioweapon experiment gone wrong that required a nuke to contain it?—I think there is a compelling argument here that this might have been pure panic on the part of the Chinese. So the real question is, what do we do?”
“Madam President,” Ben said. He smoothed the folds in his uniform with his palm. “With all due respect to Alex and her little analyst, this is ridiculous. Two sentences that use the word insects, a couple of grainy photos, and a few seconds of jerky video? Based on that, we’re going to assume there is some sort of new, virulent superweapon out there?”
Manny watched Steph stare at Ben. That was one of the things he liked about her. She wasn’t afraid to make everybody wait on her if she needed to think about something. She looked away from Ben to the map that showed troop deployments and then back at Ben.
“Get them back,” she said.
“Ma’am?” Ben looked confused.
“Get them back,” Steph said. “All the troops we started shifting outside the country. Boots back on the ground.”
Billy, who had been quiet for most of the past ten minutes, perked up. “You want us to pull all the troops who are OCONUS back home?”
“Not all of them,” the president said. “Just the ones we sent in reaction to the nuke. And I want it done now. Immediately.”