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Authors: Elizabeth Jennings
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superstitious as were so many of his subjects, peasants from the dawn of time. He’d studied at Eton and at Caltech, and he considered himself a man of reason, a man of science. But the small hardened plastic cylinder on his desk, divided into two parts by a transparent plastic barrier, filled him with the awe peasants felt for the forces of nature.
There was nothing natural in what was in that cylinder. It was the upshot of years of research furtively carried out in mobile labs—nothing more than trucks, really—driving from sandy outpost to sandy outpost to avoid discovery.
It wasn’t until he had understood what a world-changer they were working on that he accepted the offer of a Pakistani emissary who’d come two years earlier. For a goodly sum of money, which was even now accruing interest on a sunny Caribbean island, he’d agreed to let them build an underground laboratory in the mountains, beyond the software parameters of spy satellites programmed to control India and Pakistan.
No one would suspect a laboratory above the 45th parallel, at ten thousand feet, and yet there it was, twenty miles north of the Palace.
The scientists were from all over the world, but the money was Arab, the plan was Arab, the head scientist Pakistani.
General Changa didn’t care. Arab-Israeli-American. It didn’t make any difference to him. Let them all blow themselves up. There was now a weapon to do it, and he was looking at it.
He held it lightly in his hand, knowing that it had been precisely calibrated to initiate a breaching sequence at 150 psi. In the back of a drawer was a compressed-air gun, and he drew it slowly out, delighting in the precisely engineered machinery. It had the look of a gun from the future, only it was very much in the here and now.
The gun shot cylinders into the shoulder or thigh, calibrated to penetrate one centimeter, compressed gas breaching the plastic barrier, imbedding in the other half of the cylinder and injecting a slow-acting acid into it. In precisely twenty-four hours, the second part of the cylinder dissolved, dispersing what the Arabs called the Ghibli , the Wind from the East.
The wind that kills.
General Changa knew that the Arabs were planning on sending soldiers on a suicide mission into Israel and New York.
He had no intention of endangering his brave warriors. He’d had one of his bioengineers in the lab design delivery canisters, like the one the Arabs had designed, only much smaller. Tiny, in fact, so tiny thousands could fit into a backpack.
His men would seed the north of India with them when the Arabs’ attack occurred. Whether the first target was Israel or the United States didn’t make any difference. His men would slip across the border, place thousands of the canisters and be back well before the twenty-four hours were up.
They would wait out the epidemic, which would burn itself out inside of a day, and march into the emptied out land bringing medical supplies and food.
And then, just stay.
He had recruited hundreds of agronomists, thousands of engineers. The Indians didn’t know what to do with all the land they had. Rich, alluvial plains, large, navigable rivers, and they were still poor. Why, Nhala was richer, and they were an isolated strip of land surrounded by granite mountains with only one arable river valley.
The Indians didn’t deserve their land. But he and his brave soldiers did. They’d turn it into a garden within a generation.
Yes, the winds of history were indeed at his back. It was as bold a plan as Alexander or Tamerlane had ever dreamed of. Better, even, because no blood would be spilled.
The only blood spilled would be from the infected ones, and it would come out of their own bodies. Neither Changa nor his men would ever touch them. It would be their own bodies that would betray them.
There was even a legend, the Snow Dragon. A Nhalan legend recounted from generation to generation since the dawn of time, until it was in his
There was nothing natural in what was in that cylinder. It was the upshot of years of research furtively carried out in mobile labs—nothing more than trucks, really—driving from sandy outpost to sandy outpost to avoid discovery.
It wasn’t until he had understood what a world-changer they were working on that he accepted the offer of a Pakistani emissary who’d come two years earlier. For a goodly sum of money, which was even now accruing interest on a sunny Caribbean island, he’d agreed to let them build an underground laboratory in the mountains, beyond the software parameters of spy satellites programmed to control India and Pakistan.
No one would suspect a laboratory above the 45th parallel, at ten thousand feet, and yet there it was, twenty miles north of the Palace.
The scientists were from all over the world, but the money was Arab, the plan was Arab, the head scientist Pakistani.
General Changa didn’t care. Arab-Israeli-American. It didn’t make any difference to him. Let them all blow themselves up. There was now a weapon to do it, and he was looking at it.
He held it lightly in his hand, knowing that it had been precisely calibrated to initiate a breaching sequence at 150 psi. In the back of a drawer was a compressed-air gun, and he drew it slowly out, delighting in the precisely engineered machinery. It had the look of a gun from the future, only it was very much in the here and now.
The gun shot cylinders into the shoulder or thigh, calibrated to penetrate one centimeter, compressed gas breaching the plastic barrier, imbedding in the other half of the cylinder and injecting a slow-acting acid into it. In precisely twenty-four hours, the second part of the cylinder dissolved, dispersing what the Arabs called the Ghibli , the Wind from the East.
The wind that kills.
General Changa knew that the Arabs were planning on sending soldiers on a suicide mission into Israel and New York.
He had no intention of endangering his brave warriors. He’d had one of his bioengineers in the lab design delivery canisters, like the one the Arabs had designed, only much smaller. Tiny, in fact, so tiny thousands could fit into a backpack.
His men would seed the north of India with them when the Arabs’ attack occurred. Whether the first target was Israel or the United States didn’t make any difference. His men would slip across the border, place thousands of the canisters and be back well before the twenty-four hours were up.
They would wait out the epidemic, which would burn itself out inside of a day, and march into the emptied out land bringing medical supplies and food.
And then, just stay.
He had recruited hundreds of agronomists, thousands of engineers. The Indians didn’t know what to do with all the land they had. Rich, alluvial plains, large, navigable rivers, and they were still poor. Why, Nhala was richer, and they were an isolated strip of land surrounded by granite mountains with only one arable river valley.
The Indians didn’t deserve their land. But he and his brave soldiers did. They’d turn it into a garden within a generation.
Yes, the winds of history were indeed at his back. It was as bold a plan as Alexander or Tamerlane had ever dreamed of. Better, even, because no blood would be spilled.
The only blood spilled would be from the infected ones, and it would come out of their own bodies. Neither Changa nor his men would ever touch them. It would be their own bodies that would betray them.
There was even a legend, the Snow Dragon. A Nhalan legend recounted from generation to generation since the dawn of time, until it was in his
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