Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel

by William S. Cohen

  “But how does a big rock do it?”

  “The asteroid pushes air in front of it at an incredible speed, crushing molecules in ways we have little understanding of. So how does it turn off distant light bulbs? We don’t know exactly because we don’t know much about large-scale ionization. I can give you a couple of examples. And I’m writing a memo for the President that will digest what we do know and don’t know about dangerous asteroids. But the most important information you need right now is how we might be able to stop the collision.”

  “I agree,” Oxley said. “We need to pull a lot of resources together. We also need cooperation. I assume, Ben, that your Chinese and Russian partners are passing the news to their leaders.”

  “Yes, sir. Probably at this very minute. And all three of us believe there is only one way to prevent the collision. A nuclear explosion.”

  Oxley abruptly stood up and said, “We’re going to the Situation Room. Ray, get things started. Secretary Winthrop, General Amador. No aides. And … Falcone.”

  “And Secretary Edmonds? The NASA guy?” Quinlan asked.

  Margaret Edmonds was the secretary of Homeland Security, whose many subordinate entities included the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The NASA guy, whose name Quinlan could not immediately remember, was William Southerland, a physicist whose title was NASA administrator. He had not been in the White House since getting a presidential handshake upon his appointment and confirmation by the Senate nearly two years before.

  “No,” Oxley replied. “Here’s what I want, Ray. You and Anna should start rounding up every Cabinet member who’s in town. Also the House and Senate leadership.” He looked at his watch. “Tell them to be in the Cabinet Room at noon. Command performance.”

  “Nobody’s going to like that, Mr. President.”

  “Including me,” Oxley said with a bitter smile.

  Quinlan realized that Oxley’s call for Secretary of Defense George Winthrop and General Hector Amador, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, meant that the President was turning immediately to the military and invoking the National Command Authority. As for Falcone, Quinlan knew that Carlton’s letter of resignation was on Oxley’s desk. Falcone was back in the White House, this time as national adviser on defense of Earth.

  The three men left the room. At the top of the stairway, Oxley said, “Excuse me for a minute,” trotted down the hallway, disappeared behind a door, and emerged moments later with his son, David, who ran up to Taylor, carrying a book.

  “Dr. Taylor!” he said, holding out a pen and the book, Your Universe. “Please sign my book!”

  “Sure thing, David,” Taylor said.

  “He’s a big fan, Ben. Wants to be an astronaut. If he found out you were here and I didn’t tell him, I’d never hear the end of it.”

  “How old are you, David?” Taylor asked.

  “Eleven, sir.”

  “Wow! In a few years you could be going to Mars!”

  “Yes,” Oxley said. “In a few years.” He draped an arm around his son’s shoulders. “Okay, David, back to your homework.”

  83

  “You’re wanted in the Situation Room,” Ray Quinlan told Falcone on the phone. “A car’s on the way.”

  “What’s up?” Falcone asked, surprise in his voice.

  “All I can tell you is that Carlton has resigned. See you shortly.”

  Falcone called Ursula Breitsprecher and said, “White House. Gotta go.”

  “I assume you don’t know when you’ll be back.”

  “As usual,” Falcone replied with a hint of irony in his voice. “Your assumption is sound and bound to become true.”

  * * *

  Minutes after Quinlan ended his call to Falcone, Quinlan’s cell phone rang. He, Oxley, and Taylor were already starting down the stairs.

  “Lebed’s office says he’s about to call, Mr. President,” Quinlan said.

  “I’ll take it in my office,” Oxley said, looking up the stairs. “You two continue on to the Situation Room. Ben, when Secretary Winthrop, General Amador, and Sean arrive, tell them exactly what you told me. No more, no less.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As he hurried to the door of the Oval Office, Oxley nodded to Anna Bartholomew and said, “No record of this.”

  At his desk, Oxley spoke first to a Lebed aide. After a couple of sharp metallic sounds—Oxley wondered if Russian recorders were being turned on or turned off—Lebed spoke: “Terrible news, Blake.”

  “Yes, Boris. Terrible. We have so little time.”

  “We—the world—or you and I?” Lebed asked.

  “We—you, I, and Zhang Xing. Have you heard from him?”

  “No. And I don’t expect that you will either, for a while. He has many layers of government to go through. Also, I think he is reluctant to disclose his nuclear weapons inventory just yet. The fact that Russia and America are in agreement may cause him to be suspicious. He may wait for us to move first.”

  “We cannot afford to wait,” Oxley said.

  “I agree,” Lebed said. “Dr. Shvernik tells me he believes we have no choice but to use nuclear explosions to destroy the asteroid. As soon as we finish our talk I will be talking to our military. And your man, Dr. Taylor? What does he think about a nuclear response?”

  The phrase nuclear response taunted Oxley. His naïve hope had been to eliminate nuclear weapons from the planet, and now he was going to have to use them to save it. “Dr. Taylor favors it,” he said. “But I have to discuss it with our military.”

  “I think, Blake, that our militaries should be talking to each other.”

  “And China’s military?”

  “Let our generals begin the talking. We need to make sure that they agree. The Chinese will have to catch up”

  “I’ll ask General Hector Amador—my principal military adviser—to call his counterpart. Is Paskevich still there?” Oxley asked, making a subtle reference to Lebed’s frequent shuffles of military advisers.

  “Yes. Marshal Mikhail Paskevich,” Lebed replied. “I’m sure your Pentagon knows how to find him.”

  “Yes, I’m sure they do, and there’s another matter,” Oxley continued. “You, Zhang Xing, and I must tell the world what is happening.”

  “I like your idea—that ‘warner and warnee’ idea. But we can’t tell the people of the world about the asteroid until we can also tell them what we’re going to do to save the world.”

  “You’re right,” Oxley agreed. “Let us talk again at this time tomorrow. And if Zhang Xing does not call before then, we’ll have to call him. Okay?”

  “Okay. Goodbye, Blake.”

  “Goodbye for now, Boris.”

  84

  Falcone, who arrived in the Situation Room a few minutes after Taylor and Quinlan, entered and sat down next to Taylor. Secretary Winthrop and General Amador were seated next to each other, talking, their heads bowed and almost touching. They suspected that the sudden, extraordinary meeting had something to do with Hamilton and his damn SpaceMine. But their head-to-head conversation was about a frequent topic: the Department of Defense budget.

  Taylor had never met Winthrop or Amador. He knew, though, that his books, his television show, his Your Universe, and his frequent appearances on late-night TV shows had made him somewhat of a celebrity, and he assumed they knew who he was. Tough audience, he thought as he started to speak.

  “My name is Dr. Ben Taylor. President Oxley has made me his special adviser on space. A short time ago I told him that a rather large asteroid was on a probable collision course with Earth. We had thought that the asteroid would almost certainly hit the Earth in 2037 if we didn’t figure a way to throw it off course. Now we believe that the collision will occur in forty days.”

  “Forty days?” Winthrop blurted.

  “Yes, forty days,” Taylor repeated. Neither Winthrop nor Amador liked surprises.

  “How did this happen? Why such short notice?” Amador asked impatiently.

  “I believe
that Robert Hamilton—SpaceMine—had sent up a spacecraft and used it to put the asteroid in an orbit that would make it easier to mine,” Taylor said.

  “And I believe at some point he started thinking he was doing God’s will,” Falcone added. “To bring on The End Days. Greed or zeal. Take your pick.”

  Winthrop and Amador looked at each other, stunned and speechless.

  “Yes, there was zeal, too,” Taylor said. “I learned, through someone I trusted, that Hamilton had his company SpaceMine attach a spacecraft to the asteroid, forcing it into an orbit that would hurl it into Earth in 2037. We thought we had twenty years. I and two other astrophysicists—one from Russia, the other from China—had hoped to take over the control of that spacecraft so we could change the path of the asteroid. The leaders of the three countries planned to announce the threat—a threat twenty years off—and simultaneously announce the threat had been ended because we had used the spacecraft to push it into a safe orbit. A simple way to stop a catastrophe is by changing the asteroid’s orbit. But the spacecraft is no longer operational. It’s a piece of junk.”

  Oxley entered, took his seat at the head of the table, and said, “We have forty days—well, thirty-nine now—to stop the asteroid. With a … an adapted nuclear weapon. I feel we must prepare to use our military resources to handle this emergency. That’s why only you two are here. No NASA. No Homeland Security.”

  “Are you anticipating a need for martial law, sir?” Amador asked.

  “Yes,” Oxley replied. “But I don’t intend to declare it until it’s absolutely necessary. I’m mentioning it here and now to alert you two. Later I’ll tell the Cabinet and the congressional leadership. I am assembling them at noon. For situations involving military operations, Sean Falcone will be my contact to you and Secretary Winthrop.”

  Amador looked at Falcone and nodded. They went back many years and had trusted each other for a long time.

  “I have just spoken to President Lebed about the asteroid,” Oxley continued. “He has received the same forty-day warning from his astrophysicist. He and I have agreed, that the United States and the Russian Federation should work together to handle this … unexpected situation. And we believe China will agree shortly.”

  Oxley paused for a moment and then said, “We are in an unprecedented situation. The United States and the Russian Federation are bound together on this like close allies, along with China. We don’t believe there’s any point to bringing the United Nations into this crisis. Three big nations have to try to save the world.”

  “And NATO, sir?” Amador asked, knowing what the answer would be.

  “No, Hector,” Oxley replied firmly.

  Winthrop broke the sudden silence. “I’m with you on saving the world, Mr. President. But how the hell do we do it?”

  “Right,” Oxley said, turning to Taylor. “So, Ben, how the hell do we do it?”

  “We—my two colleagues and I—think we need two nuclear hits: One to dig a crater and another to go deep into that crater and break up the asteroid. We don’t believe that it can be broken up with just one explosion. A surface explosion won’t be big enough to destroy the asteroid.”

  “So, multiple warheads,” Amador said. “Rig a missile so it carries two sets of warheads, one set to create a crater, another to blow the thing apart.”

  “Exactly, General,” Taylor said. “But there’s still a problem—a big problem. The fragments. Small fragments will burn up in the atmosphere. But the big ones—possibly huge fragments—will still hit the Earth. And they’ll kill a lot of people and do a lot of damage.

  “This is a big asteroid. Probably about half a mile wide. We don’t know whether it’s a pile of rocks or a single, much heavier rock with a solid metal core. The nukes could pulverize it or blow it to pieces. The bigger pieces will, in effect, be asteroids themselves, and they will be heading for Earth anywhere from forty to fifty-five thousand miles per hour.”

  “But, as I see it, a nuclear explosion is our only option,” Oxley said. “What’s your thinking, General? Will our Missile Defense System do the job?”

  Amador shook his head. “It would be risky, sir. We’ve had a few trial intercepts but a lot more misses.”

  “We’ve spent billions on a missile shield and you say it’s risky?” Oxley was steaming. “The Israelis have an Iron Dome that we helped pay for. Tiny Israel! They’re better than we are?”

  Amador shrugged but chose to remain silent rather than point out that the Iron Dome worked against rockets fired by Hamas and Hezbollah, but would be useless against a massive boulder coming in at forty to fifty-five thousand miles an hour.

  “We have anything else, General?” It was more of a demand than a question. “What about that electromagnetic rail gun that I heard so much about a few months ago?”

  “Afraid not, Mr. President. It’s an incredible weapon. Fire a projectile through a thirty-two-foot muzzle at forty-five hundred miles an hour. Or better than a mile a second. Right now it’s designed to take out Russian or Chinese ships if we ever have to. Our engineers say it’s powerful enough to blow the top off a mountain. But it looks like we’re five years away from being able to knock down missiles—or an asteroid.”

  “Hopefully, Fat Leonard didn’t have those engineers on his payroll to slow those tests down,” Oxley snapped.

  “Fat Leonard” was the nickname of Leonard Glenn Francis, a large-bodied Malaysian national who had bribed scores of naval officials with cash, prostitutes, expensive hotel suites, and other luxury gifts. In return, Francis was allowed to pad millions to his bills for goods and services rendered to supply ships. The scandal had rocked the Navy’s leadership to its core.

  “No, sir, Mr. President. All those bastards who were involved are looking through bars for a long time to come,” Amador said through a clenched jaw.

  When Amador sensed that Oxley’s anger had eased, he said, “I hate like hell to admit it, Mr. President. But I’d say the Russians are ahead of us on having the hardware—and the warheads—for this job. I’ve been briefed on their new intercontinental missile and the multiple warheads it can carry. It looks very formidable.”

  “Briefed? Why wasn’t I briefed on this, George?” Oxley asked sharply, his eyes intense enough to cut glass.

  “It’s in the final stage of development,” Winthrop said. “We wanted to wait until we knew more about its specs.”

  Frowning, Amador said, “With all due respect, Mr. Secretary, we—the Joint Chiefs, that is—feel damn well that we know when we have enough to present a brief to the President. And tell him that the Russians are ahead of us on this.”

  “Well, don’t forget the intercept vehicle,” Winthrop said.

  “What’s that?” Oxley asked.

  “NASA’s been working on it for years, Mr. President,” Taylor interjected, eager to defuse the tension. “Its official name is Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle, or HAIV. The idea is a small, two-part spacecraft with a nuclear device. I know about it from the NASA grapevine. NASA’s been in partnership with the National Nuclear Security Administration and—”

  “And with DoD,” Amador interrupted. “Even though NASA doesn’t admit potential military use. Sorry, Dr. Taylor. Had to get in a word for my guys.”

  “No problem, General,” Taylor said, smiling. “Anyway, the idea is to overcome the fact that a nuclear explosion beneath the surface of the asteroid is much, much more effective than a nuclear explosion on the surface. The deeper the explosion, the more pieces. And many or most will be small enough to burn up when they reach Earth’s atmosphere.”

  “So,” Oxley said, “fewer hits.”

  “Right, Mr. President,” Taylor said, continuing. “But how do you penetrate the surface when the interceptor’s detonator is inevitably destroyed on impact? The answer: a vehicle with two sections. The front section is released as the vehicle approaches the asteroid. It will deliver enough kinetic energy to burrow beneath the surface. When all its energy is exhausted, it will
be a few feet below the surface.”

  “Then what?” Oxley asked.

  “Then the back section of the vehicle heads for the crater, plunges into it, and explodes within the asteroid, producing maximum destruction.”

  “Sounds like a nuclear version of our earth-penetrator bombs,” Amador said.

  “Well, General,” Taylor said, “as I understand what’s going on, the earth-penetrator bomb is a model for HAIV. But, of course, that’s a secret.”

  “What’s the status of this thing?” Oxley asked.

  “Unofficially, sir, I hear NASA is saying about two years to trial mission,” Taylor answered.

  Oxley turned to Winthrop and said, “You and Ben find the people directly involved with this vehicle—not the official brass—and tell them to speed it up. Forget two years. We don’t have two damn months! Top priority from DoD, Boeing, or whoever is involved in the hardware.”

  “I’m not sure, sir, if—”

  “George, I’m not sure of anything, either. Except that I’m commander-in-chief and I want that thing as a backup.”

  “Yes, sir,” Winthrop said.

  Oxley turned to Amador and said, “What about the Russians?”

  “From what I know of their new missile, it could do the job, sir,” Amador said. “It can carry four independently targetable warheads. Our intel says Lebed, like Putin, is pushing for space as a battlefield. Our guys think it has the potential to knock out a satellite. So that sounds like it can be adapted for the asteroid mission.”

  “Get on it, Hector,” Oxley ordered. “I just talked to President Lebed. He said your counterpart is Marshal Mikhail Paskevich.”

  “I’ve met Marshal Paskevich, Mr. President,” Amador said. “You know, one of those ‘meet and greet’ receptions at the Russian Embassy. He seemed like a real professional. And, sir, what am I to tell him when I call him?”

  “Tell him that you and he are going to save the world.”

  Amador frowned again. Instead of hearing a call to arms, he wanted a presentation of facts. He had never been a big fan of Oxley’s cool style. But he was the commander-in-chief, his orders were legal orders, and Amador knew he was trusted and respected by Oxley.