Operation Damocles Read online

  Tanner took a last drag from the cigarette and smiled grimly at the metaphor. It was a literal fact. He had been in and out of Washington for years, and knew a lot of people, but lately, new faces were everywhere. Foreign faces with attitude. Disdainful Arabs. Contemptuous Orientals. Haughty Europeans. Multinational faces. Cold-eyed faces that appeared in hallways and lobby corners, often in earnest conversation with nervous-looking congresspeople and agency heads. Cloistered meetings for unknown purposes were becoming daily occurrences.

  The federal workers who ran the day-to-day business of the government didn’t know a great deal of course, and neither, it seemed, did some of the newly appointed cabinet officials, including himself. The individual agencies were comprised of people who for the most part were innocent cogs in a machine. They weren’t privy to the inner workings and high-level meetings.

  They probably wondered at all the new changes, but there was nothing anyone could put a finger on. In their world, things went on pretty much as before, but for senior- and mid-level managers in the executive branch, politics had become brutal. It was obvious that people who couldn’t adapt to whatever the hell was going on, were being coerced to resign. People who had made even minor political mistakes, such as publicly espousing a point of view that was antipathetic to the regime, were being encouraged to quietly retire. If you were part of the secret circle, it seemed, or possessed some sort of necessary knowledge, you were judged useful. If someone had some misinformed idea of what was important, he or she was not useful, and when no longer useful, one way or another, that person went away.

  The few of his peers that Tanner had enjoyed anything resembling an intimate conversation with appeared to be as ignorant as he was about the nature of the secret substratum. By its very nature the exclusionary climate bred suspicion, and he wondered if those peers were actually ignorant, or if they just viewed him as one who was not yet an initiate to the circle. Some of them seemed reluctant to talk, not merely ignorant.

  It was almost as if the briefings and unstructured meetings with the president and department heads had been scripted, glossy charades—superfluous get-acquainted meetings with an undercurrent of knowledge that not everyone was privy to—a “sizing-up” of human resources. Tanner knew that somewhere, somebody big was pulling the strings.

  Unlike Patterson, Tanner thought he knew why he had been appointed. Of those with the knowledge to run the Defense Department, he was the most agreeable. Vanderbilt had made it plain that he didn’t want a figurehead in charge of Defense. Neither did he want a headstrong type with rigid ideas. He wanted someone who knew the department inside out. Someone who knew the key people and, as Vanderbilt had put it, “knew where the bones were buried.” Above all, Vanderbilt wanted someone malleable; someone who could be molded into an extension of his own will.

  Tanner thought back to a time just six weeks after his appointment, when he had sat with Vanderbilt and Miller, going over the classified personnel files of the various base and unit commanders in all the services, and of those members of congress who were connected in any way with military operations and procurements. On the surface, it seemed natural enough that a new president would want to know all about his key people, but it had seemed to Tanner at the time that Vanderbilt’s questions had an odd slant. Tanner was only now beginning to realize that, in the power shuffle that was taking place, it appeared that the ones being taken out of key commands were those who were the most dedicated and loyal. Commanders with exemplary war records. Older veterans with a lifetime of military honor ingrained in their makeup.

  Realization suddenly dawned, and Tanner’s eyes went wide. The entire top of the military command structure was being systematically replaced. Tanner had identified many of those people, thinking that the most diligent commanders would be the ones Vanderbilt would turn to in a crisis. Instead, they were the ones being removed and, if some of the prior appointments were any indication, they were being replaced by incompetent upstarts who had little, if any, military accolades, and the ethics of ferrets.

  Tanner was too weak to challenge the President, and realized now that Vanderbilt had counted on that. The knowledge made him angry, angry with himself, and with those who recognized his weakness and used it for their own ends. Like Patterson, he had enjoyed the first flush of pride in his appointment, and had looked forward to earning the respect of his agency—to accomplishing great things and leaving his mark. Instead, he was to be Vanderbilt’s hatchet man and errand boy. He knew now that he would be despised in the memory of the armed services.

  The thought rekindled his anger. Silently fuming, he ground out his cigarette on the polished tile floor and walked away, paying no attention to the glaring looks of two Air Force Officers seated at a nearby table. He was ready to take the head off the first person to offer a petty criticism.

  V

  On June 18, six days after the missing experiment had been noticed by NASA, a very exclusive meeting was held in the Flight Operations Conference Room at Johnson Space Center. Present were NASA Director Clarence Patterson, Joe Dykes and Charles Castor, as well as the Chief of Engineering at JSC, Natividad “Zeke” Maldenado, and Dr. Thelma Richards, Chief of Astrophysics at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where much of the telemetry and data gathering for NASA missions was done.

  Zeke Maldenado had earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Houston, and had been at JSC since his undergraduate days. He had worked for Clarence Patterson during the Apollo program, when Patterson was director of Design Engineering. Maldenado had worked hard, gradually climbing the career ladder toward engineering management, and he knew more about spacecraft propulsion and airframe design than Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, could have dreamed of in his day. At the moment, his cultured Tejano accent and reassuring tone was helping to calm the tension in Patterson’s face. Patterson knew him and his family well, had worked long hours during grueling times with the man, and he trusted him.

  Thelma Richards was another long-time friend. Tall for a woman, she had always reminded Patterson of a schoolteacher. Her no-nonsense gray eyes, wire-framed glasses, and eternal pageboy haircut might have something to do with it, he thought, smiling to himself in spite of his troubles.

  Richards had been a mission analyst during the Viking missions to Mars, and had gotten to know Patterson during the initial mission planning meetings in Houston, back in the early seventies. They, too, had worked shoulder-to-shoulder, through many long nights. They had even been intimate for a few months, but their shared dreams and consuming fascination with spaceflight and discovery had bound their souls together in a way that somehow made sex between them distracting and uninteresting. They had remained close friends over the years, even after marrying other people. They enjoyed their occasional get-togethers at agency functions and planning meetings, and still had frequent telephone conversations.

  Because her section at JPL was a locus of flight operations for so many Defense Department and civilian missions, Richards had solid contacts throughout the space sciences community, from the military to academia. She had developed most of the exobiology test protocols for deep space and planetary missions, and had earned her stripes the hard way, by genius of mind and an unrelenting hard-headedness that would brook no bureaucratic BS if it stood between her and what she wanted to accomplish.

  Something of a hippie and activist in her younger days, and contemptuous of authority and politics, she was still a bit amazed, after all the intervening years, to know that she had made a lot of friends during her career, and that she, herself, had become a scientific authority and political power of national significance.

  Patterson liked and trusted these people. They were his old teammates, people he knew he could depend on to give him good advice, and to keep it among themselves.

  “How do you suppose it evaded radar detection?” Richards asked Maldenado. “We couldn’t track it as it boosted into higher orbit, and we
can’t find it now.”

  “State-of-the-art stealth technology,” answered Maldenado. “It was meant to be undetectable.” He leaned forward in his chair, forearms on the table, fingers laced together, and surveyed the ring of worried faces.

  “Best guess scenario,” he said, “three hours after the package was released by Columbia, the container module separated. The gas bottles and accouterments, supposedly the workings of a hydrogen torch and kiln, actually comprised an engine. Same for the rest of it. The test equipment listed in the package nomenclature is probably navigational stuff and controls. The main body of the device was inside a contamination-proof housing, and engineering only has the visual record of the outer casing to go by. The plans we have are of the Stanford experiment, which may have no resemblance whatever to the package we lofted.

  “The Air Force Space Command imaged the orbital-transition burn, three hours and eighteen minutes after deployment into LEO, and assumed that it was a part of our planned activity. The Air Force thought that the burn was just an attitude-correction maneuver within the planned orbit, and didn’t pay any attention to it. Why should they? It was a NASA launch, not an incoming, hostile missile . . . right?

  “They didn’t track anything in a tangential path, just the container parts, as they swung along in the original, twenty-eight-degree track. Incidentally, those parts were lined with aluminum foil to give them a higher-than-normal radar albedo, just to keep the Air Force thinking that it was where it was supposed to be, until final maneuvers were accomplished.

  “Anyway, we enhanced the image of the engine flare. The computed trajectory of the burn path could possibly put it in a geostationary orbit, but exactly where is hard to tell. It was headed out, though. We know the bird’s mass and the duration of the burn, but we don’t know what the fuel or oxidizer was, or the thrust of the engine. Spectral analysis of the engine flare gives a strong hydrogen line, but it could be pure Hydrogen and LOX [liquid oxygen], or something like Aerozine 50 with a Nitro-Tet oxidizer, even kerosene and peroxide. Projecting where it ended up depends a great deal on knowing the energy of the burn, and we don’t. From the size and spectral temperature of the flare, though, it looks like it had more than enough energy for geosynchronous insertion. It may even be headed for Jupiter, for all we know. If it boosted to a higher transfer orbit, nobody saw an apogee burn that would have parked it in a station-keeping orbit. It just disappeared.

  “So that’s about the size of it. Unless the bird emits radiant energy of some sort—RF, microwave or something—we are going to have a hard time finding it.”

  “There’s no chance of the orbit decaying, and it falling back to Earth? You’re certain about that, Zeke?” asked Patterson.

  Richards answered, “Not unless it makes a U-turn, Butch, and we know it hasn’t yet. If it fired retros, it would eventually decay and fall back, but the chances of it surviving reentry are slim to none. What would be the point, anyway? Why go geostationary, twenty-two thousand miles out, only to drop out later. It wouldn’t make any sense.”

  “What does?” remarked Dykes, absently contemplating the paperclip he turned round and round in his fingers.

  “Well, at least this means that it is not a reentry vehicle for a weapon,” said Patterson, his worried frown visibly relaxing. “It’s certainly not big enough to be a missile launch platform, and geostationary orbit rather limits its potential applications to communications or surveillance, wouldn’t you say, Joe?”

  “Yes,” Dykes answered with a sigh, tossing the paperclip on the table and leaning back in his chair with fingers laced across his stomach, “and I haven’t breathed this easy in days. I think that, at worst, someone has hoodwinked us out of a free satellite-insertion job. A few million bucks in lost revenue is nothing to what this could have cost the agency in appropriations cuts, and loss of agency and personal prestige, not to mention the potential harm to the population, if it had been a weapon. If it is some sort of propaganda hoax, we can always deny that we helped to put it up, even if they claim we did. In fact, I suggest that we do deny it, emphatically. I don’t like lying, but it wouldn’t do anyone any good now, to admit to such a thing. If we did admit to it, we as individuals might eventually live it down, but it would do irreparable harm to this agency.”

  “A lot of other countries have launch capability,” Castor interjected. “Even the Russian satellite countries. There’s no way to prove that one of the European countries didn’t do it, and I vote we play it that way. If some terrorist faction in the Middle East wanted to put one up, there isn’t anything to stop them from buying a ride on an Ariane or Soyuz booster.”

  “That’s true,” Patterson said, gazing at the tabletop reflectively, “so why use NASA?”

  “Good question,” Castor responded. “It must mean that it’s a U.S.-based group that did it. Someone without access to other countries’ spaceflight communities. Perhaps it’s as simple as someone who just wanted to get an experiment into space, but couldn’t afford the freight. We’re looking into past applications for experiment transport—you know, university science projects, small business research initiatives we’ve sponsored, that sort of thing. We get a thousand applications for every one that we accept. It seems like a stretch, but weirder things have happened.”

  Richards commented, “Whatever the case, I have an idea we’ll know something before too long. Whether it’s an experiment, a comm satellite or just some sort of thumbing-us-off gesture, in order to be useful, it has to do something. When it does, we’ll know what it’s all about.”

  “Still no idea how they did it, Joe?” Patterson addressed Dykes.

  “Not yet. Whoever they were, they knew our launch make-ready procedures, and our launch schedule, including particulars about our cargo. It had to be planned meticulously, months in advance, and skillfully carried out. We’re checking employees, both those currently employed, and those who were dismissed ‘for cause’ as far back as two years. It’s difficult, when you can’t say why you want the information, especially with contract personnel.”

  “The Stanford group is particularly sensitive,” said Castor. “You can imagine what would happen with something like this if it leaked at a university. They had the best opportunity, based on knowledge of payload specifics, but as far as we can tell, none of them have had any in-depth experience with the workings inside Kennedy Space Center, or with NASA in general. Everything—individual backgrounds, politics, work history—they all check out. Too obvious anyway.”

  Dykes observed thoughtfully, “Somebody currently working within the agency may have helped the perpetrators, but it would still be possible for someone on the outside, if they knew our operation well enough, and if there was enough money involved to buy information from a loose-lipped employee. Hell, it’s even possible that an employee in Inspection or Packing gave out enough information to do the job over a few beers, and doesn’t even realize it.”

  “We had better devise new security procedures for launch,” said Patterson. “I would rather we did it than some heavy-handed zealots from the military and the National Security Agency.”

  “Amen!” said Dykes.

  VI

  Three weeks later, the Columbia incident was almost forgotten. It was a quiet, moonlit night on July 10, at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base, in the heart of the Mojave Desert region of southern California. Near the south perimeter of the Marine Corps reservation was an old, all-but-forgotten World War II B-17 airfield that once was known as the Eidermann Army Air Corps Heavy Bomber Maintenance Depot.

  The full moon and the clear desert sky combined to make it a scene of ethereal beauty. Bright moonlight on wind-rippled hillocks of sand contrasted with stark shadows, as though a divine paintbrush had lightly touched the tops of dunes, sagebrush and stones, leaving a dappled reflection of ghostly silver on a canvas of blackest velvet. Moonlight on the roofs of hangars and the tops of crated equipment cast inky wells of darkness under building eaves, and on the leeward side
s of equipment and containers. In the new, frugal Marine Corps, there were no sentries walking guard duty, not at remote, low-security places like Eidermann. Only surveillance cameras witnessed the silent, ghostly magic of the desert night.

  At 0200 hours, Eidermann erupted skyward in a cataclysmic flash of energy, followed instantly by a pounding concussion and blast wave that shattered windows ten miles away in the small town of Twentynine Palms. Electricity crackled and arced within a blinding, incandescent hemisphere of expanding plasma, hotter than the surface of the sun. The growing fireball dimmed from a painful white glare to red boiling blood, and finally, to a black, ominous cloud, rising to obscure the moon.

  People in Twentynine Palms and all over the Marine base were thrown from their beds by the ground-shock, a seismic wave that spread outward from the point of impact in an expanding circle, like a ripple from a stone tossed into still water. A pool table in one of the local bars bounced two feet into the air, and broke in half when it landed. The two players standing near it, along with the few other patrons of the bar, were thrown sprawling to the floor amid spilled drinks and broken glass.

  Half the Marine base went dark as one of its two electrical substations tripped offline, and the town power system blinked out completely. A mighty, thrumming drone ran through the earth, so heavy in timbre and powerful in amplitude that it hurt the teeth; it seemed to vibrate the very bones of one’s body. The acrid, stinging smell of ozone permeated the air. St. Elmo’s fire danced along those overhead utility lines still standing, the ghostly electrical flames eventually melting away into the wires.

  Water mains broke and geysers of water shot from the middle of flooding roads. Streets and parking lots resembled a battlefield that had been cratered by bombs and artillery, with buckled sidewalks and pavements everywhere. Here a pushed-up mound, there a gaping pit.