“General Cardiff said you’ve seen a lot of respiratory illness,” I said. “Has that been fungal in nature?”
“I expect so, but it’s mostly a presumptive diagnosis,” Suharto said. “Fungal etiology is hard to prove and generally unnecessary to treat in less serious cases. But as you probably know, fungal infections are endemic in this region. The rainforest, the humidity, combined with a large pool of previously unexposed subjects, and a high incidence of minor infection is inevitable.”
“Did the number of cases go up this morning?”
I heard him typing on a computer, presumably checking the data. “They did, as a matter of fact, by a good margin. Not epidemic proportions or anything, but a definite increase. What do you know that I don’t?”
I explained to him about the crop dusters and our suspicion that they were raining spores down on the camp.
Next to me, Shaunessy typed rapidly at a computer, nested lines of software code that I didn’t comprehend spidering across her screen. On two other screens beside her, she monitored the feeds from a dozen drones. The live video tracked military movements, zoomed in on specific buildings or out to view square miles at a time. Shaunessy wasn’t controlling them; she had just accessed the streaming data. Before I called Suharto, she had muttered something about training a deep learning network to recognize anomalous activity, but I barely understood what she meant.
“If it’s biological warfare, they’re not doing a terribly good job of it,” Suharto said. “I appreciate the call, and we’ll keep our eye out. A little respiratory infection isn’t going to destroy our will to fight, though. I had an infection myself a few days ago. Unpleasant at the time, but I felt better after forty-eight hours. That’s what it’ll be for most of these soldiers.”
I paused. “You were infected, sir?”
“Nasty cough, bloody nose, high fever. Knocked me off my feet for a day and a half, and I felt miserable, let me tell you. It’s the price you pay when you enter a new microbial ecosystem. Lots of opportunistic organisms happy to find a new home. Life-threatening for immunocompromised hosts, but not a serious danger for the rest of us.”
He was so confident, so articulate, that I found it hard to doubt him. But what if he, too, was under the influence of the fungus? Would he even know it himself?
An idea occurred to me. “I suppose it won’t matter once Cardiff’s plan to raze the rainforest goes into effect,” I said. Shaunessy looked up from her typing long enough to give me an odd look.
“What did you say? Raze the forest? As in, burn it?” Suharto said.
“Yeah. I don’t think it’s classified or anything. He’s planning to take out as many acres of rainforest as he can. Use accelerants to make it burn faster, get some real forest fires going. Of course, the Amazon basin is as big as the United States. Obviously he’s not going to burn all of it. He’ll concentrate on those areas where there’s suspected enemy activity, burn as much as he can. Part of the whole ‘shock and awe’ strategy, right?”
When Suharto replied, his voice was shaking. “He wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t.”
“I’m pretty sure he could.”
“The Amazon is priceless. It’s the only place like it in the world. The number of unique species, the ecological complexity, the carbon and oxygen contribution to the planet. He can’t burn it. I’d rather lose this war than see it won through such means.”
The strength of emotion behind Suharto’s speech chilled me. I didn’t even disagree with anything he said—it would be a crime to burn acres of rainforest, and the Amazon was valuable for all the reasons he mentioned and more. Furthermore, I had no way of knowing if Suharto had been passionate about ecological preservation before his infection. But the fact that my little test had been so dramatically passed frightened me more than I wanted to admit.
“I apologize,” I said. “A staffer here just corrected me. That strategy was apparently suggested but ultimately rejected by the general.”
“I should hope so,” Suharto said.
“I’m not really privy to policy. Sorry if I upset you. I guess that’ll teach me to listen to gossip.”
“No harm done.” The emotion vanished from the captain’s voice. “I’ll keep a watch on those infection rates, but really, I think there’s nothing to worry about.”
Shaunessy waved to get my attention. She looked alarmed. She clicked on one of the Reaper drone’s camera feeds so that it filled one of the screens.
“I’m sorry, I have to go now,” I said into the phone. “Sorry to trouble you, Captain.”
“No trouble,” Suharto said. “Good day.”
I ended the call and gave Shaunessy my attention. “What is it?”
She pointed to the feed. The way the Reaper’s camera was angled, I could see one of the wings, its underside loaded with Hellfire missiles, black with yellow stripes. I could also spot the edge of its 150-kilowatt laser—a new addition to the Reaper weapons catalog that enabled it to attack other aircraft, not just ground targets. The rest of the camera’s field of view showed a small city, studded with office block towers and surrounded on three sides by water. The ocean was turquoise and the wide bay beyond the city’s bridges a sparkling blue.
“Is that São Luis?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “but this drone is assigned to monitor Belém, three hundred miles away. Why is it here?”
I shrugged. “Coming back to refuel?”
Shaunessy tapped on the screen, where a column of numbers and abbreviations overlaid the edge of the image. “It’s still got three-quarters of a tank.”
“Maybe it’s malfunctioning, and they’re bringing it in for repairs?”
The drone slid over the city and crossed the bay. The precisely ordered tent city of the US Marine camp came into view, the rows of dark green canvas surrounded by sandbag walls. The camera swiveled to locate the vehicle area, where tanks, trucks, armored earth movers, and tactical vehicles of all kinds sat parked in neat lines.
“I’m sure they have it on radar,” I said. “Nothing gets within a hundred miles of that camp without them knowing it. The guy flying it is probably in that camp.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“You don’t think…” I started to say, but I trailed off when a white box appeared in the center of the screen and a red light started flashing in the lower left corner.
“No,” Shaunessy said. “No no no no no no.”
I snatched the phone and redialed Suharto’s number. Reaching the field commander or some other combat officer would probably have been better, but I didn’t know how to reach them, and I didn’t have time to find out.
“Hello?” The voice that answered was female, stressed, and not Suharto. “This is HQ in São Paulo,” I said. “Be advised that a friendly drone is targeting your position. Repeat, a friendly armed drone is about to fire on your camp.”
The voice on the other end laughed, high and panicked. “Is that all?” she said. “We’ve got bigger problems here right now.”
With a jet of white contrail, one of the Reaper’s Hellfires rocketed off the rails and dropped toward the ground. Seconds later, it hit the side of an Abrams tank and tore it open in a silent explosion. On screen, it seemed tiny, just a distant flash with no color or sound to give it power.
The woman on the line started swearing. “What’s happening there?” I demanded.