The Orion Plan (3 page)

Joe shivered. It was no hallucination. He stared at the hole in the treetops, but it didn't fade away. He wanted to hide, to crawl back inside his box. God was reaching for him, but not to comfort him or raise him up to heaven. The Lord was going to punish him for his terrible sins.

His breath came fast, in painful rasps. He clawed his hands through the mud, groping for something he could use to defend himself—a shard of glass, a heavy rock. Then he coughed and the woods swirled around him again, and when they finally came to rest he realized how stupid he was. There was no Lord in heaven. He'd stopped believing in God more than twenty years ago, when he was still in college, long before he came to New York. His faith was the first of many things he'd tossed aside. And now that he'd given up so much—his job, his home, his family, his dignity—was he going to start believing in God again? No, that would be ridiculous. He was a drunk but not a fool.

After a few minutes his breathing slowed. His head was clearer now and he'd stopped shivering. He didn't believe in God, but what was that hole doing there? Joe craned his neck, eyeing the branches scattered across the ground. They formed a trail that led uphill, past the slab behind him and another outcrop above it. If something had truly come down from heaven—a fallen angel, a bolt of lightning, the fearsome hand of the Lord—maybe he'd see some sign of it at the end of the trail. It was probably a waste of time, but he didn't have any other pressing business to attend to. And Joe wanted to be sure. He
needed
to be sure.

He stood up, slowly and carefully. His head swam and his legs wobbled but he was all right. He wasn't too buzzed to take a little stroll. He lifted his right foot and climbed onto the slab, which was flat and smooth. Leaning forward, he trudged across the slanting rock and stepped into the mud on the other side. Finding his footing was tricky in the dark, but he could handle it. He'd learned how to navigate the woods during his first few weeks of sleeping there. That was just one of the many new skills he'd picked up.

Getting past the next outcrop was more difficult. This slab was ten feet high, so Joe had to clamber around it, digging his fingers into the cracks in the rock to pull himself up the slope. It was hazardous and exhausting and he had to stop a couple of times to catch his breath. Although he hated to admit it, he was in terrible shape, at least compared with his life before. In the old days he used to jog seven miles every morning. His wife thought it was crazy, but Joe had loved it: gliding through the quiet streets of Riverdale at five in the morning, watching the sun come up over the Bronx. Now he missed those mornings almost as much as he missed his daughter.

He finally got around the outcrop and stumbled into a clearing surrounded by oaks. The slope on this part of the hillside was gentle and the ground was muddy. In the middle of the clearing was a shallow pit, roughly circular and about ten feet wide. The wet ground at the bottom of the pit reflected the moonlight. Joe turned around, looking for the quarter moon, and saw it shining through the same hole in the treetops he'd noticed before. Startled, he stepped backward and tumbled into the pit.

He landed flat on his back. Once again the woods whirled around him and the nausea made him gag. He closed his eyes tight until everything stopped spinning. Then he opened them and saw a black sphere at the center of the pit, half-buried in the mud. It looked like a bowling ball but slightly bigger, about a foot across. Its top half shone in the moonlight.

It was less than a yard from Joe's face. He gaped at the thing—it was as black as coal and yet its surface gleamed as if it were polished. But what really alarmed him was that it seemed to be glowing. He could feel its heat on his cheeks. It was burning like a furnace.

Joe backed away from it, scrabbling on his hands and knees. He didn't stop until he was out of the pit, and then he lay there at the edge, staring at the thing in horror. It wasn't the hand of God. There was nothing heavenly about it. It was more like something from hell, black and smoldering. And yet it had fallen from the sky. It had ripped through the treetops and hit the ground so hard it made a ten-foot-wide crater. Joe remembered the deep thump that had awakened him, and suddenly it all made sense: he was looking at a meteor. Or maybe you were supposed to call it a
meteorite
. He'd taken a science class in college where they explained the difference between the two, but now he couldn't recall which was which.

But would a meteorite be so perfectly smooth and round? When Joe thought of meteorites he pictured rough, jagged rocks zooming through space. He racked his brain, trying to remember something useful from that long-ago science class. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that this thing wasn't a meteorite after all. It looked more metallic than rocklike. So maybe it was a satellite. Maybe it was a NASA space probe that had gone haywire and fallen out of its orbit and plummeted to the ground. Something like that had happened to a weather satellite a few years ago. Joe remembered reading about it in the newspaper.

He crept forward, leaning over the edge of the crater, and studied the object. There were no knobs or bolts or antennas extending from the sphere. He saw nothing written on its surface either—no “NASA,” no “USA”—although he'd have to wait for daylight to be sure. The absence of an antenna was puzzling, but Joe supposed it might've broken off when the object hit the tree branches. And it was also possible that this was some new kind of satellite that didn't even need an antenna. Maybe it was an ultra-advanced spy satellite, built by the army or the CIA to hunt down terrorists. That would explain why there was nothing written on it. If it was a spy satellite, they wouldn't want to advertise where it came from.

Joe spent another minute thinking over the possibilities, but in the end he decided it didn't matter. He needed to focus on what to do with the thing. If it was a satellite that fell from space, someone would come looking for it. Even if it was busted beyond repair, the people who owned it would want to know why it malfunctioned. And those people might be willing to pay a finder's fee to someone who could tell them where their satellite had landed. Joe wondered how much they'd pay—a thousand dollars? Ten thousand? The satellite was probably worth millions, so a ten thousand dollar fee didn't seem too outrageous.

He bit his lip and started opening and closing his hands. That was something Joe did whenever he got nervous or excited. He'd been broke and desperate for so long that the prospect of making some real money seemed too good to be true. He got to his feet and turned his head to the left and right, listening to the night noises and peering into the dark woods. So far he was the only one who knew about the satellite, but he wouldn't be alone for long. Dawn would break in an hour or so, and then the other homeless people on the hill would begin to stir. The early risers would come out of their boxes and slog across the park, heading for the soup kitchen on Dyckman Street or the Dunkin' Donuts on Broadway. There was a good chance that one of them would see all the fallen branches and find the crater, just as Joe had. And if one of the homeless people didn't find it, then one of the early-morning joggers or dog walkers surely would.

Joe wasn't going to let that happen. He stepped down into the crater and approached the sphere, holding his hands out so he could feel the heat coming off it. He couldn't pick it up—it was way too hot. But he could hide it until it cooled. It was already half-buried in the mud. He could bury the rest of it.

He crouched on the wet ground and dug both his hands into the mud, scooping out two fistfuls of it. Then he leaned over the sphere and dumped the mud on top of it. The mud sizzled when it hit the shiny black surface, but some of it stuck. Encouraged, Joe grabbed two more fistfuls and did the same thing. He did it again and again, getting into a regular rhythm of crouching and scooping.

It was tiring work, and he wished he had a shovel, but he made good progress. After ten minutes the sphere was entirely covered with mud. It still looked unnatural, though. The mound of wet earth jutted like a pimple from the center of the crater. To hide the thing better, Joe needed to fill in the whole pit, or at least make the ground a little more level. But that was going to take some serious effort. He decided to take a break first so he could catch his breath.

He wiped his muddy hands on his pants and stepped out of the crater. He could really use a cigarette now—or better yet, another bottle of Olde English 800—but he told himself to be patient. If his plan worked out, he would have plenty of money for celebrating. Just the anticipation of it was enough to give him a buzz. He spread his arms and took a deep breath and gazed down the hillside at the moonlit city below. For the first time in months he felt happy.

Because Joe was higher up the slope now, he could see more of the city. Beyond the apartment buildings of Inwood were the elevated tracks of the IRT 1 line—the subway that clattered above Tenth Avenue—and the municipal depot where dozens of city buses were parked for the night. And beyond the depot was the Harlem River, which separated Manhattan from the Bronx. Joe's eyes followed the river as it curved to the west, passing under the subway line and the Broadway Bridge. Then he turned to the north and stared at the heights of Riverdale, his old neighborhood.

His old apartment building stood on the other side of the Harlem River, less than a mile away. Joe supposed that was why he took up residence in Inwood Hill Park rather than any of the other homeless encampments in the city. He liked the fact that he was still near his daughter. He knew he couldn't visit her—his ex-wife had vowed to call the police if he ever came to their apartment again—but if there was an emergency he could dash across the Broadway Bridge and get there in fifteen minutes. Their building was the tallest in the neighborhood, more than twenty stories high, and Joe avoided looking at it during the day. He had the irrational fear that if he gazed at the building for too long, his daughter might spot him from her bedroom window. But at night he was hidden, so he could stare at his old home for as long as he wanted to.

Joe stared at it now. His happiness grew as he searched for his daughter's window, which was near the building's left edge and two floors down from the top. The window wasn't lit, of course—it was much too early—but he felt a powerful new hope as he gazed at the dark façade. His life was going to change for the better once he had ten thousand dollars in his pocket. He promised himself that he wouldn't be stupid and spend all the money on booze. He'd use some of it to rent an apartment and some to buy new clothes. He'd clean up his act and get his old job back. And then he'd return to his old building with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, and his daughter would race across the playground and leap into his arms.

He closed his eyes to savor the vision. Then he heard a shout and a burst of laughter and several husky voices speaking Spanish. He opened his eyes and turned around and saw half a dozen figures emerge from the woods. They were teenage boys in baggy pants and bandannas, tall, muscular, and grinning. They headed straight for him.

 

THREE

Emilio thought it was a firecracker. He stood at the edge of the park's soccer field, huddled with his homeboys in the Trinitarios, as the boom echoed across Inwood.

He looked over his shoulder and tried to figure out where the noise had come from. The park's big hill loomed over the field, less than a hundred yards away. In the moonlight it looked like a long, high wall. Emilio couldn't see anything but trees on the hillside, but he was sure the noise had come from there. Some stupid
pendejos
had probably lit a cherry bomb or an M-80 and thrown it into the woods.

His homeboys turned their heads too. Carlos smiled and yelled, “What the fuck?” and the four others laughed. They were sharing a blunt and a bottle of Ron Barceló rum and acting like a bunch of idiots. Emilio frowned—he never got drunk or high and wished his boys wouldn't either. At eighteen he was only a couple of years older than the others, but sometimes he felt like their fucking babysitter. He whistled to get their attention.

“
Cállate!
” he ordered. “Shut up a second so I can listen.” Then he turned back to the hillside and cocked his head.

They stopped laughing. For the most part, they respected Emilio. He'd shown them how to be Trinitarios, teaching them the gang signs and codes. They also knew about his connections to the O.T.'s, the Original Trinitarios who'd come over from the Dominican Republic twenty years ago and started the first gangs in Inwood and Washington Heights. So his homeboys kept their mouths shut while he listened for more noises coming from the hillside. He expected to hear distant laughter or shouting from the
pendejos
in the woods, but there was nothing.

Paco stepped away from the others and faced the hill, cocking his head like Emilio and listening just as intently. He was their enforcer, the second-in-command, chosen for the position because of his fighting skills. He was gangly and tall and imitated Emilio in every way, even wearing the same kinds of clothes—a pair of baggy jeans, a white sleeveless shirt, and a lime green Trinitarios bandanna. When Paco joined the gang, the imitation was his way of showing respect, but over the past few weeks Emilio had noticed a change in the boy's attitude. Paco was getting surly, always arguing. He didn't want to take orders anymore. He wanted to be in charge.

After a while he gave up listening and turned to Emilio. “Yo, I know who's up there on the hill. It's those Puerto Rican bitches, the Latin Kings. They're the ones who set off that
bomba.
”

Emilio narrowed his eyes. “How do you know?”

“I heard they were coming over from the Bronx. That's what everyone's saying.”

“Yeah? I haven't heard anyone say that.”