The Orion Protocol

by Gary Tigerman

  “Augie . . . I think you want to get this.”

  Standing under the hard black sky, Deaver lifted the shard up in both hands like an ancient Egyptian priest making an offering to Ra, the sun god of the Followers of Horus. He seemed transfixed with awe.

  “Podnah . . .” Augie panned the windup Kodak. Gold threads in the Apollo mission patch on Deaver’s shoulder flashed in the sun, the embroidery depicting the three belt stars of Orion. He held the glass shard very still.

  “Can you see?”

  “God, yes. Look at that . . .”

  Augie zoomed in and Jake presented various angles on the indigo silica to the lens, but not to the billions back home. Like so much about America’s last mission to the Moon, this film footage was destined to remain an Official State Secret until “the appropriate time,” however that would be determined.

  The lunar shard would be brought back and preserved, then taken out and digitally photographed when that technology was developed in the ‘90’s and then secreted away again, in the most highly classified domain of the U.S. National Archives.

  But Deaver and Blake would remember that moment of Earthrise at Medii the rest of their lives. Well into the twenty-first century, Jake in particular would return to it in dreams, and even fully awake, he’d find himself going back, imagining himself there and thinking about it, whether he wanted to or not.

  20

  February 1/Boulder, Colorado

  Thinking.

  Inside Naropa Institute’s colorful Dharmadhatu Temple, former Apollo Commander Jake Deaver was sitting cross-legged on a Zabuton pillow, surrounded by fellow Buddhist students and trying desperately not to nod off.

  Thinking.

  He shifted his knees and brought his wandering mind back to his out-breath.

  Jake Deaver was long retired from NASA and the military and well into a third career as a teacher at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His short-cropped hair was textured with gray. The face it framed was lined and well worn, like the visage of some forgotten Roman general cast in silver coin and rescued from the Aegean by treasure hunters.

  In repose, he might have been considered flat-out handsome, even at this distance from a glory-drenched youth. But Deaver’s lopsided smile, when it surfaced, played against that, revealing a fundamental lack of vanity. At least in regard to his looks.

  Espresso, he thought, almost smelling it, like the faint odor of a skunk wandering down from the hills outside Boulder. My kingdom for a double espresso.

  Thinking.

  He labeled this mental digression and returned his attention to his breath.

  At one end of the high-ceilinged meditation hall, the Kharmapa, a visiting lama and lineage holder of the Khargyu School of Tibetan Buddhism, sat in meditation among the brightly robed monks of his order, a Vajrayana sect long exiled into northern India by the Chinese Army.

  Jake became momentarily aware of the colored silk banners, Tibetan prayer flags, and traditional thangka paintings hung from red-and-gold-enameled beams, and of the presence of His Holiness, the reincarnated Khargyu master’s proper appellation.

  Thinking.

  Deaver refocused on his breath and struggled to ignore the tingling sensations as his limbs began falling excruciatingly asleep.

  It was his knees. An awkward jet-training parachute jump in ’66 at Wright-Patterson AFB was the primary suspect, an event so far in the past it might as well have been from another life.

  Physical discomfort aside, Tibetan Shamata sitting practice was especially difficult because of the tendency of people to get bored out of their skulls, which meant their minds would constantly be wandering off into memories, feelings, daydreams, and every imaginable fantasy.

  The trick, as taught by Rinpoche, Jake’s meditation instructor, was to mentally label whatever came up during sitting practice as thinking. Then, without judgment, to gently redirect your attention back to that ineffable human activity that was always occurring in the present: your own autonomic breath.

  This was intended to help one rediscover the subtle, ordinary, but powerful state of being present or in the now. To see how thoughts arise out of nothing, manifest in living color, then return to nothingness. It also created the opportunity for the Shamata practitioner to recognize the repeating patterns of ego expressed in the human mind’s machinations, and see a lot of embarrassing shit about one’s self without jumping up and running off screaming—hopefully. And for Jake Deaver, at this point in his life, that was truly the ongoing challenge: consciousness . . . the final frontier.

  Thinking.

  He felt firm feminine hands on his back and neck that he recognized as belonging to Maeera, a dancer from New York and a Dharmadhatu meditation instructor. Her strong deft fingers pushed and pulled on him, effecting small but precise adjustments in Jake’s posture before moving on to help others.

  Maeera would later be teased that her alignment of Jake’s lean athletic body and all-too-military spine had just been an excuse to lay hands on the astronaut. The Buddhist community, or Sangha, was spiritual and disciplined but not at all prudish; the lamas themselves seeming to be unimpressed with the notion of celibacy. And Deaver was no stranger to gossip.

  Thinking.

  A Tibetan brass-bowl gong sounded twice, the ring-off reverberating as designated monks and students got up to lead walking meditation. Jake stood up on pins and needles, utterly unable to feel his feet, and made himself move. Limping along in silly agony, he shuffled into a long line filing around the room and passed the raised platform of His Holiness, the Kharmapa.

  At the end of the hall, tapping the shoulder of a hosting American student with his ornate ceremonial fan, the Khargyu lineage holder pointed in Jake’s direction down the approaching line. The tulku’s mischievous eyes wrinkled, his voice raspy from hours of song-chant, which, for the visiting monks, had begun long before dawn.

  “Moon Man,” the Kharmapa said in Tibetan, and waited as the flustered suit-and-tie Buddhist searched his modest Tibetan vocabulary.

  “Ah! Moon Man! Yes.” The student laughed, working it out, and then froze for a moment, unsure if laughing was appropriate.

  But the high lama simply sat in his traditional hat and robe, twinkling happily, and none of the attendant monks offered a reproving look.

  By the time Jake had shuffled around in front of the Kharmapa, some feeling had returned to his extremities; at least he would probably not fall down.

  “Your Holiness.” Deaver bowed slightly, his hands together.

  “Moon Man.” The Kharmapa bowed back, speaking hoarsely in English.

  His smile beamed beatifically, as if he was recognizing a saint or a long-lost relative from another life. His Holiness then nodded his closely shaved head, and with sly piercing black eyes he blessed Jake and then gestured for him to come nearer. It was both an invitation and a royal command.

  Deaver approached, understandably wary of those extremely intelligent-looking eyes. But the Buddhist master simply radiated unaffected compassion. And then leaning forward and touching foreheads with Jake, he whispered into his ear.

  “Moon Man. Time to take another walk.”

  It was as if Time had somehow stopped. The words had both literal and metaphoric meaning, but Deaver was experiencing something more: a vivid super-string of unfolding chaotic images mixed with waves of emotion that resonated through him, uncensored and charged with an indescribable oracular power. It was quick, quasi-psychedelic, and it left Jake speechless.

  Time to take another walk.

  Managing to mumble an awkward thank-you to His Holiness, he rejoined the rest of the practitioners for walking meditation in a state of turmoil.

  Time to take another walk.

  What the hell had just happened? It was as if the Vajrayana master had given him a brief inchoate glimpse of multidimensional Reality, tearing open the seemingly seamless fabric of space/time and laying the illusion of the senses bare for only a fraction of a moment.

&nb
sp; But that had been quite enough. Whatever hard-won peace Jake had acquired through years of sitting practice and other devotions now seemed absurdly delusional: just another ripe field of play for spiritual materialism. The ego’s pride in the acquisition of skills or accumulation of spiritual experiences was a classic pothole on the path of dharma.

  Seeing with stark clarity, in that instant, how this phenomenon of ego had manifested in himself was both liberating and deeply embarrassing.

  Chagrined awake, he thought.

  He felt ungrounded now and almost comically sorry for himself. He wanted to go, just get the hell out of there. Or rush back and pepper the Kharmapa with questions.

  What the hell just happened there? Was he supposed to do something or “get” something? Was there a Tibetan name for it, what he just experienced there? And what exactly was that supposed to mean: “Time to take another walk”?

  But then the bowl gong sounded the end to walking meditation and the Sangha members drifted back again to their zafu pads. Unpersuaded by any impulse to do anything else, Deaver took his spot among the others inside the crowded Buddhist temple, adjusting his legs under the Zabuton pillow.

  Then, with a practiced effort, he resumed the three-thousand-year-old Tibetan discipline of following his own breath.

  Thinking . . . thinking . . . thinking . . .

  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 fr
om 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.