“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 fucking 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.”
Manny felt his stomach hollowing. He was pretty sure he didn’t understand everything, but this did not seem good. Alex, who tended to keep a neutral facade, never too hot or too cold, looked exceedingly grim. He stared at the stopped video, but all he was seeing were shadows.
Alex dragged the slider backward and Manny realized the shadows retreated with the video. “Those aren’t shadows,” Alex said again. “Watch here, where these two soldiers stop firing and start to run. See how they’re in the lit area?” She hit the play button and the group watched the two figures move away from the building. A finger of shadow moved with them and then overtook them. The soldiers didn’t emerge from the darkness.
“Bugs?” the president said, looking at Alex.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Manny blurted out.
Alex sighed. “You can see why I was hesitant to say anything when there were more people in the room.”
“Come on, Alex,” Ben said. “How are you making the leap from this to bugs?”
“That’s the word they’re using. We ran it past three translators and they all agreed on some variant of insects. There isn’t much.” She pulled a sheet of paper from her bag. “Here. We caught ‘No longer contained. The insects are,’ and then it’s cut off by static, and then we get another chunk that says, ‘not stopping the insects,’ before we lose it altogether.” Alex put the paper on the table but nobody made any motion to pick it up. “I haven’t lost my mind. I’m not trying to argue that we are faced with some sort of plague of flesh-eating locusts. I don’t know what it is. Bio? Maybe nano? Whatever it is, it has some characteristic that is making the Chinese compare the weapon to insects. And whatever it is, it got out of hand. At this point, I’m pretty sure the Chinese nuked themselves to keep it under control.”