“He’s not small-time now, and he’s not outmanned or outgunned anymore either.” Sarah scrolled through the map, zoomed in on Atlanta. Closer. The satellite imagery jerked, went to static. She toggled the remote. The image sharpened for a moment, then broke up. She threw down the remote, glared at Spider. “I thought you fixed the digital filter.”
“I tried,” said Spider. “The chaff’s slipping into lower orbits. Reception is getting worse across the board.”
“I’m…sorry,” said Sarah.
“I’ll keep working on it,” said Spider, “but for now, forget the real-time map.”
Last year, a weather satellite had exploded after hitting a chunk of space debris, probably an uncharted leftover from the Chinese fiasco of 2007. The effects of this recent strike were catastrophic-pieces from the weather satellite had struck another satellite, which had disintegrated, causing still more debris, and so on and so on. Within a week, nineteen satellites had been destroyed. Hundreds of remaining satellites had been moved into other orbits, but there was now a layer of fragments circling the earth, a spreading ring of metallic chaff disrupting the global grid. Television and telecommunications still functioned, if intermittently, but spy satellites had been rendered nearly useless.
“The president should be here, not dump this in your lap,” Rakkim said to Sarah.
“He had to leave for an emergency session in Geneva,” Spider said. “The big boys are getting restless now that they’re blind.”
“Oh.” Rakkim covered his embarrassment. “Fine.”
What no one had considered until too late was that the prevalence of highly accurate spy satellites had maintained a semblance of world peace for the last twenty-five years. Once the Russians could no longer read the date on the fifty-yuan coin in the Chinese president’s pocket, they had to act accordingly. So did everyone else.
Sarah went back to the large map, circling Tennessee with the laser pointer. “In the last few years, our best estimates are that the Colonel has quadrupled the territory under his control, and increased his army to at least twenty thousand men. A few months ago the Tennessee governor ceded Knoxville to him to avoid a confrontation.”
“Too bad we don’t have somebody like the Colonel as joint chief,” said Rakkim. “The Mormons would be hunkered down in Salt Lake instead of giving the mayor of Denver night tremors.”
The Bible Belt was less a nation than a conglomeration of armed individuals with a common enemy: the Islamic Republic. The central government had little offensive capability, but woe unto the attacker foolish enough to invade. The South was a wasp’s nest, and every bandit and warlord carried a sting. Unlike the Islamic Republic, where private citizens were forbidden to own guns, in the Bible Belt everyone carried weapons. In spite of the danger, Rakkim had been comfortable in the South-there was an ease to life there, a strange sweetness to the days and nights. The Belt was poor, even poorer than the Islamic Republic, but there was the bracing certainty that no despot would have a chance against an armed citizenry. The Colonel might be a monster to his enemies, domestic and foreign, but were he to brutalize his own people, he would not long survive. The Islamic Republic was by nature more autocratic; only President Kingsley’s moderation ensured the limited freedoms that citizens of the Bible Belt considered their God-given right.
“The Colonel’s up to s-s-something,” said Spider, teeth chattering. Leader of an underground network of Jewish tech-geeks, sought by the Black Robes for twenty years, Spider had risked his life to save Sarah and Rakkim in the past. He raked a hand through his tangled beard. “I missed it, but S-Sarah…Sarah put the data together.”
“I got lucky,” said Sarah. “One of our people in-country sent a report about increased heavy truck traffic in the Great Smokies, well beyond any construction projects we were aware of. So I did some checking.” She highlighted Thunderhead Mountain in southeastern Tennessee. “The trucks are going here. The Colonel’s also moved in troops. Not masses of them, and he’s moving them in slowly. He doesn’t want to draw attention.” She looked at Rakkim. “I wondered why.”
“The Colonel is excavating a region below the summit of the mountain.” Spider coughed into a handkerchief, idly checked the results, and tucked it back into his pocket. “At least a half-dozen test tunnels have been drilled. We thought at first that he was mining coal, or high-grade minerals, but that wouldn’t explain the presence of his troops or his secretive actions.” His mouth set. “We just got an indication that he’s looking for something else.”
The map whirled, brought up the Gulf Coast.
“Two days ago the Colonel brought a finder named John Moseby to the site,” said Sarah.
“Man and his crew worked New Orleans,” said Spider. “Very good, from all reports.”
“A beads-and-booze looter?” Rakkim laughed. “The Colonel must be desperate.”
“Moseby’s not a typical looter,” Sarah said carefully. “As I said, he’s a finder. Lost, missing, he’ll bring it back, no matter the risk.”
Rakkim watched her. She was trying to tell him something. The presidential office might be secure from outside surveillance, but that didn’t mean the president didn’t have cameras and laser microphones of his own installed.
“What’s the Colonel looking for?” said Rakkim.
Sarah glanced at Spider, then back at Rakkim. “This mountain…it may have been a repository for certain weapon systems of the old regime.”
“Black ice?” Rakkim shook his head. They had called him off al-Faisal for this? Black ice was what the military called the covert programs from the previous regime. Off-the-books projects funded on a scale no current government could match, projects worked on by a scientific elite whose expertise could only be guessed at. The Holy Grail of advanced weaponry. “Bullshit.”
“The old regime had so many black-ice programs under way that even the leadership didn’t know about all of them,” said Sarah. “Not all of them were accounted-”
“I’ve heard those stories my whole life,” said Rakkim. “Mind-control lasers. Antipersonnel nanobots. Prototypes stashed down mineshafts, hidden under lakes, locked away in abandoned missile silos as the old regime collapsed. Thirty years and nobody has found anything. And not because we haven’t looked. They’re just stories, Sarah. If the Colonel wants to dig up a mountain, let him. It’ll keep him out of trouble.”
Sarah grabbed his wrist, turned it so the veins showed. “Those cellular injections you got as a Fedayeen recruit, where do you think they came from? Those injections that made you quicker and stronger, that gave you superior vision and hearing, and amped up your rate of healing.” Her fingers dug into his wrist. “Did you ever wonder where the research for those DNA boosters came from? Did you? It was a black-ice project from the old Americans. The chief scientist was a good Muslim. He died bringing us what he could.” She let him go, her face white, surprised by her own anger. “Black ice is real.”
Rakkim kept his voice level. “Do you have any evidence that weapons were stashed in the mountain?”
“Any evidence would be somewhere in the wreckage of the Pentagon.” Spider sat down with a sigh. “Th-th-that’s a six-point-five-million-square-foot haystack. Thirty-four acres of radioactive files and fried computer drives. If we don’t know exactly where to look, even the best hot suit in the world isn’t going to protect somebody sent to find out what’s in the mountain.”
“So, the answer is no,” said Rakkim.
“B-based on the resources the Colonel’s committed to the excavation”-Spider’s head lolled on the back of the chair-“one would conclude that he, at least, is convinced there’s something very valuable in the mountain.”
“The Colonel is virulently anti-Muslim,” said Sarah. “We can’t take the chance-”