“Hoov, this isn’t your goddamned high school reunion.”
Hoov nodded and closed his mouth.
Odin gestured next to the handsome Asian Indian man whom McKinney recognized as being the one with the stethoscope-and who had cut her loose on the plane. “Mooch, team surgeon.”
McKinney and he exchanged polite nods.
Odin now pointed to the red-bearded man she hadn’t seen on the plane. “And this is Tin Man. Human intel.”
Odin turned to McKinney. “We’ll hook up Stateside with the last two team members, Troll and Smokey. They handle signals and human intel.” He grabbed the television remote and killed the TV. “All right, listen up. I want you all ready to ship out the moment the tail numbers on the C-37 have been repainted.” He looked at his watch. “Make good use of the time en route to examine every bit of intel we got from last night’s operation. I want detailed reports and recommendations when I get back.”
McKinney glanced at the others, then at Odin. “You’re not heading back to the U.S.?”
Odin shook his head. “Hoov and I will catch up with you all later. There’s somewhere I need to go first.”
CHAPTER 11
Kinshasa and Brazzaville were the quintessential Third World cities of the twenty-first century. Large-with a combined population around thirteen million-and growing rapidly, they teemed with young men and guns. As the capitals of neighboring nations, they occupied opposite banks of the Congo River but nonetheless formed a single metropolitan area. They were essentially Africa’s liver-circulating the population of the riverine interior through a pitiless Darwinian filter.
Without an urban plan sprawling shantytowns accreted around the colonial and corporate buildings in the heart of downtown. These shantytowns were some of the most crime-ridden and dangerous places in all of Africa.
The common refrain from the West was that only economic development and modernization could address such problems, but Odin knew that the modern world itself was what made this region of Africa so violent. That was because the Democratic Republic of the Congo contained nearly eighty percent of the world’s supply of coltan- the mineral of the information age. Coltan was the industrial name for columbite-tantalite, a dull black metallic mineral from which the elements niobium and tantalum were extracted. The tantalum from coltan was used to manufacture electronic capacitors, which were needed to make cell phones, DVD players, video game systems, and computers. And at one hundred U.S. dollars per pound on the street, coltan had financed a civil war that since 1998 had killed an estimated five and a half million people. These were World War II-level casualties.
But the information age was selective about its information, and the same industrial world that fueled the conflict barely registered this war’s existence. The U.S. and British only grew interested when the Congolese government attempted to nationalize the coltan mines-at which point the war became an intolerable human crisis. It now simmered in dozens of local embers, ready to flare up the moment the opportunity arose. Alternately stoking and dousing those embers was what would keep local governments disorganized and the cheap coltan flowing.
There were Westerners who looked with concern at the suffering of burgeoning Third World populations, but Odin knew that Mother Nature wasn’t the nurturing type. In fact, she might view the stable populations of the West as a failure-a rebellion against primordial order. Nature wanted only one thing: for creatures to produce viable offspring. After that, you were genetically dead. Nature had no more use for you. Your extended lifespan, your biography, your Hummel figurine collection, were all just taking up space. By some cosmic joke, nearly the entire scope of human experience was at odds with the biological world.
So by Nature’s measure both Kinshasa and Brazzaville were a resounding success. Happiness and contentment weren’t in great supply, but there were lots of young people, eager to lay the groundwork for another generation. The rage here was of a type Odin had seen in all the shantytowns and slums of the world: Young men without prospects were not happy about their situation. In the vast game of Darwinian musical chairs, whenever the music stopped there were large numbers of people without a seat-and some smartass had sold them guns.
This was the root of most conflict in the world-people asserting their will to survive, to flourish, and to procreate. Evil had nothing to do with it. And although he’d worked these hidden conflicts for years, Odin knew that most fighting was just a symptom of another problem: too many people competing for limited resources. And yet fighting wouldn’t resolve this either. Rwanda, for example, was still the most densely populated country in sub- Saharan Africa even after the genocide. No, the best way he knew of to defuse these conflicts was to provide opportunities and education to women. Independence. Once that took, population growth would ebb, and actual plans could be made for the future.
This was not a methodology favored by weapons manufacturers.
Odin stood at the visitors’ railing and studied a glowing constellation of high-definition screens arrayed around the control room. Sprawling shantytowns simmered below the surveillance platforms. A populace unaware that they were the test subjects for a grand experiment.
“Have you ever seen EITS in action, Master Sergeant?”
“I have not, General.”
A uniformed African-American JSOC brigadier general stood in the center of the control room as green-badge contractors in shirtsleeves manned most of the workstations in cubicles around him. The general took a sip from a white al-Qaeda-branded coffee mug. “Welcome to Stuttgart. What you’re looking at is nothing less than the future of low-intensity conflict management.”
“I appreciate you taking time for me, sir.”
“Always happy to assist The Activity.” He looked up at the screens lining the walls. “You might occupy a different command silo, but our systems could be a tremendous help in your group’s line of work.” The general reached out and straightened the visitor’s badge on Odin’s lanyard. It said merely Visitor.
“I’m eager to see what they can do, sir.”
The general took another sip from his al-Qaeda mug.
Odin had seen these mugs many times before in command centers. They were much sought after by the REMF crowd. Al-Qaeda was, after all, mostly a media organization-one with a Web presence that would put Ashton Kutcher to shame. They rolled out their own branded characters and products to jihadists worldwide on a regular basis. They even had professional-looking magazines and journals, along with podcast reality shows, making jihadi documentaries with Western video-editing software. Both sides could claim it as ironic with entirely different emphasis. If even terrorists ran franchise operations, maybe there was some common ground, after all.
Odin glanced up again at the array of high-definition screens and across the rows of control board operators. Dozens of people manning supporting systems. “I was told this is a test bed-a prototype-but it looks operational.”
“In a limited geographical zone, it is. This is a joint public-private SAP. Major private sector partners helped build this operations center to showcase what a truly unified twenty-first-century command looks like. We think this technology has a tremendous future.”
“We, sir?”
“It’s difficult not to take a proprietary interest. My staff and I have contributed time and effort to make sure this system meets real-world operational requirements.”
Odin actually knew quite a bit about the systems integrated into EITS, such as the Gorgon Stare, along with all the other systems that defense contractors were developing: automated 3-D mapping of Third World cities, building by building; as well as ARGUS-IR, the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Infrared system. They were networked, unmanned suborbital camera-and-narrow-aperture-radar platforms-airborne optics tiling together live, highly detailed imagery of a broad swath of terrain in real time. A persistent unblinking eye creating a digital, three-dimensional model of reality as it happened.
Odin nodded up at the main screen-a broad view of the smoke-shrouded shantytowns of Brazzaville. He’d run
