Impact (38 page)

Chaudry said, “What utter nonsense. I have no recollection of that.”

“That was just a week ago.”

“I won’t stand for these ridiculous accusations.”

Ford held up the slip with the password on it. “You could have asked me for this. But you didn’t. You
stole
it. Why?”

“I told you, it was for security reasons. You just left it in your coat pocket.”

Leung said, “You asked me repeatedly, that night: ‘
What did Freeman tell you about the gamma rays
?’ ” She paused, then pointed a trembling finger at him. “You . . . are a
murderer
.”

“Pakistan?” said Lockwood, finally speaking up. “But that’s a backward country. What in hell would they want with information like this? They have no space program, no science, nothing.”

“I beg to differ,” said Chaudry, his voice icy. “We are the country of A. Q. Khan, one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. We have the bomb, long-range missiles, uranium enrichment. But most importantly, we have God on our side. Everything that happens is Fate, which is another word for God’s plan. The die was cast long ago. Those who think they can affect the true course of things are delusional. Einstein called it Block Time. We call it Fate. Who, I ask you, is more powerful than Allah?”

Ford turned to one of the duty officers standing dumbly in the hall. “I think you better take this man into custody.”

Nobody moved. The duty guard seemed frozen into place. All that could be heard was Chaudry’s hard breathing.

Mickelson removed his sidearm and pointed it at Chaudry. “You heard the man. Cuff him.”

Chaudry held his hands out, crossed his wrists. His face twisted into a smile. “Please.”

As the cuffs went on, Chaudry went on quietly, “It doesn’t matter now. You’re finished as a country and you know it. We are pure and we have God’s favor. In the long run, we will prevail. Mark my words: the future belongs to Pakistan. We will defeat India, God willing, and usher in an era of Pakistani science that will dazzle the world.”

Tucking the gun back into his rumpled uniform, Mickelson spoke sharply to the duty officer. “Get him out of here.” He turned to the group. “We’ve got ninety minutes before we brief the president, so pull yourselves together.”

Ford said, “Now that we’ve exposed the mole, I can give you the location of the machine. Because it’s not on Mars at all.”

The group, shaken up, fell silent.

“It’s on Deimos.”

88

Jackie kept the boat in a slow circle in the lee behind Devil’s Limb while Abbey and her father examined it for damage. He leaned into the main hatch, scrutinizing the engine compartment, while Abbey held a light for him. She could see black, oily bilgewater sloshing around in the well; the boat was leaking.

“How bad is it?”

Straw emerged, straightened up, and wiped his hands on a paper towel. He was soaked and his light brown hair was plastered to his forehead. He had a black eye and a cut on his cheekbone. “There’re some nasty cracks in the hull that could get worse in a heavy sea. Nothing the bilge pumps can’t handle now.”

He came back up the companionway stairs into the pilothouse. Jackie had tuned the VHF to the marine weather channel, and the computerized voice droned out the ugly statistics: wave heights to fifteen feet, winds thirty knots gusting to sixty, heavy rain, a tidal surge five feet higher than mean, small craft warnings . . . The storm was going to get worse before it got better.

Jackie stood at the helm, peering at the paper chart spread on the dashboard tray. “I think we should go around Sheep Island and take the inside passage to Rockland.”

Straw shook his head. “Put us in a beam sea. We’d be better off making a straight shot across the bay—in a following sea.”

A flash of lightning lit up the sky, followed by a boom. Abbey caught a glimpse of the wreckage of the other boat, now just a tangled mass of shattered fiberglass being pounded into nothing by the relentless breakers on the reef.

“We could always head to Vinalhaven,” said Jackie. “That would put us in a heading sea.”

“That’s a possibility.”

Abbey finally said, “We’re not going to Rockland or Vinalhaven.”

Her father turned to her. “What do you mean?”

She faced him and Jackie. “We’ve got something more important to do.”

They stared at her.

“This is going to sound crazy but Jackie will back me up. Last year, the U.S. put a satellite in orbit around Mars. The goal was to map the planet and its moons. One of the things it did was take pictures of Mars’s moon, Deimos, with ground-penetrating radar.”

“Abbey, please, this is
not
the time—”

“
Listen
to me, Dad! The radar woke up something on Deimos. A very ancient, very dangerous alien machine. Probably a weapon.”

“Of all the crazy—”

“
Dad!
”

He fell silent.

“An
alien
weapon. Which fired on the Earth. That meteor we saw a few months ago was the first shot. That show on the Moon was the second shot.”

She briefly explained how she and Jackie went looking for the meteorite and found the hole, how she’d met Wyman Ford, and what they had discovered.

The expression on her father’s face suddenly changed from disbelief to skepticism. He looked at her intently. “And?”

“That shot at the Moon was a demonstration. A warning.”

“So what’s this thing you want to do?” asked Jackie.

A gust of wind buffeted the pilothouse, spray hitting the windows. “I know this sounds crazy, but I think we can stop it.”

Jackie looked incredulous. “Three wet people huddled in a boat in a storm off the coast of Maine, without cell reception, are gonna save the world? Are you nuts?”

“I have an idea.”

“Oh no, not one of your ideas.” Jackie groaned.

“You know the Earth Station, that big white bubble on Crow Island? Remember going there on field trips in high school? Inside that bubble there’s a dish that AT&T built to send telephone calls to Europe. Now it’s used for satellite communications, uplink and downlink of television shows, Internet and cell phone calls, shit like that.”

“Well?” Jackie swiped her wet hair out of her face.

“We point it at Deimos and use it to send that motherfucker a message.”

Jackie stared at Abbey. “Like what kind of message? ‘My big brother’s gonna beat you up’?”

“I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”

89

Jackie laughed. “You really are crazy, you know that? We’ll be lucky just to get our ass into port in this storm. But you want us to cross Muscongus Bay to send a message? Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”

“We have no idea when the weapon might fire again. And something tells me the next shot might be the end.”

“How’s that alien machine gonna know English?”

“It’s highly advanced and it’s been listening to our radio chatter for at least two months now, since it was awakened.”

“If it’s so advanced, call it on the VHF.”

“Come on, Jackie, be serious. Even if it could distinguish our radio call from a billion other signals, it wouldn’t take it as official. What’s required is a big, strong, powerful signal hitting it with a clear message. Something that looks like an official communication from the Earth.”

Her father turned to her. “Why can’t the government deal with it?”

“You trust the
government
to handle this? First of all, they’re in denial. Either they’ll hold endless meetings or they’ll take a potshot at it. Either way, we’re dead. On top of that, I think the CIA, among others, have been trying to kill us. Even Ford was afraid of them. We’re on our own—
and we must do something, now.
”

“Getting to Crow means traversing the Ripp Island tidal bore and then three miles of open water,” said her father. “We’ll never make it in this storm.”

“We’ve
got
to make it.”

“And once we’re there,” Jackie continued, “we’re going to waltz in there and say, ‘Hey, can we borrow your Earth Station to make a call to aliens on Mars?’ ”

“We’ll force them, if need be.”

“With what? A boat hook?”

Abbey stared at her. “Jackie, you don’t get it, do you?
The Earth is under attack
. We may be the only ones who know it.”

“Hell with this,” said Jackie. “Let’s take a vote.” She glanced at Straw. “What do you say? I’m for going to Vinalhaven.”

Abbey looked at her father, his pale eyes red, his beard dripping water. He stared back at her. “Abbey, you sure about this?”

“Not completely.”

“It’s more like an educated guess, then?”

“Yes.”

“It sounds crazy.”

“I know it does. But it isn’t. Please, Dad, trust me—just this once.”

He was silent for a long time, and then he nodded and turned to Jackie. “We’re going to Crow Island. Jackie, I want you as spotter. Abbey, you navigate. I’ll take the helm.”

90

Without a moment’s hesitation, Straw thrust the throttle forward, spun the helm, and headed the boat into the storm. “Hold on,” he said.

As soon as they came out of the lee of Devil’s Limb, the boat was enveloped in the roar of breaking water, sheets of rain slamming into the windows, spume flying through the air. The waves mounted up, violent chop riding bigger waves which themselves rode on deep and terrifying swells that marched along in a regular cadence, their breaking crests swept back by the hurricane-force winds.

The wind had shifted from the east and now the waves were coming on their stern quarter, pushing the boat forward and sideways. Her father fought the screw-turn motion of it, speeding up and slowing down. Each comber rose under the boat, throwing its nose forward, steeper and steeper, as her father gunned the engine and tried to keep the breaking water from pushing the stern under. As soon as the wave passed, the boat would tip back, bow rising into the air, and it would subside into the trough of the following wave. The air would fall into eerie silence for a moment in the lee of the trough, and then a wave would tilt them up again, lifting them into the gale. Under her father’s expert seamanship the boat seemed to fall into a rhythm, its predictability bringing a small sense of reassurance. Abbey watched their progress across the bay, and finally, when they entered the protected waters of the Muscle Ridge channel, the sea subsided dramatically.

“Abbey,” said her father, “check the forward bilge. I’m getting almost continuous bilge pump action here.”

“Right.”

She climbed down the stairs into the cabin and undogged the hatch, peering in with a flashlight. She could see water sloshing about. Probing with the light, she saw the water was well above the automatic bilge pump switch.

Leaning in farther, she shone the beam into the murky water, then reached down into it, feeling along the inside curve of the hull. Her fingers located a crack and she could feel the flow of water coming in. It wasn’t a wide crack but it was long, and what was worse, the corkscrew motion of the boat was moving the two pieces on either side, grinding them against each other, slowly but surely opening it up. The water level was increasing in the bilge, despite the pump working full time.

She came back up. “The water’s coming in faster than the pump can pump it out,” she said.

“You and Jackie form a bucket brigade.”

Abbey pulled a plastic bucket out from under the sink. Jackie positioned herself at the cabin door, while Abbey dipped it into the bilge and handed it to Jackie, who tossed the water overboard. It was exhausting, cramped work. The bilgewater had engine oil and diesel fuel in it, and soon they were both covered and stinking with it. But they seemed to have turned the corner: slowly but surely the water level was dropping. Soon the long crack came into view.

“Get me some of that waterproof marine gaffing tape,” Abbey said.

Jackie handed her the roll and she pulled off a strip. Leaning into the rocking bilge, stinking with fuel and oil, Abbey wiped the fiberglass clean with a rag. Then she taped the crack, horizontally and vertically, adding several layers and pressing down. It seemed to hold. The bilge pump, going full bore, now was able to draw down the water on its own, without the help of their bucket brigade.

Jackie called down to her, “Abbey, your father wants you on deck. We’re heading into the rip.”

Abbey climbed up the stairs into the pilothouse. They were out of the channel and the seas were mounting up again. Ahead, Abbey could see a stretch of whitecaps where the rip current began that gave Ripp Island its name, churning along the northern reefs. It was a classic cross tide, the flow running against the prevailing wind and seas, creating massive standing waves, whirl pools, and a brutal chop.

“Hang on,” said her father, increasing speed. As the boat hit the current, it slowed down and her father continued to throttle up to counteract the current. The sea was pushing the stern and the current wanted to turn the
Marea II
by the bow, giving the boat a fierce and unpredictable motion which her father struggled to control, throwing the wheel from one side to the other, heavy chop bursting over the bow and washing hard across the foredeck, while swells battered the stern, sending water boiling in through the scuppers. The boat shuddered under the twisting strain, the booming sound of water hammering the hull in two directions.

Silently, her father remained at the wheel, the faint light from the electronics bathing his tense face in a ghastly greenish glow, his muscular arms working the wheel. It was a losing battle. The water erupting into the stern couldn’t clear out of the scuppers, each wave breaking over the foredeck piling more water into the stern cockpit.

“Jesus, I think we’re swamping,” Jackie said, heading for the stern with a bucket.

“Get back in here!” Straw said. “You’ll be washed overboard!”

The engine roared, straining against the increase in weight, the boat shuddering and struggling in the sea. Abbey could hear the grinding and scraping of the cracked hull. It didn’t sound good.