'Like cleaning oil spills, right?' Jeffrey said.
Ilse nodded. 'But South Africa has done genetic engineering, with help from German scientists. We think they've made a killer strain, one that seeks out humans.'
'How do we know this?' Jeffrey said.
'They didn't tell me everything,' Ilse said. 'Others like myself, who got out and know something, gave hints. Satellite imagery too, of bunkers being built in isolated areas, next to fenced-in trailer parks of captured U.S. tourists, bunkers meant for keeping something in. Suspicious movements of black children where we're going.'
'Huh?'
'The Natal Sharks Board,' Ilse said, 'on a hilltop overlooking the shore at Umhlanga Rocks, did oceanographic research for many years before the war. They had daily shark dissections for school kids.'
'Like a science museum?' Jeffrey said.
'They used sharks caught and killed in the big nets that protect the swimming beaches. That stopped with the war, but then it started up again. Black youngsters, the same group every day, are bussed in and out, except now and then a kid goes in and we don't see him come out.'
'Human experiments?'
'Your government thinks so,' Ilse said. 'The real clincher is the air filtration. The basement at the Sharks Board has a positive-pressure NBC system. That's strange enough, for what should be a low-priority installation. Somehow your NSA learned half the filter banks run backward. The air goes through the micron-level catchments coming out of the facility.'
'So there's a negative-pressure inner sanctum,' Jeffrey said. 'Probably a spy bird caught the infrared gradient of the air exhaust going the wrong way, on an especially hot or cold clear night.'
Ilse nodded. 'The school kids might be circumstantial, but this is a clear-cut signature of a biosafety level four containment.'
'Not level three?' Jeffrey said.
'No,' Ilse said, 'the output volume's much too great. It's a whole lab, not just suction hoods.'
'What does this stuff do to you?' Jeffrey said. 'The species they've been using digests sulfur.' 'So?'
'Sulfur's in acetylcholine, the human body's neurotransmitter. It's also found in cystine, a key amino acid. Disulfide bonds in cystine form a polypeptide, collagen, the basic building block for our connective tissues.'
'So?'
Ilse wiped a loose strand of hair back from her forehead, then looked right at Jeffrey. 'If something eats your sulfur, your brain stops working and your muscles turn to goo.' Jeffrey frowned. 'How do we defend against it?'
'Archaea's such a simple life-form our immune systems don't respond, so no vaccination's possible. A hybrid could be designed to spread through water, soil, the air, and through any intermediate host or carcass, making it appallingly contagious in a room-temperature nitrogen-oxygen environment.'
'Antibiotics?' Jeffrey said.
'Archaea are not bacteria, which lack internal organelles, and they have a different cell wall chemistry, so once they're in your body, drugs won't work. Tetracycline helps conserve the collagen — that's one of its side effects — but not enough to save you.'
'And they must think a sterilizing autoclave's some kind of health spa,' Jeffrey said.
'That's right,' Ilse said, 'they're so-called extremophiles. Archaea thrive at temperatures of a thousand Fahrenheit, they're found at pressures of a thousand atmospheres or more, they can be resistant to alkalis like bleach, and they simply love acid, so there's no good way to decontaminate.'
Lieutenant Clayton leaned forward. Like Captain Wilson, he was black — African American, Ilse reminded herself. Even through his uniform she could see he had a perfect swimmer's body. He looked almost thirty, more
mature than Lieutenant Sessions somehow, must be more time in grade. To Ilse this reemphasized the importance of the mission — a lieutenant in the navy equaled a captain in the army.
'We have to stop this at the source,' Clayton said. 'There's evidence they'll soon disperse the R&D, then go into mass production. They use blackout curtains at the lab, of course, and carpooling to save gas, but we can still tell that the research staff's been working very late, like they're on the verge of a breakthrough. There's just one thing we know will do the job. An atomic demolition.'
'You're taking in the warhead from one of our Mark 88s?' Jeffrey said. 'You didn't bring your own — I'd have seen the guards and paperwork.'
'We're getting a bit ahead of ourselves now,' Wilson said. He looked at his watch, then asked the steward to send a messenger to fetch COB and the navigator.
'The navigator must be running late,' Jeffrey said, 'preparing his part of the briefing.' Wilson nodded. He poured himself another cup of coffee, then sat back. Ilse saw this was some kind of signal. People relaxed again.
'This infiltration should be stimulating,' Jeffrey said, reaching for a cookie. 'The facilities around Durban are virtually impregnable.'
'That's where we like to be,' Clayton said.
'We're looking at interlocking arcs of fire,' Jeffrey said. 'Nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, supersonic, atop the skyscrapers downtown and on the bluff outside the bay. More launch points on the escarpments up and down the coast, and on the top floors of those big resort hotels, the ones they haven't knocked down to make beach landing obstacles. Constant ASW patrols, using every type of sensor. And minefields, channeled into local SOSUS bottom- listening nets.'
Captain Wilson nodded. 'Then there's the bigger picture, the Axis hostage strategy. Using innocent people as their shield, which makes it hard for us to act decisively at every level everywhere. They play to Third World fence- sitters — that if we nuke 'em, it's our fault.'
'This two-phase coup was brilliant,' Shajo Clayton said. 'We fell for it at every step.'
'South African reactionaries stage a take-over,' Jeffrey said. 'They claim they're liberating the country, for God's sake, from malicious outside interference. They declare martial law, then put down the inevitable riots with modern nonlethal weapons. They say it's the only way to stop the social chaos— crime, terrorism, and AIDS — all forced on them by ending their apartheid, a system they claim worked.'
'They fortify the Prince Edward Islands,' Clayton said, 'their own territory, halfway between Cape Town and Antarctica. The U.N. orders trade embargoes, enforced by a blockade. In retaliation the Boers close the Horn of Africa to what they call hostile shipping. The busiest maritime choke point in the world.'
'They sink some American and British merchant ships,' Jeffrey said, 'using highexplosive rounds. So NATO mobilizes, like in the Gulf War and with Yugoslavia. Coalition forces drain from Europe and put to sea, where all those tanks and troops are vulnerable as hell.'
'But due to pacifist demonstrations, the German deployment lags,' Clayton said. ' Except Namibia, the colony they lost in World War I, just to South Africa's northwest. There they go in first and meet no Boer opposition.'
'Then there's the Berlin Putsch,' Jeffrey said. 'And then they launch the European ground war. Nuking Poland's how they got the French to cave.'
'Restoring the kaiser,' Wilson said. 'Finishing the work of Bismarck. Giving all of Europe the unity it needs, without all the disorder…A new German reawakening, my ass.'
'But the U.S. and U.K. and Germany were big financial allies,' Ilse said.
'Ilse,' Commodore Morse broke in, 'in 1914 the U.K. and Germany were each other's foremost trading partners. That didn't stop the slaughter then.'
'It was a dangerous myth,' Jeffrey said, 'to think Germany needed another recession to go on the warpath again. In 1914 they were very prosperous, and that gave them ideas.' Morse nodded. 'The underlying enmities go back a century or more.'
'That's true,' Ilse said. 'The old-line Boers hate the British, starting when you took Cape Town in 1795. Shoving them aside, plundering their natural resources, building concentration camps when they resisted. They'll fight you very hard, like in the old days. They think God's on their side.'
The conversation paused. Ilse glanced at the oil painting hanging on the wardroom bulkhead, the corvette HMS Challenger in full sail, the odd fittings at her stern for the special trawls and dredges. Eighteen seventy-two,
