The Orion Protocol

by Gary Tigerman

  Through exploding sheets of rain, he could just make out the black truck as it slowly approached the arroyo, tipped itself down the sodden banks at a crazy angle, hit the water, and got bogged down up to the hubs.

  “Yes!”

  Jake watched the sliding side door open and three DIA men splash out, up to their bulletproof vests in rushing water and battling just to keep their footing.

  Then he heard the unambiguous stutter of automatic pistols on rock and roll.

  “Shit!”

  Deaver threw himself down across the passenger seat, dropping the clutch he forgot he was riding. The vintage Pathfinder lurched and stalled out.

  Inside the black van a former Olympic shooting medalist had started getting ready by taking his gloves off and warming his hands like a concert musician. Watching helplessly as the DIA fuckup played itself out, Stottlemeyer and Markgrin found it nightmarish and absurd. It was going bad: lethally, career-endingly bad. When the wallowing Suburban died and the two gym-rat hard-ons jumped out into the water and started emptying their clips, the Fibbies threw themselves past the stunned team leader and out the door.

  “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

  Jake didn’t see the G-men or their shouting match and comic wrestling melee with the intel ops in the river or hear what they were shouting. Lying across the hand break and yanking the shifter into neutral, he was too involved with staying low, grinding the starter, and praying for spark.

  As lightning lit the scene like a phosphorus flare, he lifted his head and peeked outside. A red dot of laser light flicked across his eyelashes and Jake got a long harrowing look at a man wearing a watch cap and aiming a high-caliber sniper rifle at him from inside the open door of the van.

  He knew the truck offered no real protection: a round from a weapon like that had an all-access pass. Even a mediocre shooter could put a bullet through his door faster than you could say, “I’m with the band.”

  But between the ruby blink of that realization and the impulse to put his hands up in surrender, the situation changed and Jake heard it coming: it was like the hollow sound of the ocean inside a conch shell, amplified and deepened by the concussive rush of rolling rocks and stones that were being swept up into the grainy mix and powering down the arroyo like a runaway train.

  Once the flash flood hit, it was over in about five heartbeats. The laser targeting Deaver’s face disappeared just as an eight-foot wall of water and highballing stones exploded over the huge black Chevy, skewing it sideways and washing all the former occupants downstream like summer-camp kids white-water rafting.

  “Thank you!”

  Jake hit the starter again, directing his gratitude up toward any eavesdropping deities who might have intervened.

  “Thank you very much!”

  When the damp points caught, he revved the Nissan engine back to life, blessed its 230,000 miles of loyal service, and worked his way down the mountain to the county road.

  65

  As the two men strode back through the West Wing corridor, Sandy Sokoff thought the President seemed almost jaunty. It was an odd reaction to the recital they’d just heard of horrific new applications of power designed to kill people wholesale.

  And he was pretty sure this was probably just the tip of the iceberg. Still, the transcript of the President’s council meeting, in the unlikely event that it was ever published, would probably qualify as a new Book of Revelations: the U.S. was secretly decades ahead of the rest of the world in military technology.

  Sokoff understood the theoretical upside in terms of defense strength and also how the most compelling new weaponry had become the most tightly guarded secret, kept from even our own conventional armed forces.

  But the downside was a complex puzzle: unbeknownst to most of those in the American command structure, the U.S. military was planning and training to defend the nation with hardware that was generations behind the capabilities that were being kept secret. The sheer waste in billions of tax dollars and millions of man-hours was staggering.

  Even NASA was being crippled, spending a huge portion of their limited budget on incrementally better rocket propulsion systems that had long been surpassed by black projects technology.

  For the President, this kind of gaping dysfunction was horrendous enough. What was even more alarming was the realization that any perceived balance of power in the world was an illusion. The bedrock concept upon which international security was reckoned by the world community was false; a confidence game maintained as rigorously as the fiction of a spy’s cover story.

  On one level, the U.S. appeared to be setting back the Cold War doomsday clock, joining hands with Moscow in reducing our nuclear arsenals and helping the Russians do the same. But it was a symbolic disarmament at best.

  The fact was that Mother England’s runaway child was only a blink away from possessing the means for world domination on a scale only Deutschland’s most infamous housepainter had ever envisioned, burning himself alive with pure methamphetamine crystal and raving in his self-made Bergtesgarden of corpses.

  And whether some dark, apocalyptic Pax Americana began here or not depended a great deal on what this new Commander in Chief decided to do at this particular moment in time.

  Approaching the Oval Office, the President glanced at Sokoff, who was keeping pace beside him.

  “So, how do you feel about Lowe chairing open public hearings on the Hill?”

  To Sandy, the President seemed to be animated by an almost perverse enthusiasm.

  “Sir, every political bone in my body says bury it where the sun don’t shine. But right now I’m more concerned about the Friends of Bob.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Sokoff peered around at the Secret Service agents, who were leading the way in front and trailing behind. He lowered his voice.

  “Mr. President, the first use of power is to retain power,” he said. “I’d double your personal guard. And I mean now.”

  “Have faith, Sandy. The system is going to work,” the President said, waving off the idea. “Besides, we don’t want them thinking they’ve got us running scared, do we?”

  As they reached the outer office, his secretary flagged them down.

  “Mr. President.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Travis.”

  “You have the 4-H Club from Des Moines for a photo op on the lawn in ten minutes and then the Russian ambassador’s credentials presentation in the Blue Room, but—”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Travis. Buzz me in five minutes.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” she said, deciding that telling him about the Brahman bull that was currently fertilizing the Kentucky bluegrass off the portico could wait.

  Sokoff was pulling on a freckled earlobe and staring out the Oval Office’s bay window as the President closed the door. He still didn’t know what the putatively most powerful man in the world was being so cheerful about. As far as Sandy could see, Bob Winston had them with their pants down over a barrel of moonshine and he could hear banjo music.

  “You know, you have that look, sir.”

  “What look?”

  The lanky President grinned and joined his much shorter counsel in a Mutt-and-Jeff tableau at the window. Outside, a gathering of outsized but extremely healthy-looking farm animals seemed to be attaining critical mass.

  “The I’m-the-smartest-man-in-the-room look.”

  “I’ll try to work on that. In the meantime, give me the three-minute version of what’s in the Vatican Archives that President Carter wanted to see and why I should ask His Holiness for permission to see it myself.”

  66

  After prying cold, clenched fingers off the steering wheel, Jake shook out his hands and felt them trembling. He forced himself to slow the truck down, take several deep, deliberate breaths, and he was just getting calm enough to be worrying about what to do next when a helicopter made a pass about a hundred feet above him and sharply wheeled back around.

  “Aw, fuck.” Deaver pumped t
he brakes, but they still locked up, sending him slaloming toward the little blue-painted Bell now setting down on the road in front of him behind a curtain of gray rain.

  “Jake!” The treble edge of a bullhorn cut through the helicopter whine, but he ignored it, desperately trying to turn around in the mud-pie track.

  “Jake! Hold up, there, podnah!”

  Deaver stopped: he knew that voice. And then, between the slapping wiper blades, he saw a stocky body jump out of the chopper wearing a hooded sky-blue slicker and matching NASA baseball cap. It could not have been anybody else.

  “Son of a bitch.” Jake yanked on the brake handle and splashed down into the road, looking like he just might kill Augie Blake with his bare hands.

  “You! You son of a bitch!”

  Jake stalked toward him, yelling over the whine of helicopter rotors and repeatedly losing his footing in the slop.

  “You son of a bitch!”

  “Hold on now, goddamn it.”

  Augie shouted into the loud-hailer, standing his ground.

  “This is not my show, podnah!”

  But Jake slogged furiously toward him, getting soaked to the bone.

  “Not your show? Not your show! What the fuck does that mean?! You were just in the neighborhood?”

  Augie clicked on the bullhorn again.

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “Wanna take a ride?”

  Speechless, Jake just stopped and gawked. With the prop wash whipping rain into his face, he squinted past Augie at the little two-place Bell: it was empty.

  “It’s a rental!” Augie grinned wetly and waved him closer. “Come on, Daddy-o, let me buy you a drink.”

  Jake stood in the pelting downpour for a moment, then splashed back and yanked the keys out of the Pathfinder’s ignition, cursing to himself all the way.

  67

  Augie took them up over the aspens, banking radically and pushing the performance envelope of the whirlybird to about ten-tenths. Though strapped in tight, Jake was still plastered to the Plexiglas door by the g-squash.

  It reminded him of late-’60’s flight-simulator hell: he and Augie in astronaut training and Augie’s hotshot “Hey, is that all you got?” test-pilot swagger. Not a fond memory.

  When he could sit upright again, Deaver was still hot.

  “So, what the fuck is going on? And don’t tell me those aren’t the same pond scum you threw in with.”

  Augie eyed him with a mix of affection and weary irritation.

  “Jesus God Almighty. You know a shitload has happened since you hit your dinger and hung ’em up, son.”

  “Just tell me how come your asshole buddies back there are out trashing my place and chasing me down, like America’s Most Wanted!”

  “Aw shit, now, don’t play dumb. Your little tête-à-têtes with Ms. Angela Browning? They think you’re poppin’ up in the toaster, podnah.”

  “Oh, God.” Jake swiped rainwater off his face. “Fuck me . . .”

  Augie made a slow sweeping turn and pulled a hand towel and a sweatshirt out of a sports bag under the seat.

  “Here.”

  Jake rubbed his hair and face with the towel, then stripped off his jacket and sopping T-shirt and pulled the dry sweatshirt over his head.

  “Augie, I swear to God, if they hurt her . . .”

  But he was unable to finish the thought.

  Tilting over sharply, Augie pointed down at an old cinderblock pilots’ bar near the rental helicopter hangars.

  “You remember the Condor.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Jake saw the painting of the huge endangered bird, faded and peeling on the bar’s rustic tin roof. He braced himself with both arms and legs.

  Getting clearance from the Denver tower, Augie swooped around and made a roaring hotdog approach, free-falling the last five hundred feet before catching it like a baby and setting the chopper down on its skids with masterful aplomb. It was vivid in Jake’s mind, as he fumbled with his seat belt, exactly why he really hated flying with Augie Blake.

  68

  The Condor Bar/Denver Airport

  “So, we went back,” Jake said, a shot of cuervo anjo beginning to warm his body from the inside out. Across the Formica table, Augie hunkered down over the Condor Bar’s scalding black coffee.

  “Hell, yes,” he said, “with the Soviets.”

  Cocooned in the privacy of their corner booth, Deaver made no effort to disguise his astonishment.

  “You have it on good authority or you know for a fact?”

  “I wore the vest.”

  A mission director’s sartorial choice back in the Mercury program had become both a tradition and an emblem of the job itself, a player-coach kind of job often taken up by former astronauts.

  Jake tried to imagine hot-shoe Augie Blake riding herd on a clandestine Moon return from a chair at Star City Mission Control in Soviet Georgia. Then again, who, besides he himself, would know better what a crew putting down at Sinus Medii should look out for?

  Unlike Deaver, Augie had been trusted. He had stayed with the NASA team after Apollo 18, moving on to other challenges within the space program as if not at all burdened by the weight of keeping the nation’s darkest secrets.

  “Incredible . . .” Jake said, around a forkful of eggs and salsa. He knew the true price of bearing that burden. Deaver looked away, tasting a bitterness in his mouth not put there by the Condor’s grill chef but by his own ego roiling with a sudden, poisonous envy.

  Yeah, the team player gets the rewards. Go along and get along. Follow orders, keep your nose clean, and put “doing the right thing” aside, along with your conscience.

  Jake knew he could never have taken Augie’s path: he had been much too righteously angry back in 1973. Mad at NASA and at the Navy when they wouldn’t back him up. Mad at his ex-wife and others he’d counted as friends when they made it clear that he was on his own if he refused to go along. Mad most of all at Augie Blake, for what had felt like the most personal possible betrayal.

  But now, thirty-some years later, looking at his old partner, Deaver was already becoming bored with watching his own rampaging ego grasping at all the old-news victim fury welling up from decades past.

  So what? Jake thought, addressing that fading, reptilian part of his brain as it slowly loosened its grip. So fucking what?

  “Tell me about it,” he said out loud.

  Augie warmed his aging pilot’s hands around the house coffee cup.

  “Shit, sure.”

  And fueled with shooters and Tecate, Jake listened as Augie ate huevos rancheros and told it.

  After the Apollo 18 voyage was declared the last of the Moon missions, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow showed his Russian counterpart some color stills of what had been confirmed at Sinus Medii, and proposed a collaboration. Of the two nations, only the Soviets had both the technological base and the social control necessary to mount and support a Moon mission in guaranteed secrecy.

  Thus, under the umbrella of back-channel protocols, the two nations set aside their antagonisms so that astronauts and cosmonauts might begin training together at the Cosmodrome for a covert return to the Moon.

  Ultimately launched from Star City, using a Russian Titan-class rocket for the heavy lifting, the adapted Apollo spacecraft was manned by a joint Russian/American three-man crew.

  Landing at Sinus Medii on Christmas morning, 1974, the crew had a clear-cut mission: to find and enter the alien habitat and document everything they could see underground. High on the science agenda was the collection of any artifacts that would shed light on the nature of the extraterrestrials: what they were like, why they had been there, what kind of technology they had, where they were from, and why they were gone.

  Analysis of the extensive film photography from inside the multilevel habitat resolved certain key questions: a catastrophic decompression caused by a breaching of the aliens’ protective dome had blasted out everything near the entrances that was not bolted down. Whether it wa
s caused by an asteroid hit, a large-scale industrial accident, sabotage, or an act of war was unknown.

  Artifacts from inside the tunnels were recovered, secured in the return module, and later pored over by a cadre of U.S. and Soviet scientists. And from the study of film and photographs and five hundred kilos of recovered material, a picture of the former extraterrestrial colony on the Moon gradually took shape.

  It had been a mining operation, built in six levels below the surface. Alien machinery, electronics, and hardware had remained intact, preserved for millennia in the super-cold airless tunnels and chambers, shielded from meteoritic erosion and solar radiation as if waiting to be found. And many intriguing pieces of this ancient advanced technology had been brought back to Earth.

  What was at first bizarre and indecipherable, in 1974, became recognizable under high-powered microscopes as microminiaturized electronic circuitry and fiber-optic filaments for carrying digital information. These were among the most promising discoveries yielded by the artifacts that had been retrieved from the Moon. Replication or back-engineering from the ET samples would take a decade or so, but the jump start those samples had provided in advancing U.S. computers and communication was profound. And that was just the beginning.

  Outside the windows of the Condor Bar, private jets and little four-place Cessnas taxied by; and commercial aircraft flying overhead rattled the rafters inside, where Tex-Mex was getting a big play on the jukebox. Jake and Augie hardly noticed any of it.

  “So, tell me,” Deaver said, lucidly drunk. “What were they like?”

  “Like us, only smaller: two arms, two legs, two eyes, six fingers, six toes.”

  “Humanoid.”

  “Yeah, humanoid.”

  “And they were extracting minerals?”

  “You remember when we dropped that hammer and all the moonquake sensors went ape-shit?”

  “Yeah, I remember they said the ground kept on ringing for hours.”

  “That’s because it’s damn near hollow. ET had mined the shit out of it, podnah.” Augie chuckled and swiped a corn tortilla through a puddle of egg yolk. “You know what the Russians did when they got back?”