The Rock

by Robert Doherty

  "You said there were five down link sites? Where was the message sent to?" Hawkins asked.

  In reply Lamb pressed a button on the remote and a black-and-white outline map of the world appeared with five red dots superimposed. "The message was sent from Ayers Rock via very high-power meteor burst to five locations-one in each continent outside of Australia and excluding Antarctica."

  Hawkins studied the overlay. There was a red dot in the southwest United States. One in Europe-someplace in Germany. One in the middle of Russia. One in Argentina. And one in the southeast part of Africa. That last dot-Hawkins leaned forward. "Do you have exact locations where the transmission was sent to?"

  "We've triangulated the ones in the U.S. and Africa to within a hundred-and-fifty kilometer circle," Lamb answered. "It's rather difficult because we could only interpolate a best guess off what other tracking stations caught of each down link. The one in South America we've located down to within two hundred kilometers. The one in Europe we're within two hundred kilometers also. The one in Asia is down to within a four-hundred-kilometer circle in Central Siberia, and Russia is not cooperating in giving us any data."

  Hawkins pointed. "Can you show us in greater detail where that one in Africa is?"

  Lamb graced him with a slight smile, as if he had hit the jackpot. "Major Spurlock, you can leave now."

  Lamb waited until the Air Force officer had departed the room before pressing the button on the slide remote. A strange domelike rock structure filled the screen. Hawkins felt a surge of adrenaline as he recognized the object-so this was about the bombs after all!

  Lamb spoke. "The circle includes Johannesburg and Pretoria, but the center of the estimate is Vredefort Dome. As some of you know, a nuclear bomb was set off in a mine underneath that structure by terrorists three days ago. This occurred approximately four hours prior to the radio transmission."

  Hawkins glanced at the other occupants in the room. He could tell by the expressions on their faces that Tolliver and Volkers had known about the blast, but that Levy and Batson were hearing this for the first time, and their faces showed their surprise. Hawkins wondered why Volkers had been told-as far as he knew, the incident was being kept highly classified and the media had no hint.

  "The blast effectively destroyed the most productive mine in South Africa-the Red Streak." He paused briefly as Batson whistled in surprise, then continued. "That mine had produced almost two thousand tons of gold and an unknown amount of uranium over the past three years. The bomb was believed to have been one stolen from a Russian depot two weeks ago and set off by a radical splinter group of the Xantha freedom party opposed to the ANC. How the bomb got from Russia to South Africa we do not yet know. Because the blast was underground, the South African government has been able to keep it out of public scrutiny, although how long they'll be able to maintain that veil of secrecy is unknown. Our sensing stations around the world picked the blast up clearly and easily pinpointed the epicenter."

  "How did they get a bomb into the mines?" Batson asked. "I thought security was very tight there."

  "The security is designed to keep the workers from bringing gold out," Lamb briefly explained. "From what we can piece together, it was relatively easy for them to bring a bomb into the mine and detonate it once it reached the proper level. That is not the issue here and now, though.

  "We do not know the connection between Ayers Rock, Vredefort Dome-if that is where the message in Africa went-and the other four locations. We also do not know if there is any connection between the bomb and the transmission. How Voyager fits into this is also a puzzle."

  "Voyager gave them the means of communication with this station," Levy quietly remarked.

  "Gave who?" Lamb asked.

  Levy shrugged. "Whoever is sending the message."

  "But how did they-whoever they are-get a hold of the information on Voyager?" Batson wanted to know.

  Lamb held up a hand. "There are many unanswered questions. Let's not go jumping to conclusions. You will be given access to all the data we have, and hopefully we can start coming up with some answers."

  "I still want to know why we were picked to be here," Volkers interjected. "I don't see why a physicist, a soldier, a mathematician, and a mining engineer make the best team to handle this. Surely you have people who would be better equipped to deal with it."

  Lamb looked at her. "As we told you-the message from Ayers Rock consisted of three parts. The first was the music from Voyager. The second, the greetings also recorded on Voyager. It is because of the third part that you are here."

  Lamb flicked the button and words showed on the screen. "This is the third part of the message when transcribed from the digital code."

  HAWKINSROBERTVOLKERSFRANCINEBAT-SONDONALDLEV YDEBRA

  "It took us a little while to recognize the names among the letters, as they were all just strung together." Lamb hit the forward and the message reappeared, this time broken down.

  HAWKINS ROBERT

  VOLKERS FRANCINE

  BATSON DONALD LEVY DEBRA

  "The message repeats your four names six times and then the entire message starts over again with the music."

  "Why us?" Volkers asked the question they all had.

  Lamb turned off the screen. "I was hoping one of you could tell me that."

  REACTION

  DSCC 14, Australia

  21 DECEMBER 1995, 0900 LOCAL

  20 DECEMBER 1995, 2330 ZULU

  The room was silent for a long minute after Lamb's question. Debra Levy was the one to break the silence.

  "Why don't we ask the Rock?"

  "What?" Hawkins asked.

  Levy seemed nervous to have everyone staring at her. "If you've broken down the code, then we can send messages into the Rock. We can use the code and the same frequency to transmit. Why don't we ask whoever, or whatever, is in there, why we were selected?"

  "I think first we need to have a better idea what we're dealing with," Hawkins interjected.

  Lamb seconded that. "It has been decided not to attempt any communication with the Rock quite yet.

  "That's if there is anything in there to communicate with," he added. "Despite the fact that something apparently transmitted out of there, we can't be sure that it can receive."

  "Well, what are you doing?" Fran asked.

  "Colonel Tolliver's people have secured the immediate area of Ayers Rock with the help of the Australians," Lamb answered. "By the way, the Australian government is aware that there was a transmission out of the Rock and that it is somehow tied in to the explosion at Vredefort Dome and the missing bombs, but they do not know we have decrypted the message."

  Fran rolled her eyes. "Besides guarding the Rock and keeping the message secret, what else are you doing?"

  "It's more a question of what you're going to do," Lamb replied. "We are setting up living areas on top of the Rock. We're also bringing in mining equipment in case we have to dig down to the chamber. The Australians will not be very keen about that, since the Rock is a national landmark and legally it is set aside as a place of worship for the Aborigines, but if this is connected with the bombs, we might have to do that and they'll play along."

  Batson raised a hand. "Can you show us the slide with the locations that the first transmission went to again?"

  Lamb backed up the projector. "The one in North America is centered in northeast Arizona. Near the town of Winslow. The one in South America is in Argentina near a place called Campo del Cielo. The one in Europe is centered around Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Stuttgart in Germany. The one in Russia is in Central Siberia."

  Don Batson was suddenly alert. "Do you have an atlas?"

  Lamb pulled one off the table and handed it to Batson, who eagerly thumbed through. "Campo del Cielo is similar to Ayers Rock and Vredefort Dome in that there is a unique geological feature. I want to see what's in Germany and near Winslow."

  He flipped open to Germany and looked. "I've been here-Nordlingen is right there
in the center of a triangle formed by those three cities. There's a feature called Ries Basin there. And I know what's outside Winslow." He started turning pages, then stopped and looked up, his finger pointing down at the page. "Meteor Crater is only twenty miles outside of Winslow."

  "I don't understand," Fran commented. "What does that have to do with the message?"

  Batson was tapping his finger on the atlas. "Campo del Cielo and the Ries Basin are also suspected of having been formed a long time ago by meteor impact. As is the area around Vredefort Dome. I think it's very interesting that four of the five areas the transmissions were sent to are very close to suspected meteor strike spots."

  "What about Siberia?" Hawkins asked.

  "I don't know about that," Batson admitted. He thought for a few seconds and tapped the map, which was open to Arizona. "But there is someone who might."

  "Who?" Lamb inquired.

  "Dr. Susan Pencak. She lives by the crater in Arizona. She's the best-known authority on it in the world. If anyone can make a connection between those various sites, it would be her. She makes her living studying strange geological formations and teaching." Batson smiled wryly in remembrance. "But she's also a little bit flaky. She has some weird ways of looking at things."

  "I'll bring her here," Lamb decided. "We need every piece of information we can possibly get our hands on."

  "Right now"-Lamb pointed to three boxes full of documents stacked on a table-"you have access to all information concerning these events. There are also computers linked into our main data base for your use. If there is anything else you need, please contact me immediately. We'll be moving to the Rock in about twenty-four hours, once everything is set up out there."

  Lamb made his way out of the room, followed by Tolliver. Fran glanced around at the other members of the "team." Hawkins was hiding any reaction he might have. Batson looked befuddled after his insight into the transmission reception sites. Levy looked mildly interested in what was probably to her an interesting intellectual problem.

  "He's lying to us," Fran announced.

  "What?" Batson blinked at her.

  "They're going to drill into that Rock the minute they have the equipment there to do it," she replied. "They're scared, and when they're scared, they usually overreact and keep everything a secret."

  She'd expected Hawkins to get upset by her comments but instead he nodded slightly. "That's true. I'm sure they will start or probably have already started drilling." He looked at Batson. "You're the mining engineer. How long will it take them?"

  Batson shook his head. "I'd have to know what kind of rock it's made of. Where they're starting from. What kind of equipment. What diameter bore they're making. It's impossible to just-"

  "Just a SWAG, Mister Batson," Hawkins interrupted. "A simple wild-ass guess. A day? Two days? A week? A month?"

  Batson rubbed his chin. "He said center of mass of Ayers Rock. They'd go in from the top. Say five or six hundred feet of tunnel through solid rock." He looked up at the ceiling briefly. "Five days. Give or take two days either way. That's if they only drill and don't blast, and I don't think they'll be blasting here on a national landmark."

  "That's all well and good," Fran commented. "So we have a week of sitting around with all this data and no earthly idea where to start and no idea where we're going with it."

  Hawkins stood. "Listen up for a second. You all are the scientists. I'm just a dumb soldier, but whenever I get a mission tasking, the first thing I do is organize the information I am given. I do that before I start making my plans." He pointed at the boxes. "I suggest we break down the stuff in there. Mr. Batson-"

  "Don," Batson interrupted. "Call me Don. Mister makes me nervous."

  "All right, Don." Hawkins nodded. "You can call me Hawkins-I'm used to that from the military and I probably wouldn't respond if you used my first name." He glanced at the other team members and they introduced themselves.

  "Fran."

  "Debra."

  "All right. Don, since it's your area, you become the Rock expert. You find out everything there is to know about Ayers Rock and then brief us on it later today."

  Don looked relieved to have something he could handle. "All right." He moved across the room and began digging through the books and folders in them.

  Hawkins swung his gaze around. "Fran, I hate to show my ignorance, but what is statistical projection?"

  Fran was used to the question and was impressed that Hawkins was admitting his ignorance up front. "I take information, collate it, and then make a computer program that gives probabilities on future trends."

  "You predict the future, then?" Hawkins asked.

  She graced him with a slight smile. "It's not that simple. Let's say I predict possible futures and give you the percentage chances of them occurring."

  "How about the present?" Hawkins asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Could you try to make some sort of connection between the Rock, Voyager, the explosion at Vredefort, and the messages?"

  Debra Levy spoke. "You're making a flawed assumption."

  Hawkins didn't seem bothered by either the interruption or the negative comment. "In what way?"

  "There are too many unknowns here to even begin to think all those events are interconnected," Levy said. "We know the message and Voyager are connected because of the use of the information from the record on board the probe. We don't know that the messages and the explosion at Vredefort Dome are connected. If they are, then the explosion occurred first and we know-or at least Mr. Lamb has told us-that was caused by radicals in South Africa. So I would say that it is very unlikely that those same radicals are causing the messages to be sent."

  Hawkins considered that. "Then the explosion prompted the message."

  "Maybe," Levy answered. "Why not do a time line of events, so we can see them more clearly? That's always the first step in trying to understand a problem."

  "Sounds good," Hawkins concurred.

  "I'm really not sure where my area of expertise enters into all of this," Debra commented. "I think I'll just look through what's accumulated in the computer so far and see if I find anything interesting."

  "I have some things I have to check on," Hawkins said as he left the room.

  21 DECEMBER 1995, 0930 LOCAL

  20 DECEMBER 1995, 2400 ZULU

  Lamb sat in the secure communications center and waited impatiently while a technician finished making contact with the appropriate satellite and, through it, Washington.

  "You're good to go, sir." The man scuttled out the door and locked the thick hatch behind him. The center was now impervious to external eavesdropping. The microphone was voice activated and the television screen in front of Lamb showed a large desk and chair. He fought the urge to stand as the President entered the field of vision of the camera and sat down at the desk.

  The weight of three years in office showed in the lines on the President's face. "What do you have, Steve?"

  Lamb looked at the camera looming a few feet in front of him, just above the screen. "The team is working on the data we've accumulated. Nothing very surprising so far. None of them has a clue as to why they were chosen-or let me say that none of them has indicated having any idea. Volkers and Batson have clearances from Hermes, so they should be all right. Levy worries me. We've given her an interim clearance but we know little about her. I've got my people checking on her in the States. The strange thing is that Levy's name was on the roster to be considered for addition to the Hermes Project in a couple of months."

  He looked down at his notes. "We're bringing in another person. An expert on meteor craters from Arizona."

  The President frowned, as if this detail was bothersome. "Meteor craters?"

  "It looks like four of the five reception sites for the message have suspected meteor strike spots in the immediate area. It may be nothing, but it's worth checking out."

  The President was reading a note someone had handed him from the side.
He returned his attention to the camera, dismissing the meteor issue. "So, nothing on the people so far. What about the Russians?"

  Lamb wanted to sigh but held it in. The term Russians now covered a score of various independent republics, all with their own agendas, their own set of severe economic problems, their own nuclear weapons, and worst of all, their own deep sense of historical paranoia. Lamb knew the Russians very well and like any other student of that country, he knew that they were almost impossible to second-guess because their mindset was so different from that of someone from the West. In the years since his release Lamb had tried to subdue his visceral emotions whenever he had to deal with anything about the country he had been a prisoner of-at certain times he did that more successfully than at others.

  "They had to have picked up the transmission into Siberia. I'm sure they have a better idea than we do of where it was aimed. I'm checking on that. They definitely know about the explosion under Vredefort Dome-their sensors had to have picked it up just like ours did. I'd say they probably have a good line on Ayers Rock being the source of the transmission, because their space lab was overhead when the transmission occurred. They're going to want to know what's going on. We can't hide the equipment we're putting on top of the Rock. It's totally exposed to satellite imagery.

  "The Seventh Fleet has picked up movement from Russian Pacific Fleet elements. They're moving a carrier task force south toward us."

  "Are you sure it's connected to the transmission?"

  Lamb glanced down at the satellite imagery of the fleet movement he'd been faxed less than an hour ago. "Yes, sir. They've got the research ship Kosmonaut Yury Gagarin as part of the element. That ship is their floating version of this station. It has two large steerable aerial dishes and two smaller ones built on top of the deck. Looks like they want to be in a better position to pick up any more transmissions. They've also got the Krym, one of their Primorye-class intelligence-gathering ships, among the flotilla."