"And this doesn't produce flashbacks like LSD?" Gabriel asked.
LaHaye shook her head. "When administered correctly. Proper dosage control and time-based administration are vital, and that is where Mr. Baaker comes in."
Across the table, Wim Baaker unfolded his cranelike frame and approached the small podium.
"It's good to see you again, General Gabriel," Baaker began as the title slide featuring a massive laboratory building appeared on the screen. "I believe we met at the NATO subcommittee meeting on combat nutrition prior to Desert Storm."
Gabriel nodded.
"Well, to refresh your memory, the NATO Combat Pharmaceutical Lab is located in Rijswijk, near Den Haag, and employs more than five thousand people." Baaker's voice was dull, flat, and deep from the back of his throat. "We were founded in 1930 and charged with conducting applied research for the Dutch government, including her military forces, to whom we provide advice and consultation in areas such as protection against chemical weapons, munitions technology, and weapons system and platforms technology.
"One of our subsidiaries, which provides support services to my classified operations, is TNO Pharma, which has developed, among other things, highly effective, microprocessor-controlled, transdermal delivery systems for appropriate molecules. We have expanded upon the pioneering products such as nicotine patches and those containing nitroglycerin for angina patients and developed more precise delivery methods for a wide variety of pharmaceuticals such as Xantaeus, which must be applied precisely to avoid the unfortunate side effects of previous drugs."
Baaker paused and looked at each person in turn.
Gabriel felt the ghosts of My Lai, Thanh Thong, and a host of more successfully covered-up incidents. He could almost see the near disasters hovering in the projector's vague penumbra.
Baaker cleared his throat. "Indeed, the first of our new devices is currently undergoing testing by RDECOM under the guise of the Transdermal Nutrient Delivery System. We are exploiting advances in nutritional sciences, microminiaturized physiological sensors, and molecular delivery to make this possible. We hope to deploy this within the next year."
The slide changed.
"Here is how the system works: Biosensors currently in development monitor the warfighter's metabolism, then send information to a microchip processor. This processor might then activate a microelectrical mechanical system that transmits the appropriate chemicals either through skin pores or pumped directly into blood capillaries."
The slides changed to show, in succession, a diagram of the patchlike device, a close-up photo of it, and a shot of the device installed on a heavily muscled man stripped to the waist.
"For now we are developing and testing this system as a nutrient delivery system, which serves a real need while also serving as solid cover for the Xantaeus project." Baaker paused. "Please understand this is not a sham cover. The TDNDS will undoubtedly provide significant benefits delivering vitamins, micronutrients, and nutraceuticals to warfighters with limited access to normal meals either because of protective garments or sustained combat.
"However, the TDNDS's real beauty comes with an ability allowing us to administer-along with nutritional supplements-precisely controlled amounts of Xantaeus or other drugs.
"We've tested three generations of the TDNDS system, all controlled by a microprocessor and based on a number of inputs, including simple periodic timing, triggers transmitted by encrypted radio signals, and/or from real-time personal biosensors monitoring the individual warfighter's metabolism and blood chemistry. This latter control structure will develop as the technology advances to make sure we can wirelessly connect each individual warfighters biometry with field command by extending the same GPS, identification, and data-connection technology currently used on the battlefield. This highly secret research gives us the power to shape the most lethally effective military force the world has ever experienced."
The implications of Baaker's presentation and those of LaHaye, McGovern, and the General twisted like a knife slash in Dan Gabriel's gut. He had heard vague rumors of dissenters, including his distant cousin Rick Gabriel, who warned that unspeakable horrors lurked beneath the growing enthusiasm for drugs like Xantaeus. The Pentagon establishment had done an effective job at silencing those voices who accused the drug of issuing in the era of the "chemical soldier" and creating a farm of warfare that would turn every battle into its own holocaust and destroy the very essence of what it means to be human.
But like others in the military, Gabriel had paid scant attention and given no real thought to those critics, preferring to believe the day of the nondepleting neurotrop would never come and decisions would never need to be made. But the day had clearly come, and he would now have to decide what was right.
CHAPTER 13
I had died, gone to hell, and was doomed to spend an eternity attending funerals in the freezing cold.
This time I stood far from center stage, out toward the edge of a crowd that jammed Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church's ragged little cemetery north of Greenwood. A brilliant sun had chased away the winter frost and loosened the buttons on overcoats and jackets. Among the hundreds of people there to say good-bye to Vanessa Thompson, some wore $5,000 suits and arrived on private jets. Others mourned in their Wal-Mart Sunday best worn so often the elbows shone when the sun hit them just right. I watched expensively citified celebrities with their surgically enhanced beauty literally rubbing elbows with entire families of tough, enduring people whose hard-won wisdom was sculpted in the deeply lined geography of timeworn faces. Despite the multitude, people spoke so quietly I could clearly hear the distant sounds of an old "Popping Johnny" John Deere tractor and the slamming of a screen door in some distant house.
I turned toward the sun and squinted as I held up my face to its light, trying to let it into the winter darkness that clouded my heart and chilled my soul. It failed miserably.
Here I stood as a footnote in the crowd, a grain of salt amid the pepper, relegated to the fringe less for my pale complexion than for my lack of familial, personal, political, or professional standing.
I had been to this cemetery once before, to visit the grave of blues legend Robert Johnson, who, myth has it, met the devil on a Delta crossroads somewhere nearby and sold his soul in exchange for his unholy excellence on the guitar.
As the final hymn drifted over the heads of Vanessa's mourners, I heard the low murmur of a single-engine prop biplane that resurrected a distant memory of riding in the back of Al Thompson's pickup down some dusty road at Mossy Plantation when the crop dusters would fly right over our heads and leave us lightly frosted with DDT powder.
Faces in the crowd turned expectantly upward as one, toward a vintage, fabriccovered Stearman PT-17 Kaydet biplane painted bright red. The old military trainers from the mid-1920s had been all over the Delta when I was a child. From a lengthy New York Times article, we all knew the Stearman was owned and piloted by Vanessa's daughter; Jasmine, who had almost become a commercial airline pilot before being pulled into her mother's irresistible orbit of law and power.
The Times article noted that even as a child, Jasmine had been something of an aviation prodigy, winning competitions and the respect of adults many decades her senior by designing and building advanced radio-controlled model aircraft that enabled her to obtain three patents by the time she was thirteen. But by then, she had moved on to earning a license to fly real aircraft.