Thus, the plants at the RMA had been transitioned to the production of sarin — the deadliest of the G-agents — and the race had commenced to stockpile as much as humanly possible in the shortest amount of time, which necessitated the installation of early detection mechanisms in case of accidental release, a job perfect for these rabbits.
Had any of them still been alive.
Randall opened one of the cage doors, grabbed the lifeless ball of fur, and lifted it from the litter. Its tongue protruded from between its long, hooked teeth. The glimmer of life had faded from its waxen eyes, but its body remained limp.
“This couldn’t have happened more than a few hours ago,” he said.
“3:56 AM, to be precise,” Thompson said. “The men were alerted by the screaming.”
“Screaming?”
“That’s how they described it. They were at the end of the hall. By the time they arrived, all of the rabbits were dead.”
Randall set the animal on the stainless steel examination tray behind him, then reached into the cage. The rubber gloves minimized the sensitivity of his fingers, forcing him to grab handfuls of the litter and sift it through his fingers until he found what he was told would be there. Even then he was surprised to find the locust carcasses.
“How did they get in here?” he asked.
“We believe through the ventilation ducts.”
“How in God’s name did they get out of their cage in the first place?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. It’s one of those things you’re just going to have to see for yourself.”
“Wasn’t someone supposed to be monitoring them?”
“According to the logs, he rounded right on schedule.”
Randall manipulated one of the dead insects into the palm of his glove. The African desert locust. Schistocerca gregaria. It looked like the grasshoppers in the surrounding plains, only larger and rust-colored, with a black face and red eyes. Its entire body was riddled with holes, as though someone had repeatedly punctured its carapace and abdomen with a pin.
He turned around to qualify his discovery with the doctor, only to find him studying the rabbit on the examination tray so closely that his face shield was within inches of it. Thompson sorted through the animal’s fur, revealing fresh pinprick lesions inflicted so close to its time of death that neither bleeding nor attempted healing had occurred.
“The locusts attacked them?” Randall said.
“That’s how it appears, although these look more like puncture wounds than bites.”
“But that shouldn’t have killed them.”
“You’re right, but, for the life of me, I can’t tell you what did.”
WHILE UNCLE SAM considered the chemical warfare program his priority, he invested heavily in the burgeoning field of biological weaponry. Four square miles of the arsenal had been devoted to growing grain infected with a plant pathogen called wheat stem rust. Puccinia graministritici, known as Agent TX, was more than a mere nuisance species. An infection not only decreased the yield of a crop by twenty percent, it increased the risk of contracting mycotoxicosis from ingestion, effectively wiping out entire harvests. This one anticrop agent had the potential to cripple even the mighty Soviet Union and starve its people, ending a theoretical third world war before the first shots were even fired.
Of course, this particular fungus had an added benefit with extraordinary military applications. It could be used to harvest deoxynivalenol, a toxin that could be used to both incapacitate and kill, depending upon the concentration.
Randall supervised both the plant responsible for its purification, storage, and shipment to Beale Air Force Base in California and the laboratory where they tested experimental methods of dispersal. TX couldn’t simply be loaded into a bomb and dropped into a field without serving as a declaration of war. There was an entire team devoted to stealthier means of release, chief among them the use of insects as vectors to spread the infection.
The Japanese had successfully tested the use of fleas to spread the plague, but their plan to disperse them by balloon was impractical. Even if the fleas managed to survive the plummet from high altitude, once they were free to roam the streets, the efficacy of the plan was under the direct control of so many mindless creatures. There was no doubt the plague would eventually take root, but as a weapon it lacked the immediacy necessary during times of war, which were won in the here and now, not some number of months into the unknown future. Plus, there was no means of containing the bacterium. Had the Japanese not surrendered when they did and Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night been set into motion, those infected during the planned assault on San Diego could have easily carried the disease right back across the Pacific with them on any of the Naval vessels stationed there. What they needed was both immediacy and containment, which was where Randall’s hand-selected team of scientists came in.
It wasn’t enough that a wheat stem rust infection would set into motion a series of events that would slowly lead to economic ruin and starvation, it needed to do so in a fast and predictable manner. The African desert locusts were the swarming variety, the kind that descended as a cloud upon a field and left nothing but inedible stalks in their wake. This particular species could be counted upon to lay siege to the targeted fields, but the problem quickly became one of containment. An aggressive swarm could follow the grain belt west and cut a swath across the Ukraine and Eastern Europe, leaving behind worthless acres infected with wheat rust to such an extent that nothing would grow there for years to come, but if their theory was correct, they’d finally found a solution.
Or at least they thought they had.
Randall stood in the center of the entomology lab, surrounded by six-foot-tall glass aquariums swarming with locusts. All except for one, anyway. The glass was cracked and the lid canted upward ever so slightly. It took him a moment to realize that the damage had been inflicted from the inside, where, unlike the other cages, wheat plants grew largely unmolested. The soil, however, was littered with small bones, feathers, and scavenged bird carcasses.
“What the hell happened here?”
“Show him what you showed me,” Thompson said.
Like all of the civilian scientists, Stephen Waller wore black-rimmed glasses, a white lab coat, and his ID badge clipped to his breast pocket. He was their resident entomologist, a field Randall suspected he’d chosen because of his physical resemblance. He was tall and slender and moved as though he possessed joints where others didn’t.
“If you’ll follow me, Sergeant,” he said, and led the way around the back of the aquarium to the ladder leaning against it. He gestured to it and Randall ascended until he was just above the level of the lid. It was immediately apparent what had happened.
Randall traced his fingertips across the raised edge of the lid. The bodies of hundreds of locusts were crammed into the seam, one on top of another, so many that they’d used the sheer mass of dead bodies to raise the lid high enough for the remainder to squeeze out.
“Extraordinary,” Randall whispered.
“More than that, sir. This level of coordination is beyond anything we’ve ever seen. Not even honeybees exhibit such extreme hive-mind behavior. These individuals willingly sacrificed themselves so that the others could escape. That’s higher-level thinking not traditionally associated with so-called lower orders of life.”
Cattail-like spines protruded from the carcasses. They were actually the stalks of a fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, an entomopathogenic species from Thailand that infected ants, causing them to climb a specific plant to a predesignated height, bite onto the underside of a leaf, and cling there until the fungus consumed its body and produced an explosion of spores from its fruiting bodies. The locusts had been suitable vectors for the wheat stem rust bacterium, but the unilateralis had only infected one of the twelve groups exposed to it — the one bred for aggressiveness toward avian predators, a flock of which could end their infestation before it began — and even then only a small number had survived to repopulate the swarm.