Camouflage

—9—

CNN runs a news special on 14 December 2019.

The camera pans along gentle surf, to rest on the artifact. It closes in during voice-over introduction:

MALLORY (VO): Over the past several weeks, what began as a mystery has become an enigma. It started when a private marine research organization, Poseidon Projects, claimed salvage rights for an unclaimed wreck deep in the Tonga Trench a few hundred miles from this Samoan island.

With the help of Poseidon Projects, famous for having raised the Titanic, Atlantis used acres of floats to bring the “wreck” to within a few fathoms of the surface. They towed it with tugs to a holding location…

Archive footage of towing and parking the artifact.

MALLORY (VO, CONT.): …just offshore of Independent Samoa, where they had secured a ninety-nine-year lease on a piece of undeveloped land, which was being turned into a small research center…

Archive footage of the shrouded artifact being pulled toward shore.

MALLORY (VO, CONT.): built solely to investigate this thing, which was obviously not the wreck of a ship.

Archive underwater footage: the shroud flaps teasingly, to show the bright metal surface of the thing. A montage of scenes while Poseidon engineers attach the towing collar to the artifact, and start dragging it in.

MALLORY (VO, CONT.): That cable is powered by this machine … capable of moving thousands of tons.

But when this heavy thing—more massive than a Nautilus submarine, but smaller than a delivery van—when it came to the shoreline and dug into the sand…

Archive footage of the cable accident.

MALLORY (VO, CONT.): it had met its match. One man was almost killed when the cable broke.

They had to find a way to move it the last hundred yards, to the concrete pad that would become the floor of their laboratory.

Screen fades to a live image of the thing with its rocket attached.

MALLORY (VO, CONT.): This is a self-contained Chinese booster rocket, normally used in the Glorious Wonder series, to carry up to a ton into low Earth orbit. It’s not going quite so far today.

Interior view: an improvised bunker a couple of hundred yards from the thing. You can see the artifact through a thick window. Mallory is sitting with two men, drinking coffee at a table made of a plank on stacked boxes.

MALLORY: We’re going to watch this with Jack Halliburton and Russell Sutton, joint directors of Atlantis Associates.

I suppose this is going to be the shortest rocket trip in history.

JACK: There were some last century that only got an inch off the pad.

RUSS: This one’s reliable as a Ford truck, though. Except…

MALLORY: What could go wrong?

JACK: We’re not worried about the rocket. Just its attachment to the artifact.

RUSS: It’s the irresistible force versus the immovable object.

JACK: We know the thing’s mass; we know the properties of the sand it’s resting on. The rocket generates plenty enough thrust to do the job.

RUSS: The only problem is the attachment between the rocket and the artifact. If the collar that connects them breaks … we’ll need another approach.

MALLORY: And the rocket goes screaming into the center of town there?

Telephoto zoom from the rocket’s POV: straight into Aggie Grey’s.

JACK: No, there’s an automatic shutoff if the rocket suddenly feels no resistance. It might go fifty or a hundred feet.

MALLORY: But if it doesn’t work?

JACK: Glorious Wonder carries a lot of insurance.

RUSS: A lot of people in Apia are off visiting relatives in the country. I think I would be, too.

A loud whistle blows.

JACK: That’s the ten-minute warning. You might want your cameraman out of there.

Mallory stands up and looks through the glass.

MALLORY: They’re gone. Just the camera attached to the booster.

RUSS: I hope it doesn’t give you anything too interesting.

MALLORY: Have to agree, for once… So this has to be some artifact from outer space.

RUSS: Well, you know as much about that as we do. It could possibly be the result of some natural process we’ve never encountered before.

JACK: Though its density makes that unlikely. Or inexplicable.

MALLORY: It’s very ancient.

RUSS: The coral it was embedded in was old before there were any primates resembling humans.

MALLORY: So you don’t think much of the “lost weapon” theory?

JACK: Bullshit.

RUSS: You do have to wonder how it got there, if it’s an old Soviet or American device. If we’d just found it lying someplace, sure, that would be the first assumption. But it was below million-year-old coral.

MALLORY: So maybe they hid it there?

RUSS: You’d have to ask why. I’d want to hide it in my own country.

MALLORY: Have the Russians or Americans contacted you?

JACK: Sure.

RUSS: We don’t want to talk about that. Yet.

Screen changes to an aerial view with countdown superimposed. A 360-degree pan shows all the military helicopters watching. At ten seconds, it zooms in on the artifact. A laconic voice offscreen counts down.

VOICE (OFF): Ten.

JACK: (rising) About time.

The three of them move to the window to watch. A split screen adds an aerial view. The voice counts down to zero.

The Chinese rocket ignites, its exhaust churning billows of steam in the sea behind it. For long seconds, as the noise increases to a banshee scream, it doesn’t move. Then the artifact lurches and moves slowly, then faster, up the guide rails toward the metal cradle that will be its resting place. A camera by the cradle shows it fall into place with a jarring crash, just as the rocket goes silent.

RUSS: Textbook. Those Chinese are pretty damn good.

JACK: Glad they’re on our side. For the time being.