Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

“I took this from Brink’s personal effects,” said Peng. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure who I could trust.”

Nidhi Vedala gently took the vial and case. She held the vial up to examine it, shaking her head at its contents. Carefully, she repacked the vial and slid the case into her pocket.

Having had no military experience, Stone was baffled. Tupa sat protectively at his side, eyeing the bulge in Vedala’s pocket with suspicion.

“Are you saying . . . is that poison?” offered Stone.

Odhiambo cut him off.

“It is most likely a nerve agent,” he said. “The kind that can only be produced by a state-sponsored program run by very smart and well-equipped chemists. Placed on any surface or in food or drink, this substance would kill us all quickly and without a struggle.”

A wave of anger washed over Vedala. She threw the satphone to the dirt. Peng Wu placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“I don’t know why,” said Peng. “But I think it’s clear . . . Sophie Kline just tried to have us all murdered.”

Day 4Breach

Presidents and generals and all the important people in position to make the most important decisions are, by and large, the least equipped for making them.

—MICHAEL CRICHTON

Operation Scorched Earth

IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE, IT WAS THE DAWN OF A NEW day on board the International Space Station. As was her morning routine, Dr. Sophie Kline was floating in the ISS cupola module and looking down upon the world. Her world. Locked in a prograde orbit aligned with the rotation of Earth, the ISS was falling over the dark face of the equator. Stretching to the horizon, only a few lights twinkled here and there across the great black expanse of the planet.

The night before, Kline had finally spoken the dreaded code word.

It had been a last-ditch effort, a Hail Mary, and she knew it. Managing to place Brink on the ground mission had been thanks to both preparation and luck. Kline had ensured that a well-paid asset was stationed nearby to be selected if a call was put out, and it had been. Now there was nothing more to be done about the field team situation—the outcome of the gambit would be revealed with a message from Brink, or it wouldn’t.

Kline found she didn’t particularly care.

She turned her attention to the ground-monitoring equipment clustered in the cupola. Outside the windows, the last teal curves of the Pacific Ocean were disappearing in the west. Data from the ISS WideScat all-weather radar system painted a nearby monitor in shades of red and blue. It showed a map with a few blinking signatures: slow-moving commercial aircraft at an altitude of about forty thousand feet.

More importantly, there were four new signatures—moving fast.

Kline smiled.

Four state-of-the-art fighter jets were cruising low over the jungle, on a beeline for the anomaly—which was just over the horizon from Kline’s location.

Stern’s airstrike was under way, and Kline was glad.

The field team had made it too far, pushed too deeply into mysteries best left alone. Kline had warned them. Yet they had pressed on. It was largely due to the pigheaded stubbornness of Dr. Nidhi Vedala. And despite Brink’s repeated assurances, a hired mercenary couldn’t be fully trusted.

From the beginning, Sophie Kline had been amenable to a backup plan of aerial bombardment. Presumably the Wildfire field team would soon be incinerated in a hail of napalm and likely doused with some form of the inhibitor substance.

Kline activated another instrument. On the monitor, a shaky thermal satellite visual showed four contrails of exhaust raking across the night. At this rate, she estimated, the jets would unleash their deadly payloads at dawn—just after Kline’s morning shift began.

It was truly ironic, thought Kline, as she looked down upon the slowly spinning world, that in a few hours Dr. Vedala would likely be crushed by multiple high-tonnage payloads of the same inhibitor substance she had invented to save life.

Dawn Strike

IN THE HOT, HUMID AIR A THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE Ucayali region of the western Amazon jungle, the gleaming skins of four F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter aircraft blazed pink with the first rays of dawn. Headed east, the jets roared at roughly the speed of sound directly toward a breathtaking orange-red eye rising over a vista of roiling green jungle. A thin expanse of mist rose over it all. The early-morning dew was evaporating, beading the silver jets with streaks of moisture.

The labyrinthine interior of the jungle below had remained impenetrable to wave upon wave of human civilization. It was a place where countless explorers had spent centuries searching in vain for mysterious artifacts.

Now, one had finally appeared.

No mist rose near the anomaly, only a foreboding pall of smoke trickling up from smoldering tree branches. After a series of mitotic growth events, the structure had stabilized on satellite footage as a long, slightly curved wall soaring nearly three hundred feet high at its center. On its northern side, a stagnant brown lake had formed where the river was blocked. A narrow shaft rose straight out of the water, a surreal sight at more than three-quarters of a mile tall. To the south, a stream ran out from under the obstacle, tracing a glittering trail along the wide banks of its former route.

Over six thousand miles away, General Stern stood in the wings of the launch control center in Peterson Air Force Base. The room had been built to accommodate the occasional public performance, with a viewing area for dignitaries or politicians to be photographed triumphantly overseeing a successful launch. At the rear, a pair of discreet doors allowed such celebrities to disappear without photo opportunities if things were to go explosively wrong, as they so often did.

It was after 3:00 a.m., yet the control center was crowded with experts of all kinds. Each of them had been called in to ensure the maximum probability of success for what was admittedly a desperate plan.

To that end, Stern had seized dedicated clearance from the CIA for the spectacularly expensive NIX-3 series reconnaissance satellite cluster. So far, the sensors had detected alarming levels of growth from the anomaly, and no trace of the Wildfire field team. The scientists had been lost somewhere between their last contact with the ISS and the anomaly perimeter.

Lost . . . and now, eighteen hours after a missed rendezvous, categorically presumed dead.

With a live view of the dark anomaly, the plan was to drop stripes of napalm along its outer edges. The infected area would be cauterized, isolated from the living jungle. Napalm would be followed by a payload of classified inhibitor substance—with the hope that it would shrink the structure, or at least ensure it didn’t start growing again.

The plan was desperate for a variety of reasons.

First, it broke quarantine and potentially exposed the aircraft and pilots to a highly infectious strain of Andromeda. Second, executing an airstrike on foreign soil was the definition of an act of war—one that would likely precipitate a Brazilian counterstrike and total international discord.

The original Andromeda incident had itself nearly sparked a domestic nuclear disaster with worldwide repercussions. Yet General Stern could see that his current situation was clearly much, much worse. The analysts could sense his anxiety. Aside from crunching on an occasional tablet of Tums, Stern had only been listening, not speaking.

The room hummed with the subdued energy of hushed conversations. This whispered din would fade to full silence only when the room-wide speaker loop delivered occasional reports from the Super Hornet squadron commander, call sign “Felix,” as it did now.