The Orion Protocol

by Gary Tigerman

  “I can’t tell you what we’re going to see before we see it.”

  He paused and chased a mouthful of sandwich with some diet Coke.

  “But if this thing goes on as planned and we can keep it on, I can promise you we will remember where we were, who we were with, and what we did tonight for the rest of our lives.”

  73

  In his office at NASA, Augie Blake stood stiffly in a beribboned Marine colonel’s uniform and massaged the keys on his computer, revisiting his e-mail.

  Across the room, the remote-camera operator was tweaking the shadows, and a sound engineer, who’d fitted Augie with a clip-on mike, was setting levels.

  “Say something, Colonel. In your normal speaking voice.”

  “Testing, testing, one-two-three . . .”

  A few blocks away, Augie’s plush Lincoln Navigator was parked somewhere near the Jefferson Memorial. Inside, Commander Jake Deaver shuffled through some three-by-five cards with his prepared statement, tuned in the public-radio simulcast, and talked to Miriam on the hands-free phone.

  “Can you hear me now?”

  “Loud and clear, Commander. But turn down your radio.”

  “Jake? You ready?” Angela said, and heard Deaver’s disembodied laugh.

  “Ready or not. Will Augie be able to hear me?”

  “Yo, Daddy-o. We are good to go . . .”

  In her booth above the PBS soundstage, Miriam orchestrated the elements: Angela down on the floor, Augie’s on-camera remote, and a still picture of Jake and the phone-patch audio from his still-undisclosed location. She glanced at the clock: time to call CNN, which had won the live feed in secret bidding.

  “Wolf? Miriam Kresky. We’re live in five . . . no, so far so good . . . thanks, you, too . . . and buckle up.”

  Miriam put on her headset and looked down through the double-paned glass, seeing Angela on her mark, with the red light up on Camera One. She glanced at the monitors, turned to Marvin Epstein, who was sitting nervously behind her, and gave him a conspiratorial wink. Then she got on the talk-back.

  “Okay, everybody. We are live, no jive, so if you screw up just keep on going, there’s no going back. Angie? This is it, kiddo. In thirty . . . break one.”

  She acquired eye contact with Angela and raised her right hand, the way she had done a thousand times before. But this would not be like any time before.

  “I’ll count you in . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . and . . . go!”

  The monitors in the booth and televisions all across America that were tuned to Science Horizon now showed Angela Browning standing in a tight pool of light on a dark soundstage, speaking to the camera.

  “This is Angela Browning. And tonight, this special edition of Science Horizon is coming to you live in order to offer a forum for two very special guests, Apollo astronauts Commander Jake Deaver and Colonel Augie Blake . . .”

  Across the street, a plainclothes snatch team had taken over Flowers Not to Reason Why, a florist shop with a view of the PBS Building entrance. Hiding behind a “Closed” sign and a large spray of yellow spider mums, they’d been hoping to catch Deaver going in or out. So far, no luck.

  Still with nothing to report, they checked in with Bob Winston.

  The President’s adviser for national security was taking his calls in the NASA Administrator’s office, where he and Vern Pierce were watching Angela Browning on a bookshelf TV.

  “Commander Jake Deaver, who is on the phone with us, and Colonel Augie Blake, speaking from his office at NASA, have asked to make personal statements for the first time concerning their Apollo 18 mission to the Moon in 1973, and Science Horizon has agreed to provide a platform for them tonight.”

  “Jesus . . .” Vernon Pierce said, pacing behind his desk.

  A damning government psych profile and press kit on Deaver had been printed up and was already in the hands of the NASA PR staff, along with Pierce’s own carefully crafted official statement. Pierce was still nervous.

  “Anyone interested can also access supporting materials and streaming video on our Web site at www.ScienceHorizon.org/TOLAS.”

  Winston, sitting alertly on the couch, was confident that he had assets in place for every contingency. Taking down the Science Horizon Web site would be easy; they’d make it look like it got swamped by hits. For the show itself, blocking the satellite feed, if necessary, meant taking the whole satellite off-line: messy, but doable. Ingraham was in charge of that.

  “Commander, are you there?”

  “I’m here, Angela.”

  “Commander Deaver will speak first, reading a prepared statement.”

  The screen was divided into windows: Angela at PBS, Augie in his NASA office with the remote crew, and a third window with a still picture of Jake.

  “Go ahead, Commander . . .”

  Deaver’s window was enlarged as he began reading his statement.

  “Thank you, Angela. In 1973, Colonel Augie Blake and I had the extraordinary privilege of undertaking for NASA, and for the United States of America, the Apollo 18 mission. Four years earlier, Neil Armstrong had been the first among mankind to take that historic step . . .”

  At home in her Georgetown town house, Dr. Paula Winnick watched Jake’s image fill the screen, and listened to his speech with equal parts fear and fascination.

  “But what the Apollo 18 mission discovered, which we are now confirming publicly, is that Man was not the first intelligent being to set foot on the Moon.”

  “We shall reap the whirlwind,” Winnick said out loud to the empty room. Then the phone began ringing, the first of a dozen people calling to tell her to turn on the TV. She ignored it.

  Inside the Mayfair Hotel room, Eklund and his Mars Underground colleagues had been distracted from their work. They were shouting in astonishment and staring at the Moon photo of Jake and Augie now being posted on the Web site.

  “Oh, my god!”

  “Hoo-yah!”

  Eklund turned up the volume on the TV and cracked the whip.

  “KEEP THOSE SITES UP!”

  The video lights had heated up the NASA office and Augie was sweating in his uniform. He fiddled with his earpiece: Jake’s cell phone was going in and out of phasing static. Angela’s voice interrupted as the connection got bad.

  “Commander Deaver? We’re starting to lose you.”

  “Sorry . . . maybe I should move.”

  “Yes, go ahead and see if you can find a spot with a stronger signal. We’ll talk to Colonel Blake for a bit. Uh, Colonel?”

  “Yes, Angela.”

  Across town, Jake started the Navigator, turned up the radio so he could hear what Augie was saying, and slowly drove off toward the Washington Mall.

  “You’re not saying that you saw extraterrestrials up there . . .”

  “No, no. At least I certainly didn’t. And if I may, I’d like to confine my own remarks to what I personally witnessed.”

  “Fine, Colonel. Why don’t you go ahead.”

  Nine floors upstairs from Augie, Winston smiled a vaguely reassuring smile in Vernon Pierce’s direction.

  “Here it comes.”

  The TV screen filled with the live image of Colonel Augie Blake in his office, standing in front of the NASA logo. Augie’s voice was loud and clear.

  “On the ground at Sinus Medii, the principal thing which I saw with my own eyes and was able to document on eight-millimeter film was the ruins of a large, degraded, domelike structure of unknown age and origin which was clearly the product of an advanced intelligence.”

  “That son of a bitch.” Winston was transfixed with shock.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

  “Where is he, Vern? What floor is he on? That motherfucking son of a bitch!” Winston snatched up his phone and attacked the keypad. Pierce gasped out the suite number as he hovered, hors de combat, over the office trash can.

  In the Black Chamber at the heart of the NSA facility in Maryland, Admiral James T. Ingraham listened
and hung up the phone.

  Looking over a tech officer’s shoulder at a translucent tracking screen, Ingraham studied the grid map of Washington and the GPS-style flashing dot that represented Deaver’s current position.

  “We’ve got him. He’s moving, sir. Between Twelfth and G . . .”

  Once Jake had started to speak, his cell connection to the PBS station in D.C. had been quickly traced and jammed, and his location triangulated.

  Ingraham looked up from the tracking screen at a waiting Defense Intelligence crew in black jumpsuit uniforms.

  “Good luck, gentlemen.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.” They saluted in ragged unison and hustled out the door.

  “All right. Next . . .”

  Moving over in front of an emerald laser holographic display of the Earth, the Admiral was able to see the orbital position in real time of every satellite—commercial, scientific, or military—of every nation to within one-hundredth of an arc second.

  “Admiral? When you are ready.” A civilian tech op under NSA contract made some adjustments on a large panel and indicated a red flashing icon in the hologram: the satellite carrying Science Horizon among hundreds of other programs.

  “How’s the weather on the sun today?”

  “Plasma eruptions every hour, sir. It’s sunspot season.”

  “Plays hell with our magnetosphere, doesn’t it?”

  “And with our satellites, sir.”

  “On my mark.”

  The Admiral then made a brief phone call on a scrambled line as the tech op sat at the ready.

  74

  From three TVs in the Oval Office at the White House, Angela’s voice projected out into the room as the President and Sandy Sokoff, surrounded by late-shift staffers, watched both PBS’s and CNN’s live feed of Science Horizon.

  “Colonel Blake, both you and Commander Deaver have been bound by oath not to publicly speak about this, under pain of federal prosecution—isn’t that correct? Why have you decided to break your silence now, Colonel?”

  “There’s a good question,” Sandy said, to no one in particular.

  The President made a guttural noise in his throat.

  “How many people are seeing this?”

  “PBS? A few hundred thousand. CNN? Well . . . that’s CNN.”

  “Get me Winston on a landline, Sandy. I want the council here. Now. And I mean everybody.”

  75

  NASA Station/West Australia

  At the downlink station, the Aussie grad student was tuned to CNN and practically bouncing off the ceiling.

  “My God! It’s like Galileo! It’s just like fucking Galileo!”

  Colonel Augie Blake’s Moon revelations were the most exciting thing he’d seen since The Thorpedo took home all that swimming gold at Sidney in 2000.

  “Augie, Augie, Augie!”

  Jonathan pumped his fist and shouted, pacing up and down as if tethered to the TV screen, his dog Hudson barking and trailing on his heels.

  “Angela, we were assured that the truth would be told, that the American people would ultimately be told ‘when the time was right.’ And frankly, neither one of us has another quarter of a century to wait . . .”

  “Augie, Augie, Augie! Oi, Oi, Oi!”

  76

  NASA Building/Washington, D.C.

  “Security! Colonel Blake! Open up! Colonel Blake!”

  The soundman looked at the camera operator and shrugged, shaking his head. He’d already boosted Augie’s levels until the mike started feeding back, but the shouting and pounding outside the bolted door was still bleeding in. Augie raised his voice under the hot lights and carried on.

  “The thing is, Angela, under the NASA charter, we all have a fundamental right as Americans to whatever knowledge is gained by the American space program. All of us. And if suppressing certain discoveries was justified, in the context of the Cold War . . . that justification is long over.”

  A chaos of nightsticks and flashlights began beating on the door, melding into the angry male voices shouting in the outer office.

  “Colonel Blake? You obviously have some pretty insistent folks outside your door, there. Can you make out who it is?”

  “No, ma’am . . .” Augie glanced away toward the noise. “But listen, if you lose me? Check the bulletin board. There’s an e-mail there . . . Jake? You copy?”

  “Bulletin board? Copy that.”

  “Augie? I’ve just been told that Wolf Blitzer at CNN is asking if that’s NASA security or the FBI . . .”

  “Can’t really say . . .”

  “Augie? Marvin Epstein from PBS legal is here and he’s now advising us that you probably need to find out who they are, and if it is the FBI or the D.C. police, we’ll have to continue this under different circumstances. Okay?”

  “Well, all right, then, hold on.”

  The camera operator pulled focus as Augie stepped to the door and got a great shot of NASA security guards bolstered by FBI agents exploding into the room flying-wedge–style, like crackhouse raiders.

  “GET DOWN, DOWN, DOWN! EVERYBODY DOWN ON THE FLOOR!”

  “Hey! Whoa! Hold on there . . .”

  Wrestled to the carpet, Augie was quickly handcuffed by the FBI: a scene shown mostly from a low angle, once the camera was knocked to the ground.

  “Hey! We’re cooperating here!”

  In the booth at PBS, Miriam had not anticipated this. She looked at Marvin Epstein, who was standing up now, his eyes getting big.

  “And the whole world is watching.”

  “No kidding.”

  Then it was over. The shouting and the anarchy of equipment being trashed and Augie and the video crew being dragged out were the last sounds and images broadcast, before one of the Fibbies had the presence of mind to pull the power plug.

  Of course that TV minute would be rebroadcast on CNN news every half hour as part of their lead-story coverage for the next three news cycles, which meant maybe a billion people would see it.

  With a small crowd around him in the Oval Office, the President watched the fiasco and cursed under his breath.

  “Was that the FBI?”

  “I believe so, Mr. President.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ. Has everybody gone insane?”

  On-screen now, a visibly angry Angela Browning was giving the federal agents’ performance a scathing review.

  “Well, folks, there it is. Something more reminiscent of the former Soviet Union and the KGB. What appear to be agents of the FBI and we’re presuming security guards at NASA, placing Colonel Augie Blake and the Science Horizon video crew under arrest after confirming Apollo Commander Jake Deaver’s statement about seeing an alien habitat, an extraterrestrial structure or arcology on the Moon. Our American tax dollars hard at work. Unbelievable. Miriam? Do we have Commander Deaver back?”

  Miriam spoke through her headphone mike.

  “Angie, sorry, no Jake yet. But we’re getting Wolf Blitzer; he’s got some questions for you. Give me thirty.”

  Angela then filled thirty seconds with a recap as Miriam called cameras and fielded a flood of urgent incoming calls. Behind her, Marvin Epstein burned up a phone line trying to track down the whereabouts of Augie and the video crew.

  “Angie? We have a still on Wolf. And . . . go.”

  Miriam brought up a photo of Blitzer picture in picture along with his live audio.

  “Angela, this is Wolf Blitzer at CNN in Atlanta . . .”

  Then all the monitors went blue.

  Through the glass they could see Angela and the crew staring in disbelief at the prerecorded “technical difficulties” station announcement that had automatically blipped up and started broadcasting itself.

  “Shit! We’re off the air,” Miriam said. “They can’t do that, can they?”

  Epstein looked up from his conversation with the D.C. police.

  “Not without shredding the First Amendment.”

  “Miriam?” The intercom buzzed from up front. “There are so
me gentlemen out here who say they are from the Federal Bureau of Investigation . . .”

  Miriam raised a cool eyebrow at the junior attorney.

  “You wanted the ball . . . ?”

  In the suite at the Mayfair, Eklund was working furiously, but he immediately recognized Miriam’s voice on the room phone.

  “Richard, what’s happening?”

  “It’s the satellite. We’re on it. Can’t talk.”

  Eklund hung up. The hotel TV glowed blue in the background as he and the other Mars Underground geeksters smacked frantically at their laptops.

  Suddenly their key-clacking and cursing was interrupted by a firm, hard knock at the door that might have been room service with a fresh pot of coffee.

  But it wasn’t.

  77

  NASA Building/Tower One Elevator

  The shooting pains down Augie’s arms and up the side of his neck were what he felt first, not anything in his chest. It seemed like one minute he was standing, handcuffed, and going down in the crowded NASA elevator with an FBI agent on each side, and the next moment he was down on the floor hearing a lot of shouting and oddly not giving a damn what it was all about.

  78

  Kinko’s/Washington Mall

  On the west side of the Washington Mall, Jake had stopped trying to revive the phone connection and had driven like a madman to a Kinko’s down the street, where all the available rent-a-computers were already in use.

  “I’ll pay twenty bucks for five minutes,” he said, brandishing a crisp twenty-dollar bill. “It’s an emergency. Who wants twenty bucks?”

  “Me!” A fourteen-year-old black kid jumped up from a computer and started collecting his schoolbooks.

  “Thanks.” Jake handed him the bill and sat down. Accessing the Science Horizon bulletin board, he saw a file labeled ORION and opened it. After reading Augie’s attached note, he played the sixty-second video file.