Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel

by William S. Cohen

  “That will be difficult, sir. I don’t think this can stay secret for very long.”

  81

  Taylor, back in his museum office, emailed Gillespie’s calculations to Shvernik and Liang Mei and requested a rapid response. He then plunged into amassing all that he knew about Asteroid USA, beginning with a re-reading of Cole Perenchio’s warning of a “high probability” that the asteroid would collide with Earth in April 2037.

  Perenchio had correctly guessed that it was an asteroid astronomically known as 2009FA. In fuzzy radar-telescope images, made when it was discovered in 2009, it had looked like two roundish rocks mashed together. Its discoverer named it Janus, after the double-faced god of Roman mythology.

  Although Janus’ initial location had been mapped, like many asteroids, it was lost primarily because its orbit passed on a path in front of the sun, blinding Earth’s telescopes. NASA has designed a space telescope that could solve that problem and tried to sell the idea to Congress with the slogan “finding asteroids before they find us.” But Congress failed to provide the estimated $500 million needed to build and launch the telescope.

  * * *

  Three hours later, Shvernik called. Like Taylor, he habitually worked day and night and ignored time zones. After a warm hello in two languages, he said, “I’m sorry. I was called to a big meeting at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Lebed is suddenly interested in nukes and asteroids—just as Putin was, remember?”

  “Nukes?” Taylor said.

  “Correct. So most of the talking at Plesetsk was about blowing up asteroids with nuclear weapons. Lebed himself sent a video telling everybody that he’s worried about getting hit by an asteroid. And he says America is doing secret work on war in space and Russia must be vigilant. That was his word. Vigilant.”

  “Lebed is trying to take Russia back to the Cold War, Dimitri.”

  “He says he has found that NASA is working with the U.S. group that makes nuclear weapons. That is what he says. True? Is true?”

  “Well, yes. NASA announced it. No secret, Dimitri. Some NASA people are with people at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which keeps track of American nuclear weapons. It is a unit of our Department of Energy.”

  “Energy?” Shvernik said in a scoffing voice. “Like energy for Hiroshima?”

  “Let us not get into a squabble about this. The two organizations are working on how to destroy asteroids using nuclear energy.”

  “You said what we do is not public.”

  “That is correct. We have nothing to do with the nuclear people or with NASA. We are not part of that bureaucracy.”

  “Bureaucracy. Nothing but bureaucracy?”

  “Yes. Please trust me, Dimitri.”

  “Yes. I trust you. Not your country.”

  “Forget politics, Dimitri. I called you because I have news. Hamilton turned on the transmitter in the spacecraft that’s attached to the asteroid. We’ve got a fix on the signal and a possible location. I have emailed that data to you. Please give me your opinion about its accuracy.”

  “Good thing you got that signal, Ben.”

  “I hope so, Dimitri.”

  * * *

  The time was midnight in Washington and noon in China when Liang Mei called.

  By then, Taylor had gone through the location data five times, vainly searching for errors. To plot Asteroid USA’s orbit he had first computed its elliptical path about the sun and then predicted where it would appear in reference to Earth’s orbit.

  At the computer keyboard, he had transformed Gillespie’s location data into two white oval tracks that looked like thin chalk lines on the black emptiness of the computer monitor. One track crossed over the other. On one track was a tiny blue sphere; on the other track was a tinier yellow sphere. Again and again, when Taylor pressed two keys, the two spheres moved. Again and again, the yellow sphere passed over the blue sphere and disappeared.

  Without saying hello, Taylor said, “How many days do you get?”

  “Forty days, counting this day,” Liang Mei replied, almost in a whisper.

  “I also get forty.”

  “I have other information.”

  “Tell me,” Taylor said, hoping helplessly that she had found some kind of miracle.

  “Dr. Perenchio estimated that Asteroid USA was about forty meters across. But, using a Chinese telescope and a Chinese formula for estimating size based on reflection from sun—”

  “It’s smaller!” Taylor shouted into the phone. “Smaller!”

  “No, Dr. Taylor. Bigger. Much bigger.”

  “My God! Bigger? Forty meters … could kill a city.… And—”

  The phone signaled that another call was coming in.

  “It’s Dimitri calling. I’m putting him on.”

  “Yes,” Liang Mei said. “Hello, Dr. Shvernik. Good. We now all three are talking.”

  “There was a time in my life,” Shvernik said, “when I would have consumed a liter of vodka today. This awful, awful day.”

  “How long do you figure, Dimitri?” Taylor asked.

  “Forty days and six hours.”

  “Liang Mei was just about to say something … something more about it,” Taylor said.

  “Dr. Perenchio believed that the asteroid was approximately forty meters across,” Liang Mei said. “He based his estimate on the albedo.”

  “Yes, I know,” Taylor said.

  The albedo is the amount of solar energy reflected from an asteroid viewed by a telescope on Earth. Astronomers use the albedo as a factor in determining the probable size of an asteroid, which is otherwise black against the blackness of space. So a large dark asteroid can look the same as a small, light one. Added to the puzzle of an asteroid’s size are the uncertainties of its shape, surface roughness, and rotation period. But estimates of size are principally based on that one phenomenon of the albedo.

  “In China, a colleague also uses an infrared telescope, which very accurately senses heat. When he combines visible light measurement—the albedo—and his infrared data, he finds much higher probable size.”

  “What size? What size?” Shvernik asked.

  Liang Mei ignored Shvernik and continued. Taylor suspected that she was reading her Chinese calculations while simultaneously translating them into English.

  “I applied my colleague’s findings to Dr. Perenchio’s forty-meter estimate,” she continued. “I believe there is no doubt that the size of Asteroid USA is between five hundred meters and one kilometer.”

  “Please repeat,” Taylor said.

  “Between five hundred meters and one kilometer,” she said. Taylor pictured her looking up from her written estimate and deciding she should say more: “Given that we do not know the composition of the asteroid, I believe we should support the one-kilometer estimate rather than five hundred meters.”

  In his lectures and for his Your Universe television show, Taylor routinely rendered metric measurements into what he thought of as “American numbers.” 1,640 feet to six-tenths of a mile flashed through his mind. Next came another mind-flash, one of his staples: The asteroid that streaked over Chelyabinsk in 2013 had the energy of a half-million tons of TNT. That is about fifty times the energy released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Chelyabinsk asteroid was only sixty-six feet wide.

  “Holy Jesus!” Taylor whispered. “Five hundred meters to one kilometer!” Again his mind spelled out 1,640 feet to six-tenths of a mile.

  “How…?” Shvernik asked.

  “False information. Hamilton fooled Perenchio with false information.”

  Shvernik uttered a curse in Russian.

  “The spacecraft,” Liang Mei said. “We talked about it. We can try to move the asteroid with the spacecraft.”

  “It can no longer operate,” Taylor said. He told them what had happened.

  Another curse from Shvernik.

  “But, Dr. Taylor, we must do something,” she said. “We must! We must!”

  “When we had the luxury of twen
ty years, Liang Mei, we could think of simple, gentle ways to put this asteroid on a safe course. Moving it with the spaceship was a possible solution. Using a solar sail to pull it or push it to a new orbit is another great idea. But we don’t have time to develop it. We have forty days. We three know that the only possible salvation for the world is what we all fear: a nuclear weapon.”

  From his research in easily accessible documents about U.S. bomb tests, Taylor knew far more than his colleagues from nations where such information was not generally available. He was able to show how often scientists simulated the destruction of asteroids with nuclear weapons. Now the possible use of a nuclear weapon was no longer an academic subject.

  “Please, Ben,” Shvernik said, “please call it nuclear explosion.”

  “Okay, Dimitri. Nuclear explosion. Liang Mei?”

  “Please, Dr. Taylor. It is … It is…”

  “I know,” Taylor said. “It is as if we turned to the devil—to evil—to save us. But there is no other way. We must blow up a big rock or let it hit our planet and kill millions of people. I do not want to use a nuclear … explosion. But we have no alternative.”

  After a long minute, Liang Mei said, “Very well. That must be the way.”

  “Dimitri?” Taylor asked.

  “Yes, Ben. We must try with a nuclear explosion. It is our only hope. I am sending you a rough chart on when would be the best orbital time to launch.”

  “It is awful, awful to think of,” Liang Mei said. She sounded as if she were holding back sobs. “The asteroid blows into many pieces. Many will hit Earth. The explosion makes many asteroids out of one.”

  “We need to get word to the leaders of our countries,” Taylor said. “We must tell them about the forty days, about the nuclear solution. We must tell them at once.… Thank you, my friends.”

  He ended the three-way call with a muttered goodbye. Shortly, Shvernik’s orbital chart came through as an email attachment. Taylor studied the chart for a few minutes, loaded it into his laptop, and sat staring out the window at the gray sky for a moment. Then he called Quinlan and said, “It is absolutely necessary that I speak to President Oxley immediately. Please send me a car.”

  “What—What…?”

  “Immediately.”

  “Okay, Ben. Okay.”

  82

  A Secret Service agent met the black limousine at the West Wing gate. “I’ll take you to the President,” the agent said. “You need to leave your laptop here,” he told Taylor, pointing to a locker in the entry room.

  “My meeting with the President involves his seeing what is in this laptop,” Taylor said with polite urgency.

  “Sorry, sir. It is a security—”

  “I insist that you call the President,” Taylor said, grasping the laptop case to his chest.

  It took eight minutes of phone calls to various security posts before President Oxley himself cleared the laptop, his order laced with profanity.

  Taylor and the laptop followed the agent to a stairway and up to the third-floor White House Residence. As they reached the top of the stair landing, Taylor saw the President’s wife and son walking down the other end of the hall.

  Oxley was waiting for Taylor on a sofa in a small corner room. Taylor pictured the family sitting there watching television. In a wooden chair next to the sofa was Ray Quinlan. He and Taylor nodded to each other. Oxley pointed to another wooden chair. Taylor sat, not sure how to begin.

  “Okay, Ben. What’s the verdict?” Oxley asked.

  “As you know, Mr. President, I have been working with two other scientists—one from Russia, the other from China.”

  “Yes, yes,” Oxley said, frowning. “‘Immediately,’ you told Ray. You have confirmation? Is that it? Well, let’s hear it.”

  “Yes, sir. We—all three—believe that a probable collision with Asteroid USA will happen in forty days.”

  “Days? Forty days?” Quinlan shouted. He twisted, nearly knocking over his chair, to look directly at Taylor and ask, “What the f … how certain are you?”

  “On a scale of ten, at about nine and nine-tenths. All three of us agreed.”

  “How did this happen? Forty days?” Oxley asked.

  “The actual coordinates do not match those that Perenchio reported. We calculate that it had already passed through the gravitational keyhole on a previous pass and is now following an orbit that puts it on a collision course. It’s coming in from the sun and had not been picked up until that one signal showed its present location. Asteroids are unpredictable and many times are seen once and then not seen again for many years.”

  Oxley was momentarily speechless. He stared at Taylor for nearly a full minute. Taylor, turned mute by Oxley’s gaze, brought up a chart on his laptop.

  “This is a time-to-impact window, based on our forty-day prediction,” Taylor said. He turned himself and his laptop so that Oxley and Quinlan could view it. “The vertical line shows the time needed to intercept the asteroid. The horizontal line shows the time span from the launching of a missile to the instant it hits the asteroid.”

  A line curved from the lowest point on the left of the chart to the highest on the right and abruptly dropped downward. A small red circle at the top of the curve was labeled “Optimum,” showing the impact just as the asteroid begins its plunge toward Earth. Another red circle, near the very bottom of the graph was labeled “Last Chance.”

  Interpreting the labels on the chart, Taylor said, “The interceptor must be launched on a suborbital flight toward the point labeled ‘Optimum.’ We believe that the best interceptor available is an intercontinental ballistic missile carrying nuclear warheads. It will take the missile about eighteen days to reach the asteroid. So we have sixteen days to get that missile off the launch pad. And very little time to put that intercept vehicle together as a ‘Last Chance’ backup.”

  “Chance,” the President said resignedly. “So it’s all a mix of chance. Us with our computers—our supercomputers—against the universe with its endless possibilities. Maybe I need a poet instead of a scientist.” He paused and sighed. “Sorry, Ben. You’re my man. I’m just trying to get my head around this.” He paused again. “So, if this doesn’t work for some reason and the asteroid hits the Earth, I assume you have no damn idea where, exactly, it will hit?”

  “We had tried to work out the possible sites for a 2037 collision. It’s impossible to predict. But, since more than seventy percent of the Earth is covered with water the most likely impact site is an ocean. And the most likely ocean is the Pacific. An ocean strike would produce a double shockwave of water—two tsunamis—surging toward all coasts, from the Arctic Ocean to New Zealand, from the eastern shores of Japan, South Korea, China, sweeping over islands, and extending into the Atlantic. Every shore on Earth would be affected, some so severely that no one could survive.

  “The odds are that it will hit in one of three large areas. The first—and most likely—would be in the Pacific, just off the coast of California. Worst case: tsunamis would hit the West Coast of the United States, wiping out everything in its path for about twenty miles inland. Or, if the impact is farther westward and the tsunamis sweep over Hawaii or Indonesia.”

  “Suppose it hits land instead?”

  “It would probably strike north Russia, starting a massive fire that would burn millions of acres, sending tons of ash and debris into the atmosphere and plunging the Northern Hemisphere into darkness for a long time. Recent research shows that an asteroid less than a half-mile wide could create a crater about nine miles wide, throw enormous amounts of dust into the atmosphere and set off large-scale fires that would send massive amounts of soot into the sky, blocking sunlight and ruining crops. The blanket of dust and soot would heat the stratosphere and eventually destroy the ozone layer that protects us all from harmful ultraviolet radiation.

  “The third impact zone—and the least likely—is the Caribbean. That hit would virtually obliterate human life on the islands as well as the people alo
ng the southeastern coast of the United States and the western coast of Mexico. There would also be severe flooding in Northwest Africa and along the eastern coasts of Central and South America.”

  “Jesus!” came from Oxley in a whisper. Quinlan could not speak.

  “No matter where it finally hits, as the asteroid enters the atmosphere, the ionization of the air could create an EMP—an electromagnetic pulse—that would knock out electric grids, shut down the Internet, disable satellite communications, and—”

  “How could that happen?” Quinlan asked. “How could it spread like that?”

  “We don’t know much about EMPs. They were first seen during secret U.S. tests of nuclear weapons back in the 1960s. A weapon would explode high in the atmosphere and all of a sudden phones would go dead or there would be a blackout miles from the area of the blast.

  “One theory has the nuclear explosion releasing gamma rays that strip electrons from air molecules and produce radiation that resembles super-radio waves. They may follow Earth’s magnetic field, covering a wide area in an instant.

  “EMPs have been rare—and powerful, awfully powerful. In 2000, a meteor only about fifteen feet across entered the atmosphere and exploded over a town in the Canadian Yukon. It somehow spawned an EMP that seemed like ones recorded after a couple of high-altitude nuclear detonations. It severely damaged the region’s electrical power grid. There was another one a year or so later, detected over the Mediterranean Sea. It released an immense flash of energy but didn’t cause any damage or blackout.”

  “Rays that make us blind and deaf,” Oxley said, as if to himself. He half-stood, as if wishing to walk away and then realizing that he had to stay.

  “Back to that electric pulse, Ben,” Quinlan said. “How the hell can it … stop everything?”

  “We know that there’s an ionosphere, an electrically charged layer surrounding the upper atmosphere. We’ve had examples of its power. During the Space Shuttle’s re-entry, for instance, the shuttle ionizes the air and at times it’s impossible to communicate with the astronauts. There were also electromagnetic pulses from nuclear tests.”