The Orion Protocol (36 page)

86

In high Earth orbit, the Orion array of mirror satellites had been computer-tweaked into perfect alignment.

With a sharp stab of white igniting it from below, the Shield was silently illuminated in the awful, perfect deafness of space, encircling the world for sixty seconds in a Fulleresque soccer ball pattern of laser light.

And then, by executive order of the President of United States, the test activation of the planetary defense system was over.

87

February 21/West Texas

It wasn’t bitter cold, but the temperature was low enough that they could see their breath. They had parked the rented Subaru Outback on a dark rural road miles from the highway, but big-rig headlights could still be seen navigating toward the diffuse glow in the distance that was Houston.

Clamping two mesh cables on the terminals of the SUV’s battery, Jake followed the shielded lines with his little halogen flashlight to a black electronic device that had been set up between two camp chairs. He checked the settings.

In one of the chairs, wrapped in a thick wool Navajo blanket, Angela sat holding a cigar box and looking up at the stars.

“You know what?”

“What?” Jake wiped his hands on his jeans.

“Sometimes I feel this odd little rush of panic. You know? And then these waves of longing for I don’t know what that just haven’t made any sense to me. But I think I just figured it out . . .”

“Is it about innocence?” Jake held the flashlight so he could see her face.

“Or maybe just simpler times.” Angela shielded her eyes with the back of her hand. “Or the illusion of simpler times. Y’know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do.”

Jake kissed her impulsively, then aimed the flash back down on the black box device. He could feel her smile without having to see it.

“You ready?”

“Good to go.”

Deaver then tripped a toggle switch, triggering six pencil-thin red lasers that shot up into the desert sky, forming a three-sided pyramid.

Out beyond the laser geometry, the belt stars of Orion and the winking yellow light of Mars seemed to swing above them in the small wind that had come up, a breeze carrying the smell of sage and mesquite.

A gibbous moon waxed huge on the horizon.

Augie had been cremated and buried with ceremonial honors at the Arlington National Cemetery. But when Jake asked as a favor that his sister allow part of his ashes to be brought back to West Texas, she had agreed that Augie would probably like that.

Angela looked at the moon, imagining the young Colonel Blake in his spacesuit at Sinus Medii with Earthrise reflected in his gold visor. She then opened the cigar box she’d been holding.

Inside, a small amount of ashes kept company with a few tiny pieces of bone that had refused to burn. Then, standing together, she and Jake each took a handful and looked out through the ruby laser projection now etching new geometries in the night air: pentagons, tetrahedrons, rhombuses.

“Well, hell.” Angela tossed the ashes into the lines of light and Deaver followed suit, transforming the gritty remains into the whirling carbon glitter of star dust, which is the beginning of all things.

“And good luck, Mr. Grotsky . . .”

“Wherever you are.”

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Although this book is a work of fiction, readers often ask how much of the story is true. And basically the answer is: “as much as possible” and “more than could be included.” Here are a few of the more intriguing facts I uncovered in my research.

1.
The Brookings Report
. Commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1958, it was submitted to Congress a year later. The purpose of this blue-ribbon study was to identify the potential consequences and dangers to mankind inherent in NASA’s proposed exploration of our solar system. In regard to the issue of revealing evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence to the public, the report cited a potential for unprecedented social, religious, and political chaos. Authored by Margaret Meade, among others, the report recommended that the government consider not disclosing such information.

2.
The Authority of the Department of Defense
. All exploration of space is officially considered by the U.S. government to be under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense, regardless of the NASA charter establishing the Space Agency as civilian. The Defense Department is also the primary client of the Space Shuttle program.

3.
The ET Exposure Act
. In 1968, the year before the Apollo program succeeded in putting a man on the Moon, Congress passed a little-known piece of legislation called the Extraterrestrial Exposure Act. It gave the head of NASA the right to indefinitely “quarantine” anyone exposed to extraterrestrial life or alien artifacts.
Only the President could overrule the NASA administrator’s judgment, and anyone quarantined had no right to a judicial hearing and no recourse beyond appealing to the President of the United States.

4.
The USA and the Moon, 1969–1975
. After six manned trips to the Moon, the Americans came home and never set foot there again.

5.
The Face on Mars
. It was first photographed by the Viking mission in 1976. The Face and “pyramidlike objects” found in the Cydonia region on Mars are aligned with planetary primes similar to the alignments of the oldest Pyramids found on the Giza Plateau in Egypt and at Teotihuacan in Mexico. Sir Arthur C. Clarke has called attention to striking symmetries in many monumental objects on the Martian surface, which suggest “manmade” rather than natural creation. NASA’s official position remains that these are all natural formations, that the symmetries suggesting the work of intelligent beings are coincidental, and that the Face and the “pyramids” are tricks of light and shadow.

6.
President Carter and the Vatican.
During his 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter revealed to a reporter from
Rolling Stone
magazine that he had twice seen UFOs when he was in the Navy and vowed to find out what the government knew about them if he was elected to office. Once President, Carter asked his inherited CIA chief, George Herbert Walker Bush, for the intelligence files on UFO phenomena. Bush declined, referring the new President to an obscure Select House subcommittee. A report was compiled and given to Carter by a woman working for that committee who had also attempted to obtain documents from the Vatican Archives in Rome concerning UFOs and extraterrestrial encounters going back hundreds of years. The Vatican declined to make this information available.

A senior counsel to the Jesuits who had been the White House’s unsuccessful go-between with the Vatican has since publicly acknowledged his effort and the subject matter.

7.
Space Weapons Technology
. During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan publicly offered Mikhail Gorbachev the U.S. research and technology for the Space Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, as a gift to the Russian people, and made public remarks about the future need for planetary defense. The Soviets declined the offer, proceeding to develop a photon laser cannon capable of striking targets in space. This work continues under various names in both countries, along with the development of so-called scalar weapons and other microwave beams adapted for military purposes and capable of intercepting targets at high altitude.

In a speech at the University of Georgia in 1997, Secretary of Defense William Cohen expressed concerns about terrorists having access to newly developed electromagnetic scalar beams capable of weaponizing weather and causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and even hurricanes.

In 1998, the Russians offered to put out a raging forest fire in Indonesia by creating an artificial hurricane, which they announced could be done from space. The Indonesians declined. Though this was reported in such major newspapers as the
Los Angeles Times
, there was no comment offered by the U.S. government.

8.
The Great Pyramid at Giza
. The Great Pyramid is aligned with Sirius, the brightest star in the Southern Hemisphere, and with the constellation Orion in a way that makes it a “planetary clock,” capable of measuring the precessional movement of the Earth. The three oldest Pyramids at Giza are geometrically aligned on the ground in the same precise relationship to one another as the three stars that make up the “belt” in the constellation we call Orion. These pyramids are no more than five thousand years old, but their orientation and alignments appear to reference an earlier time: 10,500
B.C.E.

9.
The Sphinx
. In 1995, American and British university scientists studied water damage on the monument that had been previously assumed to be caused by wind and sand. Their confirmation that the damage had been caused by water places the building of the
Sphinx at approximately 10,500
B.C.E.
, thousands of years before the existence of any known civilization considered capable of such a feat. This break with the theories of classical Egyptology has created an ongoing controversy. The Sphinx is oriented to the rising of the planet Mars and the word
Cairo
does
mean “Mars” in ancient Sumerian.

10.
The Billion-Dollar
Mars Observer
Mission, 1991–1993
. From the moment it was launched, the
Mars Observer
mission was dogged by controversy over the issue of reimaging the Cydonia region. It carried cameras with a fifty-times greater resolution capability than those of the Viking mission in 1976 and would easily have been able to settle the question of whether the Face or the so-called pyramids in the Cydonia region were natural rock formations or products of intelligence. NASA promised that the pictures would be taken. The entire imaging contract, however, had been taken away from the famous Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, and subbed out for the first time in NASA history to a private contractor. NASA was then no longer responsible for imaging priorities, no longer committed to any live broadcast of images from Mars, and the private contractor could delay the release of any photographs for up to eighteen months.

Mars Observer
performed flawlessly until forty-eight hours before it arrived at Mars, at which point it inexplicably “went dark” before any images could be transmitted back to Earth. It was officially declared lost. For years, NASA offered no explanation, and only recently confirmed rumors that the crucial radio link to the satellite had, against all established protocols, been accidentally turned off.

11.
The Red Planet
. The
Mars Global Surveyor
and
Mars Odyssey
satellites have confirmed that Mars did at one time have abundant water, a dense atmosphere, and a much warmer overall temperature, similar to Earth’s. According to NASA, the fossils present in the Martian asteroid ALH 84000 strongly suggest microbial life on
the planet appeared 3.5 billion years ago: 1 billion years before life is known to have appeared on™ Earth. This presents a potential time frame for the development of life, possibly intelligent life, on Mars that would give it a considerable head start on the Earth.

12.
The Last Ice Age
. Civilization is something that occurs between periods of glaciation. And the most recent such period ended abruptly about 12,500 years ago. The end of the Ice Age was marked by vast flooding, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and extreme temperature swings, which had devastating effects on life all over the planet, including mankind.

Ice-core samplings in Greenland and the Antarctic taken in the 1990s confirm rapid, catastrophic climate changes during this prehistoric time, resulting in the extinction of thousands of plant and animal species.

The impact of two huge Leonid meteors capable of causing crustal dislocation and continental shifting are among the prime suspects in the triggering of this extinction event. The Leonid group is a collection of asteroids and cometary bodies that follow a long but calculable Earth-crossing orbit around the sun. Egyptian astronomers were keenly aware of the danger this cyclical phenomenon posed to mankind over periods of thousands of years and followed it closely.

After just such an event, God-like beings called the Old Ones are said to have helped the indigenous people to rebuild, and gave them new arts, science, and architectural knowledge. And then they either “flew away across the water” or were chased away or killed. The same origin legend in different forms also appears in the oral traditions of the pyramid-building cultures of pre-Mayan Mexico, Central America, and Egypt.

13.
The USA and the Moon, 1995
. In 1995, the Defense Department sent an unmanned satellite to photograph the Moon with the latest imaging technology. This lunar mapping mission, dubbed Clementine, was the first known all-military planetary surveillance mission. Though aided by scientists borrowed from NASA, the
military acted outside the NASA charter, and the American public has no inherent rights to access the Clementine images.

Also in 1995, despite military security restrictions, a composite of leaked images from Clementine were posted on the World Wide Web. Within twenty-four hours these classified photos disappeared. Selected photographs have been subsequently published, but research-quality copies of all collected Clementine imaging are not available to the public.