World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

employees working three shifts, seven days a week: collecting, cataloging, disassembling, storing,
and shipping parts and pieces to factories all over the coast. There was a little trouble, like with
the cattle ranchers, people not wanting to turn over their Hummers or vintage Italian midlife crisis
mobiles. Funny, no gas to run them but they still hung on anyway. It didn’t bother me too much.
They were a pleasure to deal with compared to the military establishment.
Of all my adversaries, easily the most tenacious were the ones in uniform. I never had direct
control over any of their R&D, they were free to green light whatever they wanted. But given that
almost all their programs were farmed out to civilian contractors and that those contractors
depended on resources controlled by DeStRes, I had de facto control. “You cannot mothball our
Stealth bombers,” they would yell. “Who the Blank do you think you are to cancel our production of
tanks?” At first I tried to reason with them: “The M-1 Abrams has a jet engine. Where are you
going to find that kind of fuel? Why do you need Stealth aircraft against an enemy that doesn’t
have radar?” I tried to make them see that given what we had to work with, as opposed to what we
were facing, we simply had to get the largest return on our investment or, in their language, the
most bang for our buck. They were insufferable, with their all-hours phone calls, or just showing up
at my office unannounced. I guess I can’t really blame them, not after how we all treated them
after the last brushfire war, and certainly not after almost having their asses handed to them at
Yonkers. They were teetering on the edge of total collapse, and a lot of them just needed
somewhere to vent.
[He grins confidently.]
I started my career trading on the floor of the NYSE, so I can yell as hard and long as any
professional drill sergeant. After each “meeting,” I’d expect the call, the one I’d been both
dreading and hoping for: “Mister Sinclair, this is the president, I just want to thank you for your
service and we’ll no longer be requiring…” [Chuckles.] It never came. My guess is no one else
wanted the job.
[His smile fades.]
I’m not saying that I didn’t make mistakes. I know I was too anal about the air force’s D-Corps. I
didn’t understand their safety protocols or what dirigibles could really accomplish in undead
warfare. All I knew was that with our negligible helium supply, the only cost-effective lift gas was
hydrogen and no way was I going to waste lives and resources on a fleet of modern-day
Hindenburgs. I also had to be persuaded, by the president, no less, to reopen the experimental
cold fusion project at Livermore. He argued that even though a breakthrough was, at best, still
decades away, “planning for the future lets our people know there will be one.” I was too
conservative with some projects, and with others I was far too liberal.
Project Yellow Jacket—I still kick myself when I think about that one. These Silicon Valley
eggheads, all of them geniuses in their own field, convinced me that they had a “wonder weapon”
that could win the war, theoretically, within forty-eight hours of deployment. They could build micro
missiles, millions of them, about the size of a .22 rimfire bullet, that could be scattered from