Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper (39 page)

“Just log on from here.”

“You’ve got mayo on your keypad.”

“And this is against your religion?” Gershon got up and relinquished his chair. “I’ve got a telecon with JPL this afternoon, and I want this nailed.”

Naidu sat down and logged on to the observatory databases. “Okay, here’s the orbital plot for 137108 as of the last observation point in July 2008. Right now, it’s past Jupiter heading inbound with an orbital period of 1.76 years. Here’s the last simulation—let me fast-forward to August 2027. You see, there, it gets within 400,000 kilometers of us.”

“I need the new data, Govi.”

“I’m getting there.” He clicked through and opened spreadsheets that were time-stamped to the previous night. “Okay, both telescopes got clean images. Let me merge the databases from Hawaii and Palomar. It’ll just take a minute.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard as he conformed the two sets of observations, and when he was done, Gershon said, “Let’s see it.”

Naidu clicked on the orbital plotting tool and fast-forwarded the simulation to 2027. “See? It’s unchanged. The closest point is still in August at a distance of almost half a million kilometers. On February 9, it’s not even close.”

Gershon looked satisfied. “So that’s it. We can scratch 137108 off the
oy vey
list.”

Naidu didn’t get up. He was accessing the Lawrence Berkeley database. “I thought you might get more questions, so I ran a series of scenarios on the NERSCC supercomputer.”

“What kind of scenarios?”

“Asteroid-asteroid hits.”

Gershon grunted his approval. The young man was right, he’d probably get the question. There were about five thousand asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it wasn’t unprecedented for them to slam into each other from time to time, changing their orbital characteristics. “How’d you model it?”

Naidu puffed out his chest and proudly described a sophisticated statistical model he’d constructed which exploited the massive computing power at the NERSCC to examine hundreds of thousands of hypothetical asteroid-to-asteroid strikes involving 137108.

“Lot of second-body variables,” Gershon whistled. “Mass, speed, angle of contact, orbital dynamics at point of collision.”

Naidu nodded. “Each potential hit can change every parameter of 137108. Sometimes not by a lot, but you can get meaningful differences to the aphelion, the perihelion, the orbital period, the ascending node longitude, the inclination, the argument of perihelion, you name it.”

“So show me. What do you have?”

“Okay, since I had only eight hours of computing time, I limited the model to about five hundred higher-probability asteroids based on their orbital characteristics with respect to 137108. Only one simulation out of six hundred thousand produced something interesting.”

Naidu launched a graphical-simulation program and provided running commentary. “This one assumes an asteroid-to-asteroid collision between 137108 and 4581 Asclepius, an Apollo-class object that’s just a little guy, about three hundred meters diameter. It passed within 700,000 kilometers of earth in 1989. If it had hit, it would have been no big deal,” he snorted, “just the equivalent to one Hiroshima-sized explosion every second for fifty days! This simulation assumes 4581 gets tweaked by another rock, gets its own orbit perturbed, and hits 137108 near Jupiter in March 2016. Here’s what goes down if that happens.”

Naidu set the orbital simulator to run from the present. On the screen they watched a green dot representing 137108 move through the solar system in an eccentric elliptical orbit, approaching the earth approximately every two years, then sling-shotting past Jupiter before turning back again toward the sun.

When the simulation got within five years of 2027, he slowed it down so they could watch it more carefully. They stared at two independent orbits, the earth’s and the asteroid’s, a green dot and a red dot moving through the solar system. At a January 2026 time-point, Naidu slowed the simulation again to a snail’s pace.

Gershon leaned in over his student’s shoulder. “It’s really hard to say visually whether its new orbital is going to make things better or worse.”

Naidu said nothing.

The clock turned slowly and at mid-2026, asteroid 137108 turned toward the sun. The earth’s orbit was slowly positioning the planet to get close to an intersection with the asteroid’s track.

October 2026.

November 2026.

December 2026.

January 2027.

The red and green dots were getting close.

Then February 2027.

The simulation halted on February 9.

A pop-up box appeared on the screen:

Impact Probability–100% ****Torino 10**** Torino 10****Torino 10****

Gershon gasped. “The asteroid’s size. Does it change postimpact with 4581?”

Naidu scrolled down to a table, double-clicked on a cell, and pointed. “It’s still huge, a game-ender.” He logged off the terminal and stood up. “It’s all hypothetical, but I thought you needed to see it. We’re not talking about large probabilities.”

Gershon looked out the window. It was a blustery fall day, and sharp gusts were separating the last leaves from their branches. He had an urge to feel the wind on his face and to crunch through the dry leaf piles on the lawn.

He gently touched his student’s shoulder, and said, “I’m sure you’re right, Govi. Listen, I’m going to go out for a little walk.”

THE EARTHQUAKE STRUCK AT 11:05 A.M. The epicenter of the 7.8 mag event was twenty kilometers east of Caracas along the El Pilar Fault. At the moment the first tremor hit, the day was sunny and windy, the sky, hazy blue with wisps of fast-moving clouds. Forty seconds later, the sun was blotted out by plumes of concrete dust rising above pancaked apartment blocks, high-rise offices, municipal buildings, and schools. Then ruptured gas lines started fires, which were wind-whipped into conflagrations that roared through the historic Altamira district and the Parque Central Complex.

Eighty percent of the 220,000 casualties occurred within seconds of the first shock—men, women, and children mercilessly crushed to death by steel, glass, and masonry. Most of those trapped under the rubble would fall victim to slow dehydration. Others would be killed by the serious aftershocks and fires which plagued the city for the next seventy-two hours.

Incoming telemetry lit up the Global Seismographic Network like a Christmas tree. At the USGS monitoring site at the Albuquerque Seismological Lab, the Caracas quake was immediately classified as a Major Seismic Event, and, per protocol, hot-line calls went out to Homeland Security, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House.

In the C Ring of the Pentagon, deep within its inner core, the Secretary of the Navy got the news from a minor aide to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Lester listened, grunted an acknowledgment, and hung up. He’d been consumed with the planning for this day for two years, and this was not the way it was supposed to go down.

The Mission Plan stipulated that at the moment the Caracas Event occurred, Lester would descend to a command bunker in a Pentagon subbasement and authorize the US Southern Command to signal the Fourth Fleet. The fleet would be positioned north of Aruba, engaged in a mock joint exercise with the British Royal Navy. They would be ordered to proceed to Venezuela as the spearhead of Operation Helping Hand. Key Venezuelan opposition leaders and senior dissident army officers would be standing by with their families in Valencia, out of harm’s way. They’d be choppered into the capital city and under the protection of a US Marine expeditionary force, the government would be tilting toward Washington within twenty-four hours.

None of that happened.

Will Piper single-handedly blew up Operation Helping Hand.

After the
Post
story broke, the Vice President urgently convened a Task Force meeting and shut Helping Hand down: no adjustments, no modifications, just ash-canned. There was zero dissent. Anyone with a brain in their head would connect the dots between Area 51 and a military operation that looked in retrospect like it was preplanned to coincide with the disaster.

The humanitarian supplies would be airlifted, and the prompt US response would be cordially received by the shell-shocked Venezuelan president, who vowed to rebuild Caracas and continue the country on its socialist path.

Two years of work, down the drain.

Lester sighed, checked his day planner, and told his secretary he was going out. His afternoon was wide open, and he decided he’d head over to his club and pick up a game of squash.

It was a sparkling, fresh spring afternoon, the sun impossibly yellow, the newly mown grass impossibly green. Across the meadows, the seagulls were soaring over the Solent, urgently calling to one another.

The redbrick tower of the abbey church rising into the clean blue sky gave the tourists an irresistible snapshot opportunity. Although Vectis Abbey had always been open to the public, the revelations about its ancient Library had turned it into a substantial point of interest, much to the consternation of the resident monks. On weekends, local women from the village of Fishbourne volunteered to conduct guided tours, mostly to encourage visitors into bunches as this was less disruptive to the routine of monastery life than having people aimlessly wandering through the church and the abbey grounds.

The baby in the stroller began to cry. The tourists, mostly seniors well past their infant-loving years, looked annoyed, but his parents were unfazed.

His mother checked his diaper. “I’m going to find a place to change him,” Nancy said, peeling off toward the tea-house.

Will nodded and kept listening to the guide, a heavily haunched middle-aged woman who was pointing at tender shoots sprouting up from behind a rabbit fence and expounding on the importance of vegetables to a fraternal order.

He’d been looking forward to the vacation to escape the hectic world he’d created for himself. There were still interviews to give, books to write, all the unwanted trappings of celebrity. Even now, paparazzi hung around 23
^rd
Street. And he had newly found obligations. Alf Kenyon, who had largely recovered from his knee wound, was going to be going on a tour in a few months to promote his book on John Calvin, Nostradamus, and the Cantwell papers. Kenyon asked him to do some media with him, and he couldn’t say no. And Dane Bentley had a bachelor party and a wedding coming up, although Will still wasn’t sure which of his girlfriends he was marrying.

For the moment, Will was able to put the swirl of recent months out of his mind and concentrate on the here and now. He was fascinated with everything about their island visit—the chilly, wind-strafed car-ferry crossing from the mainland, the pub lunch in Fishbourne, where he wavered at the bar before ordering a Coke, the first glimpse of the monastery from the footpath, the sight of the robed monks, who, despite their habits and sandals, looked like ordinary men—until they filed into the church precisely at 2:20 for the None service. Inside the sanctuary, the monks were transformed into different sorts, all together. Their concentration at prayer and song, their intensity of purpose, the seriousness of their spiritual pleasure set them apart from the visitors, who sat at the rear of the vaulted church, curious observers, awkwardly voyeuristic.

The monks were now at afternoon work, some tending the garden and the chicken coops, others indoors in the kitchen, the pottery, or bookbinder’s shop. There weren’t many of them, fewer than a dozen, mostly older men. The young infrequently sought the monk’s life these days. The tour was winding down, and Will hadn’t yet seen what he came for. His hand shot up along with the hands of others. They all wanted the same thing, and the guide knew what was coming.

She called on him because he stood out from the crowd, tall and handsome, his eyes shining with intelligence. “I’d like to see the medieval monastery.”

The group murmured. That’s what everyone wanted.

“Yes, funny you should ask!” she joked. “I was going to point you in the right direction. It’s less than a quarter mile up that lane. Everyone wants to go there lately, not that there’s much to see. Just some ruins. But seriously, ladies and gentlemen, I understand the interest, and I encourage you to visit the site for some quiet contemplation. The spot has been marked with a small plaque.”

As the guide was answering questions, she kept staring at Will, and when she was done, she approached him and unself-consciously inspected his face.

“Thanks for the tour,” he told her.

“May I ask you something?”

He nodded.

“By any chance, are you Mr. Piper, the American who’s been in the news over all this?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She beamed. “I thought so! Would you mind if I told the abbot you’re here. I think he’ll want to meet you.”

Dom Trevor Hutchins, the Lord Abbot of Vectis Abbey was a portly, white-haired man brimming with enthusiasm. He led Will and Nancy up the gravel lane toward the crumbling medieval walls of the ancient monastery and asked to push the stroller to “give the young man a ride.”

He insisted on repeating the history that Will and Nancy had just heard about the medieval abbey being shuttered and looted by King Henry’s Reformation in 1536, the masonry dismantled stone by stone and shipped to Cowes and Yarmouth for castle-building and fortification. All that now remained were the ragged ghosts of the grand complex, low walls and foundations.

The modern abbey was built in the early twentieth century by French monks who used red bricks to revive the Benedictine tradition, choosing to build near the hallowed ground of the old abbey. The abbot himself was approaching his twenty-fifth year at Vectis, having joined as a young man fresh from a classics degree at Cambridge.

Around a bend, the rough, tumbledown walls came into view. The ruins were in a field overlooking the Solent, the south coast of England looming across the narrow stretch of sea. The pebbled walls that had survived the centuries were clipped-off facades with a few remaining cutouts where windows and arches had been. Sheep were grazing around the ruins.