The Orion Protocol

by Gary Tigerman

  Rather than disarming Sokoff, the glib reference to the ban on exporting game modules to rogue nations only pissed Sandy off.

  “Dr. Krantz.” Sokoff’s peremptory tone was as sobering as a congressional subpoena. “The President of the United States has tasked me with bringing him up to speed on all Unacknowledged Special Access Projects, past and present. This is not an idle curiosity, it is a matter of national security. What do you know about USAPs here at Sandia Labs? And would you characterize this ELF project or any aspect of ELF technology as a USAP?”

  Sandy watched the smiles disappear around the long table and felt the room temperature drop about ten degrees. President Carter had given him a few key leads, and this one had struck a nerve. Dr. Krantz, however, had a ready answer.

  “We handle no such programs at Sandia Labs, to my knowledge.”

  Sandy had ferreted more than a few bureaucrats out of their bunkers during his years as a congressional investigator. Careful language was no refuge.

  “Is there something inadequate about my level of clearance, Doctor?”

  “You’re authorized above top secret, Mr. Sokoff,” Krantz said. “But I can assure you, no Project Orion or any other special-access contracts are being worked on at this facility.”

  “To your knowledge. Is there someone who might have more complete knowledge?”

  It was a deliberate needle designed to prod Krantz higher on his horse.

  “As senior project manager, I supervise all the science being done under this roof. There’s nothing I wouldn’t know about, if it was going on here.”

  “Then you would know if the ELF technology you developed for Navy subs had a dual military purpose.”

  Krantz’s self-assurance wavered.

  “What exactly do you mean?”

  “It’s a simple question, Doctor. Could the high-powered extreme-low-frequency transmitters developed here on your watch have both overt and covert applications?”

  “Mr. Sokoff, with all due respect, if you are asking me to speculate on some convoluted hypothetical—”

  “A yes-or-no answer will suffice,” Sandy said.

  Sokoff was blunt, intentionally disrespectful. Krantz found being spoken to like this in front of his subordinates galling. He took the offensive.

  “The answer to your question is yes. Yes, of course. Anything and everything we do may have dual purposes. Please explain that to the President. You’ll find it’s true at every lab in the country; that’s just how it is. We’re given certain specifications, a time frame, and a budget. We do the research, we do the science, we gain the knowledge needed to solve a given problem. How that knowledge is applied after it leaves this facility is not our concern. What NAV/INT or the NSA does with the fruits of our research is beyond our control. Not to mention way beyond my pay grade to speculate.”

  Sandy waited a beat or two, letting his dissatisfaction and disappointment become more pointed, more evident. He then stood up and gathered his things. When he spoke, it was with the assurance of someone who knew or would soon know where all the skeletons were hidden.

  “Dr. Krantz, you and your people have seventy-two hours to do better than this, and I suggest a top-to-bottom. On behalf of the President, I can also assure you that if you fail to cooperate fully with the White House on this, if we determine that for whatever reason you are being less than forthcoming, every sustaining government contract at Sandia Labs, everything bid on by you during this administration, will come under immediate negative review.”

  The shocked silence around the conference table spoke louder than words. Sandy extracted a business card from his wallet.

  “And please, let’s not have any explosions or burst water pipes or other regrettable accidents resulting in the loss of key files and documents. The President hates having his intelligence insulted. And so do I.”

  It was a little over-the-top, but what the hell. Sokoff tossed the business card down in front of Krantz, as if paying off rough trade with chump change.

  “This is my direct line at the White House.”

  Sokoff’s phone actually rang in the Old Executive Office Building via the White House switchboard next door. But he had made his point.

  Striding out to the Marine One helicopter with the presidential seal on the side, he wondered whether Dr. Krantz would realize his little slip.

  What NAV/INT and the NSA does . . .

  Naval Intelligence being in the loop on a sub communications research contract was to be expected. The National Security Agency, however . . .

  “Our friend Bob.” Sokoff mumbled it under his breath.

  Ducking down beneath the whirling whine of the chopper, he snapped open his cell phone and hit the autodial.

  “Mrs. Travers,” Sandy shouted it out over the prop wash. “Tell the President I’m up to my knees in prairie pizza out here. I’ll call him back on a landline.”

  23

  Los Alamos, New Mexico

  As the President’s counsel took his one-man-show farther up the road, he was not strictly speaking alone. From a greater distance up the high desert hill than he would’ve liked, the intelligence officer assigned to follow Sandy Sokoff leaned across the hood of a dusty silver Crown Vic and studied the helicopter pad at Los Alamos through Zeiss binoculars.

  He could not get much closer without drawing attention. Switching to a Nikon digital camera with a kick-ass custom zoom, he documented each person who came out to greet the President’s counsel and escort him inside the facility. He recognized the Chinook’s pilot and copilot as two of the six on 24/7 rotation for the President, and took shots of them, too. He also noticed how the Secret Service seemed conspicuously absent.

  The officer then settled down to wait and see what he could learn from Sokoff’s departure.

  24

  February 2/Dunsinane, Antarctica

  Emerging from the Antarctic ice, it was erect on all fours, with an astonishing look of sentience in its wet black eyes. Frozen dead standing up, with a rack of antlers cocked back at an angle, the caribou seemed afraid, as if listening to the sound of the end of the world. The National Science Foundation team now carefully releasing it from eons inside the glacier was ecstatic.

  Mastodons had been found like this near the Arctic Circle, fully upright with a stomach full of freshly cropped grasses and flowers, as if mysteriously flash-frozen with the cud still in their mouths. But nothing like that had ever been found near the South Pole.

  At least, not until now.

  Thanks to Captain Wesley Bertrand and his crew, 99.9 percent of the radioactive ice at Dunsinane and the hot nuclear drill itself had been safely retrieved, contained, and removed. Trace contamination remained, which caused some wringing of hands, but not enough to warrant shutting down the dig.

  So, with strict protocols and new biohazard protections for the science team, the Antarctic prehistoric forest was opened for study.

  Running heavily insulated power lines down to an exposed section of ancient trees, the scientists in their bulky “clean suits” used handheld hair dryers to melt the last inch of ice from the upright caribou corpse.

  Matted wet fur dusted with a curious layer of fine black carbon began to smell as it thawed. It would be easy to get an accurate dating, but the NSF team already had a pool going with their bets. Most hovered around 10,500 B.C.E., give or take a century or two.

  Antarctic ice-core samples taken in 1998 had thrown paleoclimatologists one looping big-league curveball. The samples showed that around 12,500 years ago, the Ice Age abruptly ended with extremely rapid global warming.

  This dramatic climate change version of Earth history shattered the mainstream gradualist models taught in Western universities. Subsequent Greenland and North Pole core samples confirmed an overall fifty-nine-degree increase in average daily temperature during one fifty-year period; a radical change in a geological blink of the eye.

  For the human population, circa 10,500 B.C.E., that would’ve meant a catastrophic me
lting of glaciers around the world, lending a whole lot of historical credibility to the Noachian myth of the Great Flood.

  But what had caused the heat-up, what was the trigger? Had an immense Earth-crossing comet or bolide slammed to ground, kicking off enough volcanic eruptions to dwarf the carbon dioxide pollution pumped out by mere superindustrial man? Carbon levels in the core samples at least raised the suspicion.

  In any case, the Academy of Sciences acknowledged that around the year 12,500 something big happened and thousands of species of plants and animals were wiped out. For Homo sapiens, that most adaptable of mammals, it had been yet another near-extinction event to survive, like the Ice Age itself.

  And for the twenty-first-century scientists at Dunsinane, bent over their emerging caribou buck like Moses’ lost Israelites anointing a fatted calf, the prehistoric biosphere beneath their feet was an unfolding mystery with a hundred questions for every solid answer.

  25

  Goddard Space Flight Lab

  “Richard? Close the door, would you?”

  The normally breezy and cordial NASA project manager was all business.

  Eklund closed the door, surprised to see a stenographer perched with her machine next to the manager’s desk. Beside her was a wiry man in a dark suit who looked as though he spent all his spare time on a stationary bike when he wasn’t working for the federal government.

  Eklund knew this couldn’t be good.

  “Agent Turner, this is Dr. Eklund.” The NASA manager made the introductions. “Agent Turner and Ms. Stegman are with the FBI. The Bureau is assisting Administrator Pierce, who requested this meeting. They just want to ask you some questions.”

  Agent Turner and Ms. Stegman shook hands with Eklund as if he might have a communicable disease. Turner took charge of the questioning.

  “Please have a seat, Doctor. We’re required to record all interviews. Uh, ‘February second, Goddard Labs, Agent Turner interviewing Dr. Richard Eklund.’ “

  Eklund noticed the tape recorder and its little omnidirectional microphone and sat down. He then responded to a wide-ranging set of prepared questions for the next fifty minutes and change.

  Curiosity concerning the tenor of his remarks on the Science Horizon program was expressed, especially his criticisms direct and implied of NASA and Malin Scientific, the imaging contractor for Mars Surveyor. Past conflicts with Goddard Space Flight management were revisited and discussed. An accounting of his hours was requested, especially non-NASA activities involving the so-called Mars Underground and the use of Goddard equipment and facilities, along with a complete description in writing of his contacts and conversations with Ms. Angela Browning and anyone else in the media with whom he had any kind of contact or correspondence.

  Had the bow-tied research scientist been suspected of planning to bomb the building, the interrogation could not have been more thorough.

  They also quizzed him very closely about his colleague John Fisher; what the planetary geologist had told him about his classified work at the Pentagon, whether Eklund thought Fisher was unhappy, disgruntled, having money problems, family problems, drug problems, health problems, sex problems, etc.

  When it was over, Agent Turner showed him a copy of the nondisclosure agreement that Eklund had signed when he was hired by NASA and reminded him of the penalties for violating it. He was then thanked and dismissed.

  Eklund stood up to go, his mind racing. He had remained polite and cooperative, and except for leaving out any mention of TOLAS and the Mars Observer data, he’d been absolutely truthful. But he could tell they suspected he was holding out on them. Or maybe that was just an interrogation technique.

  In any case, he left for an early lunch in his aging red EV-1 feeling frightened, shaky, and drained.

  What the hell was that all about?

  Only paranoid-sounding answers came to mind until he remembered he needed to call John and give him a heads-up. But maybe not on a cell phone.

  John is going to shit.

  Using a pay phone at a gas station where his electric car was quite a novelty, he got Fisher’s voice mail and a thin robotic-sounding recorded announcement.

  “Dr. . . . John . . . Fisher . . . has been transferred to . . . NASA/AMES at Moffet Field, California . . . There is no new number at this time.”

  Eklund hung up, struggling with a nauseating sense of vertigo, as if a gaping crevasse had just yawned open beneath his feet. And for the first time since he’d had root-canal work done in the ‘90’s, he decided he needed to take a personal day.

  26

  Corporation for Public Broadcasting/Washington, D.C.

  In the twelfth-floor wood-paneled office at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting building on Pierre Street near the bridge, Arthur Maclewain tossed the TOLAS CD back across his mahogany desk like a radioactive Frisbee.

  “We can take your word about what’s on there. Any response yet from this Deep Cosmos?” Leaning back in his leather desk chair, the senior attorney at CPB Legal made a steeple of his manicured fingers.

  Seated opposite him and next to Angela, Miriam wasn’t sure if the lawyer’s pose was an affectation or a cliché, then decided it could be both.

  “Not yet,” she said, ready to rumble in her DKNY suit.

  “Just as well.” Maclewain rocked slightly back and forth. “Even a superficial reading of the law—re: the publishing or broadcasting of classified government documents—puts us in a world of hurt.”

  From a dollar-green tufted leather wing back off to the side, Marvin Epstein, an associate sitting in for the Washington, D.C., affiliate, nodded in agreement. But Miriam and Angela stayed focused on Maclewain. Both looked angry.

  “Who said it was classified?” Angela said, reacting first. “If you looked at it, you’d see there’s nothing on it that says it’s classified.”

  “Oh, I think a federal judge would find that a bit disingenuous, don’t you?” Maclewain said with a sly smirk. Miriam knew a smirk when she saw one.

  “Disingenuous? Come on, Arthur, cut the crap. Either it is or it isn’t. Either it’s classified information or it’s not. Why should we presume a photograph of Mars is classified, for God’s sake?”

  “Shall we call the Department of Defense and ask them?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Well, if you’re afraid to ask the Pentagon if it’s classified because you think it might be classified, then you damn well better behave as if it is classified. Next?” Maclewain raised an eyebrow that reminded them that time was money and they were on their employer’s dime.

  “Hold on a second.” Angela took a breath, trying to rein in her anger and frustration. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re talking preemptive self-censorship by a media journalist, which is de facto abridgment of free press and you know it.”

  “I don’t see a constitutional argument.”

  “Well, what’s the law here, damn it?” Miriam almost shouted it. “When does the government’s right to keep a secret supersede free speech, free press, and the people’s right to know?”

  Maclewain swiveled slightly to include his young associate.

  “Marvin?”

  “Whenever the Supreme Court says it does,” Epstein said. “And anyone who helps broadcast state secrets or analyze classified documents for attribution like this Dr. Weintraub? He’s looking at the same ten years plus that you are.”

  There it was: imprisonment and fines. It was their job to say it, but Angela thought it was also being used to try to scare them off course. She stared at Epstein.

  “That doesn’t answer the question. State secrets are state secrets because somebody has decided that our national security will be harmed if they are not kept secret. So, the question is, how the hell can a NASA photograph of Mars be a state secret? What can the government possibly be trying to hide that would be a matter of national security? They can’t make a sources-and-methods argument, it’s a NASA satellite photo. I think we’re home free. They have to know that if they d
id come after us, they’d be begging the question! The whole world would want to know what was on Mars that the U.S. government did not want the public to see. Anyway, Weintraub declined.”

  “Probably signed an open-ended nondisclosure. I don’t suppose you asked him that,” Maclewain said. Angela just stared across at him.

  He just resets to smug, Angela thought, and imagined vaulting across the barrister’s desk and ringing his condescending neck. Miriam jumped in.

  “No, we didn’t ask him about the terms of any agreements, but answer me this: Why would Justice even go after Weintraub in the first place? We were only asking him to give his opinion as a satellite imaging expert.”

  “For the record. In public. On-camera. On Science Horizon.” Maclewain shook his head and turned to Epstein, who was nodding in agreement.

  “Yeah, that’s like saying he was just casing the bank for you,” Epstein said. “You’re the ones actually stealing the money.”

  Before Angela could explode, leaving attorney entrails all over the wood-paneled walls, Miriam held up her hands like a traffic cop.

  “All right, fine. You’ve told us all the good sound reasons why Science Horizon can’t break the greatest science story ever, smash the all-time ratings record for market share on public-service television, and win every broadcast award going while we’re at it. Now tell us how we can.”

  The two men frowned, thinking it over. Epstein shrugged.

  “Big guns,” he said.

  Maclewain leaned way back into his leather desk chair and made another Christ’s Church of his well-tended fingers.

  “Big honking guns.”

  27

  Miriam and Angela took their lunch on the run as they hurried back to their own turf and the PBS tower.

  “Well, stature-wise, there’s Stephen Hawking. He’d see us. And Dr. Kaku at NYU. You like his take on multidimensional universe stuff.” Miriam licked cream cheese off the edge of an everything bagel as they walked.