76
The huge rodents - bodies as large as eggplants - were teeming over Holt, clawing their way up his legs, chest and back. Hazo watched in horror as the marine flailed his arms violently, flinging rats in every direction. Blood covered dozens of tattered holes in his sleeves where he’d been bitten (though his flak jacket had protected his torso). A sickly-looking thing squirmed up on to his shoulder and sank its teeth into his ear. Holt screamed in rage, tore it free, hurled it into the darkness like a football. By then, another horde of rats was grappling up his pant legs. Trudging through the knee-deep brood, it looked as if Holt were slogging through wet cement.
‘Up here!’ Hazo screamed again. ‘Up—’
The coughing seized his voice again. Spitting up more blood and bile, Hazo watched helplessly as Holt tried to quicken his pace. Then desperation and frustration got the better of Holt and he raised his knees to try to run. It was a costly mistake.
Trampling the spongy rats underfoot caused Holt to lose his footing. He faltered, caught himself, faltered again. The rats piled on to him. He got back up again and shook some of them free, before slipping and going down a final time.
Hazo shined his light on the spot, praying that Holt would get up.
He didn’t.
The rats swarmed over their prey.
Holt’s arms thrashed a few more times, as if he were drowning. Then he disappeared beneath the roiling current.
‘Hazo!’ a voice called out over the maddening squeals.
Hazo turned and saw Shuster pulling himself up over the edge of the neighbouring container. He’d lost his helmet and his pant legs were torn up and bloody. Otherwise, he seemed unharmed. ‘Are you all right?’ Hazo called back.
Breathless, Shuster rolled on to his back. ‘I’m okay,’ he said, panting.
Hazo looked towards the entry tunnel and saw that the glow of Ramirez’s light seemed to be growing stronger again - coming back towards the cave.
77
Years had passed since Bryce Crawford last walked these tunnels, yet he still recognized every oddity and anomaly inside the mountain as if they were the birthmarks of a former lover. Even the familiar loamy smell invoked fond memories of the extensive time he’d been stationed here - like grandma’s turkey roasting in the oven on Thanksgiving Day.
Once Frank Roselli had declared the installation ‘complete’ the previous spring, the single entrance to Operation Genesis’s self-sustaining breeding facility had been sealed. Every mechanical part of the gnotobiotic isolator cells that housed the rats had been designed for remote operation, thanks to technology borrowed heavily from NASA’s unmanned space stations. Similarly, the facility generated its own power from a state-of-the-art compact nuclear reactor capable of continuously churning out electricity for ten years before needing refuelling.
Even replenishment of the feeding tanks was handled by a cleverly concealed pipeline to a dairy farm situated a kilometre to the west. The milky nutrient solution manufactured there was a potent brew infused with plague virions and gonadotropin hormone that stimulated the brood’s pituitary development (to promote aggressive behaviour).
What they’d built inside this mountain was the most sophisticated installation of its kind. Such a pity that not long from now, not a trace of it would remain, Crawford thought.
As he neared the cave, his apprehension intensified with the sounds of squealing.
These are no ordinary rats, he thought.
He remembered Roselli saying that the proper name for a brood of rats of was a ‘mischief’, and how the Chinese revered the rat for its cunning and intellect, so much so that it earned top rank as the first of the twelve years in the Sheng xiao zodiac cycle. But this genetically enhanced batch of vermin would add a whole new meaning to ‘Year of the Rat’, thought Crawford.
In one year, the typical female black rat - sexually mature at three months - gestated every twenty-four days, gave live birth to twelve pups and spawned 16,000 offspring. But thanks to Roselli’s ingenious breeding technique, the birthing rate had been increased to an average of sixteen pups. Therefore, the growth algorithm for Operation Genesis conservatively assumed that each female in the initial set would account for an astounding 24,000 descendants in the first year alone. Naturally, the descendants would carry that trend forward exponentially.
Much of the epidemiological detail was lost on Crawford. But he remembered Roselli referring to the rats as a natural ‘intermediate host’ for plague transmission. Stokes preferred to call them a ‘delivery system’. All Crawford knew was that once the brood had reached critical mass, they’d be released from the cave into the Zagros Mountains.
Once unleashed on their new habitat, the rat population would spread out in all directions. And all the while, they’d rampantly breed; just like they’d been doing in this cave - just like their cousins, the Asian black rats or ‘ship rats’, had done before spreading out from China centuries earlier to transmit the Black Death throughout Europe.
Highly intelligent survivalists by nature, the rats would evade capture by burrowing underground, hiding in the mountains’ nooks and crannies, and building hidden nests inside the walls of homes and buildings. Even if they were to be spotted out in the open, the rats were virtually impossible to catch, because for their body size they were among nature’s best athletes: able to sprint at nearly forty kilometers per hour, swim half a kilometre, climb vertically up walls and jump up to over a metre, even squeeze their rubbery bodies through a hole smaller than a quarter. Trapping them was no easy task either since their chisel-like teeth, with more crushing force than a crocodile, could gnaw through metal and wood. At the genetic level, rats were 90 per cent identical to humans - the reason they were favoured for clinical laboratory testing. But a rat’s most important physiological similarity was its brain - nearly identical to a human’s in its ability for spatial memorization.
These rats will be impossible to contain or destroy.
Throughout history, rats had been the carriers and transmitters of over seventy diseases lethal to humans, including typhus, salmonella, parasitic trichinosis and, of course,
Rats provided everything Stokes had wished for: efficiency, cost-effectiveness and anonymity.
At first, Crawford thought Stokes’s plan to settle the score in the Middle East sounded insane. Now that the mission was nearing completion, however, he felt nothing but reverence for the man. Stokes was a visionary; a crusader; a
And Crawford was determined to play his part - to make history right alongside Stokes. During the past critical hour, however, Crawford had been unable to establish further communication with Stokes. Ye t like every operational detail of Operation Genesis, there was a failsafe for this dilemma - a manual workaround. At this juncture, the mission’s success hinged upon getting the rats out from the cave. Crawford had hoped that despite their neophobic tendencies, the rats would have already made their way outside. But the two blasts that had decimated the cave’s entry tunnels had likely forced the rats to seek an alternative exit; the very survival mechanism that would account for their staying power in the outside world.
At this juncture, all Crawford needed to do was act the role of the Pied Piper and herd the critters out the front door. Though he wasn’t counting on that being the easiest of tasks. With the rats having been down here breeding for over a year, he could hardly imagine just how many there might be inside. And since he recalled that rats evolved three times faster than humans, he wondered what effect the hormone infusions might have had on their behaviour and physiology.
If rats felt threatened, they would defend themselves. These rats, however, were likely far more unpredictable - exactly the reason Crawford had brought along the rodent repeller that had been designed for just
