For his part, Deaver saw Angela as flat-out beautiful and a born flirt, who just might have the smartest green eyes he’d ever seen. He chastened himself not to mistake her teasing for mutual interest, but he liked how she laughed from way down in her stomach and seemed to have a sense of humor about herself, too.
“Don’t tell me you never got high,” he said, turning the tables.
“In college! That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.”
“What? Weed? Ecstasy? Beer?”
“Oh, yeah. Par-tee! And diet pills during finals, like everybody else. I was curious about ‘shrooms, actually, but I guess I was never in the right situation or with the right person to want to do it.”
“But you didn’t come all the way out to Boulder to score mushrooms.”
Deaver had naturally been curious ever since Angela had declined to say exactly what it was she wanted to see him about over the phone.
“Nope,” she said. “That’s not why I came to Boulder.”
Angela searched Jake’s eyes in the live light, as if needing a last sign.
“All right, here’s the deal,” she said, taking the leap. “I want to show you some photographs that may or may not be classified documents.”
Deaver felt his own guard going up, but his voice stayed neutral and open.
“Photographs of what?”
“In a sec. If you agree to look at them, I’ll tell you how we got them and what we’ve done so far in terms of authentication. What I’d like from you is your take on what it is you see, and any ideas you might have about where these pictures might have come from, et cetera. But whether you look at them or not, I need to be able to count on your discretion.”
Deaver was glad he hadn’t had much more wine with dinner.
“What kind of classified?”
“CIA, NSA, DOD, I don’t know. Top secret.”
“Are they stamped ‘top secret’?”
“No, but the lawyers at PBS say we should behave as if they were.”
“What else can you tell me without going into the classified part?”
“One picture is of Mars and one is of the Moon.”
Jake felt a quickening, like the adrenaline spike from a small freshet of fear. He could stop it here, right here and now. He could protect himself completely by just saying no. Of course, he knew he would feel like shit, but it wasn’t the first time that had ever happened, and why should he trust this woman? Just because he was attracted to her? That would be pretty stupid.
Moon Man . . .
Remembering the voice of the Kharmapa whispering hoarsely in his ear, he relaxed a little and almost laughed out loud.
Moon Man, time to take another walk.
Deaver studied Angela’s face for a moment, like a condemned man unsure whether he beheld a messenger of deliverance or an escort to the Tower. Or both in one. He was not a hundred percent sure where this was going or what it would lead to, but the sense of danger was real enough. Even so, the impulse to turn away this earnest beauty felt suddenly like a betrayal. Not a betrayal of Angela but of his most essential self. Or at least what he thought he liked most about himself. And whether he was trusting Angela too quickly or not, he trusted that feeling.
“Okay, let’s see them,” Jake heard himself say.
“Great.” Angela offered her hand on the bargain. “You run Macintosh?”
35
NASA Station/West Australia
“Can you hear me now? Colonel Blake?”
The Aussie grad student and aspiring astronaut candidate yelled into the cell phone, steering his faded, aging Ford truck down the sun-slammed, wavery licorice blacktop road. Augie’s voice was breaking up.
“I’ll have to call you from the station . . .”
Two hours west and south of the University at Perth, Jonathan Quatraine rang off, hurtling on through the outback heat and trailing a plume of dust. It was easily 110 degrees, with the windows down.
He checked the odo and squinted out the windshield, keeping watch for a little blue-and-white sign that would probably say NASA on it.
“Shite. This is the back of beyond, eh?”
The overloaded red pickup hit a pothole and shuddered, sending a nasty jolt into the cab. Jonathan slowed down, glancing at Hudson, a four-year-old Labrador retriever, riding shotgun beside him.
“Sorry. Huddy? Care for a cool one?”
His sense of balance unfazed by the road’s bumpy assault on his four-legged center of gravity, the chocolate Lab perked up at the offer. In lieu of long-deceased air-conditioning, Jonathan kept them both hydrated with Broken Hill lager and handfuls of ice.
“Amber fluids it is.” From a plastic cooler on the floor, he fished out a beer, secured it between his thighs, and fed some ice to Hudson. Then he saw it.
“Hold on!” Jonathan stuck his arm out across the dog’s chest and stood on the truck’s aged disk/drum-brake combo, coming to a stop twenty meters past the NASA ground-station turnoff.
Eyeing the ninety days of provisions still bungied down in the truck bed, he checked the time and his unflappable companion.
“No worries, Hud. Just chuck a yewy, right? Right!”
January was the hot season down under and he was excited about winning the NASA summer job: former Apollo astronaut Augie Blake had even come to Perth and personally recruited the grad student from over two hundred applicants.
“Here we go, mate.” Jonathan graunched his balky shifter into reverse, backed up past the blue NASA down-link sign, and turned off into the bush.
Less than a mile beyond, a huge gray dish peeked up over a stand of eucalyptus hiding the cinder block building that would be Jonathan’s home for the next three months.
36
Using the dual-processor Mac in his office, Jake had put the TOLAS/ Mars Observer photo up on a high-res flat-screen monitor. From her perch in a refinished captain’s chair, Angela had observed his reactions to the Mars anomalies and fielded Deaver’s technical questions, some of which she could not answer.
Then she had one of her own.
“Jake?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t send this to me, did you?”
“Nope.” He turned to face her.
Angela knew he was telling the truth. But now he was looking at her, again with those wild-blue-yonder eyes, as if trying to divine her intentions, or testing her integrity, her character. It was a bit unnerving.
“What?” she said, shifting in her seat.
Jake leaned toward her, his voice as intimate as their proximity.
“Knowing changes everything, doesn’t it?”
There was an impish quality that rode along with the intimacy. Angela smiled and nodded, as if they were now part of a secret society of their own making. An unspoken trust was there, too, but there was more.
“Yes. Knowing changes everything.”
Jake leaned back and cocked his chin in the direction of her prodigious shoulder bag.
“Let’s see the other one.”
Angela produced the second image, showing two astronauts on the Moon. She noticed his posture, how he became tense and still, losing the more playful quality he had flashed before as he began looking closely at the lunar photo.
“And you think this is from the same guy.”
“That’s my guess.”
Deaver read the handwritten caption out loud.
“And good luck, Mr. Grotsky, wherever you are . . .”
Angela told what she knew.
“I searched the employee databases at NASA and at JPL in California and couldn’t find any Grotskys. Then we tried looking up all the cosmonauts from the ‘60’s on, but as far as we could tell—”
“Stop . . . hold on a second.” Deaver struggled to keep a straight face.
“What? You think that’s stupid?”
“No, no, it’s just Grotsky . . .”
Jake was laughing out loud, like some kind of inside joke had been played more or less at Angela’
s expense, and something about it really pissed her off.
“Then what is so damned funny?”
“Grotsky . . . is not a cosmonaut. The Grotskys were Neil Armstrong’s next-door neighbors when he was twelve years old.”
37
1950/Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
“Oh, no . . .”
Twelve-year-old Neil Armstrong couldn’t believe it. Practicing pitching, he had been doing pretty well, firing fastballs through an old tire hung from the grapefruit tree in his backyard with an almost boring accuracy. It was the curve that needed some work. Neil dried his sweaty hands on his T-shirt and changed his grip, felt the stitching of the seam snug up against the side of his middle finger, and stared down at the target. He then rocked from a stretch as if holding a runner on first and let it loose.
“Crap . . .”
As soon as it left his hand, he knew. Sailing high and bouncing off the rim of the worn-out tire, the ball made a dull thoink and caromed over the fence into the Grotskys’ yard next door.
“Crap on a crutch . . .”
Hoping to simply retrieve his baseball without the embarrassment of bothering the neighbors, Neil climbed over the fence in the direction of the ball’s last known trajectory.
Spying a flash of white in the bushes under an open window, he crouched down to get it. But before he could turn back for home he found himself frozen under the window, eavesdropping on a loud argument going on inside the house between Mr. and Mrs. Grotsky.
“Oral sex?”
He listened, rooted to the spot as Mrs. Grotsky’s voice rose in outrage.
“You want oral sex?!”
Young Neil Armstrong wasn’t exactly sure what she was referring to, but Mrs. Grotsky’s attitude about it was coming through loud and clear.
“The day you get oral sex is the day that kid next door walks on the Moon!”
Hearing himself being referred to, he felt a shock of self-conscious panic. Crawling out of the bushes on his hands and knees, he then ran as fast as he could across the yard and scrambled back over the fence.
But future Apollo Commander Neil Armstrong would remember that moment and the Grotskys for the rest of his life.
38
“And good luck, Mr. Grotsky, wherever you are.” Angela was now laughing as hard as Jake.
Trying to catch her breath, she couldn’t help thinking about Augie Blake, wondering why he had shined her on about Grotsky at the Blair House bash. Did he think she was a prude? That didn’t make any sense.
“Augie Blake would know that story, wouldn’t he?”
Deaver seemed to cool slightly at the mention of his old partner.
“It’s an old astronaut story.”
Angela refocused her attention on the astronauts in the Moon picture.
“All right, then, so this would be Neil Armstrong and . . . ?”
“No, no, this is 18,” Jake said. “That’s me and Augie at Sinus Medii.”
“Oh.”
Angela felt an odd sense of portent as Jake laid the print on a scanner bed and copied it to his computer. Once he could enlarge it and play with it on-screen, he gave her a tour, showing various lunar features in isolation.
“Look at our shadows on the ground. This was taken during the day. You see all those stars in the sky behind us?” Jake indicated an area just above the horizon. “The sun washes out the stars during daylight hours, so the sky should be completely black.”
“Meaning this picture’s been messed with?”
“Nope,” Jake said, “that’s how it was.”
His eyes invited her to solve the contradiction. Angela could feel the fine hair on her arms and on the back of her neck beginning to stand up.
“Jake, anything you want to say here is in complete confidence. Period. Until you say otherwise.”
He quit the computer without acknowledging what Angela had said. He looked wound up tight, like the insides of a baseball, and that deep, wounded feeling she had noticed before seemed to surface and then submerge itself. But it was clear they had an understanding. Deaver got up and headed for the door.
“I need some coffee. You want coffee?”
“Sure. Black, with Sweet’n Low. If you got it.”
Jake led the way back to the kitchen, passing framed photographs from his Apollo 18 days, samples of calligraphy, and Tibetan artwork.
“How about honey?”
“Fine. It’s about those stars, isn’t it?” She could feel it coming, whatever it was. Jake glanced back over his shoulder.
“Have you ever wondered why America went to the Moon eight times in four years and then came straight home and never, ever went anywhere again?”
39
1973/Sinus Medii/the Moon
Commander Jake Deaver and Colonel Augie Blake had gone to the Moon wearing the gold-embroidered mission patch of Apollo 18, which depicted their spacecraft rocketing away from Earth beneath the three belt stars of Orion.
There was overt science to do on the surface, months of tedious underwater spacesuit training in the Canaveral tanks finally about to pay off; exhaustive photo documentation, a moonquake monitoring system to set up, a protocol of instrumented readings, surface sample collecting, radiation and micrometer erosion testing, and more. And then there was the covert mission.
“Gentlemen, switch to ALTCOM Two. Do you copy? Over.”
“Going to ALTCOM Two. Roger that, Houston.”
Having achieved lunar orbit, Blake and Deaver were instructed over the secure channel to open a sealed envelope.
Diagrams and photographs inside showed that their landing site at Sinus Medii had been chosen because it was within rover distance of what was described as “possible anomalous objects” picked up by both Soviet and American lunar satellite cameras.
“Uh, Houston? What are we looking at? Over . . .”
The two astronauts hammered the mission director with more questions than anybody had answers for.
“What you see is what we got, gentlemen.”
Most of the answers would have to come from ground truth: Jake and Augie were tasked with photographing and documenting whatever they saw at Sinus Medii and bringing back to Earth up to two hundred kilos of whatever “objects” or “artifacts” could be safely recovered.
This covert mission had to be accomplished in addition to the public science mission, but they were assured that if what the Apollo 18 mission discovered was extraterrestrial in origin, the artifacts would be made public “at the proper time” and the astronauts would be allowed to talk about it publicly “at that time.”
For now, however, everything about this was to be considered a state secret and national security concerns would dictate the timing and language of all communications and determine the scheduling and priorities of the mission.
“Nondisclosure. Do you copy?”
“Roger, Houston. Copy that.”
Jake and Augie switched back to the normal radio frequency and resumed preparations to set their spacecraft down on the Moon. They’d been told that nothing unusual would be visible from the landing site, so the fixed cameras on the Lunar Excursion Module were considered safe for live network transmission of Apollo 18’s Moon landing at Sinus Medii.
But NASA’s scheduled, worldwide broadcast soon turned into a nail-biting disaster watch akin to Apollo 13, thanks to an unexpected storm on the Sun.
The first intimations of trouble came moments after beginning their descent.
“Uh, Commander, maintain your present altitude and stand by. We’re monitoring some EM coming your way. We may lose you for a bit. Do you copy? Over.”
“Maintaining altitude and standing by. Over.”
Solar flares were an unpredictable hazard of space travel, wreaking havoc with satellite and spacecraft electronics, not to mention irradiating any astronauts caught in their wake.
This, however, was an M-class solar event, undeflected by the magnetic field of the Earth. As Jake and Augie hovered, burning precious fuel, t
he EM storm arrived at the Moon in full force, its relentless waves of electromagnetic particles leaving their spacecraft deaf and blind. All voice and data communication with Johnson Space, including Earth-guided telemetry, was lost. Augie took the stick.
“Guidance is now internal.”
Standard procedure would be to do nothing until contact could be resumed, using their very limited thruster fuel to maintain a safe altitude: risk the mission, not the men.
“Houston, this is Apollo 18. Do you copy? Over.”
Jake and Augie heard nothing but white noise and settled in to sweat out the wait. Going by the book, they faced the real possibility of a scrubbed landing and a failed mission.
“How’s our burn minutes, Dog Man?”
“We’re at nineteen-point-five minutes of burn.”
They were using fuel fast just to maintain position and the margin of safety for the trip home was slipping. But after coming 300,000 miles and knowing how much more than Moon rocks might be awaiting them on the surface, the two men would have sooner augered in than turn back for home.
“Mission Control, this is Apollo 18. Over.”
After trying to make contact every ten seconds for two more long, excruciating minutes, Houston remained in blackout. Augie was a hundred percent ready to override the computer and land the spacecraft, but it was Deaver who had to make the call.
“Say the word, Daddy-o.”
Jake turned away from the instrumentation and tightened the racing-car harness that held him in his seat.
“Fuck it. Put her down.”
“Aye-aye. Manual override is a go. Grab something.”
Flying totally without external guidance, Augie fired the lander’s little attitude jets, pitching it over so he could eyeball the landing site through one of two tiny porthole windows. Then, righting the spacecraft and sighting on the horizon line, he set it down blind, as if he’d done it a thousand times, with Jake calling out the altimeter reading.
“Ninety meters . . . eighty . . . seventy . . . sixty meters . . .”
At the heart of it was a direct line drawn from the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to Sinus Medii on the Moon, and the audacious dead-stick landing would pass into NASA legend and the history of human flight.
The Orion Protocol Page 14