Project Itoh - Genocidal Organ

Legal action against the majority leader would have meant all sorts of things coming out in the wash: John Paul’s close involvement with DARPA’s research and the secrets of the NSA’s Deep Throat. No, that just wouldn’t do. So the government and the politician came to a quiet deal—he would retire from politics citing ill health and disappear from their world. He went on to work full time for Eugene & Krupps.

Meanwhile, my comrades were sealed in caskets and brought back to the US. The ambushers’ corpses were also reconstructed, and following autopsies their bodies were repatriated to their various countries of origin. Of course there were also other corpses. When the engine had exploded the train was speeding through a curved portion of the track. The pent-up centrifugal force acted as a slingshot, hurling the rear carriages away in an arc. Williams and I really had drawn long straws that day, but many of the Indian passengers hadn’t—they’d been thrown around like the contents of an old-style tumble dryer. The passengers sitting on the roof were simply flung into the heavens. The record holder was a child who landed a full five hundred feet away, head first, ramming his face and neck all the way up into his torso.

As for the Hindu India leaders that we had captured, they never did have to stand trial at The Hague. They never even made it to the Panopticon facility. They just went straight to their graves. They had all been shot dead, cleanly, one bullet per person, right in the forehead. The ambushers evidently had no interest in Indian politics. The entire assault was staged for one reason and one reason only: to free John Paul. He was all that the ghost soldiers had ever wanted.

And now there was really only one thing left to deal with. John Paul.

2

This had to be our last Seaweed drop.

We were flying through the African skies, en route to what was supposed to be the final leg of the John Paul saga. It was still a full three months before the whole scandal was due to break—soon, the twelve-member investigative committee would look into the irregularities behind the sudden retirement from public life of the former senate majority leader and find that the trail of the official cover-up led them all the way to the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence, the head of DARPA’s research arm, various generals in Intelligence, Colonel Rockwell, and finally to me.

I wondered what Williams and the others were up to. We had been sheathed in our Pods back at the aircraft hangar at base camp, so we could only communicate by wireless.

“This is Mouse Two. I’m going for gold, Seaweed!” Williams was chatting to the pilot.

“Looking forward to it, Mouse Two. Commencing countdown. Over.”

The copilot started the count. I could barely contain my rising excitement. Not because I was feeling tense about the drop. Because I was ready to carry out the first step of the plan. I had been waiting for it.

Lucia was going to be at our next destination.

“ Enemy sirens have activated!” The copilot sounded nervous. “ Ground radar has detected us. How the hell? Can they see us or something?”

“This is Jaeger One. Cut us loose now, Captain. Immediately. Over.”

“What are you talking about, Jaeger One? They’ve spotted us!”

The copilot was losing it. Stealth bomber crews weren’t used to the idea of being targeted by enemy fire just before they were about to unleash their payload. Particularly if the enemy was supposed to be some third-rate African tin-pot dictatorship.

“All you have to do is press the release button. Quickly! Over.”

“But that’s against all protocol—enemy missile incoming!”

I gritted my teeth and activated the manual override, preparing to cut loose the external safety hook from the inside. I pressed the buttons and pulled the manual release lever just as we’d been taught in training. I heard a shrill beeping in my inner ear and then a woman’s voice. “ Priority override ejection request activated. Five seconds to release. Three, two, one, release.”

I heard the faint sound of the flesh hook releasing my Pod.

I was weightless—the Pod had been released. A moment later I heard a roaring noise, and the Pod was buffeted from side to side. Maybe the missile had hit the Seaweed. But I had no way of knowing anything—I was sealed off from the world, no way of making wireless contact, no way of speaking to the pilot or even Williams.

It suddenly occurred to me that all of our missions involving John Paul had started with HALO drops of Intruder Pods. It was never a straightforward land or sea assault. The only exception had been the secret agent business in Prague. Why was it that we always had to emerge from something in order to deal with John Paul? It was as if we had to experience an arcane birthing ritual before we had the right to engage with him.

The Pod calculated the variation in course that my early release and the shock wave had caused and quickly adjusted the thrusters that covered its shell. I knew that I had been thrown off course, and there was no longer any guarantee that I’d safely land anywhere near the vast surface of Lake Victoria.

I was falling. But I felt no need to pray.

“Here’s the situation.” Colonel Rockwell was briefing us in a windowless SOCOM meeting room. “Lake Victoria used to support over four hundred distinct species. It was a prime example of biodiversity in action. Anyone know what other name the lake was known by?”

“Darwin’s Dreampond,” said Williams. “Boss, is this going to be a geography lecture? Should I go grab us some popcorn?”

As usual, Boss ignored Williams’s backchat and plowed on. “Until the middle of the twentieth century, the primary industry in the area was, unsurprisingly, fishing. I say ‘industry,’ but it was mostly subsistence fishing. Small, self-sufficient communities living comfortably on the lake’s shores. Then in 1954 the ecosystem of the lake was irreversibly altered by the experimental release of an exotic fish called the Nile perch.”

Not just altered—violently assaulted. The Nile perch was a delicacy in foreign climes, but in the lake it was a highly aggressive invasive species. The Nile perch thrived and were fished commercially and exported as far away as Russia and Japan, where people were prepared to pay good money for it. Ironically, this pushed its price out of the reach of locals. Not only that, the perch thrived by eating the cichlids native to the lake that the locals had traditionally used as their food supply. The only difference between the locals and the perch was that the perch preyed on the small fish so aggressively that they were virtually driven to extinction. The people of Lake Victoria had lost their heritage and their livelihoods in one fell swoop. There was no other industry in the area. The locals were driven to despair. Local women were driven to prostitution, and AIDS spread like wildfire; local men were reduced to scavenging scrap heaps to look for—ironically—Nile perch bones to gnaw on.

“But then the era of the Nile perch came to an end. Because smaller fish were driven to extinction, the plants in the lake that they normally fed on started thriving in their absence and soon started growing out of control. Water hyacinth—itself an invasive species—proliferated, deoxygenating vast tracts of the lake, smothering aquatic life underneath it and depleting the nutrients in the sheltered bays where the young fish could mature in relative safety. As a result, the Nile perch died out.”