The Orion Protocol (5 page)

5

Auckland, New Zealand

On the LC-130 Hercules from San Pedro, California, through a refuel at Auckland, and then on toward McMurdo Station, Colonel Augie Blake had slept like the dead, his inveterate snoring drowned in the thrum of the great cargo plane’s Pratt & Whitney engines.

Awake now, he remembered to take salt tabs and downed two with some bottled water from his flight bag.

He’d survived a palpable cardiovascular event back in Houston; he knew that. But Augie consciously pushed it aside, relegating the event and what it might mean to the dank mental storm cellar where most of Augie’s personal bad news got stored. Especially things he’d decided he couldn’t do that much about, in this lifetime. Of course, there was nothing he could do about this latest bit of bad news, at least not right now. Nothing except think about it.

And all thinking about it would accomplish would be to set him brooding over things like his father dying of heart disease when he was two years younger than Augie was now. So, he had chosen not to think about it.

His married sister, Emily Blake Warren, a veteran nurse-practitioner in D.C., had made that do-the-math point about their father last year when Augie had confessed to mild, recurring dizzy spells. She had lobbied hard at the time for a cardiologist she knew at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, but Augie balked.

What are they going to do? Fuck with my diet? Tell me to get more exercise
and take baby aspirin? Counsel me to retire if I want to live? Tell me “work-related stress” is the bad actor here and stick that crap in my jacket for the next review? Forget that noise, Nurse Warren
.

Hell, retirement would probably kill me,
he thought, gazing out the big cargo plane’s window. Maybe later he’d let his sister privately arrange an MRI or a full-body CAT scan, or whatever. Then they could see what was what.

Augie looked down into the preternatural dark at the Antarctic Ocean, dotted with bergie bits twenty thousand feet below. Somewhere down there, thanks to accelerating Earth changes, 400 million billion tons of freshwater ice called the Ross Ice Shelf had just warmed up enough to shear off from the continent and fall into the world’s southernmost sea.

What that might portend for ocean currents that drive the increasingly erratic weather systems on the planet was a problem for supercomputers to model.

But within hours of the Ross collapse, satellite photos had picked up something previously hidden under all that ice: an unprecedented scientific discovery now involving the National Science Foundation, U.S. Defense Intelligence, and Special Operations forces.

Code-named “Dunsinane,” it appeared to be the site of a prehistoric, temperate-climate forest, frozen inside a glacier for over ten thousand years.

A full lid was still down, vis-à-vis the media, because the situation on the ground had become fluid, dangerous, and complex, and the U.S. government was still struggling to get a handle on it.

For Augie, though, it was simple: the young men and women he had handpicked for EET, Extreme Environment Training, at the South Pole—
his people
—had suddenly been put in harm’s way. And he was coming to get them the hell out.

Leaning his chair back as far as it would go, he stretched his legs, feeling fine if a bit tired. And his prescription for that was simple, too: kick back, drink bottled water, and sleep.

He pulled his NASA cap down over his eyes.

6

Goddard Space Flight Lab/Washington, D.C.

Entering Goddard Space Flight’s waxy fluorescent-lit corridors required the usual security passes, though nothing like the fingerprint and retinal-scan lockdown at the CIA sister lab in Langley, Virginia. Langley fulfilled NASA contracts, too. But it operated in a different culture altogether, “haut spy” culture: a civilian/military hybrid long ago transgendered by the Cold War into something alien, virtually invisible, and much harder to kill.

The Goddard facility, by contrast, was a more freewheeling science-friendly environment and a haven for odd birds like Richard Eklund and his colleagues in the
Mars Underground
, an eclectic and wildly unofficial confederation of hard-core space fanatics “with a whole lot of fucking élan.”

Frozen in time architecturally, the Goddard campus preserved the clean, modern design aesthetic of the late 1950’s and a relatively businesslike attitude, from nine to five.

After six o’clock, though, once the presence of supervisors and administrators could no longer be keenly felt, the sprawling Space Flight Center transformed itself into a co-ed, quasi-Wozniakian Greek house with the greatest gear on Earth. And for those in the main domain of radically committed spaceheads, Goddard After-Hours was definitely
the shit
.

“Sincerity begins at sixty hours, commitment at one hundred,” Eklund and his
Mars Underground
colleague John Fisher liked to say,
leading by example. And with its red flag of Mars emblazoned on newsletters, bumper stickers, and buttons, the
Underground
had “cadres” at every NASA facility from Johnson Space in Texas to Cal-Tech and JPL in California.

Membership was earned by sweat equity, and whatever official government projects consumed them by day, the
Mars Underground
passionately invested nights and weekends free/gratis in one thing and one thing only: a manned mission to Mars.

Prohibitive space agency cost estimates running to some $100 billion for such a voyage was the principal obstacle; heavy lifting, a two-year journey, and its attendant cost of fuel being the largest expense.

So, each
Mars Underground
–affiliated scientist or engineer took up the challenge and struggled with his or her piece of the puzzle: plasma/fusion propulsion systems to shorten travel time, solar-powered oxygen-from-water electrolysis, zero-g greenhouses for grow-as-you-go roughage, and dozens more.

Researcher Richard Eklund’s contribution to the effort was something called the Intelligence Hypothesis, and it was a cheap enough project to pursue. All it really required was off-peak time on the Goddard mainframe and unfettered access to NASA and JPL archives. And an open mind.

With war-related projects grabbing the big budget dollars and the great Soviet-American space rivalry long dead, the
Underground
knew it desperately needed a catalyst, something that might inspire and galvanize public opinion in favor of a return to the glory days of manned exploration of space.

More satellites finding frozen water that hinted at possible bacterial life were not going to cut it. Neither were more fossilized Martian microbes. They needed something that’d seize people’s imagination and never let go, something worth spending tens of billions and risking American lives for.

Something like confirmed evidence of former intelligent life on Mars.

The Intelligence Hypothesis, as a legitimate line of scientific investigation, was, however, frowned on by NASA administrators. They labeled
it speculation, and firmly distanced themselves from any such efforts, inside or outside the Space Agency. But from the Viking Mission in the ‘70’s to the more recent
Mars Global Surveyor
and
Mars Odyssey
satellite data, many honest scientists believed there were too many intriguing enigmas on Mars to be dismissed.

Eklund and his colleague, planetary geologist John Fisher, had collected striking images from regions around the planet showing much more than just the controversial Face on Mars: there were monumental four- and five-sided pyramidal mounds, serpentine tubelike objects, even a field of what appeared to be identical-sized triangular monoliths.

And no credible models of natural forces like wind, water, volcanic, tectonic, or meteoritic action could be combined by NASA computers to account for them.

Yet when confronted with such evidence behind closed doors, Space Agency officials consistently demurred, characterizing the unexplainable anomalies as “tricks of light and shadow,” too open to subjective interpretation to be of any scientific value.

Undaunted, however, Eklund and Fisher persevered, becoming more and more convinced of what they hoped the Intelligence Hypothesis would ultimately prove: that the fabled Red Planet was littered with artifacts, ancient ruins, and the degraded constructs of a once highly evolved civilization.

Which would be every reason on Earth for mankind to have to go see it and confirm it
in person
, and take the world along for the ride.

“Eat food, drink water.”

Eklund dumped an armful of Goddard snack-room munchies onto the table in their workstation. Fisher didn’t look up.

“In a sec.”

Intent on a strip of
Mars Global Surveyor
imaging, John was lost in digital minutiae that’d blind a lace-making Belgian nun.

On-screen, a black-and-white MGS frame brought to their attention by Sir Arthur C. Clarke of
2001: A Space Odyssey
fame appeared to show an astonishing grove of trees over forty feet high and hundreds of meters across. NASA had dismissed it as probably frozen carbon dioxide somehow shaped like trees, perhaps by Mars’s un-Earth-like magnetic
field. As a geologist, John Fisher considered that a feeble theory at best and wholly unsatisfactory, but his tweaking of the highly organic-looking shapes still wasn’t gleaning much.

“If we just had altimeter readings over a cycle of seasons . . .”

“It’s on the request list.” Eklund sipped tea and worked on a box of raisins.

“Yeah, right.”

Given the deep, dark circles in permanent residency under Fisher’s eyes, it did not require much to imagine cartoon wisps of smoke curling up from his ears as well. Eklund spoke to the back of his head.

“You’ve got a granola bar, black tea, and a green apple.”

“Almost there.”

Eklund generally refrained from clucking over the younger scientist’s driven demeanor and grunge-garage personal style. Neither one of them really had a life. Eklund, a suspenders man and collector of vintage bow ties, just dressed more neatly and took a little better care of himself.

The intercom erupted with a piercing high-end crackle.

“Dr. Eklund, Ms. Angela Browning to see you.”

“Uh, thanks. Send her on back.” Eklund looked at his partner. “John. This is that thing I told you about.”

“Fine, fine. I’m toast, anyway.”

They could hear Angela’s Niketowns squeaking down the hall toward them.

“One decent break. That’s all I ask.” Fisher hit a key, making the Martian trees disappear, and grabbed up a granola bar.

Eklund opened the door and found Angela already there, looking cheerfully wired and tired.

“What’s up?” She grinned at him, hefting her shoulder bag.

“The gods are laughing.”

“I wondered what that sound was.”

Eklund waved Angela into their boho science confines. “You remember John Fisher?”

“Hey, how’s it going?”

“Good . . .” John stood up with his mouth full, managing to appear
starstruck, fiercely bright, and pretty much like he’d just vacated a sleeping bag all at the same time. Shaking hands, Angela thought he was actually kind of cute.

“So, whatcha got?” Eklund rolled a desk chair her way.

“You tell me,” Angela said, and produced the unsolicited Mars CD.

7

The lights were still burning in the East Wing of the White House, which was not unusual, the burden of the Office having accelerated exponentially in the nation’s third century, paralleling that of super-industrial human progress.

Typically scheduled until 11:30
P.M.
, and then up again at 6:30
A.M.
and jogging by 7:00, the fit and youthful twenty-first-century President set a killing pace, even for his junior staff. Some kept up and some were mercifully platooned into two eight-hour shifts, the second shift having already said good night.

In the residential living room, furnished largely with family photographs and a few familiar pieces from back home, the new Commander in Chief had stretched himself out on a comfortably beat-up old eight-foot leather couch and was scowling down at the briefing paper in his left hand.

“Shit,” he said, snapping to the next page.

The Seal of the Office blazed in blue and gold on his loose gray sweatshirt, and a pine-log fire hissed and popped off raucously like a miniature Chinese New Year in the brick fireplace, which had been rebuilt by Teddy Roosevelt.

“One page of hard-core hype and three pages of tortured crapola.”

Reclining in a club chair a few feet away, White House counsel Sanford “Sandy” Sokoff yawned in agreement. He’d already reviewed the brief prepared by Bob Winston, the national security adviser, and found it an information-free exercise in arcane spy argot and self-important, euphemistic bureaucratese.

“Not exactly what you asked for.” Sokoff nodded, recrossing his boots.

Sandy, a legendary campaign manager, arch fixer nonpareil, and self-styled “Texas Jew-boy,” stared into the merry fire. His black Tony Lamas, worn partly to buy an extra inch of height, rested cowboy-style on the brass-handled distressed old chest that did duty as the presidential coffee table.

“What about the bullets on page four?” he said.

The President cursed quietly and read aloud, the bad taste in his mouth becoming progressively more audible.

“ ‘Protecting rapid-response theater communications, cleaning up dangerous space junk, blinding enemy satellites in time of war . . . ‘ “

“Yeah”—Sandy laughed—”that is quite a steaming pile. There’s smarter ways to do all those things without spending a trillion dollars.”

“Not to mention shit-canning international arms agreements. If we still give a shit about stuff like that.”

“There is that.”

“Our friend Bob.” The President leveraged his long body up and consigned the briefing paper to the fire. “Maybe I made a mistake there, Sandy.”

“Then again, ‘if you want a friend in Washington’ . . .” Sokoff thumbed a smudge off his butter-soft boots.

“Hell, I’ve got a dog. What I don’t get is why the full-court press.”

Sandy shrugged. Post-9/11, the traditionally enriching revolving door between Washington, the Pentagon, and the defense/aerospace industry was back, big time, and shielded from cynicism by the enduring national outrage and resolve.

“Maybe Bob is looking beyond public service.”

“Maybe this is his idea of public service.” The President watched Winston’s top-secret briefing paper turn to ash in the fireplace.

Having had a good working view as a senator over the last twelve years, he was not naive about the nature of the executive branch of the U.S. government at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The constitutional pillar of democracy that his presidency was expected to embody was a multilayered labyrinth, with real power spreading far out and down from the Oval Office.

In fact, an extraordinary degree of decision making was done at many levels that, by custom or by covert design, flew beneath the radar of the incumbents at the White House. Over the years, scholars at prestigious private universities had published papers arguing that this quiet erosion of powers once concentrated in the Chief Executive had gotten out of hand.

The Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan years and other lesser-known foreign-policy contretemps were held up as prime examples. But the status quo rattled on, untroubled by the critics and resistant to reform.

The newly elected President was aware of it and considered it a hydra-headed problem born in the alphabet soup of the U.S. Intelligence community, bad neighbors though they might be, which had enjoyed a steady rise to executive-branch power ever since JFK was murdered or terminated-with-extreme-prejudice, depending on which of the many stories you liked.

In any case, beneath the wings of the Johnson administration, its Great Society good intentions paved over by the Southeast Asian road to hell, civilian and military intel agencies and spy domains of every stripe had proliferated ad nauseam. By the end of what had become Nixon’s war, this New Jerusalem of overlapping blood turfs had evolved into a deeply rooted executive-branch stronghold, well positioned to prosper regardless of which political party might be nominally elected to power.

By the time former CIA chief George Herbert Walker Bush ascended to the highest office in the land, some saw it as an almost embarrassing redundancy. Bush’s presidency was practically emblematic of spookdom’s neohegemony, a bald public enactment of what had been quietly going on behind the scenes for decades. Senior acronymic warriors with noble lineages back to the Secret Service, Sig Int, and the Last Good War may have had misgivings. But the limelight-shy spymasters needn’t have worried. Once Bush’s elevation was a fait accompli, the American people did not seem all that troubled that spies were now running the White House: they were our spies, weren’t they?

However, while the newest Occupant of the Oval Office might have
been skeptical about conspiracy theories, he could read a national security briefing paper and know when he was being worked.

“Well, fuck it, Sandy.”

“What do you want me to do?” Sokoff sat up and took out a notepad.

“Consider yourself tasked, counselor.”

“I figured.”

Sandy took notes as the President ticked off a laundry list, neither of them prepared to guess yet what might come out in the wash.

“I want to know how and why Project Orion got started, all the parties involved, and what their interests are. What it really will and won’t do. Cost to date in today’s dollars, cost of deployment and readiness, and environmental impact. And I need an independent risk assessment that doesn’t pull any goddamn punches, if possible.”

Sokoff looked down at a list he’d been making.

“So far,” he said, “I’ve got former secretaries of defense, Joint Chiefs, NSA heads, Naval Intelligence, DIA, CIA, and security advisers. But nobody is going to want to talk to me.”

“Remind them that conversations with the private counsel of the President of the United States are covered by executive privilege.”

“And when they stop laughing?”

The President laughed himself, stretching his arms up into the air, looking like he could almost touch the chandelier picked out by Jacqueline Kennedy and still polished weekly by housekeeping staff.

“If anybody needs face time, call me.”

“Mr. President.” Sokoff stood up, girding for battle. This was going to be delicate and difficult. He rubbed a freckled earlobe.

“D’you care if it gets back to Robo-Bob?”

“I hope it scares the Yale out of him.”

The President relaxed his lanky frame back into the long leather-covered cushions, experiencing the pleasure of releasing himself, however temporarily, from the weight of a heavy burden.

And the equal, if not greater pleasure of seeing it bend the shoulders of a younger man.