The Orion Protocol
Page 1
THE ORION PROTOCOL
GARY TIGERMAN
CONTENTS
E-Book Extra: The Truth is in Here: An Interview with Gary Tigerman
Prologue: The huge, thwopping Navy helicopter set down like a prehistoric bird
PART I
1. “Two months ago, if anybody had said we were gonna catch this in the. . . .”
2. “Now I’m gonna need a few volunteers.”
3. Once through the Oval Office door and the President’s busy anteroom,
4. Ensconced in a video editing suite at the Public Broadcasting building...
5. On the LC-130 Hercules from San Pedro, California
6. Entering Goddard Space Flight’s waxy fluorescent-lit corridors required ...
7. The lights were still burning in the East Wing of the White House,
8. Fiddling with the Goddard security guest pass clipped onto her jacket...
9. Across from Augie Blake, inside the cavernous fuselage of the LC-130 Hercules,
10. Behind the locked door of the Goddard workstation,
11. “Tricks of Light and Shadow. That’s cute.”
PART II
12. The fact was, thousands of years of accumulated ice at both poles had...
13. Sandy Sokoff had had discreet meetings with military and intelligence...
14. The next day, at a dead-end lot in one of Atlanta’s sprawling suburbs,
15. Dr. Sergei Sergeivich Berenkov, senior scientist, kept a closer eye than...
16. “We are alive in a new Golden Age of Astronomy.”
17. This guy Eklund is out of his mind, Winston thought.
18. With her Beanie Bullwinkle presiding, Angela sat next to Miriam and...
PART III
19. Setting up the last of the seismic sensors, they were unprepared for that...
20. Thinking.
21. Parked outside the Dharmadhatu in downtown Boulder,
22. Escorted into the Sandia Labs by a delegation of scientists,
23. As the President’s counsel took his one-man-show farther up the road,
24. Emerging from the Antarctic ice, it was erect on all fours,
25. “Richard? Close the door, would you?”
26. In the twelfth-floor wood-paneled office at the Corporation for Public...
27. Miriam and Angela took their lunch on the run as they hurried back to...
28. Blair House, the historic vice-presidential residence, was still impressive...
29. The Arlington Club golf course was not normally open in February,
30. “Father, I understand you’ve been called upon from time to time to use...
31. At the cortex of the National Security Agency headquarters...
32. As she entered the UC-Boulder parking lot nearest to Jake’s lecture hall,
33. “I think I see something.”
34. “So, tell me,” Angela said, cradling a second glass of Pinot Grigio...
35. “Can you hear me now? Colonel Blake?”
36. Using the dual-processor Mac in his office,
37. “Oh, no . . .”
38. “And good luck, Mr. Grotsky, wherever you are.”
39. Commander Jake Deaver and Colonel Augie Blake had gone to the...
40. “My God, Jake.”
41. The squat, gray Australian relay station had the spilled beer and moldy ...
PART IV
42. Leaning against the doorjamb in Angela’s office and watching...
43. They waited in the anteroom to Chairman Lowe’s office,
44. Across town, Sandy Sokoff was thinking about his impending meeting...
45. With the word that a Naval Intelligence team was being dispatched onto...
46. Jonathan Quatraine was starting to feel quite at home in the...
47. The course at Arlington was a vast swath of wet and soggy turf from the...
48. Soaked to the skin, Pierce found Congressman Phillip Lowe waiting in...
49. Emerging alone from the vaults of the National Archives,
50. “Congressman Lowe, on line one.”
51. From the more public foyer that communicated to the West Wing,
52. Jake mumbled to himself, unbuckling the business-class seat belt...
53. Sandy Sokoff set his empty glass down on the mantel in the residential...
PART V
54. Former Commander Jake Deaver had left Boulder and flown to Egypt...
55. Dr. Paula Winnick’s prewar town house in a posh section...
56. Outside and across the street, the surveillance baton had been passed...
57. Urine and bat guano. Deaver imagined the laugh he’d get telling...
58. The morning drive-time traffic crossing and recrossing the Potomac...
59. Shit.
60. It was not as if Deaver hadn’t been thinking about it.
61. Dicks in dick suits, Angela thought.
62. Lightning was crackling, sending bright white fiberoptic roots to ...
63. The Secret Service were obliged to wait outside the Map...
64. Everything outside Jake’s windshield kept disappearing in the lashing ...
65. As the two men strode back through the West Wing corridor,
66. After prying cold, clenched fingers off the steering wheel,
67. Augie took them up over the aspens, banking radically and pushing the...
68. “So, we went back,” Jake said, a shot of cuervo anjo beginning to warm...
PART VI
69. Angela was feeling both scared for Jake and personally responsible for...
70. Returning from Denver on Air Force transport, Colonel Augie Blake...
71. “I talked to Deaver. After you folks’s little fiasco.”
72. A phone bank was set up at the PBS station and staffed,
73. In his office at NASA, Augie Blake stood stiffly in a beribboned Marine...
74. From three TVs in the Oval Office at the White House,
75. At the downlink station, the Aussie grad student was tuned to CNN...
76. “Security! Colonel Blake! Open up! Colonel Blake!”
77. The shooting pains down Augie’s arms and up the side of his neck were...
78. On the west side of the Washington Mall, Jake had stopped trying to...
79. By the time they arrived at the White House with a black helicopter...
80. The conference room down the hall from the Oval Office was crowded...
81. Discussion dissipated and people turned away from the TV news crawl...
82. In the ICU at Bethesda, Augie was still benefiting from the anesthetic...
83. It was nicer going in the front door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,
84. Miriam Kresky, wearing nothing but a man’s white dress shirt...
85. The normally sticklike rosebushes had been tricked into leafing out by...
86. In high Earth orbit, the Orion array of mirror satellites had been...
87. It wasn’t bitter cold, but the temperature was low enough that they...
A Note from the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
1973/Lunar Receiving Lab/Houston
The huge, thwopping Navy helicopter set down like a prehistoric bird and disgorged the astronauts onto the pad at the Lunar Receiving Lab in Houston, Texas. Shuffling toward the NASA research hospital in their bulky BIGs (Biological Isolation Garments), the returning Young Gods of Space passed network cameras and a roped-off press pool that applauded them every step of the way.
“Welcome back, gentlemen! Congratulations!”
“Commander Deaver! What was
it like on the Moon?”
Hustled inside by escorting Marine guards and Navy nurses, they could only give a big thumbs-up and grinned telegenically before disappearing from media view.
Once inside the lab and proceeding through the hyperclean corridors, Commander Jake Deaver and Colonel Augie Blake joked with the personnel bunched up in doorways and affected game swaggers, unconsciously competing in the effort to disguise any signs of strain from their 600,000-mile round-trip to the Moon.
“Colonel Blake! Whoo-ya! Some landing up there!”
“Piece o’ cake.”
“Can o’ corn.”
Sleepless for much of the ten-day voyage, the two-man crew of Apollo 18 had splashed down in the Caribbean only hours before under marginal conditions requiring a retrieval/rescue in twelve-foot seas. Millions had watched the event live, holding their collective breaths as the helo from the USS Hornet labored to extract them from their bobbing and rolling spacecraft and then set them down safely on the carrier deck. But the odyssey wasn’t over yet.
“Colonel Blake! You guys get wet out there or what!?”
“Hell, we’re all ninety-eight percent water. At least the Commander is.”
“Hoo-ya!”
Raucous cheers combined with sheer exhaustion-adrenaline buoyed them now as Jake Deaver and Augustus “Augie” Blake were led directly toward the quarantine unit.
“Augie-Doggie! You gonna let a Texas girl buy you a drink?”
“Later, darlin’. Gotta go kill us some cooties.”
They banged through rubber-sealed double doors marked QUARANTINE and then stopped, standing patiently still as the antiviral team descended on them, ending their all-too-brief victory lap.
Protected by otherworldly clean-suits, the NASA doctors unceremoniously stripped off the bio-iso garments that had been delivered to Jake and Augie by rescue swimmers, and prepared the two men for decontamination. While everything from boots to underwear was being shucked, bagged, tagged, sealed up, and taken away to be analyzed and ultimately burned, Augie offered a deadpan running commentary.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to apologize in advance for how plain ungodly awful the Commander here smells right now.”
Deaver acknowledged the team’s laughter without looking at his pilot.
“In my own defense, I can only say that any urine-sample je ne sais quoi is probably left over from the Colonel’s dead-stick landing and the rest is just honest American sweat.”
Tested, poked, punctured, and prodded, none of it fazed them. They’d long since become inured to standing nude in a roomful of scientists of every gender.
But the next part was no joke. Sequestration in the “delousing” chamber, an ordeal involving radiation baths and noxious chemical scrubs, amounted to mankind’s last line of defense against any friendly lunar microbes that might have hitchhiked their way back to Earth with the Apollo 18 crew. Not a subject discussed much by NASA, any extraterrestrial virus had the potential to run through the human population like a massive biological terrorist attack. By comparison, the nineteenth-century ethnic cleansing atrocity that wiped out the Cherokee in Oklahoma (courtesy of smallpox-contaminated Army blankets) would rank as a bad flu season on the scale of human suffering. Classified worst-case scenarios involving alien pathogens projected millions to tens of millions dead or dying before medical science would have time to develop an effective response.
However, at the height of the Cold War and the Space Race, potentially catastrophic biohazards had been weighed against the unthinkable prospect of getting beaten to the Moon by the Soviets and judged an acceptable risk. Still, precautions had to be taken.
So, Jake and Augie’s lean fit bodies were aggressively irradiated, purged, and punished to a degree commensurate with terminal cancer treatment until cautiously declared bug-free.
The buck-naked Buck Rogers were then zipped into sterilized jumpsuits fashioned like feetie pajamas and taken by another Marine escort to an unmarked white door with a stainless steel handle and a lock on the outside.
Taking up sentry positions, the surgically masked Marine corporals delivered crisp salutes and stood at ease, their hands sweating inside sterile latex gloves. Deaver and Blake looked at each other, returned the salutes and stepped inside the room.
What was said behind those closed doors at the Lunar Receiving Lab in Houston in 1973 would not be divulged in NASA-sanctioned media interviews or mentioned in any astronaut biographies, authorized or otherwise. The classified, psych-med debriefing notes of the Navy psychiatrist in attendance would remain an Official State Secret well into the twenty-first century.
Within days of Apollo 18’s return, NASA and the U.S. government would cancel the remaining missions of the Apollo program, citing budget concerns and lack of public interest. In addition, it was announced that ambitious plans for sending American astronauts to Mars by 1984 would also be scrapped.
Thus the wonder and triumph of mankind’s boots-on-the-ground exploration of the solar system began and ended with the Apollo program.
And no human being has ventured more than a few hundred miles from home ever since.
PART
I
I dreamt that I was walking with my left side folded-over. And I knew somehow that if I could just unfold it, I would then be whole and complete and my destiny could be fulfilled.
—Descartes
1
January 27/Oval Office/the White House
“Two months ago, if anybody had said we were gonna catch this in the first hundred days, I’d have thought they were high.”
The fifty-eight-year-old former senator from Colorado and newly elected President of the United States stared out the much-photographed bay window of the Oval Office and into the cut-back winter Rose Garden.
“What was it Truman said?”
On the desktop, the blade end of his letter opener, engraved with the presidential seal, tapped out a rhythmic figure from the William Tell Overture known to Americans who came of age in front of three black-and-white channels of network TV as the theme from The Lone Ranger.
“Truman, sir?”
From a clubby wing chair, R. Cabot “Bob” Winston, the President’s national security adviser, recognized the galloping little perididdle and made a private note to include it in his memoirs: one of those little human details people liked to read about from a historic moment.
“When they told him about Fat Boy.” The President clanked the blade into a decorated soup can/pencil holder his youngest daughter once made him for Father’s Day. “Damn it, I know this.”
“Ah, January of forty-five. In this room.” Winston sat up minutely straighter, unconsciously signaling the sense of occasion he felt when past presidents were invoked within these walls.
The new President rocked in his leather chair.
“With Harriman and his whole sleek Ivy League crowd telling poor Harry-the-Haberdasher he had to nuke the Japanese.”
“Or not,” Winston said, in a small bow to the Office.
“Oh, I think Einstein’s group was the only ‘or not.’ “ The President’s dry tone glinted off the darker edge of a sense of humor familiar to his campaign staff. “Jesus, what the hell did he say?”
Winston searched his own mental archives.
A buttoned-down Skull & Bones veteran of executive-branch politics, he had experienced an extraordinary tenure, having served at high levels in the NSA and on the National Security Council in both Bush administrations. His carryover appointment was both an olive branch across the aisle and a gesture of confidence toward Intelligence: a community beleaguered by scandal, Cold War excesses, and spectacular failures, now resurrected and seeking redemption through its mission against global terrorism.
Winston, their point man, produced an answer.
“Yes. Wasn’t it, ‘How much time do I have?’ “
“No, ‘How much time do I get?’ “ the President said, in Harry Truman’s flat twang, savoring the Midwest inflection. “
How much time do I get?”
Winston nodded, composed and ramrod straight.
Younger White House staffers had observed that he seemed to wear alertness like a mask, as if some hard-bitten mentor from the halls of spookdom had once cautioned him that blinking one’s eyes was a sign of weakness. And, though word was passed down that the President regarded R. Cabot Winston as a symbol of national unity, many still referred to him in-house as “Robo-Bob.” It was cruel, but fair.
“Well, I guess that’s my question, too, Bob.”
“We’re a few days out from final testing, sir.”
“Days.” The President’s surprise was eloquent enough.
Winston offered a thin-lipped smile. “With a caveat which I will explain.”
As if triggering a pair of explosive bolts, the national security adviser loudly snapped open the bombproof briefcase handcuffed to his left wrist. He then produced a file stamped PROJECT ORION/POTUS/EYES ONLY and laid it flat on the Oval Office desk. POTUS used reading glasses to inspect it as Winston explained.