The Swarm (57 page)

‘Hell, yes. They were so darned pompous about it. Well, I can't help it if he's a pussy. It's just the truth. But what's your point, Jude?'

‘I was just saying.'

‘Come on, out with it! What's the alternative?'

‘You mean the alternative to being led by a committee including dozens of Middle Eastern delegates?'

The President went quiet. ‘I guess we could lead it,' he said in the end.

Li waited before she spoke, as though she needed time to think. ‘That's an excellent idea, sir.'

‘But then we get lumbered with the whole world's problems -
again
. Sickening, isn't it?'

‘Well, we'd be stuck with them anyway. We're the only superpower, and if we want things to stay that way, we'll have to keep taking the lead. Besides, bad times are good times for the powerful.'

‘You and your Chinese proverbs,' said the President. ‘Well, they're not going to hand it to us on a plate. We'll have a tough time convincing them that we, of all people, should head an international commission. Imagine the reaction from the Arabs! Not to mention China and North Korea. Oh, that reminds me. I took a look at your files on the scientists. One looks Asian. I thought we said no Asians and no Arabs.'

‘Asian? Which one?'

‘Oh, something funny-sounding, like Wakawaka or—'

‘You mean Leon Anawak. Did you read his CV?'

‘No, I only flipped through.'

‘He's not Asian.' Li increased the speed to twelve kilometres per hour. ‘I'm the most Asian person in Whistler by some margin.'

The President laughed. ‘Oh, Jude, you could be from Mars for all I care. I'd still back you all the way. Darned shame that you can't come over and watch the game. We're going out to the ranch - assuming nothing comes up. Barbecued spare ribs. My wife's got them marinating already.'

‘Next time, sir,' Li said heartily.

They chatted for a bit about baseball. Li didn't push the idea that the US should lead the global coalition. Within forty-eight hours, he'd believe he'd thought of it himself. It was enough to plant the suggestion.

At the end of the conversation, she carried on running for a while. Then she sat down at the grand piano, her body still dripping with sweat, and lifted her hands to the keyboard. She focused.

A few seconds later, Mozart's Piano Sonata in G Major was flowing from her fingers.

KH-12

Like perfume on the breeze, the strains of Li's piano-playing carried through the corridors on the ninth floor of Chateau Whistler and floated out of the half-open window into the outside air. At a hundred metres above ground-level, the sound waves fanned out in concentric ripples. At the highest point of the hotel, in the fairy-tale turret perched at the top, anyone with sharp ears would have heard the music, albeit faintly. Beyond the gabled roof, though, the waves began to disperse. A hundred metres higher up, they had merged with numerous other sound waves and, as the altitude increased, the noises fell silent. A kilometre above ground, a number of sounds could still be heard: car engines starting, propeller planes droning past, and the chime of bells from the Presbyterian church in Whistler village, whose otherwise bustling streets now formed part of the exclusion zone. Finally, at an altitude of two kilometres, the whirring noise of the military choppers - the Chateau's main link to the outside world - gradually started to fade.

Viewed from that height, the hotel was still clearly visible to the naked eye, nestled among acres of forest rising gently to the west. Furrowed snow glistened on the nearby mountain ridges. Ludwig II could only have dreamed of such a place.

Higher up in the atmosphere, the sounds from below petered out altogether.

Now only jet planes taking to the skies or coming into land could still be heard. Seen from an altitude of ten kilometres, the Chateau blurred into the landscape. Charter planes left white trails in the air, and the horizon curved. Low-lying banks of cloud stood out against the bright blue sky like snow plains and icebergs, the vapour conjuring an illusion of firm ground. Another five or ten kilometres further up, the noise of supersonic jets cut through the thinning atmosphere. The troposphere was governed by the whims of the weather, but further up, the stratosphere was home to the ozone layer, which screened out ultraviolet light. The temperature increased. At that altitude, the clouds were just ethereal wisps, shimmering like mother-of-pearl. Silvery weather bal
loons shone in the sunlight, sparking reports of UFO sightings below. In 1962 an American recon plane had stolen through the silent skies twenty kilometres above ground to photograph Soviet warheads in Cuba. Because of the extreme altitude, the pilot of the legendary U-2 had been forced to wear a spacesuit. It had been one of the most daring flights of all time, and had taken place in a deep-blue sky that opened into the vastness of space.

At an altitude of eighty kilometres, the interwoven streaks of individual noctilucent clouds glistened in the light. It was minus 113°
C
. Up here the only sign of human presence was the rare sight of a passing spaceship as it took off or landed. The deep-blue gave way to blue-black. This was the realm of the heathen gods, unmasked by modern science as polar aurorae and glowing meteorites. The thermosphere had given rise to more myths and legends than any other feature of the physical environment. In reality it was an unsuitable home for divinities or for any form of life at all. Gamma and X-rays poured in from above. The thermosphere extended for hundreds of kilometres, but gas molecules were few and far between.

There were other things to see, though.

Travelling at 28,000 kilometres per hour, the nearest satellites orbited the Earth at an altitude of 150 kilometres. By their very nature they were mainly recon satellites, positioned at the minimum possible distance from the ground. Eighty kilometres above them the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission gathered land-elevation data from the Earth's surface to create a twenty-first-century planetary map. At relatively low altitudes such as these, the atmosphere was dense enough to slow the satellites, making them reliant on the occasional injection of fuel to keep them in orbit. Three hundred kilometres above the Earth there was no need for fuel. The centrifugal force and the force of gravity balanced each other out, and the satellite's orbit was stable. The skies began to fill.

The satellites circled the Earth like cars on a network of highways, passing over and under each other. The higher the altitude, the denser the traffic. At 500 kilometres, two elegant little satellites called Champ and Grace monitored the Earth's gravitational and magnetic fields. Six hundred kilometres above the polar regions, ICESat measured lightwave reflections from the Earth's surface, allowing scientists to track changes in the icecaps. Seventy kilometres above that, three state-of-the-art US Army Lacrosse satellites orbited the Earth, scanning its surface
with high-resolution radar. At an altitude of 700 kilometres, NASA's Landsat satellites observed the land and coastal regions, acquiring data on advancing and retreating glaciers, mapping the growth of forests and the formation of pack ice, and providing accurate charts of the Earth's surface temperature. SeaWiFS, on the other hand, used optical scanning and infrared to keep tabs on the build-up of algae in the oceans. At 850 kilometres above ground, NOAA's satellites had made themselves at home in a sun-synchronous orbit, with numerous meterological satellites circling the planet, passing close to both poles. The bustle of satellites encroached high into the magnetosphere, where cosmic and solar particles were bundled into two radiation belts, known as the Van Allen Belt - a phenomenon that had developed a life of its own in the media. For many Americans the Van Allen Belt was proof positive that the moon landings had never happened. In fact, even respected scientists had cast doubt on whether the astronauts in the spaceship would have been sufficiently protected to pass through the band of lethal radiation and survive. In satellite terminology, though, space was simply divided into LEO, Low Earth Orbit, then Middle Earth Orbit, used by numerous satellites, including the GPS constellation at 20,000 kilometres above ground; and then finally Geostationary Orbit, where the satellites - primarily Intelsats, used for international communication - kept pace with the Earth at an altitude of 35,888 kilometres.

Mozart was nowhere to be heard.

Though the notes from the piano had been lost in the spring air, Li's conversation with the President had made the long voyage up to the satellites and back. At the peak of the phone call, the two had chatted in outer space, exchanging information that came courtesy of the skies. Without its army of satellites, America would never have been able to fight the Gulf War or the wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The air force's campaigns of precision bombing had relied on help from outer space, and if it hadn't been for the high-resolution images from Crystal, also known as KH-12, the US high command would have been blind to enemy movements in the mountains.

KH stood for Keyhole. America's most sensitive spy satellites were the optical counterpart to the radar system of Lacrosse. They could detect objects of just four to five centimetres across and could operate in infrared light, which allowed them to work through the night. Unlike satellites orbiting above the Earth's atmosphere, they were equipped
with a rocket engine, permitting them to travel in a very low orbit. They usually circled the planet at an altitude of 340 kilometres from pole to pole, which meant they could photograph the whole Earth within twenty-four hours. When the attacks had begun off the coast of Vancouver Island, some of the Keyhole satellites had been brought down to an altitude of 200 kilometres. In response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, America had launched twenty-four new high-resolution optical spy satellites that orbited the Earth at a very low altitude, and with Keyhole and Lacrosse, they formed a formidable recon network whose capabilities exceeded even Germany's famous SAR-Lupe system.

At eight p.m. a call came through to two men in an underground bunker in Buckley Field, not far from Denver. The intelligence base was one of several secret ground stations belonging to America's National Reconnaissance Office, the NRO, whose mission was to co-ordinate satellite espionage for the American air force. It had close ties with the NSA, an agency responsible for national security and cryptology. Its brief was to bug and intercept. The alliance of the two intelligence agencies gave the American administration an unprecedented power of surveillance. In addition to that, the entire planet was continually monitored by an almost fully automated reconnaissance network known as ECHELON, which used various technological systems to listen in to international communication, including satellite, radio and fibreoptic traffic.

The two men were sitting below ground, beneath an enormous satellite dish. Working in a room full of monitors, they spent their time receiving real-time data from Keyhole, Lacrosse and other recon systems, analysing and evaluating the information, then forwarding it to the relevant authorities. According to their job titles, they were intelligence agents, though their outward appearance gave nothing away. Dressed in jeans and sneakers, they looked more like grunge rockers.

The caller informed them that a fishing-boat had radioed for help from the north-east tip of Long Island. There seemed to have been an accident near Montauk, probably involving a sperm whale. In any case, there was no guarantee that the mayday would be genuine. Already the climate of hysteria was such that false alarms flooded in. A larger vessel was said to be on its way to help, but there was no way of knowing if that was true either. Contact with the crew had broken off only seconds into the exchange.

KH-12-4, a Keyhole-class satellite, was approaching Long Island from the south-east. It was in a good position to begin the search. Buckley Field's instructions were to focus the telescope on the relevant section of coast.

One of the men typed in a string of commands.

A hundred and ninety-five kilometres above the Atlantic coast, KH-12-4 was racing across the sky; a cylindrical telescope, 15 metres long and 4.5 metres in diameter, with a total weight of 20 tonnes including fuel. Large solar sails extended on either side. The command from Buckley Field activated the rotating mirror, through which the satellite could scan an area of a thousand kilometres in any direction. In this instance, it required only the smallest adjustment. Evening was drawing in, so the image intensifiers came on, brightening the picture as though it were midday. Every five seconds KH-12-4 took another photo and transmitted the data to a relay satellite, which beamed the information down to Buckley Field.

The men stared at the screen.

Montauk appeared in the distance, a picturesque old town with a world-famous lighthouse. But from a height of 195 kilometres, Montauk's charms were no more evident than they would have been on a map. Thin lines representing roads wiggled through a landscape scattered with light dots, which was all that could be seen of the buildings. Even the lighthouse was just a faint white dot at the tip of the headland.

Beyond that, the Atlantic stretched towards the horizon.

The man guiding the satellite pinpointed the area where the boat had supposedly been attacked, punched in the co-ordinates and zoomed closer. The coast disappeared from view as the screen filled with water. There were no boats in sight.

The other man watched. He reached into his paper bag of fish nuggets. ‘Well, get looking, then,' he said.

‘Cool it, man.'

‘Cool it? They said they need that data
now
.'

‘Well, they can kiss my ass.' The operator tilted the telescope's mirror by another fraction of a degree. ‘Don't you get it, Mike? It's going to take for ever. This whole thing sucks. They always want everything yesterday, and this time they're going to have to wait. Thanks to that shitty little boat, we'll be searching the whole damn ocean.'