The Orion Protocol (9 page)

14

January 30/Atlanta, Georgia

The next day, at a dead-end lot in one of Atlanta’s sprawling suburbs, he stood and watched as former President Jimmy Carter banged away at the frame of a two-story house with a claw-head hammer, hanging Sheetrock for Habitats for Humanity.

The young intern who had met Sokoff at the airport said something to Carter, who just nodded and then finished knocking home the last nail before belting the hammer and wiping his hands on his overalls.

Turning toward him, Carter smiled and looked so fundamentally happy in that moment that Sandy felt a pang of remorse for bothering him.

But if “Jimmy,” as he was called at the worksite, was feeling bothered, it did not show on his beaming octogenarian face. Motioning Sokoff toward a Dodge pickup parked out front, he stolidly led the way.

“Come on and step into my office.”

Sandy followed, mindful of not getting mud on his boots as he crossed the unlandscaped yard. Climbing up into the cab of the 4 × 4, he slammed closed the passenger-side door.

“Mr. President, we appreciate this very much.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Sokoff.” Jimmy’s eyes twinkled as they shook hands. “What can I do for you?”

“It’s about Project Orion, sir.”

Carter’s cheerful demeanor faded slightly to a pensive smile as he turned over the truck engine and revved it a couple of times.

“Well, now. Are they about to test it?”

“A final test has been authorized, sir. The President asked me to provide some deep background before he takes any further action. But I’ve been encountering a lot of . . . well, reticence to discuss. I was hoping you might be able to help me not make a fool of myself.”

The former Democratic President studied Sandy for a moment as if wondering what else he already knew and how frank he might be.

“Of course,” he said, “but I think you better buckle up.”

Carter grinned, adjusting his own seat belt, and then gunned the shiny Dodge truck out of the cul-de-sac and off to what Sokoff would later remember as the best beef brisket and hot links he’d had east of Louisiana and a top-fiver among the most extraordinary conversations he would never be allowed to share with his wife, Juana, back home in Austin.

It wasn’t until three hours later, while he was waiting in the VIP lounge at the Atlanta hub, that a new plan began to suggest itself to the President’s counsel about how to complete his task.

15

Little Cosmograd, Ukraine

Dr. Sergei Sergeivich Berenkov, senior scientist, kept a closer eye than usual on the data stream from the photon laser. He knew the crucial parameters of Project Orion by heart. He had, in fact, written them himself, but project managers always got so hysterical before a test.

Of course, this was not just another computer simulation. This was it.

Through the glass walls in front of him, American aerospace giant TRW’s Orion laser cannon loomed in all of its forged-titanium glory. The danger inherent in firing the six-story-tall chemical/nuclear device was a given: they could all be incinerated in a blink, shadows burned into the ground. Not an atom or a particle identifiable as a project manager or a Sergei Berenkov would even be left to wonder what went wrong.

Berenkov shrugged off the risk with his usual fatalism.

So, why worry?
he thought, pretending to concentrate ferociously on his computer screen.

Setting aside the chance for catastrophe, the principal fear in the Little Cosmograd lab outside the Ukrainian capital was about their “employment future” becoming an oxymoron. The plain fact was, if the Orion test worked they had a future. If it didn’t, they probably didn’t. A loudspeaker came to distorted life.

“Stations for pretest. We are calling pretest stations.”

White-coated technicians hurried anxiously past Berenkov’s workstation. He straightened the tie he was wearing for the occasion underneath
the clean but shopworn lab coat that his wife, Ilyena, had laundered for him the night before. He owned only the one and she had a hard time getting it away from him long enough to wash it.

Delayed paychecks, stalled projects, physicists moonlighting as cabdrivers and waiters: to be a Russian scientist at the dawn of the twenty-first century was to be condemned to a not-so-genteel poverty. But at least the former dictatorship of the proletariat was also no longer a police state.

“Project managers, please report to the test director.”

Exercising the newly acquired freedom of speech—“We are free to speak and they are free to ignore us”—Berenkov complained openly these days about the remnants of the former Yeltsin kleptocracy, the greedy oligarchs snapping up national resources at fire-sale prices, and the continuing abject neglect of Russian science. His colleagues would nod and ruefully agree with him about rampant corruption and Mafia entrepreneurs run amok. They listened to Berenkov’s witheringly critical, often hilarious rants against the Duma leadership in Moscow, laughed at the painful truths, and then dubbed him with the nickname “Mr. Grumpy.”

“Test programmers, take your stations for the duration of the test. Security, please clear the chamber.”

Wishing desperately for a smoke, Mr. Grumpy stayed put at his station and sipped tepid tea instead, unconsciously avoiding the familiar chip in the ceramic cup as his eyes wandered to a dark blank space on the wall behind him.

A proud group photo had hung there, with many old friends and colleagues standing in front of a Titan-class rocket engine: Russia’s part in a multinational space effort to study Mars in the ‘90’s. Launching and then losing control of the plutonium-powered spacecraft with its hundreds of millions of dollars in international experiments had marked the nadir of the Russian space program.

Delivering their key contributions to the International Space Station years late and millions over budget had not redeemed Russian space science, either. So, to Berenkov and everyone else, it was obvious: the success of the Orion test was absolutely crucial.

“Recalibrate and reset your instruments for Primary Alpha.”

He had already recalibrated, but he did it again. Listening to voices around him, he smiled: the murmured litany of the final checklist sounded like an Orthodox church full of penitents petitioning the God of Physics for mercy.

“Project Orion. Primary Alpha testing. Prepare for countdown.”

Glancing up at the observation platform where former KGB politicos huddled nervously with U.S. military and aerospace VIPs, Berenkov also reflected on how, in the Church of Space Science, the parishioners made such strange bedfellows.

Soviet space weapons work countering the Americans’ SDI, the so-called Star Wars program, had made him proud during the Gorbachev years. He’d felt as if he was “defending the Motherland” against President Ronald Reagan, that charismatic cowboy actor, and the reckless arms buildup of the West. By the time Reagan proposed sharing Star Wars technology with the Soviets in Helsinki, Gorbachev already knew the game was up: the Russians were too broke to go on.

Emerging from long years of post-perestroika depression, they were now in a new, more hopeful era, though with the U.S. aerospace industry largely funding the Russian side of joint laser defense research, it all seemed a bit surreal. Was he now defending the Motherland for TRW?

“Project Orion Primary Alpha testing in minus five minutes.”

An alarm began to pulse and the tension around him rose perceptibly.

And so it begins
, he thought. Berenkov saw the countdown numbers appear in a window on his new IBM PC, a nice thing: he didn’t have to look up to follow the rolling count.

The new CPUs they all had now were a gratifying improvement, with Russian-language software and blazingly fast Pentium upgrades. Of course, in the old Soviet days they had gone into space on a slide rule and a stopwatch, a fact he brought up to his computer-mad younger colleagues at every opportunity.

“Elegant and sufficient to the day,” he would say as they shook their heads and rolled their eyes. “Those days were truly heroic, a time of greatness.”

“Primary Test Alpha. Initiation in minus ninety seconds.”

The senior scientist glanced through the wall of tempered glass at the huge, imposing laser weapon. An insistent bell heralded the opening of automated sections of the lab’s domed articulated roofing, irising wide to the night sky. Berenkov noticed that he seemed to be the only one interested in what might be a last look up at the stars.

“Primary Alpha Test. Initiation in minus sixty seconds.”

With the verbal count under way, the entire facility became eerily quiet, heads bowed over each piece of the streaming status data in digital meditation.

“Minus . . . thirty . . . twenty-nine . . . twenty-eight . . . twenty-seven . . .”

Above them large monitors displayed various views from geosynchronous satellites and the U.S. Space Shuttle Atlantis. Cosmonauts manning cameras aboard the ISS Alpha could be heard locking down their videos and chatting.

“Minus ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . .”

Berenkov and the others around him now donned dark glasses, as the project director’s voice came over the loudspeaker.

“Project Orion. Initiating Primary Alpha Test.”

In an underground lead-lined core, a controlled nuclear explosion telegraphed a low rumble through the floor and then the fission flash of a hundred Hiroshimas was directed and transmuted through the multistory titanium weapon just fifty yards away.

If Berenkov had looked up, he would have seen how the entire airspace up and out through the open dome had now been replaced by a spectacular rod of laser light, one hundred feet in diameter and brighter than the sun.

How quiet it is
, Berenkov thought, fighting the urge to steal a peek at the blinding energy column thrusting out into space, its giga-trillions of electrons per second streaming in lockstep alignment.

“Sixty percent and stable . . .”

But the senior scientist stayed riveted to the fluctuating readings on his monitor. Everything was remaining within parameters, but his eyes played tricks on him and he found himself hallucinating tiny alarming changes. It was excruciating.

“We are at seventy-five percent and stable . . .”

He began to hear excited yelps and cheers, which he presumed were coming from the Americans on the Atlantis and the cosmonauts and Chinese taiko-nauts on board Space Station Alpha.

So far, so good.

On the monitor, Berenkov could see how the laser looked from orbit; this magnificent beacon beaming out from the Earth, all the way out as far the eye could see into the solar system.

If some extraterrestrial beings were watching this event, what would they make of it? he wondered. An impressive human achievement? A bold statement of an emerging species arriving at a new threshold of knowledge? A wake-up call?

“We are at nominal target volume, ninety percent and stable . . .”

Each nanosecond seemed like an hour of doubt and fear, the smell of his own suppressed terror sweating through Berenkov’s undershirt. If something went bad at this point it would likely happen far too fast to retrieve it. The Russian scientist realized that the last thing he ever saw in this lifetime might be a tiny little sine-wave spike on his nice new American PC.

“Sixty seconds at ninety percent and stable . . .”

But it was holding. Orion was holding.

Berenkov heard the exclamations of his colleagues as the reality of their achievement began to sink in.

“Two minutes at ninety percent and stable. Going to one hundred percent . . .”

If focused on the Moon, the Orion laser weapon would melt the surface silica into molten glass, burning a hole the size of a football field a half-mile deep. If it targeted the Clark Belt, where the world’s key military and civilian satellites orbited, a nation’s communications could be vaporized in half a heartbeat.

“We are at one hundred percent and holding.”

Project Orion was working.

Berenkov thanked God, in whom he did not believe, and then shivered involuntarily as he imagined this same awesome power directed downward from space at the great cities of the Earth. The potential for
holocaust that this would add to mankind’s already planet-wasting nuclear and biological arsenals was suddenly palpable.

“Project Orion. Preshutdown and counting ten—nine—eight—seven—six—five—four . . .”

And then it was over.

The dazzling rod of light disappeared, leaving bars of after-colors swimming on everyone’s retinas. Cheers of triumph and waves of applause erupted around the room. Berenkov blinked and took off his cheap sunglasses. Looking down at his hands, he found them slick with sweat. The hair on his arms and on the back of his neck was sticking up.

Well
, he thought,
we lived. That was something
.

As loudspeaker voices chanted through the postshutdown procedures, a party atmosphere began to blossom. On the observation deck, the generals, politicians, and businessmen were popping open French champagne. Everywhere people hugged one another, crying and laughing in relief.

Orion was a success. A resounding success.

Berenkov blinked and then abandoned his workstation, his clipboard still clenched unconsciously in his hand. He could feel colleagues clapping him on the back, pressing little paper cups of export-quality vodka into his hand, but he waved them off.

“Sergei Sergeivich!”

“Aw, Mr. Grumpy. You must drink a toast!”

Pushing his way through the knots of celebration, Berenkov lurched out of the control room and down the empty linoleum-covered corridor.

The implications of his work, the potential nightmare of horrific applications, hadn’t really hit him full force until this moment. His mind flashed to the ‘40’s, to Fermi and Oppenheimer and all the elite minds weaponizing the physics of fission; what ambivalence they had felt even in a time of world war.

Orion had begun long before the end of the Cold War and had continued now for decades since the Wall had come down, and the Americans had become our partners and allies. So who, then, was the enemy? Who except we ourselves and our will to destroy one another? Who, now that we are in bed with the enemy, is the enemy?

Stumbling into the chill and ill-kept men’s room, Dr. Sergei Sergeivich Berenkov was overwhelmed with dread and an inexpressible fear for the
future. Losing his grip on the clipboard holding the day’s test protocols, he heard it clatter to the floor.

We are all insane
, he thought.
We are . . . insane
.

The Cyrillic letters spelling out
PROJECT ORION
fell facedown into a small unmopped puddle of water, but he didn’t notice and would not have cared.

Mr. Grumpy was too busy at the washstand, throwing up.