Daniel Suarez - Kill Decision

McKinney was taken aback. She had apparently managed to get under his skin. Finally. She nodded. “All right. Okay. Just laying my cards on the table.”

“Thank you.”

Foxy, the wild-haired Albanian man with the heavy metal T-shirt, ducked his head into the office. “Knock, knock. Sorry to interrupt the high velocity data exchange, but you need to see this, Odin.”

“What is it?”

“Cable news. They found something in Pakistan.”

“What?”

“Drones.”

“Goddammit.”

Odin cast a look to McKinney, and then nodded. “No time like the present, Professor.”

They headed toward the door.

Odin gestured to the Albanian soldier. “Professor, this is Foxy, my two-IC. If you need anything, and I’m not available, you talk to him.”

Foxy extended a calloused hand. “Pleased to meet you, Professor. Wish it was under better circumstances.”

“You and me both.”

Odin led them down a tiled institutional hallway. They soon arrived at an austere recreation room at the end of the deserted office wing. There, on sturdy sofas, sat Mooch, Hoov, and the woman she’d seen earlier wearing a maroon hijab and a chocolate brown abaya. There was also a Caucasian man, short and stocky, with a thick reddish-brown beard-possibly Scotch-Irish. The group was staring at a television bolted at an angle to the drop ceiling. The woman was leaning back with her sandaled feet up on a coffee table. She nodded to McKinney.

McKinney nodded back.

When Odin entered everyone stood, but all eyes were still glued to the television, where an American cable news channel was showing video of a workshop filled with aircraft components-wings and fuselages. Odin studied the screen.

Foxy spoke over the anchor’s voice. “Found a workshop in good ol’ Karachi. Reverse-engineering operation for American drone wreckage. The story is that whoever ran it was behind the attack in Karbala.”

“Who found it?” Odin was watching the screen impassively.

“Pakistani military. Maybe ISI. They tipped off CIA.” Foxy pointed at the rough, leaked video footage. “There’s a Predator tail. A few pieces of Reapers in the back.”

Odin turned to him. “I call bullshit.”

Foxy nodded. “No doubt.”

McKinney looked at him with surprise. “Why do you think it’s fake?”

“Too perfect. One of our drones commits an atrocity, and a week later we find a barnful of evidence that we’ve been framed by insurgents?” Odin shook his head, accentuating the length of his beard. “I’d say it’s an influence operation. Even if it’s true, most people abroad won’t believe it. Foxy, work your connections at CIA. Try to find out who’s hypnotizing the chickens. In the meantime, we proceed under the supposition it’s an IO focused at a domestic audience.”

Foxy frowned. “What if it’s the real deal? Shouldn’t we send someone to examine the site?”

“Too risky. They’ll be closely watching whoever goes there. If the same extremely careful people carrying out the drone attacks Stateside are behind the Karbala attack, then they probably intended us to find this orgy of evidence-which means it’s worse than useless; it’s a deception. And if they weren’t behind Karbala, then this has no bearing on our mission.”

Above them a Ford pickup truck commercial had come on, depicting trucks towing improbable loads up improbable inclines in improbable ways.

Odin made a slashing gesture across his throat, and someone muted the television. He placed his hand on McKinney’s shoulder. “Everyone. Cornell University professor Linda McKinney is now a member of this team. You are to defend her with your lives. From this point onward, you will refer to her as Expert Six or simply as ‘Professor.’ Is that understood?”

The team members nodded.

“Professor, this is my team. You’ve already met Foxy.” He pointed to the woman in the maroon hijab. “Ripper. Human intel. Pay no attention to her outfit. She’s about as Muslim as a Vegas casino.” He pointed at the Eurasian kid who worked the electronics board on the plane. “This is Hoov. Signals intelligence-our knob turner.”

Hoov displayed mild impatience. “He means commo-I trained with the 704th-”

“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.”

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.