Impact by Douglas Preston Page B

who drank deeply. He then drank himself, the water warm and fetid.
    “You verified the mine,” said Khon, sitting up and examining his fingernails. He took out a nail file and began to clean and sand them. “You have the location. We can go back now.”
    Ford said nothing.
    “Right, Mr. Mandrake? We go back now?”
    Still no answer.
    “No more saving the world, please!”
    Ford rubbed his neck. “Khon, you know we’ve got a problem.”
    “Which is?”
    “Why did they send me here?”
    “To locate the mine. You said so yourself.”
    “You saw it. Are you trying to tell me the CIA didn’t already know exactly where it was? No way could our spy satellites have missed that place.”
    “Hmmm,” mumbled Khon. “You have a fucking point.”
    “So why the charade of sending me in?”
    Khon shrugged. “The CIA moves in mysterious ways.”
    Ford rubbed his face, smoothed back his hair, breathed out. “There’s another problem.”
    “Which is?”
    “Are we going to leave those people to die?”
    “Those people are already dead. And you told me you were ordered to do nothing. No touchee mine. Right, Mr. Mandrake?”
    “There were children there, kids .” Ford raised his head. “Did you see them blow that teenager away, just like that? And the mass grave? There must be a couple of hundred bodies in there already and the trench wasn’t even a quarter full. This is genocide.”
    Khon was shaking his head. “Welcome to the land of genocide. Leave it.”
    “No. I’m not going to just walk away.”
    “What can we do?”
    “Blow the mine up.”

21

    Mark Corso clutched the CD-ROM in his hand, feeling the sweat from his fingers sticking to the plastic case. It was his first time in the MMO conference room, the sanctum sanctorum of the Mars mission. It was disappointing. The stale air smelled of coffee, carpeting, and Pledge. The walls were done up in fake paneling, some of which had buckled. Plastic tables against the walls were loaded with flat-screen computer monitors, oscilloscopes, consoles, and other random electronic equipment. A screen lowered from the ceiling covered one end of the room, and the ugliest conference table he had ever seen, in brown Formica with stamped aluminum edges and metal legs, dominated the center.
    Corso took his seat in front of a little plastic sign sporting his name. He slipped his laptop out, plugged it into a dock, jacked it in, and booted up. Meanwhile the other technicians were trickling in, chatting, joking, and tanking up on weak California coffee from an ancient Sunbeam in the corner.
    Marjory Leung sat down beside him, plugged her own computer in. A fragrance of jasmine drifted over him. She was unexpectedly well dressed in a sleek black suit and Corso was glad he had donned his best jacket that morning with one of his most expensive silk ties. The white lab coats were nowhere to be seen.
    “Nervous?” she asked.
    “A little.” It was Corso’s first senior staff meeting, and he was third in line out of ten presenters, each with five minutes and questions.
    “Pretty soon it’ll seem routine.”
    The room fell silent as the MMO mission director, Charles Chaudry, rose from his seat at the far end of the table. Corso liked Chaudry—he was young, hip, with premature gray hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, utterly brilliant and yet down to earth. Everyone knew his story: born in Kashmir, India, he came to the U.S. as a baby in the wave of refugees fleeing the Second Kashmir War of 1965. He’d worked his way up from nothing, a classic immigrant success story, to earn a Ph.D. in planetary geology from Berkeley, his dissertation winning the Stockton Award. As if to make up for his foreign birth, Chaudry was quintessentially American—Californian even—a rock-climber, mountain biker, and avid surfer who tackled the winter waves at Mavericks, said to be the most dangerous break in the world. There were rumors he came from a rich Brahmin family of obscure nobility and