Operation Honshu Wolf Read Online Free PDF Page A

destroying soup kitchens made things tough, but without the government authorizing the mass movement of cargo and food across state lines, Schaeffer-Yeager would never have been able to help as much as it did. Now, of course, there wasn’t much left to stop anyone from doing as they liked, but having a President bought and paid for by the company had been helpful.
    The man who’d actually bought President Fredericks, not that Miller would ever say that to Gray’s face, was looking calm and collected. But L. Gray Matheson always did.
    There were two kinds of billionaires Miller had met in his life: the psychotics built on a foundation of poisonous ego, and the steely ones with ice in their veins. Gray was the steely kind, in public. With his kids—Miller usually provided live-in security for the family—he could warm up some.
    Maybe, before the famines, there could have been enough clout to quietly bury something like this. There had been armies of lobbyists on both sides of the aisle, and while Gray didn’t directly own any of the media conglomerates, there was enough financial incestuousness to squash things. Now? Now there wasn’t enough of a government left to authorize drilling in a national park.
    There wasn’t any law and order left in the continental United States. Even the National Guard had collapsed, since the famines had forced half of them to desert in search of food. And when a government couldn’t even feed its armed forces, it sure as hell couldn’t squelch a crime against humanity.
    That’s what the helicopter attack was, even if some wouldn’t view the Infected as human.
    “We. Had. To. Rescue. Our. People! ” Harris roared from the table’s opposite end, getting up and slamming his fists down. “The response was legitimate! ”
    Barrett was on her feet too, knuckles on the table, furious. “Stop trying to justify this, Bob. You didn’t give a shit about ‘our people,’ you wanted BioGen’s field research.”
    Harris blanched. “That’s a baseless allegation.”
    “Whose department did you hand Lester Allen’s phone to, Bob?” She bared teeth. “Of course I looked at what my guys pulled out of it. Why is genetic field analysis of air-trapped fungal spores worth killing that many people for?”
    “This isn’t going to stick in court. You can’t pin this on me.”
    “This isn’t going to court,” Gray said, speaking up at last. “We’re all friends here.” Robust, in his mid-fifties, Gray spoke with a honey-warm burr. But, as Miller had seen many times before, Gray’s voice could go from comforting purr to threatening growl in a flash. “There aren’t any courts left to throw you in front of, Bob.” There was that growl.
    Harris sat down, slowly.
    “So,” Gray went on, “let’s take it as given that your death sentence is temporarily suspended, and make the presumption that we’re all working toward the same goals, whether we are butchers , bakers, or innocent, bystanding candlestick makers. Tell us, Bob. Why?”
    Harris withered under Gray’s gaze, realizing his boss didn’t have his back to be friendly, but to be first one in with the knife. “Lester Allen’s team weren’t just tracking the spread of crop-killing Archaeobiome funguses,” he admitted, at last.
    “What were they doing, Bob?”
    “Testing an aerosolized anti-parasitic drug called NAPA-33.” Harris clawed his fingers over his face. “They loaded it into their air traps across the city, and dispersed it from there. It’s designed to interfere with genetic replication in the parasite—we don’t know if the drug works or not. Mixed in with the fungal genetic samples are samples his team pulled from the commune we were testing it on. It needs to get to what’s left of BioGen.”
    “For God’s sake,” Barrett hissed. “You’re talking about bioweapons.”
    “ Medicine! ” Harris roared. “This is medicine! The Infected are the biggest threat to humanity out there; if we don’t stop