Gorman was a thin, nerdy looking individual, with thick glasses, a big nose and a narrow scrawny neck. Not even full dress uniform could make him look sexy. Popular with the other troops for his almost-photographic memory and sharp wit, his call-sign 'Brainiac' was a compliment, not an insult.
'Bullshit,' Elvis said, 'DARPA made it in the nineties, in conjunction with the Navy…'
'But they could never make it work. Thing depended on some element only found in meteorites and they could never find a live specimen of it'
'You guys'll believe anything,' a softly spoken voice said from the other side of the office.
Everybody turned, Schofield included.
The speaker was a new sergeant to the unit — an intense young man with a heavy-browed face, pug nose and deep brown eyes. He didn't talk much, so when he did it was something of a special occasion for the team. At first, it had been a trait which some had mistaken for contempt. But soon it was discovered that Sergeant Buck Riley Jr. just didn't like to talk unnecessarily.
Riley Jr. was the son of a highly regarded Marine staff sergeant. His father, Buck Riley Sr., had also been a man Shane Schofield had known better than most.
They had met under fire — back when Schofield had been in a god-almighty mess in Bosnia and Riley Sr. had been on the rescue team. They had become good friends and Riley Sr. had become Schofield's loyal staff sergeant. Sadly, he had also been on that fateful mission to Antarctica — where he had been murdered in the most brutal fashion by an enemy whose name Schofield had been forbidden to mention by the Official Secrets Act.
Sergeant Buck Riley Jr. - silent, intense and serious — bore his father's call-sign with pride. He was known throughout the unit simply as 'Book II'.
Book II looked at Elvis and Brainiac. 'Do you guys seriously believe that DARPA has built a bomb that can destroy a third of the earth's mass?'
'Yes,' Elvis said.
'No,' Brainiac said.
'Well, they haven't The superbomb is an urban myth,' Book II said, 'designed to keep the conspiracy theorists on the Internet and the gossipy old women in the United States Marine Corps happy. Want me to give you a couple more examples? That the FBI sends agents into prisons as deep cover operatives. That the United States Air Force has nuclear bombers stationed in commercial hangars at every major airport in the United States for use in the event of a sudden outbreak of war. That USAMRIID has developed a cure for AIDS but hasn't been allowed to release it. That the Air Force has developed a magnetic propulsion system that allows vehicles to float on air. That the losing tenderer in the bid to build the stealth bomber proposed a supersonic plane that could attain complete invisibility through the use of nuclear-powered air refraction — and built the plane anyway, even after they lost the bid. Heard any of those?'
'No,' Elvis said, 'but they're way cool'
'What about you, Captain?' Book II turned to Schofield. 'You heard any of those before?'
Schofield held the young sergeant's gaze. 'I've heard about the last one, but not the others.'
He turned away from the debate, scanning the office around him.
He frowned. Someone was missing.
And then it hit him.
'Hey, where's Warrant Officer Webster?' he said.
The President of the United States stared out through the slanted observation windows, his mouth agape.
Through the windows, in the middle of a high ceilinged, hall-like room, he saw a large freestanding cube made of a clear glasslike substance.
It just sat there in the middle of the hall, not quite reaching the ceiling, not quite reaching the walls, a glass cube the size of a large living room, bounded on two sides by the elevated Lshaped observation structure.
It was what lay inside the glass cube, however, that seized the President's attention.
Indeed, he couldn't take his eyes off it.
'The cube is made of high-tensile polyfiber, and has its own separate oxygen supply. It is completely airtight,' Colonel Harper said. 'Should its structural integrity be compromised, the cube's internal air pressure is automatically raised, so that no contagions can enter it.'
Harper gestured to one of the three scientists who had been up on the tarmac earlier. 'Mr. President, I'd like you to meet Dr. Gunther Botha, the guiding force behind Project Fortune.'
The President shook Botha's hand. Botha was a fat, wide-faced, balding man of fifty-eight, and he spoke with a guttural South African accent. 'It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. President.'
'Dr. Botha is from…'
'I know where Dr. Botha is from,' the President said, a trace of disapproval in his voice. 'I saw his file yesterday.'
Gunther Botha was a former member of the South African Defense Force's notorious Medical Battalion.Though not widely known, throughout the 1980's South Africa was second only to the Soviet Union in the creation and stockpiling of biological weapons, principally for use against the black majority. '
But with the fall of the apartheid regime, Gunther Botha quickly found himself out of a job and directly in the firing line of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His clandestine hiring by the United States government in 1996 was not unlike its harboring of Nazi scientists after World War II. Specialists in Botha's chosen field of expertise were exceedingly hard to come by.
The President turned back to look out through the observation windows. 'So this is the vaccine…' he said, gazing down at the clear fiberglass cube.
'Yes, sir, it is,' Botha said.
'Tested?' The President didn't turn as he spoke.
'Yes.'
'In serum-hydrate form?'
'Yes.'
'Against the latest strain?'
'We tested it against 9.1 yesterday afternoon, as soon as it arrived.'
'Mr. President,' Colonel Harper said, 'if you'd like, we can give you a demonstration.'
A pause.
'All right,' the President said. 'Do so.'
'Where did he go?' Schofield asked as he stood in the middle of the wide main hangar of Area 7 with Libby Gant.
Warrant Officer Carl Webster — the man in charge of the Football — wasn't in either of the two Presidential helicopters, nor was he in the hangar's two offices. And a quick check with the Secret Service people had revealed that he hadn't gone with the President on the tour of the facility.
Warrant Officer Webster was nowhere to be found.
It was cause for concern because there were strict rules of protocol as to Webster's movements. If he wasn't with the President, he was supposed to stay close to Marine One at all times.
'Take a look at the welcoming committee, the famous 7th Squadron,' Gant said, eyeing the three groups of P-90 armed commandos stationed at various points around the hangar bay. The crack Air Force troops just watched Schofield and Gant impassively.
'They look pretty mean to me,' Schofield said.
'They're jacked up,' Gant said.
'What?'
'Yellow tinges to their eyes.'
'Steroids?'
'Uh-huh,' Gant said.
'No wonder they look so edgy,' Schofield said.
'Elvis doesn't like them,' Gant said. 'Says he heard somewhere that they're, quote, 'unofficially racist.' You'll notice that there are no black members in these squads.'
