Ben opened his mouth to speak but then stopped. It was actually kind of comical, Manny thought. Ben was not the kind of man to hold himself back or to second-guess, and the sight of him with his mouth hanging open would have been, at another time and under different circumstances, worth laughing at. But it wasn’t another time and different circumstances. It was the day after China accidentally dropped a nuclear weapon on one of its own villages. Except the problem was they still weren’t entirely sure if China had accidentally dropped the weapon or if they had “accidentally” dropped the weapon.
“That’s what I’m trying to say.” Alex put her cup down and pulled her tablet out and put it on the table. “I’m sorry for being late, and I’m sure Billy and Ben did an excellent job of explaining the rationale behind deployment decisions, but all those decisions are based on the idea that this nuclear explosion was either just an accident, as the Chinese claim, or part of some sort of wider, deliberate strategy. But the thing is, from the information I have, I’m willing to say it wasn’t an accident, and that it wasn’t planned either,” Alex said. She tapped the tablet twice and brought up a picture. “The important thing is that the information we have leads me to believe that while this wasn’t a strategic decision, there was a reason the Chinese set off the explosion. They were trying to cover something up. The images we have aren’t great, but look here. There just isn’t much going on in that part of China on a regular basis, and even though we have satellite coverage, it’s limited. Frankly, this part of China isn’t considered important, and it hasn’t been a real priority with imaging. Tech has enhanced, but there’s a limit to the resolution and to how much we can blow things up.” She spun the tablet so that it was facing the president. The men—and everybody else in the room other than Steph and Alex was a man—leaned forward so they could see the picture. “Blow things up is maybe the wrong phrase given what happened, but this is from five hours before the nuke.”
Manny had seen enough of these sorts of military satellite pictures that even if he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at, he could recognize the pattern of cars and trucks in a parking lot, the layout of buildings. He turned to the aide behind him. “Get this up on the big monitor.”
The young man nodded, took the tablet, tapped it a few times, and then the image was on the wall.
“Here,” Alex said, standing up and tapping against the monitor. “This is the entrance to the main mine. Primarily rare earth metals, the kind of stuff you’ll find in your cell phones and your tablets. They do most of the refining on-site, here, in this large complex of buildings.” She tapped another spot. “As far as we can tell, all of this over here is just garages, maintenance, that sort of thing. I mean, it looks so damn regular it’s almost comical. There are a couple of factories in the village, some chemical processing stuff, but basically, if this mine weren’t here, the village wouldn’t be here. The mine is the center of things.”
Ben Broussard was standing now, leaning over Manny’s shoulder and staring at the image on Alex’s tablet instead of looking at the monitor on the wall. “Military? You’re saying this is a hidden military facility?”
“Not exactly,” Alex said. “That’s the thing. If it were a standard military, chem, or bio research facility, we would have better pictures. I mean, obviously, it’s possible we just whiffed. We all know how much we’ve struggled with getting agents on the ground in China, particularly in the rural areas, but I don’t think that’s what we have here. I think it’s something small. Maybe biological weapons. Maybe chemical. But almost certainly only a couple of scientists, a few rooms, the sort of thing that could stay hidden because nobody, including the Chinese, think it’s important. I mean, this is the ass end of China. The analyst for this region is young, uh,” she looked over her shoulder at her aide who said something under his breath, “Terry Zouskis, but she’s sharp. She knows what she is talking about, and, well, here’s the thing. Something was going on, something that scared the shit out of the Chinese.”
“Bioweapons?” Billy looked rattled when he said it, and Manny couldn’t blame him. Conventions and treaties be damned, they all knew the Chinese were researching biological agents, and sooner or later there was going to be a breach. The only question was how big a problem it was going to cause for the Chinese. And the world. Was it a “drop a nuke on it” kind of problem?