The Orion Plan (30 page)

“Stop where you are.” It was a man's voice, probably one of the correction officers in the patrol cars. “If you don't stop, we are authorized to shoot. Repeat, we will shoot you.”

Take a deep breath, Joe. You're going to dive.

The Emissary helped him by taking control of his breathing muscles and expanding his chest. Then she plunged his head into the water and swept his arms in a breaststroke. His body jackknifed and he went down deep.

He couldn't see a thing. Without the Emissary's help, he would've panicked and immediately come up for air, but she kept sweeping his arms through the cool black water and propelling him forward. He stayed under until his lungs were screaming and he was absolutely sure he was going to drown. Then his head broke the surface and he took an excruciating breath.

But the spotlights were still trained on him, and the officer with the megaphone was still threatening to shoot him. Worse, he saw another spotlight off to his right, this one coming from the river rather than the island. A patrol boat sped toward him, bobbing over the waves.

You're going to dive again. Just—

“No! I can't!”

Trust me, Joe. Just take a deep breath.

She expanded his chest again, then forced him underwater. Although the river was utterly opaque, he saw bursts of color against the blackness, red and green splotches that flashed across his field of vision. Joe was bewildered for a moment—what's the hell's going on now?—but then he realized that the splotches weren't real. They were hallucinations, distress signals from his oxygen-starved brain. The Emissary had pushed him beyond his limits. He couldn't stay conscious much longer.

Then he felt something curl around his right arm. A smooth, cold rope looped once around his wrist and a couple of times around his forearm. His stomach clenched and churned in terror, but his right hand gripped the cold line. The Emissary closed his left hand around it too, and then Joe felt a tremendous tug. The rope grew taut and began pulling him through the water.

He moved like a torpedo, swift and straight. The river currents battered his head and torso as he plowed through them, and his arms felt like they were being yanked out of their sockets. After several seconds the rope angled him upward and raised him to the surface of the river. He opened his mouth and gasped for breath as his body skimmed over the waves. The rope was pulling him as rapidly as a towline pulls a water-skier. He'd already gone far beyond the reach of the correction officers' spotlights, and when he glanced to the right he noticed that the patrol boat was no longer heading his way. Instead it cruised toward the circles of water illuminated by the spotlights, which swept back and forth in a vain effort to find him. He'd slipped away from his pursuers, and now they couldn't see him. He was gliding fast and low across the river, invisible in the darkness.

There was just enough ambient light, though, that Joe could see the reflections off the wet, gleaming line. It wasn't really a rope. It was black and metallic.

After another minute he approached the Bronx shoreline. The metallic strand pulled him toward a muddy riverbank next to an abandoned warehouse. As he neared the shore, the Emissary unwound the tentacle from his arm and relinquished control of his body. Joe waded the last ten feet under his own power and collapsed on the bank, lying on his back in the mud. He turned his head to the left and noticed that the tentacle stuck out of a small hole in the mud a few yards away. He stared at the strand as it withdrew into the hole. Within seconds it vanished.

Joe closed his eyes. He was spent. He didn't want to get up. He wanted to lie there forever.

What's wrong, Joe? You're free. The correction officers will assume you drowned.

He shook his head. Then he opened his eyes and pointed at the hole where the tentacle had disappeared. “This place is miles away from Inwood. Are your machines all over the city now?”

Yes. Now we're ready for the next phase. You're going to help me make contact.

 

SEVENTEEN

General Brent Hanson marched down Payson Avenue with one of his GPR search teams. A burly Air Force corporal pushed the ground-penetrating radar machine down the middle of the street, and a tall lieutenant trailed behind him, carrying a flashlight and a sheaf of blueprints. Twenty other search teams were in the area surrounding Inwood Hill Park, all of them using the radar systems to peer below the streets and sidewalks. Luckily, they could do this job without worrying about interference from curious bystanders or journalists. Hanson had already evacuated the neighborhood.

The cover story he'd used, predictably enough, was terrorism. At 4:00
P.M.
that afternoon the Department of Homeland Security had announced the arrest of a dozen fanatical Muslims who'd intended to bomb several targets in Manhattan. The leaders of the terrorist group, however, had escaped arrest and were believed to be hiding somewhere in Inwood. These fanatics had all the materials needed to build a powerful bomb, one that could destroy an entire apartment building, so the government had ordered the immediate removal of all the residents living between Dyckman Street and 218th Street.

Hanson had come up with this story. He was proud of it because it had the ring of truth. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the military officials had been lying when they'd said the soldiers in Inwood were on a training mission. The locals were sure the government was hiding something, probably a terrorist threat, and they all proclaimed, “I told you so!” when Homeland Security admitted they were right. But it never occurred to them that the government's second story was also a lie. And this lie was very convincing: between 4:00
P.M.
and 9:00
P.M.
, twenty thousand people fled the neighborhood. Most went to emergency shelters that the city had set up, but many took up watch at the edges of Inwood, standing behind the police barricades on Tenth Avenue and waiting for the military to either capture or gun down the terrorists.

What's more, the gawkers at the barricades got further confirmation of the cover story when they saw the soldiers pushing the GPR machines down the neighborhood's streets. The military had used the same radar system in Iraq and Afghanistan because it was excellent at detecting buried explosives. So when the television reporters spotted the GPR teams they naturally assumed the soldiers were looking for a bomb.

In reality, though, tonight's search was much more difficult. Hanson wasn't even sure what he was looking for. Only Sarah Pooley and the Con Edison inspector had actually seen the strange conductive cables. Hanson's men had done their own inspections of the Con Ed manholes and found no slender black strands tapping into the power lines.

This failure frustrated Hanson. He needed more proof to convince his superiors. He already had some strong evidence—the sample Dr. Pooley had collected, plus her trajectory analysis proving that the probe couldn't have been launched from Earth—but that wasn't enough for the generals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the bureaucrats on the National Security Council. They weren't going to start believing in aliens until they could see, hear, and smell them.

The GPR teams began their search at 10:00
P.M.
and Hanson crisscrossed the neighborhood with them, walking beside his men as they looked for anything unusual lurking underground. The streets were dark because Hanson had ordered Con Ed to cut the power to the area. The blackout order was consistent with the cover story—the military was supposedly making things difficult for the hiding terrorists—but it was also a precautionary measure. If Dr. Pooley was right and there really was an alien entity beneath the streets of Manhattan, Hanson wasn't going to let it siphon any more electricity from the power grid.

By 1:00
A.M.
, though, none of the search teams had detected anything unusual, and Hanson grew impatient. He stepped closer to the corporal who was pushing the GPR machine and the lieutenant who was analyzing the results. The machine looked a bit like a lawn mower—its lower part had four wheels, and suspended between them was a heavy rectangular unit, about the size of a briefcase, which contained the antennas. As the corporal steered the machine down the street, the unit's transmitting antenna fired radio waves downward. These waves penetrated the asphalt and concrete and dirt, and some of them bounced back to the street. Another antenna in the unit received the reflected waves and measured how long it took them to return. The data revealed the shape and depth of the underground structures.

The long handle that the corporal used to push the machine also supported a ten-inch-wide screen that displayed the GPR signals. Whenever the corporal spotted something new on the screen he stopped pushing and let the lieutenant compare the data with his blueprints. Because his schematics showing the locations of all the ordinary structures beneath the street—the water pipes, sewer mains, power lines, and fiber-optic cables—the lieutenant could tell if the GPR was showing something that wasn't supposed to be underground. The problem, though, was the sheer quantity of cables and pipes below their feet. Every few yards the search team had to stop the machine and consult the maps. It was driving Hanson crazy.

The next time they stopped, Hanson nudged the lieutenant aside and looked at the screen himself. On the display was a mishmash of wavy bluish lines, a confusing jumble of parabolas and hyperbolas. But Hanson was a radar expert—he'd studied the subject at MIT and now oversaw all of Space Command's satellite-tracking stations. Looking at the screen, he could tell right away what the GPR had detected: a twelve-inch water pipe located about six feet below the street. He'd seen similar signals many times over the past three hours. There were lots of water pipes in the neighborhood.

Hanson tapped the screen to get the attention of both the corporal and the lieutenant. “This is part of the water system, a distribution main. Don't bother stopping when you see this kind of signal.”

“Yes, sir!” The lieutenant nodded. He was young, no more than a year or two out of the Air Force Academy, but he seemed eager and intelligent. The name written on his fatigues was
MEKLER
. “Sir, is there a range of sizes for the objects we're looking for? A minimum and a maximum?”

That was a good question. Hanson had no idea. “You should look for anything out of the ordinary, anything that doesn't appear in the blueprints. But as I mentioned in the briefing, you should pay special attention to any cables that are half an inch in diameter.” This estimate was based on the observations of Dr. Pooley, who'd said the conductive strand was about as thick as her pinkie.

“The GPR doesn't work well for objects that small, sir.” Lieutenant Mekler sounded apologetic. “If the cable is buried more than a few feet underground, I don't think the machine can detect it.”

“Just do your best. Stay alert and keep your eyes on the screen.”

Mekler shouted, “Yes, sir!” and snapped off a smart salute. The corporal also saluted, but less enthusiastically. Then they resumed their survey of the underside of Payson Avenue.

None of the soldiers below the rank of colonel knew the true nature of their mission. Hanson had told them the same cover story about the fanatical Muslims, so his men thought they were hunting for a bomb. He disliked lying to them, but he didn't have a choice. This was a national security crisis of the highest order. It was the most serious threat the United States—or any other country—had ever faced. And, for good or bad, Hanson was in charge of facing it. He had to strictly control the information about the threat.

He took a deep breath as he followed his men down the street. It was strange to see New York City this way, so dark and empty. The neighborhood wasn't entirely deserted—Hanson had glimpsed a few shadowy figures in the windows of the darkened apartment buildings—but the streets were deathly quietly, and the silence exhilarated him. He tilted his head back and gazed at the night sky. It was so much clearer with the streetlights turned off. Even though the quarter-moon was up, he could see dozens of stars.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he'd always known this day would come. His whole life he'd been waiting for it to happen. Hanson felt a little dizzy as he stared at the stars overhead. Something marvelous and alarming had emerged from the darkness, and soon enough he would confront it, the terrifying unknown.

It was his destiny.

*   *   *

When Brent Hanson was a boy he'd dreamed of becoming an astronaut. He was too young to witness the Apollo missions—that program ended when he was only two years old—but he was eleven when the space shuttle
Columbia
shot into orbit for the first time. He watched the launch on an old black-and-white TV in the kitchen of his trailer home. It was April 12th 1981, three seconds after 7:00
A.M.
His mother and her boyfriend were still asleep in their bedroom.

In 1988 Hanson entered the Air Force Academy to pursue his dream. He did everything he could to improve his chances of being chosen for one of NASA's space-shuttle crews. After graduation he became a fighter pilot. A few years later he went back to school on Uncle Sam's dime and earned a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. By the age of thirty-three he was one of the youngest lieutenant colonels in the Air Force and a prime candidate for the astronaut corps. He submitted his application to NASA and passed the preliminary screening.

Then two setbacks happened in quick succession. On February 1, 2003, during its twenty-eighth mission, the space shuttle
Columbia
disintegrated while reentering the atmosphere. The disaster doomed NASA's shuttle program and limited the agency's need for more astronauts. A month later the United States invaded Iraq, and the Air Force put out a call for experienced airmen to lead its fighter squadrons into combat. Hanson had to make a choice. For the good of his career he became a squadron commander and abandoned his dream of spaceflight.