Operation Damocles (3 page)

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 sides 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.

The small county fire and sheriff’s departments of Twentynine Palms were inundated by frantic callers demanding information. Half-dressed people milled in the streets, looking toward the Marine base and the rising pall of darkness that drifted on the high-altitude air currents, blotting out the stars and dimming the moon. Clusters of excited, gawking neighbors impeded authorities who were trying to reach and assess affected areas, repeatedly asking the same questions.

“Was it a plane crash?”

“Did the Marines explode a bomb?”

“I nearly bit my tongue off; I’m gonna sue somebody!”

“When will the power come back on?”

“My trailer house is tilted off its blocks, and the water pipes are broken. Everything I have will be ruined.”

Similar chaos erupted on the Marine base as bugle calls pierced the night and cursing marines hurriedly dressed for formation.

Except for a few portable units, emergency generators had to be jacked back onto concrete mounting pads before they could be started. In many cases, electrical distribution transformers and broken utility poles lay scattered along streets and highways like ninepins, and restoration of power to some areas would take days. The base and town were a pandemonium of activity as engineering and maintenance personnel in trucks and heavy equipment scattered over their respective areas of responsibility, tackling the highest priority problems first, trying to restore power and communications, and isolate broken water mains.

The flash was recorded by Defense Department Milstar satellites, NASA Observer and NOAA weather satellites over half the northern hemisphere. Seismic stations as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska, and as far west as the University of Hawaii recorded the thump of the solitary blow.

The Eidermann site had consisted of seventy or eighty abandoned buildings, mostly decaying, Quonset-type barracks, storehouses, workshops and hangars, and a cracked and weed-grown runway that was still occasionally used by Marine and National Guard personnel for “staging” exercises. The Eidermann post proper, including buildings, ammo bunkers, streets and utility works, and an old, rusting tank farm that had once stored aviation fuel, covered about ten square miles. It had lately served as an equipment storage depot for the California National Guard, and had been home to a couple of thousand pieces of moldering equipment—old “deuce-and-a-half” trucks, “water buffalo” trailers, World War II and Korean War howitzers, tanks, crates of shelter-halves, field tents and other miscellaneous gear. These items, along with the buildings, facilities, scrub brush, cactus and anything else aboveground, now comprised six thousand acres of smoldering ash.

The Marine Corps personnel and the invited city and county officials from Twentynine Palms who were picking over the area the following day, save for a few pieces of exposed underground piping, could not positively identify a single artifact. Molten metal from the armored tanks and equipment had exploded like pellets from a shotgun, to dot the area with solidified slag. Rubber, wood, cloth and paper had been vaporized without a trace. Concrete, glass and stone had exploded into fragments. The very ground itself, to a mean depth of half a meter, had exploded from the sudden thermal expansion, as the meager moisture in the desert soil flashed to steam. Clumps of shiny, vitrified sand covered the site. The result looked like the earth had been turned over by a gigantic garden tiller and scorched by flames, and all outlines of buildings and streets were gone.

###

Two days after the Eidermann incident, a Los Angeles television station came forward with a cassette tape which had been delivered the week before. They had thought the message on the tape to be from “just another nut” trying to attract attention. They received such things daily, ranging from UFO sightings and encounters with extraterrestrials to out-and-out threats of one kind or another.

The station manager had listened to the tape, and it had held his attention for a few minutes, at least until it began listing demands, whereupon he labeled it and tossed it into the junk drawer where they kept such threats and crank calls. They kept such items for a few months, just in case something happened and the police had a need for them as evidence. The mention of Twentynine Palms called the tape to the station manager’s mind, and he contacted the FBI.

The
San Francisco Chronicle
,
Washington Post
,
New York Times
and
Chicago Tribune
, among other newspapers and TV stations across the nation, now confirmed that they, too, had received copies of the tape. A few still had them. The FBI had taken possession of the Los Angeles tape, and five days after the Eidermann incident, the tape and the author of the message it contained were the subjects of an emergency congressional subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C. On the tape was what FBI voice analysis had determined to be the voice of a middle-aged, Caucasian male. Although he sounded calm, coherent and technically educated, what he threatened to do seemed impossible for a lone man, and probably beyond most nuclear powers in the world.

The hearing, currently in progress, was being chaired by Senator William Harford, Democrat from Delaware, and extant Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was closed to television cameras, but a dozen journalists, and three dozen people from military and federal agencies, crowded near the front of the large, oak-paneled hearing room, leaving most of the auditorium vacant.

A wine-red carpet with a kingly black-and-gold castellated pattern covered the floor and the dais. Matching swivel chairs of rich brown leatherette lined the facing sides of polished oak tables. The tables were ornately inlaid with obsidian. A center aisle divided the rows of tables, like a small theater.

Running the length of its periphery was a long, enclosed desk that faced the room. Built-in microphones marked the desk and tables at regularly spaced intervals on the dais, and along the first two rows of tables that faced the dais from the floor.

The Vice President of the United States, Joseph Miller, occupied a chair near one wall, behind and to one side of the dais where the congressional investigators sat, and quietly observed the participants of the hearing. Secretary of Defense Harold Tanner sat on his right, with CIA Director Casper Franklin, and FBI Director Jack Mota, sitting on his left. Senator Harford was flanked on both sides by Senator Roth, Democrat from South Carolina, and Senator Isley, Republican from Idaho.

Harford, in top form this morning, was known for his ability to bluster and rail with the best of them. He was a short, heavyset man, with a round, balding, bulldog head. His face was habitually red, supported at the collar by multiple chins, and his expression was usually down-turned. His ill temper and matching scowl were focused this morning on the military contingent in the front row.

“Well, Dr. Stickle, what the hell are we up against? Does the fruitcake on this tape really represent a power that has the capability to blow up an entire friggin’ military base, or is this just a cover-up for something your screwball organization did? If the military is trying to cover up some sort of accident, the Joint Chiefs are going to regret it. What the hell kind of weapon is this supposed to be, anyway?” He waggled the cassette tape at Stickle. “We already know there isn’t any residual radiation; that’s the first thing anybody thought about. If it wasn’t a nuke, what was it? It sounds to me like somebody had chemicals or explosives stored out there. Or maybe, just maybe, one of your harebrained, experimental weapons blew up in your faces.”

Tall and thin, wearing a gray three-piece suit and wire-framed glasses, Dr. Gene Stickle looked more like an accountant than a scientist. Despite his appearance, he was one of the leading experts in strategic missile systems in the world. He was the chief physicist of the Air Force Office of Science and Technology, and currently assigned to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.

He sat with another scientist and two colonels from the United States Air Force Space Command, at the nearest table facing the dais and the congressional panel. Stickle was the primary target of Senator Harford’s ire today, and to his credit, he responded with calm and deliberate speech.

“The destruction at Twentynine Palms was accomplished by a directed-energy weapon system in Earth orbit, Senator.”

An audible hush passed over the room. Silence reigned for a moment as the gravity of Stickles words sank in.

“You mean a laser weapon, out in space?” Harford was momentarily stunned.

“Yes. Or an advanced, particle-beam system.”

“Are you serious? How is that possible? A laser or particle beam diverges, spreads out, dissipates its energy in the atmosphere. I know that much from the Star Wars hearings I’ve sat on. It would take an energy plant the size of a mountain to produce a pulse with enough energy to start a grass fire, let alone wipe out an entire airfield.”

Harford’s bluster had momentarily gone, and he appeared genuinely confused and concerned. It seemed almost as if he were trying to reason Stickle out of some preposterous stand.

“It was not a single pulse, Senator Harford,” continued Stickle, calmly. “That’s the one thing we do know about it, and the weapon is all the more formidable because of it.

“An Air Force satellite was looking at the southern California area when the base was hit. The satellite is designed to image radiant energy in the IR—infrared—spectrum, and couldn’t image the beam itself, but it could image the impact point, or thermal bloom, as the instantaneous temperatures of things on the ground suddenly increased.”

Stickle stood up and began to pace the aisle as he talked, his left hand in his pocket, his right hand casually emphasizing his words. “The beam is a CW—continuous wave—beam, which makes us think it is a laser or laserlike form of energy. Particle beam weapons are, by nature of their power requirements, at least in our experience, pulsed energy packets. Relatively low-powered generators charge up energy storage capacitors, and the capacitors release the stored energy in a short-duration burst. This is necessary to obtain momentary energy levels in a contained plasma sufficient to create a destructive pulse. The same is true of lasers to some extent. Only low-power devices can usually operate in the CW mode. We will know more when we have the results of the material analyses that are being done.”

Stickle stopped pacing, and stared meditatively at his fingers for a moment, gathering his thoughts. The room was silent except for the hushed sounds of breathing, and the muffled stutter of weight being shifted in vinyl-covered chairseats. All faces looked expectantly at Stickle, waiting for him to proceed. He resumed pacing.

“This weapon sweeps the target area with a sharply focused beam,” he said, finally raising his eyes to meet Harford’s frowning, confused countenance. “It traces a path back and forth across the target, like a child coloring in a picture with crayons, until the target area has been covered,” Stickle illustrated a zigzag, painting motion in the air with his free hand.

“A television set or computer monitor recreates images in much the same way. An electron beam sweeps across the CRT screen from side-to-side, working its way down the screen from top to bottom in a zigzag path. It only takes a fraction of a second, about fifteen milliseconds—fifteen thousandths of a second—for the beam to traverse the screen from top to bottom, but to human senses, it appears as an instantaneous event. One doesn’t see the trace, only the completed image.