"Twenty SAS members, plus twenty police constables, are there at all times, plus ten more SAS circulating in pairs around the stadium. The people at the CP are armed with automatic weapons. The ones on patrol with pistols and radios. There is also a supplementary reaction force a kilometer distant with light armored vehicles and heavy weapons, platoon strength. Beyond that, a battalion of infantry twenty kilometers away, with helicopters and other support."
"Sounds good to me," Colonel Gearing said. "Can you give me the alarm code for this facility?"
They didn't even hesitate. He was a former staff-grade army officer, after all, and a senior member of the consulting team for security at the Olympic Games. "One-One-Three-Three-Six-Six," the senior cop told him. Clearing wrote it down, then punched the numbers into the keypad, which armed and then disarmed the system. He'd be able to switch out the chlorine canister very quickly.
The system was designed for rapid servicing. This would work just fine, just like the model they'd set up in Kansas, on which he and his people had practiced for several days. They'd gotten the swap-out time down to fourteen seconds. Anything under twenty meant that nobody would notice anything remiss in the fog cooling system, because residual pressure would' maintain the fogging stream.
For the first time, Gearing saw the place where he'd be doing it, and that generated a slight chill in his blood. Planning was one thing. Seeing where it would happen for real was something else. This was the place. Here he would start a global plague that would take lives in numbers far too great to tally, and which in the end would leave alive only the elect. It would save the planet-at a ghastly price, to be sure, but he'd been committed to this mission for years. He'd seen what man could do to harm things. He'd been a young lieutenant at Dugway Proving Grounds when they'd had the well-publicized accident with GB, a persistent nerve agent that had blown too far and slaughtered a few hundred sheep-and neurotoxins were not a pretty death, even for sheep. The news media hadn't even bothered to talk about the wild game that had died a similar, ugly death, everything from insects to antelope. It had shaken him that his own organization, the United States Army, could make so grave an error to cause such pain. The things he'd learned later had been worse. The binary agents he'd worked on for years-an effort to manufacture "safe" poisons for battlefield use… the crazy part was that it had all begun in Germany as insecticide research in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the chemicals used to kill off insects were nerve agents, simple ones that attacked and destroyed the rudimentary nervous systems in ants and beetles, but those German chemists had stumbled upon some of the deadliest chemical compounds ever formulated. So much of Gearing's career had been spent with the intelligence community, evaluating information about possible chemical-warfare plants in countries not trusted to have such things.
But the problem with chemical weapons had always been their distribution-how to spread them evenly across a battlefield, thus exposing enemy soldier sufficiently. That the same chemicals would travel downrange and kill innocent civilians had been the dirty secret that the organizations and the governments that ruled them had always ignored. And they didn't even consider the wildlife that would also be exterminated in vast quantities-and worse still, the genetic damage those agents caused, because marginal doses of nerve gas, below the exposure needed to kill, invaded the very DNA of the victim, ensuring mutations that would last for generations. Gearing had spent his life knowing these things, and he supposed that it had desensitized him to the taking of life in large quantities.
