know that the road of death is likely to be a dead end. Without saying it, the thought of a vehicle getting behind us and blocking our retreat is ever present.
From the look of it, the pavement has not seen much in the way of recent traffic. There are sizable chunks of rock in the middle of the road.
Harry gets back in the car. “It’s OK,” he says.
About a mile farther on we pass several abandoned and wrecked cars along the shoulder.
“Slow down,” says Harry.
“I’m doing ten miles an hour,” I tell him.
“I know. Slow down.” Harry tightens his grip on the speargun, though what he is going to do with it if we run into trouble I’m not sure.
I tell him to watch where he’s pointing the thing. He tells me to keep my eyes on the road.
Several of the wrecked vehicles have the brown-rusted hue of burned-out metal, their tires gone as if eaten by fire. A light pickup truck, or what is left of it, appears to have been shot to pieces. The driver’s door panel is filigreed with enough holes that it looks like a lace doily.
“Pull over,” says Harry. He wants to check it out.
I pull in front of the burned-out pickup and put the car in park, but I leave the engine running. Harry and I get out.
As we approach the burned-out vehicle, we realize that the passenger compartment is not empty. Slumped across the narrow bench seat is a partially burned and decomposed body.
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
