The Orion Plan (2 page)

“Or maybe your radars are malfunctioning. Or you misinterpreted their signals.”

He stepped toward her, still grinning, cocky as hell. He stopped in front of her and leaned forward, as if he were about to tell her a secret. “Those radars at our Hawaii station? They're the best in the world. They're designed to tell the difference between a nuclear warhead and a decoy from four thousand miles away. I have a lot of confidence in them.”

Sarah scowled. She hated cocky men. “So you're saying your system's infallible? There's no chance at all you made a mistake?”

Hanson stopped smiling. He took a deep breath and looked Sarah in the eye. He seemed to be changing his strategy, trying for a less combative approach. “You're right, nothing's perfect. Maybe the radar is malfunctioning and maybe a killer asteroid is really coming toward us. But it's a moot point. We can't stop the rock anyway.”

“You could issue a warning to the local authorities, couldn't you? You—”

“No, that wouldn't do any good. There's not enough time to evacuate the impact zone.” Hanson shrugged. He seemed tired of arguing with her. He turned away from her and faced the three airmen. “Gentlemen, let's do our best to track this object. Just in case I'm wrong.”

The airmen swiftly returned to their terminals. They stared at their radar screens and typed new commands on their keyboards. The commands changed the display on the jumbo screen: the image of the western hemisphere was replaced by an enlarged view of North America. Sarah stood beside Hanson and focused on the screen, gazing over the heads of the airmen.

The blinking red dot was now less than fifteen hundred miles above the continent. In sixty seconds the asteroid would plow into the atmosphere, and then they'd see who was right. Sarah felt a mix of horror and guilt as she stared at the screen. For the past decade she'd devoted herself to identifying all the asteroids that posed a threat to Earth. Her Sky Survey team had detected thousands of near-Earth objects and carefully studied their orbits. But it was very difficult to detect the midsize asteroids, the ones between a hundred and five hundred feet wide. They were too small to be spotted by telescopes and yet large enough to blast through Earth's atmosphere. Sarah had struggled with the problem for years, trying to devise new instruments and techniques for observing and tracking these rocks. But now it was too late. All she could do was watch the thing plunge toward the ground.

After half a minute Sarah couldn't do that either. She turned away from the screen and looked at the floor instead. It seemed obscene that they were the only people on the planet who knew this was happening. She glanced at Hanson, who rocked back and forth on his heels as he watched the screen. He looked so calm, so unafraid. She couldn't understand it.

After another half minute the airman with the ugly glasses looked over his shoulder at the general. “The object has entered the atmosphere, sir,” he reported. “Air resistance is decreasing its velocity.”

The view on the screen enlarged again, and now the blinking red dot was less than a hundred miles above New Jersey. The radar signals grew fuzzy, thrown off by the violent turbulence of the object's passage through the atmosphere. Sarah pictured it in her mind's eye: the shock wave forming just below the rock, the phenomenal heat melting the surface of its lower half, the pressure building against the object as it plummeted toward the Earth. Despite her distaste for Hanson, she hoped to hell he was right. She said a silent prayer as she gazed at the blinking dot on the screen:
Disintegrate, you bastard. Explode into a million pieces before you get too close to the ground.

Then the dot disappeared. The jumbo screen showed the red line ending in midair above the Jersey coast. The airmen leaned close to their radar screens, studying the final signals.

General Hanson stepped forward. “What was its last position?” he asked his men. His voice was professional, emotionless. “At what altitude did you lose contact?”

Ugly Glasses tapped his keyboard. “I'm still checking, sir.”

“What's the problem?”

“The signals are a little confusing. I just need a minute.”

Hanson nodded. “All right. Carry on.” He took a step backward, returning to his place beside Sarah.

The waiting was unbearable. Sarah clenched her hands so tightly her fingernails dug into her palms. The general, meanwhile, folded his arms across his chest. Then he turned to Sarah and smiled at her again. “Before I forget, I want to tell you how much I admire your work.”

His comment threw her. Now, of all times, he wanted to engage in small talk? “What?”

“I've read the reports about your Sky Survey project. How you're cataloguing all the potentially hazardous asteroids. It's good work, important work.”

Sarah stared at him, dumbfounded. “Well, that's strange. Just a minute ago you said I didn't know what I was doing.”

“No, I didn't say that. Not at all.” He shook his head. “You've been extremely helpful tonight. In fact, I'm wondering if you and I can establish a stronger connection between NASA and Space Command. We should work together on contingency plans for asteroid threats. We'd all benefit from closer cooperation, don't you think?”

She couldn't tell how serious he was. Hanson was obviously smart, but he didn't seem so trustworthy. There was a good chance he was just flirting with her, just like the airmen. “Sure, that's a good idea,” she said. “But maybe we should find out what happened to
this
asteroid first?”

“Yes, absolutely. First things first.”

Hanson stepped forward again and gripped Ugly Glasses by the shoulder. “Okay, time's up. What do you have?”

The airman looked up from his radar screen. He seemed puzzled. “Sir, our last radar contact with the object was at an altitude of twenty-one miles over the town of South Amboy, New Jersey. There were no further contacts along its track, so it must've exploded at that altitude.”

“Ah, twenty-one miles.” Hanson let go of the boy's shoulder and looked at Sarah. He didn't grin, but he wasn't exactly hiding his satisfaction either. “I'll have to congratulate my staff for predicting it so well.” He turned back to the airman. “And did the radar detect any fragments from the explosion?”

“Yes, sir. And that's what made it so confusing.” The boy grimaced. His glasses had slid halfway down the bridge of his nose. “Most of the fragments were tiny, just specks of dust, but one piece was pretty big.”

Hanson frowned. “Define ‘pretty big.'”

“At least a foot wide, sir. But the weird thing is its trajectory after the explosion. The blast kicked it almost horizontally to the northeast. It traveled more than thirty miles in that direction before hitting the ground.”

Sarah's throat tightened. Even a foot-wide chunk could cause major damage if it struck the ground at high speed. She stepped toward the airman. “Can you show the radar track for that fragment?”

The boy looked frightened now. “I … I can draw a partial trajectory. Our radars couldn't track it after it dropped below two thousand feet, but—”

“Just show it.”

A moment later the airman drew a new path on the jumbo screen. This red line ran thirty-three miles northeast from South Amboy. It terminated at the northern tip of Manhattan.

 

TWO

Inwood Hill Park, New York City | June 20, 2016 | 4:19
A.M
. Eastern Daylight Time

Joe was dreaming of his daughter when the noise woke him. In the dream he chased Annabelle across the playground near their apartment building in Riverdale. This was a memory from the old days, before Joe's wife kicked him out of the apartment. Annabelle raced past the playground's swings and seesaws, her long brown ponytail bouncing against her back, her neon-pink T-shirt flapping at her waist. Joe couldn't keep up with her, she was too fast. He yelled, “Slow down!” but she kept running.

Then the noise hit him, a deep, ground-shaking
thump
that echoed in his chest. At the same time, something mashed against his nose. In pain, Joe opened his eyes, thinking that someone had punched him in the face while he slept, but all he saw was blackness. For a moment he thought he was gone—dead, buried, finally out of his misery. He felt a roiling, nauseating fear in his stomach, so strong it made him gag. But after a couple of seconds of sickness and terror he realized why he couldn't see anything: the box he was sleeping in had collapsed. He was looking up at a three-foot-by-five-foot rectangle of cardboard—the top of the box—which had smacked against his face and now hung, hopelessly crumpled, an inch above his eyes.

Joe didn't move a muscle, didn't make a sound. Although his mind was still fuzzy from all the malt liquor he'd drunk, one thing was clear: the box wouldn't have hit his face so hard if it had collapsed on its own. Someone must've smashed it. Because Inwood Hill Park was deserted at night—it was mostly woods—the teenagers from the neighborhood liked to party there during the summer, and they entertained themselves by tormenting the homeless people who slept on the wooded hillsides. One of those kids—no, probably two or three or four of them—had just pounded the hell out of Joe's box. He couldn't see or hear them but they probably stood just a few feet away, stifling their laughter and waiting for his reaction. They wanted to watch him struggle, to hear him yell and curse them. And the more he yelled, the more they'd harass him. So the best strategy was to lie there inside the crumpled box and play dead. It was no fun to pick on a homeless guy if he didn't squirm.

Blood leaked from Joe's nostrils and covered the stubble on his upper lip, but he didn't dare to wipe it off. He was afraid to even breathe. Lifting his head ever so slowly, he gazed down the length of his body. His sneakers, their toes wrapped in duct tape, stuck out of the box and rested on the mud of the hillside. The legs of his pants were patched with duct tape too. Even though it was a warm night, Joe had fallen asleep in his jacket—it was a New York Yankees jacket, the only decent piece of clothing he had left—and now his undershirt was damp with sweat. The stench inside the box was so foul it made him gag again, and before he could stop himself he let out a groan, loud enough for anyone to hear.
Now you've gone and done it,
he thought.
Now they're gonna beat the crap out of you.

Joe rolled on his side and covered his head with his hands, waiting for the kids to start pummeling the box. But the blows never came. He listened carefully and heard only a car alarm whining in the distance. He waited another minute until the alarm cut off. Then he turned onto his stomach and crawled out of the box.

He was alone. His box sat in a hidden rut on the hillside, between the base of an oak tree and a massive slab of rock jutting out of the mud. With another groan, Joe pushed himself up to a sitting position, his back against the slab. He felt dizzy and nauseous, and the dark woods whirled around him. He didn't own a watch anymore, but he guessed it was three or four in the morning. He'd passed out only a couple of hours ago, and the buzz in his head was still pretty strong.

After several seconds the whirling stopped. He brushed his hair to the side—it was greasy and way too long—and saw the silhouettes of the treetops against the night sky. He was perched on the steep slope that overlooked the park's soccer fields. Beyond the fields were the apartment buildings on Payson Avenue, half a mile away. A quarter moon hung above them, shining on their roofs, but all their windows were dark. It was the deepest part of the night in the emptiest corner of Manhattan. Joe wished he had a cigarette, but his pockets were empty.

He heard a siren, very faint. It was a long way off, probably on Dyckman Street or Broadway. The police sometimes came into the park and rousted all the homeless people they could find, but the cops mostly stuck to the asphalt pathways. They weren't going to risk breaking their ankles in the woods, so the park was a good spot for sleeping, at least during the summer. Joe knew half a dozen men and two or three women who were somewhere on the same hillside, each curled in a cardboard box or snoring under a pile of blankets and plastic tarp. Some of them were crazy and all of them were thieves. If you left anything on the hillside during the day—even just an empty water bottle—it would be gone by the time you came back.

The thought of water made Joe thirsty. He had a dim memory of carrying a forty-ounce bottle of Olde English 800 up the hillside earlier that night, but he didn't see it anywhere nearby. Although he'd probably downed the malt liquor before passing out, there might be some dregs at the bottom. He turned to his box, wondering if he'd hidden the bottle inside, and his heart sank. It had been a truly excellent refrigerator box, new and sturdy—he'd found it behind the appliance store on 207th Street—but now it was a flattened wreck. Its cardboard sides were bent and bowed so much they'd never stand up straight again. The cause of the disaster lay on top of the ruined box: a fair-sized tree branch, at least four feet long and two inches thick. It must've fallen from the oak. Joe shook his head as he stared at it. He was lucky to get away with just a bloody nose. That thing could've killed him.

As he looked around he saw an even bigger branch lying in the mud a few yards away. Leaves were scattered across the slab he was leaning against, and in the light from the quarter moon he saw more severed branches farther up the slope. The hillside was littered with them. Joe thought that maybe a storm had blown through the park and knocked down the branches, but there wasn't even a breath of wind now. He tilted his head up, looking for storm clouds in the night sky, and that's when he noticed it: a ragged hole in the treetops, marked by branches that had been torn off or were hanging by a thread. It was so eerie Joe wondered if he was hallucinating. It looked like God Almighty Himself had stretched his hand down from heaven and plunged it through the trees.