Birdkill
Birdkill is about a young British woman - Robyn Shaw - who travels to Lebanon to work as a teacher in an international school up in the mountains above Beirut, in a small town called Zahlé. Something terrible happened to her there, but her mind has shut it out. Now, airlifted out of Lebanon and following a long rehabilitation in the UK, she is offered a job working at a boarding school for unusually gifted children, the Hamilton Institute.
Robyn takes to her new role as best she can, but she’s unsettled by one of the children who appears to lead the others, a young man called Martin who summons birds from the sky before killing them. When he turns his unwelcome attentions on her, she feels her mind start to unravel and the gap in her past starts to creep back into her dreams even as she starts to hallucinate in her waking hours.
Terrified at what is happening, she turns to best friend and journalist Mariam Shadid who tries to unravel the secrets of Robyn’s past before her friend loses her mind. Mariam uncovers a vicious and dangerous battlefield enhancement program that has spiralled out of control and chases the story via a US army whistleblower even as she finds herself endangered by the secrets that Robyn’s shattered memory is now releasing.
Dream/nightmare/dream
Quite a lot of the writing I get up to is inspired by dreams and Birdkill was the result of a particularly vivid dream which I noted down in the form of a short story, written sometime in the late 1980s. It sat in a file since then, a few sheets of stapled-together paper I'd sent to Sarah back when she lived in Sharjah in the UAE and I lived in Northampton in the UK and we used to write letters to each other. Yes, yes, letters.
I found it again when I'd finished A Decent Bomber and suddenly the book was there, wriggling in my hands like a live thing. I wrote Birdkill in six weeks flat. A Decent Bomber had taken me two years and was like shitting a breeze block and so Birdkill was a sort of massive sigh of relief.
Dogs of war
At its core, Birdkill centres around a battlefield enhancement, eugenics and drugs program called ODIN that has failed dramatically (or succeeded dramatically, depending on how you look at it).
Strangely enough, we’re looking at a military enhancement program that is so successful it turns men into monsters, the very thing you’d think you’d want men at war to be. But the subjects of ODIN, the soldiers it has created, are so horrific they challenge every conception of human decency - even when war itself demands what most people in society would recognise as indecency.
The worrying thing is not what a tall tale ODIN is, but how similar it is to efforts by various militaries to create 'supermen' using drugs and other enhancement techniques - some of which have gone horribly wrong. It's a little like finding my lost Oka nuclear missiles in researching Beirut - An Explosive Thriller - the facts you uncover researching books at times make the fiction seem, well, a little dull.
Battlefield drugs: Hitler was off his tits on them…
Drugs have been a tool of war for hundreds of years. Our very own part of the world contributes its own tale of battlefield drugs, with the infamous C11th Ismaili rebel Hassan Al Sabbah establishing his mountain fortress in Alamut Castle up in the craggy mountains of Northern Iran and sending his hashish-crazed warriors against the Seljuks. The soldiers, the hashishim, give us our word 'assassin' today.
Hitler was an enthusiastic convert to the use of drugs, despite Nazism's prudery in other aspects of bohemianism. The German rush to conquer Europe was fuelled on massive supplies of Pervitin, a synthetic methamphetamine. 35 million tablets shipped to German forces in 1940 alone, each packing a 3mg dose of good old fashioned speed.
By 1941, the German Supreme Command had realised that uppers came with downers and was restricting its enthusiastic use of Pervitin. But stories of remarkable achievements made by soldiers under the influence of the drug led to trials of other battlefield drugs, including one pill which packed a cocktail of 5mg of cocaine, 3mg of Pervitin and 5mg of painkiller Eukodal. Throughout the war, the Fuhrer himself was bouyed up by near-constant doses of Pervitin. Imagine Lemmy running Nazi Germany and you've got something like the idea of how much trouble everyone was in.
It wasn't just the Germans, though. The British and Americans both used amphetamines for their bomber crews, including Benzedrine and Dexedrine. Even the Japanese got in on the act. Despite their usefulness as a stimulant for weary soldiers, the come-downs and addictiveness of amphetamines led to their being tightly controlled as a drug. And yet the Americans are still handing out Dexies to their pilots in 10mg doses today.
Other 'wonder drugs' routinely find their way into military use. Several have chequered histories, including Methylhexanamine (say that after a couple of stiff ones) or DMAA, which has been linked to a number of military and sporting deaths. The British army experimented widely with LSD in the 1950s, the Americans (aiming this time not at enhancing their own troops but at taking down the enemy) with LSD and other agents as weaponised aerosols in the 1960s.
Of the very many military enhancement programmes that have run since WWII, probably the most 'holistic' was DARPA's* Peak Soldier Performance Programme, which ran in the early noughties. This looked at every aspect of performance enhancement, including genomic and biochemical approaches. A Presidential report at the time referred to the danger of 'potential development of drugs that could suppress the fear and inhibition of soldiers, effectively turning them into killing machines capable of acting without both scrutiny and impunity.'
The disastrous ODIN military trial in Birdkill is not only NOT far fetched, but scarily real and based on pretty solid precedent...
Which is actually something of a worry...
* DARPA were the clever boys and girls who invented the Internet… They didn’t do it with videos of cats riding around on Roombas in mind, believe me…
"There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations."
George Bernard Shaw
Eugenics is a worryingly real idea…
The idea that we can somehow shape the betterment of our species has long held scientists in thrall. And yet we are still chilled by the efforts of the Nazis and others who ventured into the territory of human enhancement through selective breeding. It's fine to breed and cross dogs or horses, to transplant trees and splice varieties to create disease resistant, hardier and larger fruit and vegetables. But when you start doing that with people, the overwhelming majority of us feel a line is being crossed.
Eugenics is, in short, a dirty word.
Although thinkers way back in human history toyed with the idea - the soldiers of Sparta were an early example of hardy stock applied to a task, as I suppose the Nepalese Gurkhas are today - it wasn't until the Victorians happened by that we started playing with the idea of improving the human gene pool by spaying the insane and sterilising the less than perfect humans out there. Armed with calipers to measure people's heads and various other dubious 'sciences' to categorise people in nice, easy boxes that conformed to Victorian ideals of human perfection, a number of organisations around the world sprang up around the world, all espousing the spurious ideals of eugenics.
We like to think of it as a uniquely German invention, but it wasn't. The Eugenics Education Society of London was formed in 1907; the American Eugenics Society in 1912 and the French Eugenics Society in the same year. They were joined by the Belfast based Irish Eugenics Society: British perceptions of the Irish as a nation of sub-human, troglodyte beings and Catholic notions of shame were to morph through the C20th into the vile social experiment we would come to know as the Magdalene Laundries. At their heart, the ideals of eugenics; cleansing humanity of those too weak or afflicted to defend themselves against the perfect puritans of Victorian society.
I propose to show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.
Introduction to Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton (1869)
Galton's book would have graced the library in Lawrence Hamilton's cosy study at the Hamilton Institute, the setting of Birdkill. He would have taken it down and cupped its leather spine in his hand as he soaked up the great man's words, because Hamilton, too, believed in creating a highly gifted race. With a mixture of breeding, chemical augmentation, training and experimentation into the workings of the human mind, Hamilton's work is funded because he has said he can produce better, more effective soldiers.
He is Robyn's rather dubious host as she tries to embark on her new start in a life so recently torn apart by the nameless terror her mind has shut down...