Hamilton didn’t reply.
“What were you doing that you considered important enough to keep us all waiting for you to finish?” Clendennen asked.
“Actually, I had several processes working, Mr. President,” Hamilton, un-cowed, said. “The most important of them being the determination that Congo-X and Congo-Y were chemically—perhaps I should say ‘biologically’—identical—”
“What’s Congo-Y?” the President interrupted.
“I have so labeled the material from the Mexican border.”
“And are they? Identical?”
“That is my preliminary determination, Mr. President.”
“Colonel, two questions,” General Naylor announced.
“Sir?”
Clendennen didn’t like having his questioning of Hamilton interrupted by anyone, and had his mouth open to announce Excuse me, General, but I’m asking the questions when he changed his mind.
Clendennen liked General Naylor, and had been pleased when he had shown up to stand in for the secretary of the Defense and Defense Intelligence Agency general. He knew he could always believe what Naylor told him. This was not true of the people he was standing in for: The secretary of Defense had assured President Clendennen that the infernal laboratory in the Congo had first been completely reduced to pebbles and then incinerated. Clendennen had never heard the DIA general mouth an unqualified statement.
“They’re related, obviously,” Naylor began. “First, do you know with reasonable certainty who developed this terrible substance? And, second, how would you say they intend to use it against us?”
“Sir, I have nothing to support this legally or scientifically, but something tells me the origins of this substance go back at least to World War Two and perhaps earlier than that.”
“Go down that road,” Clendennen ordered.
“During the Second World War, sir, both the Germans and the Japanese experimented with materials somewhat similar to Congo-X. That is to say, biological material that could be used as a weapon. The Japanese tested it in China on the civilian population and the Germans on concentration camp inmates.”
“And did it work?” the President asked.
“All we have is anecdotal, Mr. President,” Hamilton said. “There is a great deal of that, and all of it suggests that it was effective. There is strong reason to believe material similar to this was tested on American prisoners of war by the Japanese ...”
“Do we know that, or don’t we?” the President asked impatiently.
“A number of POWs were executed by the Japanese immediately after Hiroshima. Their bodies were cremated and the ashes disposed of at sea,” Naylor said.
“Nice people,” the President said.
“And there is further evidence, Mr. President, that the Chinese sent several hundred American POWs captured in the early days of the Korean war to Czechoslovakia, where they were subjected to biological material apparently similar to something like this. Again, no proof. We know the prisoners were sent to Czechoslovakia. But no bodies, not one, were ever recovered. We still have Graves Registration people looking.”
“Why don’t we know more about the chemicals, about whatever was used on the prisoners?”
“At the time, Mr. President,” Naylor said, “the greatest threat was perceived to be the possibility the Russians would get their hands on German science vis-à-vis a nuclear weapon and rocketry. We were quite successful in doing so, but the effort necessary was at the expense of looking more deeply into what the Germans had been doing with biological weapons.
“In the Pacific, actually, we acquired what anecdotal information we have about the executed and cremated POWs primarily because MacArthur was passionately determined to locate, try, and hang as quickly as possible those Japanese officers responsible for the atrocities committed against our prisoners. They were, so to speak, just one more atrocity.”
The President considered that for a moment.
“So, then what is your theory about this, Colonel Hamilton?” he asked.
Hamilton began: “It’s pure conjecture, Mr. President—”
“I thought it might be,” the President interrupted sarcastically, and gestured for Hamilton to continue.
Hamilton ignored the interruption and went on: “It is possible that, at the end of World War Two, the Russians came into possession of a substance much like Congo-X. They might even have acquired it from the Japanese; there was an interchange of technical information.
“They very likely acquired at the same time the German scientists working with this material, much as we took over Wernher von Braun, his rocket scientists, and the rockets themselves.