Curtis O’Connor had recently returned from a covert intelligence operation deep inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. He knew the risks involved if the United States were to open up a third front in the Middle East. The Taliban were already gaining the upper hand in Afghanistan, and further to the west over 4000 young Americans had been killed in combat in Iraq. Tens of thousands more soldiers were disabled for life.
‘Operation Sassanid was launched two years ago, following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s refusal to halt the enrichment of uranium,’ O’Connor began. ‘Sassanid includes electronic intercepts of phone conversations, emails and fax transmissions, as well as satellite surveillance of areas where we suspect the Iranians are constructing nuclear facilities.’ The National Reconnaissance Office’s KeyHole spy satellites were the size of school buses, and travelled at over six kilometres a second. Orbiting as high as 36 000 kilometres above the Islamic Republic, they provided imagery so precise that vehicle registration plates and street numbers on buildings were clearly visible. The sophisticated cameras also operated in the near infra-red and thermal infra-red spectra, and could peer through darkness and clouds. But as good as the coverage was, O’Connor knew there were still gaps.
‘Despite our 24/7 coverage, we don’t have reliable detection of Iranian bunker systems or tunnels, and we suspect they may be constructing more nuclear plants deep underground,’ O’Connor continued. ‘Nor can satellite imagery provide precise information on what might be going on inside a particular building. Up until now, Iran has only admitted to two nuclear facilities. The first is located in Isfahan in central Iran.’ O’Connor used a laser pointer to indicate the facility’s location on the map behind him. ‘Isfahan’s main function is to convert yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride. The second facility is in Natanz.’ He pointed to an area south of Tehran.
‘Despite relying more heavily on technology, we have still managed to maintain some agents on the ground,’ O’Connor said, glancing at the Secretary of Defense, ‘and we now have both facilities under constant ground surveillance. One of our agents has confirmed that the Natanz facility contains high-speed centrifuges, perhaps as many as 50 000, which are used to convert the Isfahan hexafluoride into highly enriched weapons-grade uranium. Of greater concern is a new facility under construction deep inside a mountain complex at Fordo, near the ancient city of Qom.’ O’Connor indicated a range of hills to the south-west of Tehran. ‘This facility is located on an Islamic Revolutionary Guard base, and it’s managed by the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran – or AEOI – although few know of its construction, even amongst those who work for the AEOI.’
‘But it’s for military use?’ President Denver Harrison looked tired and confused. Now well into his second term, he’d aged considerably. Curtis O’Connor had long thought this president out of his depth. The real power in the administration rested in the hands of the irascible Vice President Montgomery.
‘Our agent in Qom thinks so, Mr President. He’s counted just 3000 centrifuges. That’s too few to enrich enough uranium for a nuclear power station —’
‘But enough to create several nuclear bombs,’ Montgomery cut in. ‘Time is running out, Mr President. We need to take out all three facilities, and we need to do it now.’
‘The Israelis are already considering that option,’ the Secretary of State added. ‘Ahmadinejad’s threats to wipe Israel off the map have tried Israeli patience to the limit, and we fear they will launch a preemptive strike.’ The Secretary of State went no further. Everyone in the room knew that Israel was an undeclared nuclear power, and there was already a precedent. In 1956, Egypt’s charismatic president Gamal Nasser seized the Suez Canal and sank dozens of ships laden with concrete to deny its use to the West, and the Israelis acted without the imprimatur of their great and powerful friend. Without informing President Eisenhower, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered Israeli tanks into the Egyptian-held Gaza and General Ariel Sharon’s paratroopers attacked deep into the Sinai Desert, surprising the Egyptians on the passes a few miles from the canal. Might Israel act unilaterally again? The question hung in the tense atmosphere around the table.
‘Are the Iranians capable of striking Israel?’ the President asked, looking at O’Connor.
‘Not yet, but they’re very close to testing a new version of their Sejil-2 missile.’ O’Connor flashed up a photograph of the latest Iranian surface-to-surface missile on a screen. The gleaming black twenty-metre-high Sejil-2 stood on its launch pad amongst the foothills of a mountain range to the south-west of Tehran. ‘The Sejil-2 will be capable of delivering a nuclear warhead and will be powered by solid-fuel rocket motors similar to those that powered our Minuteman 1 missiles. Although that’s reasonably old technology by our standards, it represents a significant step forward for the Iranians, and will give their missile a range of over 2000 kilometres.’ O’Connor pressed a remote and a map of the Middle East and Eastern Europe came up on a second screen. ‘The Iranians could then not only wipe out Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but reach all of our bases in the Middle East, even from eastern Iran; and from western Iran, cities like Athens and Istanbul will also be in range.’
‘All the more reason we should act before they do,’ the Vice President urged.
O’Connor shook his head. ‘All of our analysis indicates that a strike against Iran would be a disaster, Mr President. For one thing, it would almost certainly result in the Iranians closing the Straits of Hormuz. Eighty per cent of the world’s oil supply flows through those straits.’
Montgomery was apoplectic, but O’Connor pressed on. ‘Mr President, our intelligence indicates that the Fordo facility is buried so deep within the surrounding mountains, even our most powerful bunker-busting bombs wouldn’t touch it. It’s a widely held view amongst many of our analysts that rather than attacking Iran, the better strategy would be to establish a dialogue with Iran’s ruling elite, and with Syria. The real power in Iran does not rest with Ahmadinejad, but with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomenei. If the United States were to adopt a more balanced foreign policy towards the Occupied Territories, and increase pressure on Israel to cease building settlements and to reach a solution on the Palestinian question, in our view, the Iranians may come to the table.’
‘That’s enough, O’Connor,’ the Vice President rasped. ‘You’re operating well above your pay grade, and you’re obviously not aware of the experiments being conducted out of Alaska.’ The President looked puzzled. ‘Seismic tomography, Mr President,’ Montgomery explained. ‘Extremely low-frequency radio waves that can be targeted to discover the precise locations of facilities underground. There are promising indications that if the power is increased to sufficient levels, the tunnels and the facilities within them can be destroyed.’
‘Get me DDO Wiley on the phone, now!’ Montgomery barked at his secretary as he stormed back into his office. The CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations was responsible for all United States covert spy operations around the world, and Howard J. Wiley was now the second-most powerful man in the CIA. He often knew more than the director, an appointment held in the past by influential men like George Bush Snr and William J. Casey.
‘Who the fuck does this O’Connor think he is?’ Vice President Montgomery demanded after DDO Wiley came on the secure line.
‘I’ve just heard, Mr Vice President. I can assure you, he’ll be disciplined.’
‘Disciplined? He needs to be fucking well sacked! If the O’Connors of this world get their way, we’ll be inviting Ahmadinejad and his mad mullahs to a fucking barbecue on the lawns of the White House! Get him out of Washington. He’s far too cosy with those jerk-offs in the State Department. Send him off to keep an eye on Mugabe and his gangsters. Or better still, fuck him off to Alaska. The last time I was there it was forty below. Perhaps living with the goddamned huskies and bears will give him a better perspective.’
‘Consider it done, Mr Vice President,’ DDO Wiley responded, but he was wasting his breath. The line had al
ready gone dead.
22
GAKONA, ALASKA
The blizzard was the worst in living memory. Icy winds tore up the Copper River Valley at over a hundred kilometres an hour. O’Connor glanced at the security-camera screen and shivered involuntarily. The mercury had dropped to minus fifty degrees. Alaska was a hell of a place to spend a forty-second birthday, he thought grimly, as another sub-zero blast shook the HAARP control centre.
HAARP stood for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, an ostensibly harmless scientific project, run out of a base in the Alaskan wilderness near Gakona, 320 kilometres north-east of Anchorage, but O’Connor was already wondering about the schedule of experiments. Outside the snow was piling up around the 180 high-powered antennae that were spread over nearly fifteen hectares. Each over twenty metres high and not dissimilar in shape to the backyard Hills Hoist, the combined antennae were capable of producing a staggering 3.6 billion watts of radio frequency power.
‘That storm’s packing one heck of a punch out there.’ Dr Tyler Jackson, the CIA’s senior scientist at HAARP, ducked through the outer door and ambled inside the control centre, brushing the snow from his long angular face and sandy beard. Ducking was a habit the gangly scientist had developed at an early age, but Jackson was now in his sixty-fourth year, and close to retirement. He had been with the Firm for over forty years, but, like O’Connor, he didn’t always agree with the party line coming out of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
‘Not the only storm brewing,’ O’Connor replied. ‘The Iranians have just test-fired another Sejil-2 missile.’ In the two weeks since O’Connor had arrived at Gakona, a camaraderie had developed between the two men. Both had strong scientific backgrounds, both were cleared to the highest levels of security, and both were serving their country amidst the privations of the harsh conditions of Alaska.
‘Have a look at this.’ O’Connor rebooted the satellite images showing a powerful twenty-six-tonne missile rising majestically into the Iranian night sky from its launch pad at the missile test site at Semnan, outside of Tehran.
‘They’ve come a long way in a very short time,’ Jackson agreed. ‘Their next step will be a three-stage motor … which will put cities like Rome and London in reach.’
O’Connor nodded. ‘It may not be that far off, when you consider their first space launch – you could see bits and pieces falling off the rocket as it left the launch pad – yet barely a year later they’ve got a satellite into a stable orbit.’
‘You think they’re getting help? I’ve been a bit out of the loop up here.’
‘I know they’re getting help. I’ve seen the reports from one of our agents inside Iran. For starters, they needed maraging steel for the missile casing. That’s a low-carbon, ultra-high-strength steel that’s critical for low-weight missile skins. It’s a controlled item under international agreements, but the Iranians have managed to buy it; so someone’s selling. The tungsten copper alloy bars they needed for their solid-propellant control vanes are also a prohibited item, but somehow they’ve managed to get hold of them as well … probably out of China.’
‘Why the tungsten alloy?’
‘Solid propellant exhaust contains aluminium oxide, which is extremely abrasive,’ O’Connor explained, ‘but the Iranians have designed jet vanes that can withstand the entire sixty-second burn of the first stage of the rocket. If they can overcome the problems of an external heat shield and they develop a nuclear warhead, the balance of power in the world is going to change dramatically.’
‘You think they’re getting close?’
O’Connor nodded. ‘The reports we’re getting out of Iran indicate they’re constructing a new uranium enrichment plant near the old city of Qom, but it’s buried so deep into solid rock it will be almost impossible to attack, at least with ordinary bombs. The Pentagon is developing what it’s dubbed a “massive ordnance penetrator” that contains thousands of kilograms of explosives. It’ll be delivered by the stealth bomber, but even that may not be enough to deal with blast doors that are deep underground.’
‘Which probably explains the pressure we’re now under to fast-track our experiments here,’ Jackson said grimly, ‘which is madness.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘The science is untested, which is reason enough to be cautious.’
‘Try telling that to the Vice President.’
‘Exactly. Or some of the gung-ho brass in the Pentagon. Have you seen the proposals for Operation Aether?’
‘Not the detail.’
‘It’s in three phases. The first involves a burst of three billion watts to heat and raise the ionosphere, to see if we can deflect a missile off course, and the last phase aims to develop ways of controlling the weather, which the military have been trying to do since Vietnam. But as dangerous as those experiments might be, it’s the second phase that worries me most.’ Jackson loaded a thumb drive into the computer on O’Connor’s desk and fired up a PowerPoint presentation. It was headed ‘Top Secret’.
‘The second phase involves the generation of extremely low frequency, or ELF, waves directed at the earth’s core, rather like the way the mining industry uses seismic tomography to search for deposits of oil and natural gas.’
‘But the mining industry only uses power of about thirty to forty watts?’
‘Precisely. At higher power levels we know we can X-ray the ground, and that can be useful in providing imagery on tunnels and bunkers, but the Pentagon wants to know if we can generate power levels at the extreme end of the range that can actually destroy underground installations – Iran’s nuclear facilities being high on their list.’
O’Connor let out a low whistle. ‘Are we seriously thinking of bombarding the earth’s core with three billion watts?’
‘There are powerful forces in Washington who are determined to see if it will work, and I’m afraid the director is just a puppet who’ll do as he’s told. Are you familiar with the Chandler wobble?’
O’Connor nodded. In 1891 an American astronomer, Seth Carlo Chandler, discovered that the earth wobbled on its axis by up to fifteen metres.
‘Well,’ Jackson continued, ‘a highly respected Indian seismologist has pointed to data from the International Earth Rotation Service. In the three months leading up to the devastating earthquakes and tsunamis of 2004, the Chandler wobble increased significantly. Normally we might get one earthquake a year above seven on the Richter scale – what we call a “great earthquake” – but in 2004 there was a massive earthquake in the Macquarie Trench off New Zealand on 23 December, and that one measured 8.1. Just three days later, we had an even bigger earthquake … around nine if I remember correctly … triggering the tsunamis that killed hundreds of thousands on the coasts of Asia. The frequency of those great earthquakes is increasing, and the Chandler wobble is maintained by mass distribution within the molten outer core, as well as the crust and oceans.’
‘So if we start bombarding the core with billions of watts of electromagnetic energy … ’
‘We might generate an even greater wobble. It’s madness, but the admirals and the generals aren’t listening.’
‘Neither are the politicians. Is there any other data to connect the wobble with the frequency of earthquakes?’
‘In 1967 two Canadian scientists came up with the Mansinha-Smylie theory connecting the earth’s wobble with the big earthquakes, but mainstream science has largely ignored it. And it gets worse.’ Jackson turned to one of the centre’s computers, keyed in a series of commands and pulled up an extraordinary photograph taken from the Hubble telescope. The space shuttle Discovery had carried the eleven-tonne Hubble into orbit in 1990. Bigger than a truck, the telescope orbited the earth every ninety-seven minutes. ‘At a height of 360 kilometres, Hubble is free of any of the distortions of the earth’s atmosphere, which enables us to take very clear photographs of some of the most distant objects in the universe. That’s the galaxy NGC 1300, which in the scheme of things is ac
tually quite close. It’s about sixty-nine million light years away from earth, and 88 000 light years in diameter.’
O’Connor stared at the stunning image of the barred spiral galaxy, a massive swirling red-and-blue catherine-wheel in the Eridanus constellation. ‘Huh. Eighty-eight thousand light years wide … big doesn’t seem to do it justice.’
Jackson grinned. ‘No, and that’s especially so when you think about the size of the universe. There are somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Multiply that by another 200 billion galaxies in the cosmos, and size is difficult to picture. With trillions of planets out there, it’s absurd to think that earth is the only one with life on it, but I’ve chosen a photograph of the NGC 1300 galaxy because it’s similar to our own and its centre is clearly visible.’ Jackson pointed to the swirling image on the screen. ‘The centre is a black hole of unimaginable gravitational and electromagnetic energy.’
‘It looks flat – almost like a disc.’
‘Precisely. As you and I both know, black holes are so powerful they flatten everything around them. Nothing, not even light, can escape, hence the term ‘black’, and it’s that power that keeps a galaxy’s stars and solar systems in orbit. However, once every 26000 years, our solar system travels through the same plane as the black hole in the middle of the Milky Way. In effect, if you imagine that black hole being in the middle of a dinner plate, our solar system rises to be level with the edge of the plate.’ Jackson paused, weighing the impact of what he was about to say. ‘That 26 000-year marker comes up again in 2012,’ he said finally, ‘at which time we’ll be exactly opposite the black hole.’
‘And that may explain some of the wild weather patterns?’
‘Yes. And we’re messing with the balance of the earth when its orbit is at its most unstable. On top of which, the earth’s magnetic field is now at its lowest level in recorded history. The poles are skipping across the wastes of the Arctic and Antarctic at over thirty kilometres a year. If you couple that with the latest NASA data on sunspots, which are at an unprecedented power level, the planet faces an uncertain future, to put it mildly.’
THE MAYA CODEX Page 14