Blinding Fear (25 page)

“It’s signed by Francesca Sporano, Assistant to the President for National Security.”

Kay pointed to what looked like several sets of illegible scribbles below Sporano’s signature. “What are those?

Ranjit looked closely at them. “I’m not sure, of course, but unless I’m mistaken, they’re the President’s initials, along with those of the Vice-President, White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of State.”

Around the coffee table, no one spoke for nearly a minute.

“It’s Ludlow’s......I mean Gnash’s, full-blown, honest-to-God carte blanche,” Herc finally said. “He can do whatever he wants to virtually anybody! It’s like we’re in Henry the Eighth’s England!”

“Looks to me like a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card,” DeAngelo added.

“He probably carried it with him wherever he went,” Kay noted. “Whenever he first met with anyone to plan their operations, it’s certain he showed them the letter. The White House didn’t dare send it by mail or electronically out of fear the wrong people might intercept it. The courier must have personally handed it to the director who in turn personally passed it to Gnash.”

“Ranjit, you’re right about what you said a moment ago,” Claire said. “That’s why Gnash came to your house. Talk about a ‘smoking gun!’ This is exactly what I need!” She turned to the rest of the group. “With this letter, Ranjit’s eyewitness, inside accounts, the attempts on our lives, the confrontations with Gnash, the deathbed account of Richard Halpren, the explosion in Cambridge, I’ve almost got everything I need. The only missing pieces are the astronomical specifics: proof the asteroid exists and when and where it will hit.”

“Then I guess it’s time for us to plug the celestial coordinates we got from Frank Whalen’s telescope into mine,” Herc said. “Why don’t you all go out to the front yard. I’ve got my telescope on a wheeled cart in a shed further back in the cave. I’ll meet you outside.”

Everyone except Veena stood up and made for the door.

As Ranjit got up he leaned over and gave his wife a kiss on the forehead, then headed out the door with the other men.

Claire approached Veena. “How’s your leg feeling?”

“Not too bad. It’s starting to throb a little again. I’ll take some more pain meds in an hour or so.”

“Can I get you anything now?”

“No thanks.” She paused for a moment, then continued. “If I didn’t already, I just wanted to thank you and your friends for helping us. I don’t know what we would’ve done otherwise.”

Claire could see tears start to well up in Veena’s eyes. “You’re welcome. One thing’s for sure now: we’re all in this together!” She smiled, then turned to go outside with the rest.

She picked up her parka and stepped out the front door just as Herc approached from further back in the cave, pushing what looked like a rectangular, flatbed loading cart only with bigger, pneumatic tires. Bolted to it was a telescope that looked identical to the one Frank Whalen had owned. At each corner of the flatbed a screw jack with wide metal feet had been welded on. A long, heavy-gauge electrical extension cord was coiled to one side. A five-foot carpenter’s level lay next to the telescope. There was also what looked like an expensive carrying case for camera equipment. Herc stopped and uncoiled the male end of the cord, plugged it into an electrical outlet near the front door, then continued out of the cave. Claire followed as Herc pushed the cart—with the cord trailing behind—out into his grassless front yard. As he neared the drop off at the edge of the space he looked down at the ground and seemed to see the spot where he needed to be. He stopped, pivoted the cart a precise amount then cranked each of the screw jacks down so that the wheels were off the ground. He picked up the carpenter’s level and laid it on the carts metal top then leaned over to carefully look at the bubble tube to see if the cart was level on that horizontal plane. Apparently seeing that it wasn’t, he slowly cranked two of the jacks until satisfied. He rotated the instrument to measure the other horizontal plane and again spun the jacks until the bubble was precisely in the center of the tube.

“Okay,” he said, “now we can get down to business. Claire do you have the coordinates from Whalen’s telescope with you?”

“Yeah, I think so,” she replied and reached into one of her pockets, pulled out the notepad and handed it to Herc.

He stepped onto the flatbed, pushed the telescope’s power button and waited for the LCD screen to light up. Once it did, using a numeric keypad, he began entering the coordinates of the last ten points in the sky Whalen had looked at and recorded. After several minutes of using the keypad he pushed several other buttons on the main control panel in a careful sequence then stood up.

“I’ve told my computer exactly where in the celestial sphere Whalen surveyed,” Herc continued. “Once I push the ‘Initiate Search’ button, using its internal GPS system, my telescope will precisely follow those coordinates—even though we’re hundreds of miles from where they were recorded—and compensate accordingly, allowing us to see what he saw. They’re sort of like a trail of bread crumbs. After it gets to the last point the computer will automatically rotate and elevate the telescope to the next spot where the object is calculated to be based on the trajectory of the object, exactly where we are on the Earth’s surface at this moment and time, and the objects speed.” He looked at each of those watching with great anticipation, then slowly reached out and pressed “Initiate Search.”

Chapter 38

The telescope whirred to life and began to rotate and elevate. It came to a brief stop, then continued until it stopped again. It repeated the process eight more times. After the tenth stop there was a slightly longer pause, then it rotated and elevated an amount greater than the previous intervals and stopped for the last time.

“If we’re right about this whole thing, it should now be pointing at the object that Frank Whalen—and many others—were murdered just for looking at,” Herc said quietly. He reached down, opened the case, took out a lens and inserted it into its holder. He stopped for a second before putting his eye to the lens and rubbed his hands. “I gotta tell you, I’m nervous. In a few moments I might be looking at something that could be the instrument of all our deaths.” He leaned forward and looked into the eyepiece.

“Whad’ya see? DeAngelo asked expectantly.

He pulled back. “Nothing but stars. Field of view is too large. I need more magnification.” He pulled out the first lens, placed it back in the case, replaced it with another and looked again. This time he stared for nearly a minute.

“Well?!” Kay appealed.

“It’s there,” Herc said flatly. “Take a look for yourselves.” He stepped off the flatbed, deep in thought.

The others glanced at each other trying to decide who would go next.

“Ladies first,” Ranjit said.

Claire stepped up on to the flatbed, took and exhaled a deep breath, then looked into the lens. It took her a moment for her eye to adjust to the image, then she saw it. If she’d been standing an arm’s length from a blackboard and made a circle about an inch in diameter, that would have approximated how large the object appeared to her. Roughly one half of it was dimly illuminated by the sun. Strangely, it looked slightly like a dirty golf ball. It was surprisingly spherical and pockmarked by many, small impact craters that were more or less uniformly distributed across it surface. What was also interesting to her was how little light it reflected. She could only guess that it must be covered with a thick layer of dust. She stepped back then jumped off the flatbed.

Within a few minutes the rest of the men had viewed the asteroid. No one spoke for several more as horrifying questions raced through everyones minds: when and where the astroid would hit, foremost among them.

Finally Herc broke the silence. “Let’s go inside. I’ve got some software on my computer that will enable us to visually plot the asteroid’s trajectory and its timetable.”

They all followed Herc as he headed back into the house. Once inside he led them to one of his bedrooms that he’d converted to an office. On a desk he’d set up a 27-inch iMac computer. He turned it on and clicked on an icon that looked like the Earth. The entire solar system sprang into view. He clicked on a pull-down menu and began entering the coordinates he’d just plugged into his telescope.

“You need many data points to determine where a space object like an asteroid or comet is headed and when it will get there,” Herc said to the group looking over his shoulder. “When Frank Whalen first saw the asteroid, and took a photograph, it was nothing more than a tiny, fuzzy dot. When he took his second photo he could tell it was moving but not much else. He probably assumed it was a comet and immediately sent the coordinates to the International Astronomical Union hoping to beat the competition to the punch when it came to naming rights. The IAU computer that was on the Harvard campus is almost certainly where Gnash got Whalen’s address. Gnash then sent him that threatening e-mail that Halpren told me about.”

He continued loading the coordinates as well as dates into the program. “The software uses a very complex mathematical algorithm based on the data I’m plugging in. We’re fortunate Whalen stored ten sets including the dates. Anything less than that and we wouldn’t be able to get an accurate look at the trajectory. Once I’ve got them all in, the program will project the asteroids orbit on screen including when and where it will hit the Earth.”

For several more minutes he typed then stopped and turned to look at the cluster. “All done. Everybody ready?”

“Enough with the suspense already,” DeAngelo said. “Let’s see what you got!”

Herc reached down with his index finger and pushed “Return” on the keyboard. Instantly the solar system image shrank from showing every planet to just the inner planets, with Mars at its edge. Ten dots—including the date the coordinate was recorded—popped into view, with the first outside the orbit of Mars and nearly off the screen’s upper edge. The tenth dot was much closer to the Earth.

“This is interesting,” Herc said. “The first data point is way above the plane of the ecliptic.”

“What’s that mean?” DeAngelo asked.

“Imagine our solar system as a gigantic flat disk,” Herc replied, “with the planets orbiting the sun on the surface of the disk. This asteroid appears to have an orbit that is nearly at a 45-degree angle to the disk. It’s very unusual. It must have originated in the Oort Cloud.”

“The Oort cloud?” Claire felt like she was listening to an Astronomy 101 lecture at USC.

“It’s a giant, spherical cloud made up of trillions of mainly icy objects that surround our solar system way out into interstellar space. Astronomers believe some comets originate there. To have an asteroid come from there is.......odd. It might explain why world governments are acting so irrationally.” He hesitated for a moment. “Asteroids normally come from the asteroid belt. They’re relatively easy to find and their orbits are regular as clockwork. For years NASA has been finding, cataloging and tracking every one that might present a threat to us. I’m guessing maybe one of the reasons they missed this one was because of its highly eccentric—or maybe just plain weird—orbit. Another possibility is the asteroid’s low albedo. Through the telescope you probably saw that it looked kind of dirty or dusty. In effect that means it reflects very little light compared to other asteroids. I’m guessing that because of those two factors, by the time they saw it, it was too late to launch an operation to do anything about it. Most of the ideas astronomers have had over the years to stop a comet or asteroid from hitting the Earth involved discovering it years, if not decades, in advance.”

He moved the cursor to another pull-down menu and clicked on “Connect Data Points.” Instantly, each dot was connected by a gently curving line that, when combined with the others, arched toward the Earth. Beside each line was a number.

Herc whistled and pointed to the number near the line that connected the first data point near Mars and the second. “See that number?” He tapped the screen. “It represents the speed of the asteroid. It shows it’s moving at 35 miles per second. That’s high for that far out. Something must have accelerated it. It couldn’t have simply fallen out of the Oort Cloud on its own with that kind of speed. Most comets reach speeds that range from 25 to 80 depending on how elliptical their orbits are and how close they get to the sun. Now look at the line between the second and third points. It shows 37. Between the third and fourth it’s 39. It’s accelerating as it gets closer to the Sun. You can see that by the time it gets to the last two data points it’s moving at approximately 50 miles per second. That’s 180,000 miles per hour. It’s traveling too fast to stay in orbit around the sun. If we weren’t in the way, it would eventually accelerate to a speed that would cause it to whip around the sun and leave the solar system forever. But since we apparently are in the way, let’s see what happens next with the program.”

Using the same pull down menu he selected “Project Orbit.” They all watched in fascination as another curved line sprang from the tenth dot and “collided” with the Earth.

“Now let’s see where on the Earth’s surface it’s going to hit and when,” Herc said. “Here we go.” He clicked on “Impact Point and Date.”

The image zoomed in on the slowly rotating Earth. From off screen the projected orbital line appeared and curved toward the planet’s surface. After half a rotation it stopped and the image zoomed in some more. They could now see the outlines of Africa and South America. In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, roughly halfway between the two continents, almost directly on the equator, a red dot pulsed with “January 16” next to it.

“Six weeks!” Claire whispered.

“Worst case!” Herc said glumly.

“What’d’ya mean, Herc?” DeAngelo asked.

“If it hit land, maybe humanity’s got a fighting chance,” Herc replied. “Not with a water impact.”

“I thought it would be better in the ocean,” DeAngelo countered. “Sort of absorb the impact. Because of all the water, not much of an explosion.”

“A water impact is far more catastrophic,” Ranjit interjected. “Hitting in the middle of the Atlantic will create tsunamis a thousand feet hight that will devastate the east coasts of North and South America within hours, along with the west coasts of Africa and Europe. Think of all the huge populations centers right on or near every ocean: New York, Miami, Rio, London. The waves will sweep tens of miles on shore everywhere; some places hundreds of miles. Florida will be scoured clean from coast to coast. The waves will keep right on going into all the other oceans as well. Wave height in Tokyo Bay could be more than a hundred feet; Honolulu more than that. Every building on Waikiki will be knocked flat. World-wide estimates of total dead just from wave action alone range toward two billion. Then, of course, there’s the billions of tons of water vapor that get thrown into the upper atmosphere along with all the chemicals that were in the water. Some scientists say the chemicals would create a drastic depletion of atmospheric ozone. This in turn would allow for a huge increase in UV radiation hitting the Earth’s surface. Essentially, everything that’s left immediately after the waves recede gets cooked.”

“Sounds like you’ve seen some classified reports,” Kay said to Ranjit.

“When I was assigned to Gnash’s team we had several meetings where we discussed worst-case scenarios. Once government astronomers had enough data points they confirmed what we just discovered here.”

“How long have they known, Ranjit?” Claire asked.

“We got confirmation in early June. The conspiracy got into full swing not long after that. Amateur astronomers like Frank Whalen, with their smaller telescopes and less sophisticated equipment, might have started seeing it in late August or maybe September. That’s when the warning e-mails started going out. Actually, it was easy to keep things under wraps for a while. The vast majority of those that got it were intimidated enough to do exactly as they were told. But we continued to monitor astronomy bulletins boards and forums, other social media and of course the CBAT website we’d taken over. It was easy to quickly shut down any new ‘exposures,’ as we called them.”

“We guessed government leaders thought that if no one knew what was about to happen they’d be better able to do something to deflect or destroy it,” Herc added.

“Without a doubt they still do,” Ranjit replied.

“Okay,” DeAngelo said. “I think I get it. They need everybody on the job to take out the asteroid. So why haven’t they done it? They’ve had months. It seems to me all you need to do is blow it up with a nuke or two. That shouldn’t be so hard.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Ranjit added. “Remember, the primary reason a nuclear bomb is so effective on the Earth is blast, thermal and radiation effects. In the vacuum of space there is no blast, so you’re left with thermal and radiation. Radiation’s not going to do much to a giant hunk of iron and nickel. And they aren’t sure what effect a thermal blast will have on an asteroid that’s covered with a thick layer of dust. You could try to plant a nuke directly on the surface and hope to literally blow it apart, but you’re still not going to vaporize it completely. Then instead of one very large rock coming your way maybe you’ve got 10 or 20 smaller ones, each of which would be devastating by itself. I suppose it’s the difference between getting shot by a rifle or shotgun. Either way, you’re dead.”

Claire again felt anger rising up inside her. “So they’ve gained all this valuable time by murdering dozens of people! Just what have they done to protect us?!”

Ranjit frowned and shook his head. “Quite honestly, not much. As you might expect, there’s been a lot of political posturing, bickering and in-fighting among the 53 industrialized nations who signed the treaty. Some want to nuke it, regardless of the shotgun effect. Some wanted to plant rocket motors on it and sort of nudge it away from us. Others wanted to use giant mirrors to heat its surface which would generate super-hot geysers that would eventually cause some tiny change in its trajectory. Along with these there are about seven or eight other technologies that scientists think might work—eventually. That in a nutshell is the problem with virtually all of them. You need a lot of time to literally get them off the ground and to the asteroid—years at least—and you still don’t know how long it might take for them to move the asteroid off its collision course with us. We’ve got a whole lot less time than that.”

“It sounds like they’re not going to resolve anything, anytime soon,” Kay said bleakly.