Trader of secrets

Chapter Fifty-Five

Part of DARPA’s mission, along with the Department of Defense, was to anticipate new weapon systems and to study and explore them before they could be developed and used by adversaries against the United States. It was for this reason that the Defense Department drew NASA into the web on Project Thor.

If they could prove that the concept of using Near-Earth Objects as weapons was feasible, the plan was to publish the findings. Once it was known to the world, it would become infinitely more difficult for any nation to use asteroids in a preemptive strike against a foe and to hide their actions behind the blind of nature.

Any unexplained catastrophic impact would be followed by a thorough investigation, and the possibility of devastating reprisals would act as a deterrent once more. At least that was the theory. Now they had created a monster. Worse, they had lost control of it.

The information Leffort traded away gave up mastery over the two iron-core asteroids. More damaging was the fact that this transfer of knowledge had been grasped without difficulty by the talent pool of scientists assembled at Coba. Where these people had obtained their training Leffort did not know, possibly Europe, perhaps the United States. It really didn’t matter. The fact remained, they knew their business. They could easily build on what they had been given.

So far they had managed to park and conceal the two asteroids at the lunar Lagrange point without any real assistance from Leffort. The problem he had now was to keep them away as he prepared the final targeting software for the asteroid’s final trajectory around the moon.

Leffort was not at all comfortable doing this. The problem was that the targeting software was not his product. It had been developed by Raji and his crew, none of whom were present. The software was designed to deal with fine-tuning as to deflection, the timing and angle of entry into the earth’s atmosphere, which would be critical for targeting.

Because it was not part of his turf at NASA, Leffort had not spent much time familiarizing himself with many of the aspects of final targeting. His specialty was the selection, harvesting, and macro movements of the asteroids in space. When he turned his back on Raji in Paris and allowed him to be killed, Leffort didn’t realize the box he was putting himself in. Raji’s death suited his purposes because Fareed’s portion of the payment would be wired into Leffort’s account. But now he had to perform. If anything went wrong, Leffort knew he would be held responsible. They would kill him in a heartbeat, or send the Mexican in to do it.

Over protests by several of the other scientists, Leffort cleared everyone out of the small control room. He wanted the others out so that he could do the final preparations and make the last lunar course corrections to escape the Lagrange point without a crowd looking over his shoulder. He promised that he would review everything with them in fine detail when he was done.

The last thing Leffort needed was people who knew what they were seeing if the telemetry readings on the monitors revealed that something had gone wrong.

He locked the door to the room and went to work. Leffort reached into his pants pocket and took out a plastic pill container. He popped the cap and took two of the pills, a double dose of slow-release amphetamines that helped focus his mind.

He spent the next several minutes checking the software to make sure it was properly installed. Then he began the procedural checklist. Ordinarily this would be a two-person job, one person reading the checklist while the other verified that each of the command codes was properly entered into the computer. Twice he lost his place on the checklist and had to go back to reconfirm the proper command sequence in the computer.

Twenty minutes later he was finished. He checked both clocks, the one on the wall and the one in the computer. The computer clock controlled the mission schedule. Timing was critical. There existed only a small window of about six minutes in which a launch for accurate targeting could be made. Once past the window, Leffort would have to wait twenty-four hours for the next rotation of the earth. It was, after all, a moving target, not only rotating on its axis but also moving through space at more than sixty-six thousand miles per hour.

He kept his eyes on the computer clock as it counted down to single digits. He watched it reach zero and waited two more seconds before he pushed the entry key on the computer.

The endless list, long chains of numbers, began racing up the screen as the software took over.

The motor on the mammoth satellite dish outside began to turn, making subtle adjustments in the orientation of the antenna. It would link up with the antennas on the rocket motors attached to A-1, the smaller of the two asteroids, on its next loop out beyond the edge of the moon. Within seconds the command codes would be fed into the microprocessor linking the four rockets, and the asteroid would be tipped from its balance point at lunar L2 and begin its journey.

Using lunar gravity and its own velocity, the asteroid would slingshot around the lunar surface in the same way NASA had done with its orbiters on moon missions.

The iron-core asteroid would begin its journey of nearly 240,000 miles. By the time it was picked up by astronomers on Earth, it would be too late to even think. Moving at more than 600 miles per minute, it would reach its target on the North American continent in just over six and a half hours.

Given its mass and velocity, a direct hit was not only unnecessary, it was inadvisable. If an impact was to look like a naturally occurring event, it would not make sense to strike a city center. Anywhere within a twenty-mile radius would be enough to level and incinerate almost all of the metropolitan area.

An elevated level of dust in the atmosphere would surround the earth for a few months, but would not, according to the calculations, result in anything approaching a nuclear winter.

The purpose behind this test was not unlike Trinity, the early Alamagordo tests of the atomic bomb. Leffort’s clients had to be sure they got it right before bringing the second weapon closer to home and risking self-annihilation. The people paying him had to know how much dust and rock would be ejected. They wanted to have some sense of the heat that would be generated, the volume and the range of any fiery ejecta that gravity carried back through the atmosphere. They had to know how far fires would spread, as well as the effect of the ground shock waves as the impactor mostly vaporized and buried what was left of itself a mile deep in the bedrock at ground zero. In the end, all that would be left would be a vast crater.

It was the similarities of the desert with its geologic characteristics so much like those of their homeland that gave Leffort’s clients the idea-setting up in the jungles of Mexico and targeting the area around Phoenix and Scottsdale in the state of Arizona would make for the perfect test.

Once the first asteroid was proven to work, they would know with a high degree of confidence what to expect when they launched the second, the larger of the two asteroids, into the desert just outside of the city of Tel Aviv in Israel. It was to be the fulfillment of the promise to wipe Israel off the map.

Leffort was confident that with enough practice and the right space rock, he could penetrate the earth’s atmosphere to create a supersonic shock wave that would level everything beneath it-a blast similar to the Tunguska event.

On June 30, 1908, a sudden flash of light, brighter than the sun, followed by an ear-shattering shock wave, struck the area over the Tunguska River in a remote region of Siberia. It leveled trees, stripped their foliage, and set wildfires over an area of more than eight hundred square miles. Virtually nothing was left standing.

It has been estimated that the offending meteor may have been no more than thirty to sixty feet in diameter. Scientists believe that it never actually impacted the earth but disintegrated in the skies above. Its mass coupled with its extreme velocity caused a massive shock wave as it collided with and finally exploded in the thickening atmosphere of the earth. Had it occurred over Manhattan it would have destroyed the city and killed almost every living thing in the five boroughs below.

Leffort watched the telemetry readings on the large left-hand screen as the rockets fired up. Within seconds they began to nudge the asteroid from its raceway behind the moon. Everything looked smooth until suddenly…

A hundred and twenty miles above the Mare Orientale, a largely featureless plain on the southeast rim at the far side of the moon, the rear lateral thrust rocket attached to A-1 began to vibrate. It shimmied and sent the asteroid into a yaw as it began to tumble.

The rocket was programmed to fire for a minute and forty seconds. At fifty-seven seconds a large amorphous section of iron, what rocket engineers at NASA had called the dorsal fin, tore itself free from the asteroid and began to spin toward the surface of the moon.

Leffort watched in horror as the telemetry data began to pile up on the screen. Something had gone badly wrong. He wasn’t sure what it was, but A-1 had given up any semblance of equilibrium. The readings for yaw, pitch, and roll all exceeded acceptable parameters for anything close to controlled flight. From all the readings, A-1 was nothing but a tumbling iron anvil in space. Caught in the moon’s gravity, flung like a stone from a blind man’s sling, it could end up anywhere.

Leffort stood there paralyzed. There was nothing he could do but watch as the numbers stacked up. With each passing second, the blood in his veins grew hotter. All he could do was turn off the monitors. The minute he opened the door, they would want to know what was happening. Dark screens would be a dead giveaway. Leffort’s mind raced. All he wanted now was to survive, to get away from them.

A quarter of a million miles away, beyond the edge of the moon’s southern hemisphere, the tumbling train of iron finally ceased its twisting tails of fire. The three remaining rocket motors shut down, though by now the tumbling asteroid was a perpetual motion machine.

Moments later a silent ball of fire erupted on the dusty plain below as the errant engine and the two tons of iron to which it was attached slammed into the surface of the moon. From space it looked like a pebble in a pond as the shock waves spread out into rings of ground matter rippling up, forming a new crater near the southern edge of the Orient Sea.