“I can lay out the paper trail for you later, but the main thing now is that there’s a private outfit in Ontario, west of the Hudson Bay, that fits the bill for our germ factory in every way. Uniquely. The flow of bioprocessing equipment to it is incredible. I’ve got listed purchases of regulated biological cultures and growth media, freeze drying and containment equipment, recombinant gene tech… it goes on and on. This is a soup-to-nuts bioprocessing facility, and one that was built at great expense. I’d guess the initial cost would total a hundred million dollars. You won’t find any other operation like it in Canada, and only a few comparable facilities exist here at home.”
Megan took a breath.
“You mean to tell me that nobody in Washington has deemed it in our national interest to investigate what’s being developed at this place?”
“I’ll share a bit of irony, Meg. We do business with these folks. Loads of it. They own agricultural patents that have scored them numerous federal contracts. And they recently won the bidding competition for a huge deal to develop genetically modified strains of Fusarium oxysporum-a fungus that’s proven to be wholesale murder on coca plants.” He paused. “The State Department’s been trying to persuade the Columbians and Peruvians to use it against their narco farmers, and it looks like it’s going to happen. Chew on that one for a second. Given this company’s presumed ties to the Quiros fam-
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ily, which derives its income primarily from the cocaine trade, it’s conceivable they’re creating a fungus that’s specially adapted to wipe out the crops of competing growers. And all on our government’s tab.”
Megan was silent a moment, thinking, the receiver held tightly in her hand.
“Tell me the name of the firm, Al,” she said at last.
“Earthglow,” he said. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
392
TWENTY-FOUR
NORTHERN ONTARIO, CANADA NOVEMBER 17, 2001
remote was a relative term nowadays, paul
“Pokey” Oskaboose was saying as he dipped his single- prop Cessna 172 from the cloud rack. “I read some magazine article by somebody a while back, and I think it said there are something like six, maybe eight places left on the planet where you can spend an hour-or maybe it’s a night, I forget-without hearing an engine noise of some kind or other.” He banked sharply toward the bunched, snow-draped hills to port.
Seated on his right, Ricci watched the world slant down and away. “How long till we’re over the plant?” he asked, his stomach lurching.
“Should be any minute.” Oskaboose pointed out his window. A Cree-Ojibway Indian with a wide, bony face and dark hair worn in a buzz cut, he was on loan to Ricci from the Sword watch quartered amid the radomes and communications dishes of an UpLink satellite ground station to the southwest, located midway between the Big Nickel Mine in Sudbury and Lake Su-
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
perior. “You see the twin rises over there, sort of rounded, got all those wrinkles in them?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The local tribes call them Niish Obekwun. Means Two Shoulders. Past them’s a gap where a stream slices down to the White River. And then that third taller slope. Goes up pretty steep.”
Ricci nodded.
“Far side of it, on the west face, is our spot,” Oskaboose said. “Go ahead and check the moving map on the instrument panel. Groundhog like you, it’ll help with your orientation.”
Ricci glanced at the nonglare video display, where a Real Time Geographical Information System map overlaid a live image of the rough, frozen vista below, plotting the airplane’s course with a series of flashing red dots, and enclosing Earthglow’s position in a bright green square. It was helpful, he thought. And precisely matched his recollection of the Hawkeye-I photos he’d seen back in San Jose. With a zoom resolution of under three centimeters, they had afforded detailed aerial close- ups of the custom biological facility and its perimeter defenses. But Ricci had wanted to get a visceral feel of the land that for him would only come with firsthand observation.
Oskaboose leveled the aircraft. “In today’s world, Tarzan wouldn’t have to worry about being raised by apes,” he said. “You’ve got, what, a couple thousand gorillas left in Africa, that’s counting all five subspecies. And they’re more used to having their pictures snapped than models and movie stars. Some British kid in knickers being nursed at the breast of a furry mama would be spotted in no time by rich tourists on photo safaris. And
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brought back to civilization, heaven help him.”
The guide’s apparent non sequitur drew a puzzled glance from Ricci.
“Another instance of how the wilderness isn’t wilderness like it used to be,” Oskaboose said, noticing his expression.
Ricci grunted.
“Give you one more example,” Oskaboose continued. “People hear the name Tibet, they think robed Buddhist mystics levitating and astral-projecting in transcendental bliss. Or at least I do. But you know, it’s become just another getaway for Hollywood stars with personal problems. Donate a million bucks to the temple chest, they’ll issue you a wallet card listing the chakras, declare that you’re pure of spirit, and initiate you as an honorary monk of the order. I kid you not.” He made a sad tsldng l I sound and motioned out the window again. “We’re % about to head over the basin. You might want to take a peek.”
Ricci looked downward. The folds of the rise they were overflying were thick with pine forest. On the almost perpendicular uplift at the basin’s far side, the growth was sparser, clinging to the rock face in stubborn, woolly tufts between wide, white expanses of snow. Directly below them now, the tributary was a crystalline blue ribbon in the midday sunlight.
“That water frozen solid?” Ricci asked.
Oskaboose shrugged his shoulders. “Hard to be sure from up here,” he said. “You can tell for yourself that there’s a surface layer of ice. But it only takes a little silty runoff for the crust to stay thin in patches. Especially this early in the season, when the temperature can still poke above freezing.”
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Ricci compressed his lips. ‘The snow on the slopes. You have any idea how deep it is?”
“The precip hasn’t been too bad, so I’d guess about a foot, with drifts coming up maybe knee high.” He gave Ricci a quick glance. “Inexperienced climbers have to watch out for cracks in the rock that get covered by bridges of crusted snow. Fall into some of ’em, and you can take quite a plunge.”
Ricci nodded thoughtfully.
“Okay,” Oskaboose said. “Soon as we cross that next hill, you’ll catch sight of Earthglow to your right, down on a ledge near its base.”
“We do one pass. That’s it. No doubling back.”
“Understood.” Oskaboose shrugged again. ‘The point of what I was explaining to you, though, is that the sight of a plane is nothing to make anybody suspicious around here. Pukaskwa National Park isn’t too far to the south. Rangers there use fixed wing aircraft and choppers for wildlife observation, search and rescue, and supply transport. Then you have airmail deliveries to townspeople, recreational pilots, and so on. We don’t have to be too worried about being noticed.”
Ricci kept silent, his pale blue eyes staring out the window.
In a large conference room at the Sudbury ground station, Rollie Thibodeau and the rest of the twenty-four- man RDT were gathered before a flat-panel wall monitor, viewing the same pictures that appeared on the Cessna’s video display as it made its flyby.
The Earthglow facility was a low, concrete building backed directly against the almost vertical eastern slope, bounded on its other three sides by a high, industrial
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chain-link perimeter fence topped with multiple rows of electrical wiring. A sliding gate in the north-facing section of the fence opened onto a two-lane blacktop that curved along the base of the hill and then stretched off eastward toward the railway station at Hawk Junction- about a hundred miles distant, across rolling, heavily forested country. Small guard posts were visible at the southern and western corners of the fence. A third stood outside the gate at the terminus of the blacktop. A network of access roads branched from the gate to various building entrances.
Watching the stream of recon images over- his microwave link with the aircraft, Thibodeau muttered unhappily under his breath. He knew Tom Ricci better than he liked-would have liked not to know him at all- and could anticipate the mission plan he would present upon returning to base.
What bothered him, in part, was that it stood to be dangerous to the extreme. But the thing that filled him with deepest distress was also knowing there was no workable alternative.
Back at the ground station an hour later, Ricci and Pokey Oskaboose had joined Thibodeau and the others in the conference room. The lights were dimmed around them. On their screen was a bird’s-eye color still of the Earth- glow building and its surrounding terrain, the key tactical points highlighted with Xs.