Deception Point (10 page)

“Marjorie,” the President said, standing to welcome her into the Oval Office. “What can I do for you?” He did not offer her a seat. The typical social graces did not apply to women like Marjorie Tench. If Tench wanted a seat, she would damn well take one.

“I see you set the staff briefing for four o’clock this afternoon.” Her voice was raspy from cigarettes. “Excellent.”

Tench paced a moment, and Herney sensed the intricate cogs of her mind turning over and over. He was grateful. Marjorie Tench was one of the select few on the President’s staff who was fully aware of the NASA discovery, and her political savvy was helping the President plan his strategy.

“This CNN debate today at one o’clock,” Tench said, coughing. “Who are we sending to spar with Sexton?”

Herney smiled. “A junior campaign spokesperson.” The political tactic of frustrating the “hunter” by never sending him any big game was as old as debates themselves.

“I have a better idea,” Tench said, her barren eyes finding his. “Let me take the spot myself.”

Zach Herney’s head shot up. “You?”
What the hell is she thinking?
“Marjorie, you don’t do media spots. Besides, it’s a midday cable show. If I send my senior adviser, what kind of message does that send? It makes us look like we’re panicking.”

“Exactly.”

Herney studied her. Whatever convoluted scheme Tench was hatching, there was no way in hell Herney would permit her to appear on CNN. Anyone who had ever laid eyes on Marjorie Tench knew there was a reason she worked
behind
the scenes. Tench was a frightful-looking woman—not the kind of face a President wanted delivering the White House message.

“I am taking this CNN debate,” she repeated. This time she was not asking.

“Marjorie,” the President maneuvered, feeling uneasy now, “Sexton’s campaign will obviously claim your presence on
CNN is proof the White House is running scared. Sending out our big guns early makes us look desperate.”

The woman gave a quiet nod and lit a cigarette. “The more desperate we look, the better.”

For the next sixty seconds, Marjorie Tench outlined why the President would be sending her to the CNN debate instead of some lowly campaign staffer. When Tench was finished, the President could only stare in amazement.

Once again, Marjorie Tench had proven herself a political genius.

T
he Milne Ice Shelf is the largest solid ice floe in the Northern Hemisphere. Located above the Eighty-second Parallel on the northernmost coast of Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic, the Milne Ice Shelf is four miles wide and reaches thicknesses of over three hundred feet.

Now, as Rachel climbed into the Plexiglas enclosure atop the ice tractor, she was grateful for the extra parka and gloves waiting for her on her seat, as well as the heat pouring out of the tractor’s vents. Outside, on the ice runway, the F-14’s engines roared, and the plane began taxiing away.

Rachel looked up in alarm. “He’s leaving?”

Her new host climbed into the tractor, nodding. “Only science personnel and immediate NASA support team members are allowed on-site.”

As the F-14 tore off into the sunless sky, Rachel felt suddenly marooned.

“We’ll be taking the IceRover from here,” the man said. “The administrator is waiting.”

Rachel gazed out at the silvery path of ice before them and tried to imagine what the hell the administrator of NASA was doing up here.

“Hold on,” the NASA man shouted, working some levers. With a grinding growl, the machine rotated ninety degrees in place like a treaded army tank. It was now facing the high wall of a snow berm.

Rachel looked at the steep incline and felt a ripple of fear.
Surely he doesn’t intend to—

“Rock and roll!” The driver popped the clutch, and the craft accelerated directly toward the slope. Rachel let out a muffled cry and held on. As they hit the incline, the spiked treads tore into the snow, and the contraption began to climb. Rachel was certain they would tip over backward, but the cabin remained surprisingly horizontal as the treads clawed up the slope. When the huge machine heaved up onto the crest of the berm, the driver brought it to a stop and beamed at his white-knuckled passenger. “Try
that
in an SUV! We took the shock-system design from the Mars Pathfinder and popped it on this baby! Worked like a charm.”

Rachel gave a wan nod. “Neat.”

Sitting now atop the snow berm, Rachel looked out at the inconceivable view. One more large berm stood before them, and then the undulations stopped abruptly. Beyond, the ice smoothed into a glistening expanse that was inclined ever so slightly. The moonlit sheet of ice stretched out into the distance, where it eventually narrowed and snaked up into the mountains.

“That’s the Milne Glacier,” the driver said, pointing up into the mountains. “Starts up there and flows down into this wide delta that we’re sitting on now.”

The driver gunned the engine again, and Rachel held on as the craft accelerated down the steep face. At the bottom, they clawed across another ice river and rocketed up the next berm. Mounting the crest and quickly skimming down the far side, they slid out onto a smooth sheet of ice and started crunching across the glacier.

“How far?” Rachel saw nothing but ice in front of them.

“About two miles ahead.”

Rachel thought it seemed far. The wind outside pounded the IceRover in relentless gusts, rattling the Plexiglas as if trying to hurl them back toward the sea.

“That’s the katabatic wind,” the driver yelled. “Get used to it!” He explained that this area had a permanent offshore gale called the katabatic—Greek for flowing downhill. The relentless wind was apparently the product of heavy, cold air “flowing” down the glacial face like a raging river downhill. “This is the only place on earth,” the driver added, laughing, “where hell actually freezes over!”

Several minutes later, Rachel began to see a hazy shape in the distance in front of them—the silhouette of an enormous white dome emerging from the ice. Rachel rubbed her eyes.
What in the world . . . ?

“Big
Eskimos up here, eh?” the man joked.

Rachel tried to make sense of the structure. It looked like a scaled-down Houston Astrodome.

“NASA put it up a week and a half ago,” he said. “Multistage inflatable plexipolysorbate. Inflate the pieces, affix them to one another, connect the whole thing to the ice with pitons and wires. Looks like an enclosed big top tent, but it’s actually the NASA prototype for the portable habitat we hope to use on Mars someday. We call it a ‘habisphere.’ “

“Habisphere?”

“Yeah, get it? Because it’s not a
whole
sphere, it’s only
habi
sphere.”

Rachel smiled and stared out at the bizarre building now looming closer on the glacial plain. “And because NASA hasn’t gone to Mars yet, you guys decided to have a big sleepover out here instead?”

The man laughed. “Actually, I would have preferred Tahiti, but fate pretty much decided the location.”

Rachel gazed uncertainly up at the edifice. The off-white shell was a ghostly contour against a dark sky. As the IceRover neared the structure, it ground to a stop at a small door on the side of the dome, which was now opening. Light from inside spilled out onto the snow. A figure stepped out. He was a bulky giant wearing a black fleece pullover that amplified his size and made him look like a bear. He moved toward the IceRover.

Rachel had no doubt who the huge man was: Lawrence Ekstrom, administrator of NASA.

The driver gave a solacing grin. “Don’t let his size fool you. The guy’s a pussycat.”

More like a tiger,
Rachel thought, well acquainted with Ekstrom’s reputation for biting the heads off those who stood in the way of his dreams.

When Rachel climbed down from the IceRover, the wind almost blew her over. She wrapped the coat around herself and moved toward the dome.

The NASA administrator met her halfway, extending a huge gloved paw. “Ms. Sexton. Thank you for coming.”

Rachel nodded uncertainly and shouted over the howling wind. “Frankly, sir, I’m not sure I had much choice.”

•   •   •

A thousand meters farther up the glacier, Delta-One gazed through infrared binoculars and watched as the administrator of NASA ushered Rachel Sexton into the dome.

N
ASA administrator Lawrence Ekstrom was a giant of a man, ruddy and gruff, like an angry Norse god. His prickly blond hair was cropped military short above a furrowed brow, and his bulbous nose was spidered with veins. At the moment, his stony eyes drooped with the weight of countless sleepless nights. An influential aerospace strategist and operations adviser at the Pentagon before his appointment to NASA, Ekstrom had a reputation for surliness matched only by his incontestable dedication to whatever mission was at hand.

As Rachel Sexton followed Lawrence Ekstrom into the habisphere, she found herself walking through an eerie, translucent maze of hallways. The labyrinthine network appeared to have been fashioned by hanging sheets of opaque plastic across tautly strung wires. The floor of the maze was nonexistent—a sheet of solid ice, carpeted with strips of rubber
matting for traction. They passed a rudimentary living area lined with cots and chemical toilets.

Thankfully, the air in the habisphere was warm, albeit heavy with the mingled potpourri of indistinguishable smells that accompany humans in tight quarters. Somewhere a generator droned, apparently the source of the electricity that powered the bare bulbs hanging from draped extension cords in the hallway.

“Ms. Sexton,” Ekstrom grunted, guiding her briskly toward some unknown destination. “Let me be candid with you right from the start.” His tone conveyed anything but pleasure to have Rachel as his guest. “You are here because the
President
wants you here. Zach Herney is a personal friend of mine and a faithful NASA supporter. I respect him. I owe him. And I trust him. I do not question his direct orders, even when I resent them. Just so there is no confusion, be aware that I do not share the President’s enthusiasm for involving you in this matter.”

Rachel could only stare.
I traveled three thousand miles for this kind of hospitality?
This guy was no Martha Stewart. “With all due respect,” she fired back, “I am
also
under presidential orders. I have not been told my purpose here. I made this trip on good faith.”

“Fine,” Ekstrom said. “Then I will speak bluntly.”

“You’ve made a damn good start.”

Rachel’s tough response seemed to jolt the administrator. His stride slowed a moment, his eyes clearing as he studied her. Then, like a snake uncoiling, he heaved a long sigh and picked up the pace.

“Understand,” Ekstrom began, “that you are here on a classified NASA project against my better judgment. Not only are you a representative of the NRO, whose director enjoys dishonoring NASA personnel as loose-lipped children, but you are the daughter of the man who has made it his personal mission to destroy my agency. This should be NASA’s hour in the sun; my men and women have endured a lot of criticism lately and deserve this moment of glory. However, due to a torrent of skepticism spearheaded by
your
father, NASA finds itself in a political situation where my hardworking personnel
are forced to share the spotlight with a handful of random civilian scientists and the daughter of the man who is trying to destroy us.”

I am not my father,
Rachel wanted to shout, but this was hardly the moment to debate politics with the head of NASA. “I did not come here for the spotlight, sir.”

Ekstrom glared. “You may find you have no alternative.”

The comment took her by surprise. Although President Herney had said nothing specific about her assisting him in any sort of “public” way, William Pickering had certainly aired his suspicions that Rachel might become a political pawn. “I’d like to know what I’m doing here,” Rachel demanded.

“You and me both. I do not have that information.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The President asked me to brief you fully on our discovery the moment you arrived. Whatever role he wants you to play in this circus is between you and him.”

“He told me your Earth Observation System had made a discovery.”

Ekstrom glanced sidelong at her. “How familiar are you with the EOS project?”

“EOS is a constellation of five NASA satellites which scrutinize the earth in different ways—ocean mapping, geologic fault analyses, polar ice-melt observation, location of fossil fuel reserves—”

“Fine,” Ekstrom said, sounding unimpressed. “So you’re aware of the newest addition to the EOS constellation? It’s called PODS.”

Rachel nodded. The Polar Orbiting Density Scanner (PODS) was designed to help measure the effects of global warming. “As I understand it, PODS measures the thickness and hardness of the polar ice cap?”

“In effect, yes. It uses spectral band technology to take composite density scans of large regions and find softness anomalies in the ice—slush spots, internal melting, large fissures—indicators of global warming.”

Rachel was familiar with composite density scanning. It was like a subterranean ultrasound. NRO satellites had used similar technology to search for subsurface density variants in Eastern
Europe and locate mass burial sites, which confirmed for the President that ethnic cleansing was indeed going on.

“Two weeks ago,” Ekstrom said, “PODS passed over this ice shelf and spotted a density anomaly that looked nothing like anything we’d expected to see. Two hundred feet beneath the surface, perfectly embedded in a matrix of solid ice, PODS saw what looked like an amorphous globule about ten feet in diameter.”

“A water pocket?” Rachel asked.

“No. Not liquid. Strangely, this anomaly was
harder
than the ice surrounding it.”

Rachel paused. “So . . . it’s a boulder or something?”

Ekstrom nodded. “Essentially.”

Rachel waited for the punch line. It never came.
I’m here because NASA found a big rock in the ice?