The Orion Protocol (13 page)

21

Parked outside the Dharmadhatu in downtown Boulder, the two plainclothes FBI men in their burgundy Chevy program sedan were bored to death and tired of being made for narcs.

Waiting for Commander Jake Deaver, USN, Ret., to finish whatever the hell he was doing in there, they were continually being pinned by passing CU students who would then scuffle off in burgeoning paranoia about their current source for Ecstasy and reasonably priced weed.

“On-sight prevention,” Agent Stottlemeyer said.

“Yeah, right.” His partner, Agent Markgrin, took his word for it from behind the financial section of the
Denver Post
.

Field agents Stottlemeyer and Markgrin were not staked out in the little college town of Boulder, Colorado, to interdict a scourge of psychotropic drugs. A certain incident last summer involving trespassing, mushrooms, and a private cow pasture notwithstanding, they were keeping an eye on former astronaut Jake Deaver under what the two men liked to call the government’s Witless Protection Program.

On a recent trip to Egypt, the astronaut-turned-history-teacher had apparently been present during a tragic and calculated paroxysm of radical Muslim xenophobia: a terrorist attack that left dozens of mostly Russian, Georgian, and Ukrainian visitors injured and four Egyptian policemen killed outright. Already crippled by the regional violence and instability among its Middle East neighbors, the National Tourism Bureau in Cairo would be a long time recovering. Commander Deaver, however, had escaped harm. And as far as Agents Stottlemeyer and
Markgrin and even their superiors in the Denver field office were concerned, that should have been end-of-story.

The powers-that-be inside the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., however, obviously disagreed.

“My turn to check the alley for ragheads and car bombs.” The stocky agent Stottlemeyer smirked over at his partner.

“You be careful out there,” Markgrin said, flipping to the tech-stock index below the fold.

Stottlemeyer had not been spurred to action by any real hope of squelching international terror in the mean streets of Boulder, Colorado. Mostly the G-man was moved by the dead nerve endings in his ample derriere and the sight of a pair of laughing co-eds jaywalking across the street to the local Starbucks, a situation plainly calling for a fresh cup of coffee. He checked his teeth in the rearview mirror, looking for nasty food bits, and then squeezed his thick torso out from behind the steering wheel.

Behind the dull tail job, there was method to the madness, or at least a rationale. Hustled out of Egypt by the CIA head of station aboard an Exxon company jet, Deaver had left the embassy folks more jittery about Deaver’s presence at the attack than about the violence itself.

Twenty-two hospitalized Russian Federation tourists on five-day packages, air included, at $500 per person/double, along with four dead Egyptian policemen was terrible, but finally not the issue. The issue was Jake: Was it just a coincidence or had an American space hero been targeted in the incident? The potential for political exploitation was certainly there; in Egypt’s ongoing secular/religious power game, an attack on Deaver might have been designed to set certain actions in motion.

Had former Apollo Commander Jake Deaver been deliberately targeted for assassination, the United States would have been “invited” by the embattled Cairo government to “offer assistance” in hunting down the Pan-Islamic terrorists presumed responsible. And if the FBI and the CIA came rushing in, wasn’t this just the kind of move that the most radical anti-American mullahs and clerics could exploit to the hilt? The Caireen news headlines practically wrote themselves.

INFIDELS PURSUE EGYPTIAN CITIZENS ON THEIR OWN SOIL!

Public outrage, massive street demonstrations, more inflammatory antigovernment rhetoric in the mosques. And the last thing Washington wanted to see in Cairo was a coup that brought fundamentalist Egyptian
jihadis
to power.

Fortunately, though, Deaver had not been harmed in the attack at Giza, so the adept U.S. ambassador at the scene made quick calls to Western media moguls, who used their influence with CNN, the Russian news people, and regionals like al-Jazeera, until a full lid was brought down: Deaver’s presence during the tragedy went unreported.

Still, even with Jake safely home and teaching again at UC–Boulder, someone high up in the intelligence food chain in D.C. had apparently decided that the situation bore watching.

“Want anything?” Stottlemeyer said, indicating the Starbucks and pulling on a mustard-stained Rockies warm-up jacket.

“A tall Americano. And a biscotti.” Markgrin barely looked up, continuing to track his tech-heavy nest egg on the NASDAQ roller coaster.

“Jesus.” Stottlemeyer rolled his eyes and leaned down to look back at his partner through the driver’s-side window. “Coffee and a doughnut would just be too much of a cliché, wouldn’t it? Whoa! Hate to be mistaken for cops.”

Markgrin put down the
Post
. The town-and-gown bit was a running gag. Both men had degrees. Only Stottlemeyer had had to earn his education scrambling for loans and scholarships, and working his butt off nights and weekends. It was a hardship that made him feel both self-made, as they used to say, and proud, but also a bit defensive, with a slightly righteous sense of personal “street cred” next to his Ivy League partner, whatever that was worth.

“Starbucks doesn’t carry doughnuts,” Markgrin said. “Anyway, biscotti is hard, so it dunks better. Trust me. I have a great catholicity of taste.”

Stottlemeyer smiled and zipped up his baseball jacket.

“Aw, fuck you
and
the Pope. Plain or chocolate?”

22

Sandia Research Labs/New Mexico

Escorted into the Sandia Labs by a delegation of scientists, Sandy Sokoff made it an aggressive, high-profile entrance. The President’s Marine One helicopter that had delivered him was instructed to keep its engines warm, at the ready to whisk him off to Los Alamos, Raytheon, and the other top-secret facilities on his itinerary. The hulking chopper hunkered down on the landing pad, radiating a sense of urgency and command authority.

Sokoff thought a little big-swinging-dick ostentation was in order to inspire fear and, hopefully, cooperation at one of the nation’s most insular and tightly guarded weapons plants.

Half science compound, half classified military base, Sandia Labs was home to the development of the next three generations of high-tech American weaponry, about which the new President and his personal counsel knew almost nothing. And once inside, Sandy expected to encounter institutional reluctance as far as the divulging of any details. In that, he was not disappointed.

“Project Orion,” Dr. Milton Krantz, the senior project manager, addressed Sokoff from across a long conference-room table. “Well, we did design work for something like what you are describing. It was a prototype ELF, Extreme Low-Frequency scalar-type transmitter.”

“Who commissioned it?” Sandy said, making notes on a yellow pad. He knew who had assigned the Orion contract to Sandia Labs. He just wanted to see how forthcoming Krantz intended to be.

“The Navy.” Krantz shot the cuffs slightly on his white lab coat. “We were given certain specifications after initial consultations. The lab was then tasked with developing a solution for long-range submarine communication; bouncing extreme-low-frequency signals off the upper atmosphere. Very interesting problem, hadn’t been done before really, but in the end, it did prove technically feasible.”

“Long-range data transmission without satellites.”

“Yes. Think of it as high-powered sonar. In case, for whatever reason, in time of war, our satellites were down. But like I say, it wasn’t called Project Orion.”

“No, you probably knew it as part of the HAARP project.” Sandy rubbed his ear, looking up at the half-dozen other scientists seated at the table, ready and waiting to field any technical questions he might have. “Up in Alaska.”

“That’s correct.”

Krantz looked wary, wondering what the agenda was here. Maybe more grief about beaked whales beaching themselves with bleeding inner ears after Navy testing of the new sonar they’d developed. In any case, the President’s counsel was behaving more like a prosecutor than a fact finder.

“Now, in your opinion, Doctor, could this extreme-low-frequency or ELF technology also be used as part of a space-defense platform?”

The senior project manager smiled, visibly shifting gears.

“Mr. Sokoff, if a Sony PlayStation can be used for missile guidance . . .” Krantz offered an insider’s Gallic shrug and looked at his hand-picked colleagues around the table. They chuckled on cue.

Rather than disarming Sokoff, the glib reference to the ban on exporting game modules to rogue nations only pissed Sandy off.

“Dr. Krantz.” Sokoff’s peremptory tone was as sobering as a congressional subpoena. “The President of the United States has tasked me with bringing him up to speed on all Unacknowledged Special Access Projects, past and present. This is not an idle curiosity, it is a matter of national security. What do you know about USAPs here at Sandia Labs? And would you characterize this ELF project or any aspect of ELF technology as a USAP?”

Sandy watched the smiles disappear around the long table and felt
the room temperature drop about ten degrees. President Carter had given him a few key leads, and this one had struck a nerve. Dr. Krantz, however, had a ready answer.

“We handle no such programs at Sandia Labs, to my knowledge.”

Sandy had ferreted more than a few bureaucrats out of their bunkers during his years as a congressional investigator. Careful language was no refuge.

“Is there something inadequate about my level of clearance, Doctor?”

“You’re authorized above top secret, Mr. Sokoff,” Krantz said. “But I can assure you, no Project Orion or any other special-access contracts are being worked on at this facility.”

“To your knowledge. Is there someone who might have more complete knowledge?”

It was a deliberate needle designed to prod Krantz higher on his horse.

“As senior project manager, I supervise all the science being done under this roof. There’s nothing I wouldn’t know about, if it was going on here.”

“Then you would know if the ELF technology you developed for Navy subs had a dual military purpose.”

Krantz’s self-assurance wavered.

“What exactly do you mean?”

“It’s a simple question, Doctor. Could the high-powered extreme-low-frequency transmitters developed here on your watch have both overt and covert applications?”

“Mr. Sokoff, with all due respect, if you are asking me to speculate on some convoluted hypothetical—”

“A yes-or-no answer will suffice,” Sandy said.

Sokoff was blunt, intentionally disrespectful. Krantz found being spoken to like this in front of his subordinates galling. He took the offensive.

“The answer to your question is yes. Yes, of course. Anything and everything we do may have dual purposes. Please explain that to the President. You’ll find it’s true at every lab in the country; that’s just how it is. We’re given certain specifications, a time frame, and a budget. We do the research, we do the science, we gain the knowledge needed to solve a given problem. How that knowledge is applied after it leaves this facility is not our concern. What NAV/INT or the NSA does with the
fruits of our research is beyond our control. Not to mention way beyond my pay grade to speculate.”

Sandy waited a beat or two, letting his dissatisfaction and disappointment become more pointed, more evident. He then stood up and gathered his things. When he spoke, it was with the assurance of someone who knew or would soon know where all the skeletons were hidden.

“Dr. Krantz, you and your people have seventy-two hours to do better than this, and I suggest a top-to-bottom. On behalf of the President, I can also assure you that if you fail to cooperate fully with the White House on this, if we determine that for whatever reason you are being less than forthcoming, every sustaining government contract at Sandia Labs, everything bid on by you during this administration, will come under immediate negative review.”

The shocked silence around the conference table spoke louder than words. Sandy extracted a business card from his wallet.

“And please, let’s not have any explosions or burst water pipes or other regrettable accidents resulting in the loss of key files and documents. The President hates having his intelligence insulted. And so do I.”

It was a little over-the-top, but what the hell. Sokoff tossed the business card down in front of Krantz, as if paying off rough trade with chump change.

“This is my direct line at the White House.”

Sokoff’s phone actually rang in the Old Executive Office Building via the White House switchboard next door. But he had made his point.

Striding out to the Marine One helicopter with the presidential seal on the side, he wondered whether Dr. Krantz would realize his little slip.

What NAV/INT and the NSA does . . .

Naval Intelligence being in the loop on a sub communications research contract was to be expected. The National Security Agency, however . . .

“Our friend Bob.” Sokoff mumbled it under his breath.

Ducking down beneath the whirling whine of the chopper, he snapped open his cell phone and hit the autodial.

“Mrs. Travers,” Sandy shouted it out over the prop wash. “Tell the President I’m up to my knees in prairie pizza out here. I’ll call him back on a landline.”