The Orion Plan

by Mark Alpert

A moment later the airman drew a new path on the jumbo screen. This red line ran thirty-three miles northeast from South Amboy. It terminated at the northern tip of Manhattan.

  TWO

  Inwood Hill Park, New York City | June 20, 2016 | 4:19 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  Joe was dreaming of his daughter when the noise woke him. In the dream he chased Annabelle across the playground near their apartment building in Riverdale. This was a memory from the old days, before Joe’s wife kicked him out of the apartment. Annabelle raced past the playground’s swings and seesaws, her long brown ponytail bouncing against her back, her neon-pink T-shirt flapping at her waist. Joe couldn’t keep up with her, she was too fast. He yelled, “Slow down!” but she kept running.

  Then the noise hit him, a deep, ground-shaking thump that echoed in his chest. At the same time, something mashed against his nose. In pain, Joe opened his eyes, thinking that someone had punched him in the face while he slept, but all he saw was blackness. For a moment he thought he was gone—dead, buried, finally out of his misery. He felt a roiling, nauseating fear in his stomach, so strong it made him gag. But after a couple of seconds of sickness and terror he realized why he couldn’t see anything: the box he was sleeping in had collapsed. He was looking up at a three-foot-by-five-foot rectangle of cardboard—the top of the box—which had smacked against his face and now hung, hopelessly crumpled, an inch above his eyes.

  Joe didn’t move a muscle, didn’t make a sound. Although his mind was still fuzzy from all the malt liquor he’d drunk, one thing was clear: the box wouldn’t have hit his face so hard if it had collapsed on its own. Someone must’ve smashed it. Because Inwood Hill Park was deserted at night—it was mostly woods—the teenagers from the neighborhood liked to party there during the summer, and they entertained themselves by tormenting the homeless people who slept on the wooded hillsides. One of those kids—no, probably two or three or four of them—had just pounded the hell out of Joe’s box. He couldn’t see or hear them but they probably stood just a few feet away, stifling their laughter and waiting for his reaction. They wanted to watch him struggle, to hear him yell and curse them. And the more he yelled, the more they’d harass him. So the best strategy was to lie there inside the crumpled box and play dead. It was no fun to pick on a homeless guy if he didn’t squirm.

  Blood leaked from Joe’s nostrils and covered the stubble on his upper lip, but he didn’t dare to wipe it off. He was afraid to even breathe. Lifting his head ever so slowly, he gazed down the length of his body. His sneakers, their toes wrapped in duct tape, stuck out of the box and rested on the mud of the hillside. The legs of his pants were patched with duct tape too. Even though it was a warm night, Joe had fallen asleep in his jacket—it was a New York Yankees jacket, the only decent piece of clothing he had left—and now his undershirt was damp with sweat. The stench inside the box was so foul it made him gag again, and before he could stop himself he let out a groan, loud enough for anyone to hear. Now you’ve gone and done it, he thought. Now they’re gonna beat the crap out of you.

  Joe rolled on his side and covered his head with his hands, waiting for the kids to start pummeling the box. But the blows never came. He listened carefully and heard only a car alarm whining in the distance. He waited another minute until the alarm cut off. Then he turned onto his stomach and crawled out of the box.

  He was alone. His box sat in a hidden rut on the hillside, between the base of an oak tree and a massive slab of rock jutting out of the mud. With another groan, Joe pushed himself up to a sitting position, his back against the slab. He felt dizzy and nauseous, and the dark woods whirled around him. He didn’t own a watch anymore, but he guessed it was three or four in the morning. He’d passed out only a couple of hours ago, and the buzz in his head was still pretty strong.

  After several seconds the whirling stopped. He brushed his hair to the side—it was greasy and way too long—and saw the silhouettes of the treetops against the night sky. He was perched on the steep slope that overlooked the park’s soccer fields. Beyond the fields were the apartment buildings on Payson Avenue, half a mile away. A quarter moon hung above them, shining on their roofs, but all their windows were dark. It was the deepest part of the night in the emptiest corner of Manhattan. Joe wished he had a cigarette, but his pockets were empty.

  He heard a siren, very faint. It was a long way off, probably on Dyckman Street or Broadway. The police sometimes came into the park and rousted all the homeless people they could find, but the cops mostly stuck to the asphalt pathways. They weren’t going to risk breaking their ankles in the woods, so the park was a good spot for sleeping, at least during the summer. Joe knew half a dozen men and two or three women who were somewhere on the same hillside, each curled in a cardboard box or snoring under a pile of blankets and plastic tarp. Some of them were crazy and all of them were thieves. If you left anything on the hillside during the day—even just an empty water bottle—it would be gone by the time you came back.

  The thought of water made Joe thirsty. He had a dim memory of carrying a forty-ounce bottle of Olde English 800 up the hillside earlier that night, but he didn’t see it anywhere nearby. Although he’d probably downed the malt liquor before passing out, there might be some dregs at the bottom. He turned to his box, wondering if he’d hidden the bottle inside, and his heart sank. It had been a truly excellent refrigerator box, new and sturdy—he’d found it behind the appliance store on 207th Street—but now it was a flattened wreck. Its cardboard sides were bent and bowed so much they’d never stand up straight again. The cause of the disaster lay on top of the ruined box: a fair-sized tree branch, at least four feet long and two inches thick. It must’ve fallen from the oak. Joe shook his head as he stared at it. He was lucky to get away with just a bloody nose. That thing could’ve killed him.

  As he looked around he saw an even bigger branch lying in the mud a few yards away. Leaves were scattered across the slab he was leaning against, and in the light from the quarter moon he saw more severed branches farther up the slope. The hillside was littered with them. Joe thought that maybe a storm had blown through the park and knocked down the branches, but there wasn’t even a breath of wind now. He tilted his head up, looking for storm clouds in the night sky, and that’s when he noticed it: a ragged hole in the treetops, marked by branches that had been torn off or were hanging by a thread. It was so eerie Joe wondered if he was hallucinating. It looked like God Almighty Himself had stretched his hand down from heaven and plunged it through the trees.

  Joe shivered. It was no hallucination. He stared at the hole in the treetops, but it didn’t fade away. He wanted to hide, to crawl back inside his box. God was reaching for him, but not to comfort him or raise him up to heaven. The Lord was going to punish him for his terrible sins.

  His breath came fast, in painful rasps. He clawed his hands through the mud, groping for something he could use to defend himself—a shard of glass, a heavy rock. Then he coughed and the woods swirled around him again, and when they finally came to rest he realized how stupid he was. There was no Lord in heaven. He’d stopped believing in God more than twenty years ago, when he was still in college, long before he came to New York. His faith was the first of many things he’d tossed aside. And now that he’d given up so much—his job, his home, his family, his dignity—was he going to start believing in God again? No, that would be ridiculous. He was a drunk but not a fool.

  After a few minutes his breathing slowed. His head was clearer now and he’d stopped shivering. He didn’t believe in God, but what was that hole doing there? Joe craned his neck, eyeing the branches scattered across the ground. They formed a trail that led uphill, past the slab behind him and another outcrop above it. If something had truly come down from heaven—a fallen angel, a bolt of lightning, the fearsome hand of the Lord—maybe he’d see some sign of it at the end of the trail. It was probably a waste of time, but he didn’t have any other pressing business to attend to. And Joe wanted to be sure. He needed to be su
re.

  He stood up, slowly and carefully. His head swam and his legs wobbled but he was all right. He wasn’t too buzzed to take a little stroll. He lifted his right foot and climbed onto the slab, which was flat and smooth. Leaning forward, he trudged across the slanting rock and stepped into the mud on the other side. Finding his footing was tricky in the dark, but he could handle it. He’d learned how to navigate the woods during his first few weeks of sleeping there. That was just one of the many new skills he’d picked up.

  Getting past the next outcrop was more difficult. This slab was ten feet high, so Joe had to clamber around it, digging his fingers into the cracks in the rock to pull himself up the slope. It was hazardous and exhausting and he had to stop a couple of times to catch his breath. Although he hated to admit it, he was in terrible shape, at least compared with his life before. In the old days he used to jog seven miles every morning. His wife thought it was crazy, but Joe had loved it: gliding through the quiet streets of Riverdale at five in the morning, watching the sun come up over the Bronx. Now he missed those mornings almost as much as he missed his daughter.

  He finally got around the outcrop and stumbled into a clearing surrounded by oaks. The slope on this part of the hillside was gentle and the ground was muddy. In the middle of the clearing was a shallow pit, roughly circular and about ten feet wide. The wet ground at the bottom of the pit reflected the moonlight. Joe turned around, looking for the quarter moon, and saw it shining through the same hole in the treetops he’d noticed before. Startled, he stepped backward and tumbled into the pit.

  He landed flat on his back. Once again the woods whirled around him and the nausea made him gag. He closed his eyes tight until everything stopped spinning. Then he opened them and saw a black sphere at the center of the pit, half-buried in the mud. It looked like a bowling ball but slightly bigger, about a foot across. Its top half shone in the moonlight.

  It was less than a yard from Joe’s face. He gaped at the thing—it was as black as coal and yet its surface gleamed as if it were polished. But what really alarmed him was that it seemed to be glowing. He could feel its heat on his cheeks. It was burning like a furnace.

  Joe backed away from it, scrabbling on his hands and knees. He didn’t stop until he was out of the pit, and then he lay there at the edge, staring at the thing in horror. It wasn’t the hand of God. There was nothing heavenly about it. It was more like something from hell, black and smoldering. And yet it had fallen from the sky. It had ripped through the treetops and hit the ground so hard it made a ten-foot-wide crater. Joe remembered the deep thump that had awakened him, and suddenly it all made sense: he was looking at a meteor. Or maybe you were supposed to call it a meteorite. He’d taken a science class in college where they explained the difference between the two, but now he couldn’t recall which was which.

  But would a meteorite be so perfectly smooth and round? When Joe thought of meteorites he pictured rough, jagged rocks zooming through space. He racked his brain, trying to remember something useful from that long-ago science class. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that this thing wasn’t a meteorite after all. It looked more metallic than rocklike. So maybe it was a satellite. Maybe it was a NASA space probe that had gone haywire and fallen out of its orbit and plummeted to the ground. Something like that had happened to a weather satellite a few years ago. Joe remembered reading about it in the newspaper.

  He crept forward, leaning over the edge of the crater, and studied the object. There were no knobs or bolts or antennas extending from the sphere. He saw nothing written on its surface either—no “NASA,” no “USA”—although he’d have to wait for daylight to be sure. The absence of an antenna was puzzling, but Joe supposed it might’ve broken off when the object hit the tree branches. And it was also possible that this was some new kind of satellite that didn’t even need an antenna. Maybe it was an ultra-advanced spy satellite, built by the army or the CIA to hunt down terrorists. That would explain why there was nothing written on it. If it was a spy satellite, they wouldn’t want to advertise where it came from.

  Joe spent another minute thinking over the possibilities, but in the end he decided it didn’t matter. He needed to focus on what to do with the thing. If it was a satellite that fell from space, someone would come looking for it. Even if it was busted beyond repair, the people who owned it would want to know why it malfunctioned. And those people might be willing to pay a finder’s fee to someone who could tell them where their satellite had landed. Joe wondered how much they’d pay—a thousand dollars? Ten thousand? The satellite was probably worth millions, so a ten thousand dollar fee didn’t seem too outrageous.

  He bit his lip and started opening and closing his hands. That was something Joe did whenever he got nervous or excited. He’d been broke and desperate for so long that the prospect of making some real money seemed too good to be true. He got to his feet and turned his head to the left and right, listening to the night noises and peering into the dark woods. So far he was the only one who knew about the satellite, but he wouldn’t be alone for long. Dawn would break in an hour or so, and then the other homeless people on the hill would begin to stir. The early risers would come out of their boxes and slog across the park, heading for the soup kitchen on Dyckman Street or the Dunkin’ Donuts on Broadway. There was a good chance that one of them would see all the fallen branches and find the crater, just as Joe had. And if one of the homeless people didn’t find it, then one of the early-morning joggers or dog walkers surely would.

  Joe wasn’t going to let that happen. He stepped down into the crater and approached the sphere, holding his hands out so he could feel the heat coming off it. He couldn’t pick it up—it was way too hot. But he could hide it until it cooled. It was already half-buried in the mud. He could bury the rest of it.

  He crouched on the wet ground and dug both his hands into the mud, scooping out two fistfuls of it. Then he leaned over the sphere and dumped the mud on top of it. The mud sizzled when it hit the shiny black surface, but some of it stuck. Encouraged, Joe grabbed two more fistfuls and did the same thing. He did it again and again, getting into a regular rhythm of crouching and scooping.

  It was tiring work, and he wished he had a shovel, but he made good progress. After ten minutes the sphere was entirely covered with mud. It still looked unnatural, though. The mound of wet earth jutted like a pimple from the center of the crater. To hide the thing better, Joe needed to fill in the whole pit, or at least make the ground a little more level. But that was going to take some serious effort. He decided to take a break first so he could catch his breath.

  He wiped his muddy hands on his pants and stepped out of the crater. He could really use a cigarette now—or better yet, another bottle of Olde English 800—but he told himself to be patient. If his plan worked out, he would have plenty of money for celebrating. Just the anticipation of it was enough to give him a buzz. He spread his arms and took a deep breath and gazed down the hillside at the moonlit city below. For the first time in months he felt happy.

  Because Joe was higher up the slope now, he could see more of the city. Beyond the apartment buildings of Inwood were the elevated tracks of the IRT 1 line—the subway that clattered above Tenth Avenue—and the municipal depot where dozens of city buses were parked for the night. And beyond the depot was the Harlem River, which separated Manhattan from the Bronx. Joe’s eyes followed the river as it curved to the west, passing under the subway line and the Broadway Bridge. Then he turned to the north and stared at the heights of Riverdale, his old neighborhood.

  His old apartment building stood on the other side of the Harlem River, less than a mile away. Joe supposed that was why he took up residence in Inwood Hill Park rather than any of the other homeless encampments in the city. He liked the fact that he was still near his daughter. He knew he couldn’t visit her—his ex-wife had vowed to call the police if he ever came to their apartment again—but if there was an emergency he could dash across the Broa
dway Bridge and get there in fifteen minutes. Their building was the tallest in the neighborhood, more than twenty stories high, and Joe avoided looking at it during the day. He had the irrational fear that if he gazed at the building for too long, his daughter might spot him from her bedroom window. But at night he was hidden, so he could stare at his old home for as long as he wanted to.

  Joe stared at it now. His happiness grew as he searched for his daughter’s window, which was near the building’s left edge and two floors down from the top. The window wasn’t lit, of course—it was much too early—but he felt a powerful new hope as he gazed at the dark façade. His life was going to change for the better once he had ten thousand dollars in his pocket. He promised himself that he wouldn’t be stupid and spend all the money on booze. He’d use some of it to rent an apartment and some to buy new clothes. He’d clean up his act and get his old job back. And then he’d return to his old building with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, and his daughter would race across the playground and leap into his arms.

  He closed his eyes to savor the vision. Then he heard a shout and a burst of laughter and several husky voices speaking Spanish. He opened his eyes and turned around and saw half a dozen figures emerge from the woods. They were teenage boys in baggy pants and bandannas, tall, muscular, and grinning. They headed straight for him.

  THREE

  Emilio thought it was a firecracker. He stood at the edge of the park’s soccer field, huddled with his homeboys in the Trinitarios, as the boom echoed across Inwood.

  He looked over his shoulder and tried to figure out where the noise had come from. The park’s big hill loomed over the field, less than a hundred yards away. In the moonlight it looked like a long, high wall. Emilio couldn’t see anything but trees on the hillside, but he was sure the noise had come from there. Some stupid pendejos had probably lit a cherry bomb or an M-80 and thrown it into the woods.