SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror

He nodded. “There are times I envy drive-through window employees at McDonalds. Red tape isn’t a factor when ordering fast food.”

“No joke.”

We gave each other small, bland smiles.

I folded my arms. “Again I ask – why now?”

“There was a police report of lights on inside the facility late last night. Officers on scene found the rear door broken open, but a quick search of the premises yielded no results. The intruders must have fled.”

“Could the intruders have been some of the missing scientists?”

“Certainly a possibility.”

“But why break in? What’s left to steal?”

“Unknown. When the Koenig senior staff realized the hammer was about to fall they tried to clear things up in a hurry. A lot of material was destroyed to keep it from falling into our hands and, by association, a congressional committee. The task force recovered a lot of melted disks, destroyed hard-drives and that kind of thing. Bug put his team on it to see if there was enough left to determine whether they trashed the actual records or if what we recovered was pure junk. Computer records are small, and easy enough to hide. The task force might have missed a flash drive or some disks. If someone was there last night, it’s likely they removed whatever was hidden. However, we do need to check.”

“Swell.”

“What little we did recover,” Church continued, “tied into something that’s clanged a few warning bells for MindReader.”

When the DMS was formed it was built around a real mother of a computer system that was entirely owned by Mr Church. Aside from being enormously powerful and sophisticated, MindReader had two primary functions. First, it collated information from all of the major intelligence networks, including some who didn’t know their data was being mined, and then looked for patterns. Often different agencies will have gotten whiffs of things or obtained pieces of information, but MindReader sorted through all of it and began assembling fragments into whole, actionable pictures. A lot of our effectiveness is built on being able to spot trouble before it literally blows up in our face.

MindReader’s other function was actually its scariest aspect. It could intrude into virtually any other computer system, poke around, take what it wanted, and then rewrite the target’s security software so there was absolutely no record of the intrusion. All other intelligence software leaves some kind of scar on the target system; MindReader is a ghost.

“What bells?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

“Sadly, it’s vague. The North Koreans and Chinese were both providing funding for a project codenamed ‘Changeling’. We don’t know the nature of the program, but when nations who don’t always have our best interests at heart are willing to transfer funds in excess of fifty million…”

He left the rest to hang.

“Have you talked to Dr Hu about this?”

Hu was the head of the DMS science division. He was both a super-genius in multiple disciplines and a world-class heartless asshole. We have failed to bond on an epic level.

“Dr Hu is intensely interested in it because he feels it may be connected to a project we caught wind of last year that dealt with transformative genetics.”

“I don’t even like the sound of that.”

“Neither do I. It’s a radical branch of transgenics in which animals of various kinds are given gene therapy in order to provoke controlled mutations. We saw some of that in the Jakoby labs.”

“Ah,” I said, loading that syllable with as much scorn as I could. The Jakobys were a family of brilliant geneticists. Immeasurably dangerous. Their Dragon Factory laboratory was used to create animals that, at least, looked like mythical creatures. Big game hunters paid millions to hunt unicorns and centaurs. It didn’t matter that the animals were genetic freaks whose DNA was now hopelessly corrupted. Nor did it matter that the resulting mutations were often painful for the animal and virtually guaranteed a short and agonizing life. None of that mattered. The novelty market allowed them to raise money for more destructive projects, including ethnic-specific pathogens intended to fuel a new genocide.

We shut them down. Hard.

And it was there at the Dragon Factory that Grace died.

“Do these Koenig assholes have the Jakoby research? ‘Cause if they do I’m going to find them and remove important parts.”

“It’s unlikely. MindReader would have flagged that. But it seems that their scientists were working along dangerously similar lines. To what end we don’t know. Once the red tape is sorted out I intend to have our people be first through the door to do a thorough examination of any materials left intact.”

“Must be pissing you off that we’ve had to wait so long.”

He said nothing, and nothing showed on his face, but there was a palpable feeling of tension buzzing around him. Yeah, he was pissed.