Forty-Eight X (19 page)

“Well, there are several reasons, Senator,” Shell began. “Chimps are man’s closest living relatives. We had a common ancestor only about six million years ago. Scientists have sequenced the genetic code of several species—humans, as well as fruit flies, mice, and chimps. The genetic code of chimps is more than ninety-eight percent the same as ours. Between us, out of three billion DNA base pairs, there are only forty million sequences that are different. A little more than one percent.”

“But one of our guys, Eichler, a geneticist from Brown in your state,” Dr. Sun added, “has determined that we’re even more alike. You see, a lot of those forty million different sequences don’t matter. They’re duplicates or silent. So we’re actually 98.8 percent identical. And this is what’s fascinating: in Eichler’s research with our young chimps, he’s noted that their genetic mutation rate, how fast they’re evolving, is higher than ours. Now you hear the word
mutation
, you think cancer. But don’t think cancer. They’re not getting cancer. The genes that are mutating are evolving. The genes are those involved with transmission of nerve signals, the perception of sound, visual interpretation. Eichler thinks our chimps are getting smarter. And we’re helping them along.”

The senators were then brought into a room with a dozen chimps sitting in front of computers.

“Show them Einstein,” Dr. Sun ordered.

A trainer ushered the senators around one chimp intently staring at his computer screen. The trainer hit a key, and on screen a series of numbers from one to nine popped up, scattered randomly on the screen. They appeared for only a split second. Then, the numbers in those same locations were replaced by a blank square. Einstein, named for obvious reasons, then quickly touched the squares on the computer screen in the exact sequence that the numbers had appeared.

“I’ve played this game dozens of times,” Dr. Sun said. “Everyone has. And nobody can match the chimp’s ability to remember those sequences. The numbers appear for just a half a second. I’ve managed to do the test with four of five numbers. Nobody can do ten. Our Einstein here has managed to do as many as fifteen. Most of the chimps can do eight or nine without any trouble.”

“How’d you teach them to do that?” Senator Berger asked.

“It’s an innate ability chimps have that we don’t,” Shell answered. “A talent they’ve evolved. In the wild, they would’ve needed to quickly recognize the locations of multiple predators to survive.”

“That’s true,” Dr. Sun smiled. “But we’ve helped. We’ve developed both chemical and electrical models to enhance LTP.”

“LTP?” Even Shell was sometimes caught off guard by the rapid advances of his teams.

“LTP means long-term potentiation,” she explained. “The strengthening of cell connections in the hippocampus, the area of the brain involved in memory, learning, tracking, and spacial awareness. I think our new drug works pretty well. Half our staff volunteered to take it. Everybody wants to compete with Einstein. Our simian friend here, I mean.”

There were many other advances in chimp development that General Shell had passed over and some clearly of which he was unaware. They were becoming smarter, with each succeeding generation having measurably larger brain size. Lemuria’s scientists had also manipulated stem cells to turn fat cells into muscle. While pound for pound chimps were stronger than humans, Shell’s chimps were stronger still. His researchers had also genetically altered their hemoglobin, the molecule in red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body. This new hemoglobin had far greater oxygen-carrying capacity, giving the chimpanzees greater endurance. They could also perform better at higher altitudes and, as tests showed, remain conscious while holding their breath underwater beyond any human record.

“Are there any problems with these animals?” the other senator asked.

Shell paused. He wanted to be honest but at the same time not put off his benefactors. “They’re smart and they train well.” He would leave it at that.

“But no problems?” Senator Berger pressed.

“They do have one terrible attribute,” Shell conceded.

“And what’s that?”

“They kill their own kind,” the general answered.

“That’s not a small problem,” Berger grumbled.

“No,” the general agreed.

“Are you working on the problem?”

“We’re working on it. I doubt we’ll come up with a solution.”

“Why not?” the other senator asked.

“Well,” Shell went on, “there is only one other mammal that kills their own. And that’s us—human beings. And we haven’t been able to solve that problem in thousands of years.”

On his flight home, Senator Berger wondered if this “monkey business” was worth billions of dollars. He had some ethical questions, as well. For now, however, he’d keep them to himself. No use providing fodder for those few U.S. senators who were borderline “creationists” and leaned toward a wacky dismissal of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He smiled to himself imagining relaying the stories of the research he had seen with chimps named Fish, Talk, Fart, and Einstein.

“We’re a few million years apart on the evolutionary tree,” Shell had mentioned.

Many of Berger’s peers in Congress would be quite displeased to learn that monkeys were climbing up fast.

C
olonel McGraw had new orders: OD 9.12 0400. RP DG. FARP Davao. AOB Jolo. AFO auth. HUMINT. Translation:

This operation would take place on an island in the south of the Philippines. Apparently stateside brass wanted to see if his crew could function in a different type of terrain, climate, culture, and battlefield.

He felt he was ready. More importantly, he knew his team was ready.

The Abu Sayyaf were Muslim separatists who had been a nemesis for the Philippine government for decades. They were few, but they were vicious, frequently beheading the soldiers they captured and holding hostages for ransom. And they were well armed. Most recently they had killed an American missionary and a dozen other hostages when an assault by the Philippine army failed. It was an American defeat as well, since the Americans had trained the Philippine special ops forces.

McGraw came to finish the task with just a single platoon, actually fewer troops than he’d used before. He was smart enough not to bring along the baggage of past successes. Fighting new wars with old strategies had always been the bane of military men. He had practiced a deployment of his troops in the same kind of terrain he would need to attack. As soon as his troops advanced on the training objective, the jungle came alive with screeching and screaming animals. The jungle would require different tactics. There would be no stealth here. But all of Colonel McGraw’s troops now had a new weapon in their arsenal, a weapon Alexander the Great could not have imagined.

A Lemuria researcher at DG had developed a brain prosthesis—an artificial hippocampus. It was a microchip inserted into the brain that functioned as an accessory hippocampus, that part of the brain inside the temporal lobes that activated memory and spatial navigation. The name came from a Greek word—
hippokampos
—meaning “sea horse,” because that’s what that part of the brain resembled, and that’s exactly what McGraw called his show: Operation Sea Horse.

Operation Sea Horse would take patience. It wouldn’t be timed by the minute, but by the day.

When his troops entered enemy territory, the jungle came alive as expected. The screeching of wild animals was like an early warning system for the Abu Sayyaf. The rebels readied for an attack. None came. Every night the jungle would scream. The terrorists would move from one locale to another. Scouts were sent to look for the enemy. None ever returned. No grand attack ever came.

For ten nights, McGraw’s troops hid and maneuvered in the trees of a Philippine jungle. With an “artificial hippocampus,” they had a built-in GPS and an implanted memory of the rules and options for this engagement. While they waited for their go-ahead to attack, they ate leaves, seeds, tree bark, and flowers. They ate termites and ants. They ate young monkeys. And they ate even more. Then one night a signal came, a sound that no one else but they could “see,” and they attacked the Abu Sayyaf.

Several days later the Philippine army came upon the bloodstained battlefield. As in the attack on the Pakistani Taliban, the enemy had been horrifically butchered, sliced apart with the blades of Alexander. There was one other interesting note in the report of the scene that McGraw read days later. The victims were found with limbs and other body parts partially chewed off, eaten. McGraw tried to shrug it off. His soldiers had gone into battle with no food, no water, only determination. They were taught to survive and win any way they could. War was kill or be killed. Why should this added bit of wartime horror make him squeamish? But it did.

S
everal days after the Abu Sayyaf massacre, General Shell received a call from the vice chief-of-staff at the Pentagon, who imagined himself to be Shell’s “handler.” Shell viewed him as simply a nemesis bureaucrat. He was someone who had succeeded in rising through the ranks by simply saying “no” to everything, lauding his own judgment when things went wrong and, when they went right, somehow making others believe he’d actively supported the mission from the sidelines. Like many men he had run into in his years in the military, he substituted bravado for brains.

The VCS ranted. He used phrases like “indiscriminate killing” and “a total breakdown in morality.”

“When this gets out,” the VCS said, “it’ll be no different from the atrocities of war that have undermined our missions in the past, like Mai Lai and Abu Graiv. We can’t condone or ignore cannibalism.”

The VCS liked “yes men,” so Shell answered “yes” to anything he had to say. When that call was finished, General Shell made his own call—to Colonel McGraw.

“You won’t get one, Link, but you deserve a medal for this one.” That’s all he had to say. There was more work to do on Lemuria. The military would not toss out the use of their new troops because of one misstep. They would just train them better.

At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, someone else was dealing with the problem. The president was briefed on the Philippine Lemuria mission. By all accounts it was a success. No U.S. troops had been lost, and forty-one vicious terrorists were slain. There were women and children among them, but intelligence confirmed that they were carrying weapons as well. That was how terrorists fought. They had no hesitancy in hiding among civilians or using women and children as part of their arsenal. The United States and other nations had to fight with moral handcuffs. The president was actually pleased to have this new, albeit still imperfect, weapon in his war on terror.

There was another, perhaps bigger problem with which his staff would have to deal. The
New York Times
would headline the story of the Abu Sayyaf “massacre” the next day. There were three hits the administration would take.

The story would say Americans were involved. That came from a Philippine military source. The U.S. Army clearly had to remove any Filipino troops from the area before pursuing their agenda. They couldn’t be trusted anyway. Many were either susceptible to bribes or sympathetic to the terrorists. It was expected that it might leak that U.S. troops undertook the mission. But it was a fight against terrorists, and taking any fight to the enemy anywhere was not going to pose a problem. So, it was decided. They would admit to involvement.

The story would go on to mention words like
atrocity, barbarism
, and
cannibalism
. The responses to that story, the president’s national security advisor said, would require some fine-tuning, a euphemism for “denial.”

And finally, the story would say that an American soldier had been taken prisoner and unless the U.S. government paid reparations to the Abu Sayyaf, the soldier would be tortured and sent back to America “piece by piece.” That was a bit more troublesome. But after a quick and thorough investigation, the military returned with an answer. Bogus. No troops were taken in the attack. None wounded. None captured. And, after a lot of number counting, the generals concluded that unless one of the few dozen navy personnel on leave in Manila had been captured by hookers, there wasn’t an American soldier or sailor missing in the Philippines. And with orders going out canceling any leave, they, too, would soon be accounted for.