The Orion Protocol (8 page)

12

January 29/Dunsinane/Antarctica

The fact was, thousands of years of accumulated ice at both poles had begun melting into the sea. The ozone layer protecting the Earth from damaging UV radiation was breaking down so dramatically that a huge hole had formed above the Southern Hemisphere. This hole in the ozone now let in enough solar radiation that incidents of skin cancer were soaring throughout the region and school kids from Australia to Chile were no longer allowed outside on the playgrounds without wearing hats.

North American energy and car-building leaders howled that power plants and the internal combustion engine were not to blame, finding it easier to engineer the U.S. pull-out from the Kyoto Protocols than to develop nonpolluting vehicles and renewable clean fuels.

In any case, such highly paid lobbying and verbal obfuscation were moot as far as the Arctic Circle was concerned: for the first time in recorded human history there was open navigable water all across Santa’s northernmost domain.

And whether the temperature was rising from industrial pollution or all the hot air sent aloft from attorneys, the situation at the South Pole, too, was degrading more rapidly than even Greenpeace and the Sierra Club had feared.

The bad news was, the Ross Ice Shelf had joined the massive Larsen B and Larsen C Shelves in cracking off from the continent and subsiding into the Antarctic Ocean about ten years sooner than the National Science Foundation’s worst-case scenarios of the ‘90’s had envisioned.

That there was good news at all from this was totally unexpected: a scientific treasure of inestimable value had been uncovered in the collapsing polar ice and picked up by one of NASA’s Earth Sciences LEO satellites.

The find, code-named Dunsinane, was stunning: a frozen forest of temperate climate trees suddenly visible in the glacier like a portal in time, a pristine biosphere preserved for millennia and offering science nothing less than a firsthand look at the world of 10,000
B.C.E.
Not to mention a first-rate mystery: How does a forest get to the South Pole? Within days, the National Science Foundation was galvanized into action.

All science done in Antarctica must be done according to rules enunciated in a United Nations agreement protecting the entire continent from exploitation and pollution: the Antarctic belongs to all mankind and is held in sacred trust. Thus, all junk, all refuse, including every ounce of human waste generated by the three thousand people in the science town of McMurdo, was flown out each spring in over forty-five lift sorties and recycled in California.

On the last airlift before all flights were shut down for the winter, foundation scientists quietly brought in a nuclear-powered ice drill designed to tunnel down through the glacier to the prehistoric forest waiting beneath the ice. After weeks of building out the dig site in the perpetual dark and testing the drill in various extremes of temperature and conditions, the excited waiting was over and they had begun tunneling carefully down to the trees.

But as it happened, there was something more contagious than the NSF excitement over their find. Within hours of retrieving the first core samples from Dunsinane, signs of severe viral infection began to appear at McMurdo.

The work was halted, the tunnel sealed over, and the dig site decontaminated, but it was too late: everyone exposed to the Dunsinane samples was quarantined, many developing high fevers and vomiting. The little science colony at the pole now realized that the ice samples held hibernating viruses that had been “switched on” by the relative warmth of the Quonset huts and were then released: twelve-thousand-year-old bacteria to which human beings were no longer immune.

By the time Bertrand arrived, thirty-five scientists and engineers were being extracted, including the McMurdo medical staff members who had treated the first sick ones and then fallen ill themselves. Augie Blake’s astronaut trainees, wintering over, had not come into direct contact with the virus but were evacuated as a precaution. And all evacked personnel were sequestered for treatment in a military hospital in New Zealand.

There had been no fatalities, but the worst was not necessarily over. After securing and cleansing the Dunsinane site, bundled-up Army engineers and National Science Foundation glaciologists now gathered to bring Captain Bertrand and his Spec Ops crew up to speed.

Bertrand peered at a dim, greenish video screen set up on a workbench in the main Quonset: the only remaining connection to the prehistoric forest down below was via the camera on their broken nuclear-powered drill.

“How far down is that?”

“About two thousand feet.” The lead scientist pointed to a 3-D map.

The tiny reactor with its tank tracks and titanium bit had tunneled into the glacier efficiently enough. But weather at the South Pole is changeable in the extreme, with temp swings of as much as one hundred degrees in a six-hour period.

“How cold was it when you had to shut her down?”

“Yeah, that was the bitch. About minus eighty-five degrees, Fahrenheit,” an engineer said. Approaching ninety below, running anything mechanical that required lubrication was to court failure. “The hydraulic fluid froze.”

“That’d do it.” Bertrand scratched at his jaw with a thermal glove. The rasping sound of his day-old beard was audible across the room. There was not exactly a vast array of options: restarting the drill and taking it out under its own power was out of the question. At least they were still getting video.

“How hot is it?”

“Celsius or rads?”

An Army engineer showed him the two readings.

“Jesus. We got us a little Chernobyl, gentlemen.” Bertrand gestured toward his crew. Each man took a turn checking out the monitor, but they were all getting the picture: ground truth at ninety below was a sobering bitch.

“If you all will excuse us . . . ?”

Bertrand herded his guys together, away from the anxious civilians. It was his task to assess, make recommendations up the chain, and then ultimately implement whatever decision came back down.

While the Spec Ops team huddled, the heavily dressed foundation scientists stood around looking exhausted and depressed, arguing about how to handle the next press cycle.

The media had either been tipped off or somehow read the Web-traffic tea leaves and had gotten wind of the Antarctic evacuation. CNN, MSNBC, and the wire services were pressing McMurdo Station hourly for details. So far, the NSF had only put out a cryptic, one-page press release from McMurdo saying there was no “general evacuation,” that a dozen people were being “normally rotated out,” with the exception of a doctor who “needed an unexpected operation” and a few astronaut trainees who were simply “homesick” and taking advantage of the unscheduled air transport out.

But the numbers, like the story, didn’t really add up. There were going to be questions about the military hospital in Auckland, demands for interviews with the personnel flown up there and others still remaining on-station. It was a mess. And until they had a solution in place, in progress, the situation totally “under control,” they were terrified of involving the media.

“Captain?” the lead NSF scientist called across the hut. He hadn’t slept much the last seventy-two hours and his voice sounded ragged and impatient.

Captain Bertrand turned away from his huddle and focused on the civilians. There was no magic wand to make this all go away. They all knew that, but he said it out loud anyway.

“Well, in and out and nobody gets hurt? We cut the goddamn drill loose, let it melt its way down as far away from people as it’ll go, and
then we seriously close that hole. But I suppose there is a good argument against that.”

In his fur-lined hood, the lead scientist looked bleak. When he spoke, angry little puffs of condensed air formed in front of his face like clouds.

“We’re standing over the first and only pristine prehistoric biosphere on the planet. To contaminate it with radioactive machinery would be a criminal act, not to mention the grossest possible violation of the UN no-footprint rules. American science would be disgraced, banished, and we’d all be out of our jobs.”

“That’s pretty much what I was thinking.”

Captain Wesley Bertrand and everyone else knew that any real solution to this mess would be slow, nasty, dangerous, and seven-figure expensive with mega lift-tons of blame to go around. All the science folk and Army engineers could do was put in their two cents and wait until Bertrand’s official recommendations set the process in motion. For the civilians, the scientists, this was not what they had worked so hard to be down here for. Not to preside over this huge messy disaster that could only blight their careers.

But Bertrand was here because, for him, disasters were kind of fun.

“All righty, then,” he said, already dividing the operation into doable pieces, organizing, prioritizing, and saving the craziest, most risky “fun” for himself. “The way I see it, we’re looking at mechanical retrieval of the drill; complete biohazard and radiation containment and cleanup; airlift and disposal of all contaminated water, ice, materials, and equipment. I see at least three lift sorties, maybe five, and we’re gonna need hazard experts, radiation experts, one helluva winch that will still work at fifty below, plus a shitload of support from HAZMAT, the NRC, the Air Force. And is there someplace down here where my boys can get hot coffee and take a warm piss?”

Everyone in the freezing hut grinned and looked visibly relieved for a moment. The lead scientist did the honors, heading toward the insulated doors.

“This way, gentlemen.”

Hundreds of what-if and if-then concerns began beating their wings
inside each person’s brain as the group shuffled out in their boots and bulky clothes. That the crisis would be resolved seemed a bit more certain. Bertrand certainly inspired confidence.

Whether the unexplored ancient biosphere in suspension beneath them would have to remain unexplored was harder to determine. At least for the paleobiologists and glaciologists it was still too early and too painful to think about that.

13

Old Executive Office Building/Washington, D.C.

Sandy Sokoff had had discreet meetings with military and intelligence people at the Pentagon, at CIA headquarters in Virginia, and at the vast NSA facility at Ft. Meade in Maryland.

Each intelligence officer or general officer questioned about Project Orion professed to have either no knowledge or very limited knowledge, operating within the limitations of institutional cutouts that prevented anyone from seeing the whole picture. And none of those Sandy interviewed were willing to speculate, at least not in front of the President’s counsel. Many had seemed more intent on pumping
him
for information than on illuminating matters for the White House, which Sokoff found both curious and irritating.

Nevertheless, certain impressions were evolving, specifically that both inside and outside government, support for the building out of a vastly expensive space-based weapons system was wide, deep, and not justified by any military or terrorist threat that made any sense whatsoever.

It was a truism that the easiest way for a terrorist to deliver a nuclear bomb to any city in America was to hide it in a shipment of dope. And against this basic street reality, as far as Sandy was concerned, all the ICBM-killing Star Wars crap in the world didn’t mean squat.

So, why the big push for Orion, if it was just some leftover big-ticket, pre-9/11 China-containment boondoggle in Republican geopolitical drag?

Sitting in his office in the Old Executive Office Building with the clock ticking, Sokoff stared at his list of spies, former spies, and closemouthed generals. He then consulted his computer address book, made an impulsive phone call, and booked himself on the earliest morning flight to Atlanta.