Nemesis (16 page)

“But there were counterarguments,” Webb reminded him. “For example the lack of rocks spalling off along the trajectory, and the coincidence with the Beta Taurid comet swarm. And with a small change in the assumed trajectory they could accommodate a comet.”

Shafer asked, “What do the spectra say about the Earth-crossers?”

“There are hardly any available. They’re too faint.”

“Okay,” said Noordhof, resuming his place at the head of the conference table. “From what you people are saying it seems to me that I can come to an immediate decision. There’s too much at stake here to take chances. We have to invent something that will work whatever Nemesis is made of.”

“We could play with all sorts of deflection scenarios,”
Judy said. “Solar sails, laser propulsion, kinetic energy impactors and so on. Either they take far too long to develop or they can’t deflect in the time available. Only nuclear weapons stand a chance, but as you’ve seen they could give us a cluster of debris or maybe even—if Nemesis turns out to be an old comet—a blanket of dust and a cosmic winter.”

“Hell,” said Sacheverell, “even a pure rock asteroid would give us that after it fried us.”

Noordhof put his hands on top of his head. “Am I going mad here? You are telling me the following: One, you will have to deflect Nemesis at less than a metre a second or it will break up and shower us with fragments. Two, you will have to deflect it at more than ten metres a second or it will hit us.”

“Depending on how far out it is,” Shafer said.

“And you can’t even guess that?” the Colonel asked.

“How can we?” Judy raised her hands. “We need to discover the thing.”

“Which brings me to Three. You have no hope of finding it on any timescale likely to be useful.”

“Pending discovery, we could adopt a hundred-day guideline for interception,” suggested Judy.

McNally was in pain again. “This hundred days you keep bugging me with . . .”

Noordhof reminded them: “It’s not the hundred days. The White House, in their infinite wisdom, have given us until Friday night. And this is Tuesday night, and so far you people have come up with zilch.”

The
Salem Witch
screamed as she hurtled along the runway, her headlights picking up only snow rushing out from a point in the dark, and her wheels throwing arcs of slush high in the air. The screaming faded as the little executive jet slowed to a crawl. The pilot taxied bumpily along to a slipway and turned, slipping the Gulfstream in between the parked jumbos and 707s; an inconspicuous dwarf amongst the giants flying the flags of all the world.

They were in a dark corner of Dulles International Airport.

Human forms flickered in silhouette beyond more dazzling headlights. Three men stepped down from the aircraft. Two were in uniform; the third man, a civilian, was clutching a shiny new briefcase to his chest. A sudden gust caught the leading officer’s hat and he cursed briefly as he snatched it back from the bitter wind.

Traffic was light and the black Lincoln Continental took them fast and skilfully into town. The driver wore a naval uniform. There was no conversation. Along Wisconsin Avenue the car slowed, turned and halted, its headlights illuminating a wrought iron double gate straddled by a metal spider eight feet wide. The spider’s legs were white with snow. A second car, which had followed them discreetly from the airport, drove on. They waited while a camera appraised them from atop a gatepost. Then there was a metallic click, the
spider split quietly into two halves and the car sighed on to the inner approach road. They drove through a grove of white-laden trees, lit up by red, white and blue spotlights, and effectively shielding the CIA Director’s home from curious eyes and laser microphones.

The avenue curved round to the back of a large, dark house and stopped at the door of a conservatory, lit up from within and throwing an orange glow into the surrounding woods. The three men climbed wearily out of the car, which drove off, its tyres scrunching over the snow. The leading officer opened a glass door and they were met with a surge of hot, foetid air. They walked, single file, along a narrow paved path taking them through dense jungle foliage, past a tinkling fountain and over a small bridge. Colourful fish with long diaphanous fins swam in the pond below. There was a strong smell of narcissus. A slice of Guatemala, preserved in the Washington winter.

There was a sandy, cactus-strewn clearing in the jungle and an elderly man, wearing an oversized grey pullover, was sitting at a circular table, smoking a pipe. He waved them towards white garden chairs around the table. A moth was throwing a giant frantic shadow on the table as it circled to its doom around the light overhead.

The Director’s wife came out with a tray of iced tea and biscuits. She had long blonde hair and the slim, elegant frame mandatory for the Washington hostess. The civilian, Sacheverell, guessed she was about fifteen years younger than her husband. She could have been on the cover of
Vogue
, he thought, about twenty years ago.

A breast brushed lightly over his shoulder as she leaned over him with the tray; the light physical contact tingled his nerves. She said, “Don’t forget your tablets, honeypie.” The Director growled and Sacheverell watched her slim form disappear through the French windows. The moth sizzled briefly overhead.

Sacheverell took stock of the evening’s company. There
was Honeypie, alias Richard Heilbron, the Director of the CIA, tapping out his pipe on an ashtray and looking like a professor in some provincial university. There was Samuel B. Hooper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a small, burly, white-haired man who looked as if he had been born radiating authority. And his companion, the gaunt, self-effacing Colonel Wallis who, with his combat crew a few hours earlier, had been tossed in a fire and grilled like the moth.

“Gentlemen, welcome,” said Heilbron. “How was your Martian Scenario, Sam?”

“A catastrophe. Foggy here manages a threat assessment conference with NMCC and Offutt, they deduce that there’s a blast coming from Mexico, and then they’re dead. There was no counterstrike, no nothing.”

“You got nothing away? Not even a Trident?”

“Not even a frigging rowing boat. If the Russians have pulled this off . . .”

“As you know we’re due to brief the President at twenty-one hundred. I understand we’ll be in the East Wing theatre and I’ve had your movie set up there, Doctor Sacheverell. What I want to do is go over the CIA evidence with you in advance.”

“Rich,” said Hooper, “I still think this is the most crack-brained tale I ever heard. I hope I’m about to hear some damned hard evidence.”

“What you’re about to hear, Sam, is guesswork. Open the folders in front of you, gentlemen. Look at the top two pages. Now this is a translation of a conversation in Russian intercepted by Menwith Hill a couple of weeks ago. It’s an exchange between the cosmonauts aboard Phobos Five and their mission control in Tyuratam.”

“Phobos Five?”

“Is a deep space probe which the Russian Republic launched six months ago with three men aboard. Their declared intention is to head for Mars, get into a low parking
orbit, launch a couple of probes and come back in one piece. It’s a two-year round trip. Ever since the days when there was a Soviet Union we’ve known they would try for a manned landing on Mars early in the millennium and this looks like a prelude. It all fits nicely.”

The declaration of a nice fit, Sacheverell thought, came with a hint of world-weary scepticism.

Heilbron nodded towards a small cassette tape recorder on the table. “In this tape the cosmonauts are one week out. Three point three million kilometres away. Speed of light is three hundred thousand kilometres a second. Listen, and try to follow the transcript.”

There was a lot of static. Every few seconds a metallic bleep cut through the sound. Then a voice, speaking in Russian. Putting their weariness aside, Sacheverell and the officers followed the script intently:

00.17.27 GROUND CONTROL
. Phobos, this is ground control at 173 hours Ground Elapsed Time. We have readings that the charge in cell 7 is fluctuating. Will you check this please? (Long pause.)

00.18.01 COSMONAUT
. Phobos. We’re all asleep here. (Background noise.) Control, this is Stepanov. I can report that cell 7 has no malfunction that we know of. All our readings are, ah, normal.

00.18.12 GC
. We may have a telemetry malfunction. As a precaution will you go through the check routine on page 71 of the manual? (Long pause).

00.18.48 COSMONAUT
. (Expletive.) If you insist. Ah—a moment—(garbled conversation)—Vyssotsky tells me he checked the fuel cells this morning, while I was asleep. He says there were no problems.

00.19.00 GC
. Thank you, Toivo Stepanov. I have a (garbled) display now. It says we have a minor telemetry problem here on the ground. You can go back into hibernation. What is that horrible noise? (Long pause.)

00.19.30 COSMONAUT
. Vyssotsky is singing.

00.19.36 GC
. Glad to hear you’re all happy. We await your systems report at 175 hours GET. Ground control out.

Heilbron rewound the tape. Hooper picked a winged insect out of his tea and flicked it into the shadows. He said: “It’s a bit late for quiz games, Rich.”

Wallis said: “The guy on board answered pretty damn smart.”

Sacheverell, who had also noticed the fact, looked at the colonel with respect. He said: “Distance is 3.3 million kilometres. With a speed of light of three hundred thousand kilometres a second, that gives a round trip, from the question asked at Tyuratam to the answer intercepted at Menwith Hill, of twenty-two seconds. It fits with all the pauses except the last one.”

“I can see we’re in smart company tonight,” Heilbron said. “Excellent. We can use all the brains we can get on this one. Yes Sacheverell, all the pauses except the last one. What is that horrible noise? Then there’s a
nineteen
-second delay and the reply, ‘Vyssotsky is singing.’ ”

“Meaning?” Wallis asked.

“Now hold on, Heilbron,” General Hooper interrupted. “Are you trying to tell me the cosmonaut answered the question before he got it?”

“Precisely.”

“Christ, Sam, maybe Menwith just screwed up their tapes.”

“Negative. We’ve checked out the technical side.”

“What’s your conclusion, Mister Heilbron?”

“Patience, Colonel Wallis, there’s more, much more. We hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the Phobos launch until then, you understand. Plenty of stuff on tape etcetera but processing it wasn’t a high priority. The timing hiatus had been picked up by one of my bright young geniuses, a guy by the name of Pal. So I put him in charge of a small team, a sort of
Operation Phobos. They found this—listen. This is from a conversation three days later. I haven’t bothered with a transcript. Listen to the timing pulses.” They listened to the high-pitched, frightened bat, coming between the deep Slavic tones of the man in the spaceship. Heilbron replayed it several times. The military men shook their heads. Sacheverell frowned.

“It’s impure,” he said. “Structured.” He was beginning to feel light-headed, whether from tiredness or the narcotic effect of the scented narcissus he couldn’t tell.

Heilbron nodded encouragingly. “Another Brownie point for our young friend. Now here’s the same timing pulse slowed down ten thousand times.” He wound the tape on, missed the start, wound it back again and then played it. Sacheverell felt the hair on the back of his neck prickling as the clandestine message came over, a clear, Morse-like, intelligent signal spreading out from the circle of light, through the Guatemalan jungle, over the big lawn and into the dark woods beyond. Heilbron let it run a minute and then stopped it. He said:

“They’ve slipped in a burst transmission. It goes on for hours. I’ve had my best people on it for a week, fifth-generation machines trying to talk to it. It even beat the NSA’s Cray T3D at Fort Meade.” Sacheverell recalled that more mathematicians were employed at the National Security Association’s Maryland headquarters than anywhere else on Earth. Heilbron went on: “The consensus now is that it’s some sort of one-way encryption system, unbreakable unless you have the key. And the conversation is phoney—the voice people tell me the acoustics aren’t quite right or something. What’s up there on Phobos Five is a tape recorder. They’re playing some sort of charade, ground control asking questions in anticipation of the answers on the tape. Only the tape carries messages and the guy on the ground mistimed, just once.”

“What are you telling us? That the Soyuz is unmanned?” Hooper asked.

“Three cosmonauts climbed on board. We took pictures.”

“Jesus, Rich,” said the Chairman, JCS, in exasperation. “First you tell us some machine on the spacecraft is answering pre-set questions, then you say there are people on board. Why don’t they just do their own talking instead of playing an answering machine?”

“Because they’re not there any more.”

Hooper gave the CIA chief a sceptical stare. “They jumped out?”

Heilbron said, “Take a look at Exhibit B.” There was a rustle as envelopes, about a foot square, were opened. Sacheverell, baffled, helped himself to more iced tea. The CIA Director produced a small red pill from a packet and swallowed it with his tea.

“Like I said,” Heilbron continued, “nobody was paying much attention to Phobos at the time and the pictures you’re going to see were just filed away at first. Look at the first one. This came from the French. It’s an unclassified Spot picture. What you’re looking at is the Baikonur cosmodrome. The scale’s about a hundred miles. Aral Sea’s off the picture to the left. The river”—a thin blue ribbon wandered left to right across the picture, passing through a city—“is the Sar-Daya.”

“What’s the town?” Wallis asked.

“The former Leninsk. It’s a hundred miles east of the Aral Sea. Following the Red Army takeover, the whole region has been closed again to Westerners. Leninsk is one of the new science cities: cinemas, culture palaces, sports stadiums and so on. They’ve built it on to Tyuratam old town—that’s the darker colouring on the left.”