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capillaries."
The slides changed to show, in succession, a diagram of the patchlike device, a close-up photo of it, and a shot of the device installed on a heavily muscled man stripped to the waist.
"For now we are developing and testing this system as a nutrient delivery system, which serves a real need while also serving as solid cover for the Xantaeus project." Baaker paused. "Please understand this is not a sham cover. The TDNDS will undoubtedly provide significant benefits delivering vitamins, micronutrients, and nutraceuticals to warfighters with limited access to normal meals either because of protective garments or sustained combat.
"However, the TDNDS's real beauty comes with an ability allowing us to administer—along with nutritional supplements—precisely controlled amounts of Xantaeus or other drugs.
"We've tested three generations of the TDNDS system, all controlled by a microprocessor and based on a number of inputs, including simple periodic timing, triggers transmitted by encrypted radio signals, and/or from real-time personal biosensors monitoring the individual warfighter's metabolism and blood chemistry. This latter control structure will develop as the technology advances to make sure we can wirelessly connect each individual warfighters biometry with field command by extending the same GPS, identification, and data-connection technology currently used on the battlefield. This highly secret research gives us the power to shape the most lethally effective military force the world has ever experienced."
The implications of Baaker's presentation and those of LaHaye, McGovern, and the General twisted like a knife slash in Dan Gabriel's gut. He had heard vague rumors of dissenters, including his distant cousin Rick Gabriel, who warned that unspeakable horrors lurked beneath the growing enthusiasm for drugs like Xantaeus. The Pentagon establishment had done an effective job at silencing those voices who accused the drug of issuing in the era of the "chemical soldier" and creating a farm of warfare that would turn every battle into its own holocaust and destroy the very essence of what it means to be human.
But like others in the military, Gabriel had paid scant attention and given no real thought to those critics, preferring to believe the day of the nondepleting neurotrop would never come and decisions would never need to be made. But the day had clearly come, and he would now have to decide what was right.

CHAPTER 13
    I had died, gone to hell, and was doomed to spend an eternity attending funerals in the freezing cold.
This time I stood far from center stage, out toward the edge of a crowd that jammed Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church's ragged little cemetery north of Greenwood. A brilliant sun had chased away the winter frost and loosened the buttons on overcoats and jackets. Among the hundreds of people there to say good-bye to Vanessa Thompson, some wore $5,000 suits and arrived on private jets. Others mourned in their Wal-Mart Sunday best worn so often the elbows shone when the sun hit them just right. I watched expensively citified celebrities with their surgically enhanced beauty literally rubbing elbows with entire families of tough, enduring people whose hard-won wisdom was sculpted in the deeply lined geography of timeworn faces. Despite the multitude, people spoke so quietly I could clearly hear the distant sounds of an old "Popping Johnny" John Deere tractor and the slamming of a screen door in some distant house.
I turned toward the sun and squinted as I held up my face to its light, trying to let it into the winter darkness that clouded my heart and chilled my soul. It failed miserably.
Here I stood as a footnote in the crowd, a grain of salt amid the pepper, relegated to the fringe less for my pale complexion than for my lack of familial, personal, political, or professional standing.
I had been to this cemetery once before, to visit the grave of blues legend Robert Johnson, who, myth has