Impact

by Douglas Preston

  “Right.”

  Ford fired the .32 in the general direction of the soldiers, and a moment later Khon leapt up and tore down the hill. Ford kept up a slow, irregular suppressing fire as Khon dodged down the hill and disappeared.

  A minute later Ford heard the pop pop of Khon’s covering fire for him. He scrambled to his feet and tore downhill, into the draw. An RPG went off behind him, throwing him forward—and a good thing, as the vegetation where he had just been was chopped into bits by a discharge of automatic weapons fire.

  He crawled down the draw as twigs and wet flecks of vegetation rained down on him. They were still firing high, raking the understory, unable to get the right angle from their position. A moment later he saw Khon ahead.

  “Run!”

  They both pounded downhill, crashing their way through bushes and vines. Bursts of fire ripped through the vegetation around them, but gradually it became more distant and sporadic.

  Ten minutes later they hit the upper part of the ravine, and paused at the banks of the stream to catch their breaths. Ford knelt and threw water into his face and neck, trying to cool himself off.

  “They’re tracking us,” said Khon. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

  Ford nodded. “Upstream. They won’t expect it.”

  Wading in the water, stepping from pool to rushing pool, Ford climbed up the loose boulders of the steep streambed. A half hour of grueling climbing brought them to a spring, where water poured from a fissure. A ridgeline lay a hundred yards above and a dry gully went off to the right.

  They crossed the gully and climbed the ridge, down the other side, and up the next one, bulling through dense thickets of brush. A couple of hours passed and twilight began to fall. The forest sank into green gloaming.

  Khon threw himself down on a bed of small ferns, rolled on his back, tucked his hands behind his head. A big smile spread over his placid features. “Lovely. Let’s make camp.”

  Ford sank onto a fallen log, breathing hard. He took out his canteen, handed it to Khon, who drank deeply. He then drank himself, the water warm and fetid.

  “You verified the mine,” said Khon, sitting up and examining his fingernails. He took out a nail file and began to clean and sand them. “You have the location. We can go back now.”

  Ford said nothing.

  “Right, Mr. Mandrake? We go back now?”

  Still no answer.

  “No more saving the world, please!”

  Ford rubbed his neck. “Khon, you know we’ve got a problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “Why did they send me here?”

  “To locate the mine. You said so yourself.”

  “You saw it. Are you trying to tell me the CIA didn’t already know exactly where it was? No way could our spy satellites have missed that place.”

  “Hmmm,” mumbled Khon. “You have a fucking point.”

  “So why the charade of sending me in?”

  Khon shrugged. “The CIA moves in mysterious ways.”

  Ford rubbed his face, smoothed back his hair, breathed out. “There’s another problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “Are we going to leave those people to die?”

  “Those people are already dead. And you told me you were ordered to do nothing. No touchee mine. Right, Mr. Mandrake?”

  “There were children there, kids.” Ford raised his head. “Did you see them blow that teenager away, just like that? And the mass grave? There must be a couple of hundred bodies in there already and the trench wasn’t even a quarter full. This is genocide.”

  Khon was shaking his head. “Welcome to the land of genocide. Leave it.”

  “No. I’m not going to just walk away.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Blow the mine up.”

  21

  Mark Corso clutched the CD-ROM in his hand, feeling the sweat from his fingers sticking to the plastic case. It was his first time in the MMO conference room, the sanctum sanctorum of the Mars mission. It was disappointing. The stale air smelled of coffee, carpeting, and Pledge. The walls were done up in fake paneling, some of which had buckled. Plastic tables against the walls were loaded with flat-screen computer monitors, oscilloscopes, consoles, and other random electronic equipment. A screen lowered from the ceiling covered one end of the room, and the ugliest conference table he had ever seen, in brown Formica with stamped aluminum edges and metal legs, dominated the center.

  Corso took his seat in front of a little plastic sign sporting his name. He slipped his laptop out, plugged it into a dock, jacked it in, and booted up. Meanwhile the other technicians were trickling in, chatting, joking, and tanking up on weak California coffee from an ancient Sunbeam in the corner.

  Marjory Leung sat down beside him, plugged her own computer in. A fragrance of jasmine drifted over him. She was unexpectedly well dressed in a sleek black suit and Corso was glad he had donned his best jacket that morning with one of his most expensive silk ties. The white lab coats were nowhere to be seen.

  “Nervous?” she asked.

  “A little.” It was Corso’s first senior staff meeting, and he was third in line out of ten presenters, each with five minutes and questions.

  “Pretty soon it’ll seem routine.”

  The room fell silent as the MMO mission director, Charles Chaudry, rose from his seat at the far end of the table. Corso liked Chaudry—he was young, hip, with premature gray hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, utterly brilliant and yet down to earth. Everyone knew his story: born in Kashmir, India, he came to the U.S. as a baby in the wave of refugees fleeing the Second Kashmir War of 1965. He’d worked his way up from nothing, a classic immigrant success story, to earn a Ph.D. in planetary geology from Berkeley, his dissertation winning the Stockton Award. As if to make up for his foreign birth, Chaudry was quintessentially American—Californian even—a rock-climber, mountain biker, and avid surfer who tackled the winter waves at Mavericks, said to be the most dangerous break in the world. There were rumors he came from a rich Brahmin family of obscure nobility and sported a title back in the home country, a pasha or nabob, or so the jokes went, but nobody really knew. He was somewhat vain but that was a fault common among NPF staff.

  “Welcome,” he said, in an offhand way, flashing a white smile at the group. “The mission’s making great progress.” He ran through some of their recent successes, noted a glowing article in the science section of The New York Times, quoted another piece in the British publication New Scientist, mentioned with a certain schadenfreude suspected problems with the Chinese Hu Jintao orbiter, and cracked a few jokes.

  “Now,” he said, “let’s get to the data presentations.” He glanced at a piece of paper. “Five minutes for each, followed by questions. We’ll start with the weather report. Marjory?”

  Leung rose and launched into her talk, a PowerPoint presentation on Mars weather, showing infrared images of equatorial ice clouds recently photographed by the MMO. Corso tried to concentrate, but he was too distracted. His moment was fast approaching—five minutes to make his first impression as a senior technician. He was about to make a high-risk move, uncharacteristic of him, but he felt secure with it. He’d gone over it a hundred times. It might be unorthodox but it would blow them away. How could it be otherwise? Here was a stunning mystery, apparently uncovered by Dr. Freeman shortly before his death which he hadn’t had the time to analyze. Corso had carried the torch. It was, he felt, a way to honor his professor’s memory while at the same time advancing his own career.

  He slid his eyes toward the far end of the conference table and took in Derkweiler, sitting at the foot, fat leather portfolio in front of him. Derkweiler would come around when he saw which way the wind was blowing.

  Corso listened to the first reports but hardly heard them. He felt a flurry in his gut as the presentation before his drew to a close.

  “Mark?” said Chaudry, glancing over at him. “You’re up.” He smiled encouragingly.

  Corso
slid the CD into the computer drive. It took a moment to load, and then the first image in the PowerPoint presentation popped up on the project.

  The MMO Compton Gamma Ray Scintillator:

  An Analysis of Anomalous High-Energy

  Gamma Ray Emission Data

  Mark Corso, Senior Data Analysis Technician

  “Thank you, Dr. Chaudry,” said Corso. “I have a bit of a surprise for you all—a discovery that I believe has some significance.”

  Derkweiler’s face darkened. Corso tried not to look at it. He didn’t want to be thrown off his game.

  “Instead of the SHARAD data, I would like to focus on the data gathered by the MMO’s Compton Gamma Ray Scintillator.”

  The room had fallen very, very silent. He risked a glance at Chaudry. The man looked interested.

  He went to the next image, showing Mars with many orbital trajectories drawn around it. “This is the trajectory of the Mars Orbiter over the past month, collecting data in an almost polar orbit . . .” He rushed through familiar information, punching through several screens in quick succession until he got to the money shot. It showed a graph with periodic spikes. “If there were a gamma ray source on Mars, this is the theoretical signature as seen from the Mars Orbiter.”

  Nods, murmurs, exchanged glances.

  He went to the next image, two graphs, one on top of the other, with the spikes almost coinciding.

  “And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the actual gamma ray data from the orbiter, laid over the theoretical graph.” He waited for the reaction.

  Silence.

  “I would call your attention to what appears to be a fairly significant match,” he said, trying to maintain a modest, neutral tone.

  Chaudry squinted, leaning forward. The others just stared.

  “I know the error bars are somewhat large,” said Corso, “and I’m well aware that the background noise is high. And, of course, the scintillator is nondirectional. It can’t focus on the exact source. But I’ve run a statistical analysis and determined that there’s only one chance out of four that this match is a coincidence.”

  More silence. A kind of nervous shuffling in the room.

  “Your conclusion, Dr. Corso?” came Chaudry’s question, in a studiously neutral tone of voice.

  “That there is a gamma ray source on Mars. A point source.”

  A shocked silence. “And what might this gamma ray source be?” asked Chaudry.

  “That is the very question that needs to be answered. I believe the next step is to examine the visual and radar images and try to find a corresponding artifact.”

  “Artifact?” Chaudry asked.

  “Feature, I mean. Artifact was a rather poor choice of words; thank you for the correction. I don’t mean to imply we’re looking for something unnatural.”

  “Any theories?”

  Corso took a breath. He had debated whether to offer his thoughts. In for a penny, in for a pound. “This is sheer speculation, of course, but I have several conjectures.”

  “Let’s hear them.”

  “It could be a natural geological reactor, as has been discovered on Earth. In which the movement of rock or water concentrates a mass of uranium to create a subcritical mass, which would decay, emitting gamma rays.”

  A nod.

  “But that theory has significant problems. Unlike Earth, Mars has no plate tectonics, no faulting or large-scale water movement that could do this. A meteorite impact would spread, not concentrate material.”

  “What else might it be?”

  Corso took a deep breath. “A miniature black hole or a large piece of neutron-degenerate matter would emit copious high-energy gamma rays. Such an object might have arrived on Mars through an impact event and somehow lodged or been trapped close enough to the surface to emit gamma rays into space. In fact, such an object might still be active, eating up the planet so to speak—hence the gamma rays. This could be . . .” He paused, then forged ahead, “. . . a possible crisis situation. If Mars were swallowed by a black hole or crushed down to neutron matter, the gamma ray flux would sterilize the Earth. Completely.”

  He stopped. He had said it. As he looked around, he saw incredulity staring back at him. No problem—the data didn’t lie.

  “And the SHARAD data?” asked Chaudry.

  Corso stared at him, disbelieving. “I’ll have it ready in a few days. I felt, and I hope you’ll agree, that the gamma ray data was more important.”

  Derkweiler spoke up, his voice surprisingly friendly and well-modulated. “Dr. Corso, I’m sorry, I was under the impression that you would be presenting the SHARAD data at the meeting today.”

  Corso looked from Derkweiler to Chaudry and back. Everyone would now see what a putz Derkweiler was. “I felt this was more important,” he finally said. He looked at Chaudry, hoping for, praying for, encouragement.

  Chaudry cleared his throat. “Dr. Corso, at first glance I’m not sure I share your enthusiasm for these data. The error bars render a lot of this ‘match’ meaningless. A one in four departure from noise is not exactly definitive.”

  “A lot of cosmological data are barely above noise level, Dr. Chaudry,” said Corso, quietly.

  “True. But for the life of me, I can’t even begin to imagine what could be emitting gamma rays on the surface of a dead planet with no current tectonic activity and no magnetic field. This business of a black hole or . . .” his skeptical voice trailed off.

  Corso cleared his throat and plowed ahead. “I would recommend we search the planet’s surface for a visual feature corresponding to the gamma ray emitter. If we could pinpoint the gamma ray source on the planet’s surface, we could photograph it with the HiRISE camera. Or, what’s more likely, we’ve probably already photographed it and haven’t recognized the significance.”

  Chaudry seemed to collect himself. He stared for a long time at the image on the screen, everyone waiting for him to speak. “I see a problem.”

  Corso waited, his heart in his mouth.

  “The periodicity of the gamma ray source of yours is allegedly about thirty hours—according to your plot. But Mars rotates once every twenty-five hours. How do you account for the discrepancy?”

  Corso had noted the difference, but it seemed small. “Five hours is within the margins of error.”

  “Excuse me, Dr. Corso, but if you extrapolate along your graph, the two periodicities get out of phase. Wildly out of phase. That’s no margin of error.”

  Corso stared at the graph. Chaudry was right—he saw it instantly. An elementary, stupid, unforgivable mistake.

  There was a dead silence. “I see your point,” Corso said, his face burning. “I’ll go back over the data and see if I can’t clear that up. But the periodicity is there. It could be in orbit about the planet.”

  Derkweiler spoke up. “Dr. Corso, even if this were accurate, which I doubt, this is still an irrelevant diversion from our current mission. I’d rather you turned your efforts to the SHARAD polar data—which is very late.”

  “But . . . surely we should investigate this gamma ray anomaly,” Corso said weakly. “This could pose a significant risk to life on Earth.”

  “I’m not sure there is an anomaly,” said Chaudry. “And I do not appreciate the alarmist sentiment built on such wobbly data. We’ve got to be very careful around here.”

  “Even if there’s a small chance of—”

  Chaudry interrupted. “When you stare at noise too long, you start seeing things that aren’t there. The human mind often tries to impose patterns where none exist.” He spoke calmly, almost compassionately. “The SHARAD data is what’s important. The late Dr. Freeman made a mistake in focusing so much of his time on the gamma ray data. I’d hate to see you fall into the same error.”

  Derkweiler turned to Chaudry. “Chuck, I’ll finish the SHARAD analysis myself and have it on your desk tomorrow by five. My apologies.”

  Chaudry nodded. “Tomorrow at five, then. Appreciate it, Winston.”

  C
orso sat through the rest of the presentations with his hands folded, an attentive expression fixed on his face, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling like he was dying inside. Even Marjory Leung’s comforting pat on his shoulder as he rose to leave didn’t help. How could he have made such an elementary mistake?

  Freeman had been right: Chaudry was in fact as big an idiot as Derkweiler. But where did that leave him? Totally fucked.

  22

  Ford sat cross-legged on the ground, staring at the fire and listening to the sounds of the jungle night. The dark forest enclosed them like a humid dungeon.

  Khon reached over, raised the lid of the pot cooking on the fire, and stirred the contents with a stick. He said, his voice laden with skepticism, “So—what’s next? How are you going to blow up the mine?”

  Ford sighed.

  “During the Killing Fields,” Khon said, “I saw my uncle shot in the head. You know what his crime was? He owned a cooking pot.”

  “Why was that a capital offense?”

  “That’s the Khmer Rouge. That’s how they think. Owning a cooking pot meant he hadn’t gotten into the collective spirit, the communist spirit. It didn’t matter he had a five-year-old boy who was starving. So they executed his boy in front of him, and then killed him. These are the men you’re up against, Wyman.”

  Ford broke a stick, tossed the pieces in the fire. “Tell me about Brother Number Six.”

  “He was part of Pol Pot’s student group in Paris in the fifties. He became a member of the Central Committee during the Killing Fields, went by the name of Ta Prak.”

  “Background?”

  “Educated family from Phnom Penh. The bugger ordered the killing of his own family—brothers, sisters, mother, father, grandparents. He held it up as a badge of honor to show the purity of his ideals.”

  “Nice guy.”

  “After the death of Pol Pot in ’98, he disappeared in the north and started smuggling drugs and gems. His ‘revolutionary ideals’ degenerated into criminality.”