The Orion Plan (7 page)

Sarah bit her lip as she stared at it. Hanson was right. Besides the United States, there were only two countries that could've launched such a complex spacecraft: Russia and China. And China was only barely capable of it.

She jabbed her finger at the trajectory diagram. “I bet it's the Russians. You remember the Ikon, the interplanetary spacecraft they launched a few years ago? That whopping big thing with the nuclear-powered propulsion system? They put it in orbit around the sun, and after six months of testing they said they lost contact with it. But maybe they were lying. Maybe they found another use for it.”

Sarah gathered from the look on Hanson's face that he'd also considered this possibility. He stepped closer, standing with his shoulder touching hers, so they could look at the document together. “Our best guess is that the spacecraft's real purpose was to provide a demonstration. The Russians are returning to the intimidation tactics they used during the cold war. They want to show us they can attack any of our cities with a weapon that's too fast to be stopped by our missile defenses.”

“You mean a kinetic-energy bombardment? The speed of the projectile provides the destructive power?”

Hanson nodded. “The Pentagon studied a similar system ten years ago, a satellite that could hurl tungsten rods at the Earth's surface. They called it ‘Rods from God.' We'd heard rumors that the Russians were working on the same technology, but now it looks like they made a few improvements. Their system is less vulnerable because it doesn't use an orbital platform.”

Sarah looked again at the trajectory diagram. “Yes, it's coming from deep space, so you couldn't destroy it in advance with an antisatellite weapon.”

“Exactly. There's no defense against it. If there's a standoff anywhere in the world—the Middle East, Ukraine, wherever—they could obliterate any of our command centers or sink any of our aircraft carriers.” He pointed at the analysis in Sarah's hands. “And the Russians wanted us to know they could hit any city on the globe. Here, go to page twenty-seven.”

Sarah turned the pages until she reached a second diagram. This one showed the probe at twenty minutes before reentry, when it was still thirty thousand miles from the Earth. At this point, according to the Air Force's analysis, the object's trajectory branched off into two curving paths. Now Sarah realized what Hanson had meant when he'd said the probe had gotten smaller—it had split in two. The larger part, the hundred-foot-wide object, had swung clear of the Earth and continued speeding across the solar system. The smaller part, the foot-wide probe shielded by the ten-foot-wide aeroshell, had plunged into Earth's atmosphere.

She looked at Hanson. “Doesn't this seem a little strange? To use such a large spacecraft to deliver such a small probe?”

“We think the spacecraft can deliver as many as ten kinetic-energy projectiles, each capable of extensive destruction. But for this test they used only a small dummy payload. They didn't want to start a war, but they wanted to show us what they could do. Like I said, typical Russian intimidation.”

“Well, it sounds pretty inefficient.” Sarah shrugged. “So what exactly do you want me to do?”

Hanson stretched his hand toward the diagram and pointed at the larger object, the one that flew past Earth. “I want you to plot all the possible trajectories for that thing. I want to know how it got here and where it's going next.”

“It's moving so fast, it's probably gonna go straight out of the solar system.”

“I don't think so. I think that spacecraft is carrying more projectiles. And they're real weapons, not dummy payloads.” The general shook his head. “I think it's coming back.”

 

FIVE

Although Dorothy Adams loved Inwood Hill Park, she hated climbing that damn hill.

She chose the easiest route, walking along a pathway that gently meandered up the slope, but it was still tough going. She'd never been especially athletic, and everything had grown so much harder since she got sick. After the first hundred yards, she started panting. After a quarter mile, her head swam and her chest ached. By the time she reached the top of the hill she was ready to retch. She staggered toward one of the park benches and gripped its back to steady herself. Then she dropped her canvas bag on the ground, let out a groan, and settled her skinny butt on the bench's wooden slats.

This is just pitiful,
she told herself.
You're not even sixty yet. Your grandmother worked in the cotton fields till she was eighty-four, and you can't even walk half a mile from your apartment. Lord in Heaven, what a mess you are.

The chemotherapy was to blame, mostly. The drugs had snuffed out Dorothy's energy and appetite. Her weight had dropped to a measly hundred and ten, and now her yellow blouse hung as loosely as a curtain from her shoulders. The worst part, though, was the pain in her belly. It wasn't like a stomachache or a cramp. It was a dull misery in the very center of her being. In the beginning—six months ago, that is—she'd felt the pain only when she was lying down or after a big meal. But now it was always there, like a heavy stone inside her stomach.

Dorothy closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It was hot and muggy in the park, but the day was almost over. In a couple of hours the sun would go down and the whole earth would let out a sigh of relief. She took another deep breath and smelled the leaves and grass and dirt. There was more oxygen on top of that hill than anywhere else in Manhattan. That was one of the things she loved about the place. Another was that it reminded her of the countryside where she grew up. With her eyes closed she could imagine she was back in Alabama.

After a few minutes she started to feel better. She opened her eyes and gazed at the trees all around her, the hundred-year-old oaks with hulking trunks and gnarled branches. The early evening sunlight slanted through their leaves. Swarms of gnats whirled inside the shafts of golden light. Noisy squirrels scurried across the gold-dappled ground.

She smiled. It was all so ordinary and beautiful. If she were still the minister of her church she would've written a sermon about it, this blessed daily miracle. But she'd retired from Holy Trinity four months ago, soon after she got the bad news from her doctor. She no longer had to write sermons, organize bingo nights, or run the Sunday school. Now she had the luxury of simply enjoying the moment.

Oh, Lord,
she prayed,
you've given me so much. Would it be presumptuous to ask you for one more blessing?

To the west the Hudson River glittered in the sunshine. Looking down from the hilltop, Dorothy could see the cars stuck in traffic on the West Side Highway and a sleek Coast Guard boat going up the river. Then she raised her head and squinted at the sun and the thin clouds around it. Presumptuous or not, she was going to send her prayer skyward.

Reach inside me, Lord. Remove the stone from my body. Find the cancer cells in my pancreas and liver and bloodstream and melt them away with your holy touch. Because I'm only fifty-nine years old, Lord. There's so much more I want to do.

She wasn't completely satisfied with the prayer. It sounded a bit whiny, to tell the truth. During her thirty-five years in the Episcopal church—five years as a missionary, ten years as an organizer for the Union of Black Episcopalians, and twenty years as vicar of Holy Trinity—she'd taken great pride in her sacred writings. This piddly, whiny prayer didn't measure up to her usual standards. But under the present circumstances it would have to do.

As she stared at the Hudson, she noticed another Coast Guard boat cruising a few hundred feet behind the first one. Curious, she craned her neck to look down the river and saw yet another one. And there were
three more
Coast Guard boats in the distance, close to the New Jersey side of the river.

That's strange.
Dorothy's first thought was that they were searching the waters for a drowning victim, maybe a suicide. She rose from the bench and went to the other side of the pathway to get a better view. Then she looked down the hillside at the riverbank and noticed the men in uniforms near the marina. There were dozens of them.

Now she started to worry.
Did something happen? Some kind of terrorist attack, maybe?
She hadn't heard any bombs go off.

Several soldiers stood guard at the entrance to the marina, but most were marching across the baseball fields. They didn't come up the pathway that climbed the hill, though. The soldiers stayed on the other side of the highway, in the section of the park closest to the river. Dorothy looked for signs of an attack or an explosion down there, but she didn't see any. There were no injured people, no ambulances. It occurred to her that maybe this was just a drill, a training exercise. She'd seen several police drills in Inwood over the past few years. The NYPD patrol cars would come roaring down Broadway in the middle of the day with their lights flashing and their sirens screaming. Maybe the Coast Guard did the same thing.

She continued watching for another minute or so. None of the soldiers seemed to be moving with any urgency, which made Dorothy more convinced that it was a training exercise. Still, she was uneasy.

The pain in her belly sharpened. It was bad today, even worse than usual. She needed to go back to her apartment and take some more pills. First, though, she had to visit her friends.

With another groan, she returned to the bench and picked up the canvas bag she'd dropped. Inside the bag were several packages of string cheese and half a dozen cans of Planters Peanuts, all taken from the food pantry at Holy Trinity. The church offered free groceries to the needy on Monday and Thursday mornings, but Dorothy knew that many of the neediest people in Inwood were too ashamed to come to the pantry. So she went to them instead. She wasn't strong enough to run the church anymore, but she could still perform this simple act of charity.

She walked a little farther down the pathway, then stepped off the asphalt and into the woods. Because she was afraid she might stumble, she moved slowly and kept her eyes on the muddy ground. Most of the park's homeless people slept on the eastern slope of the hill. They spent their days wandering across the neighborhood, begging for change and dodging the cops, and returned to the park before sunset to find a place to sleep. So the early evening was usually a good time for Dorothy to visit them, before the drunks passed out for the night and the junkies hit the needle. She would offer them some cheese or peanuts and ask a few questions and try to gauge how they were holding up. If someone seemed in dire need of help she'd encourage him or her to go to a shelter, but she never forced anyone. She wasn't their social worker. She was their friend.

And though the visits were difficult, she always looked forward to them. Yes, most of the homeless were traumatized and some were deeply disturbed, but they were also more interesting than most ordinary people. They were a multiracial group—black, white, Asian, and Latino—and in that way they resembled the congregation at Holy Trinity. Dorothy had been visiting some of them for years, and over time she'd learned their nicknames and quirks. In bits and pieces they'd told her their stories: their troubled childhoods, the sexual abuse, the prison sentences, the rehab attempts. As she listened she sometimes felt a powerful urge to rescue them. She wanted to drag them, kicking and screaming, to her church's parish house. But she'd realized long ago that she couldn't save anyone who didn't want to be saved. All she could do was feed them and listen to their stories.

After a minute she stopped and surveyed the hillside, which was studded with boulders and outcrops. Because these rock formations provided some shelter from the rain, the homeless usually camped beside them. She looked for the wrinkled tarps and plastic shopping bags that marked their sleeping spots but didn't see anyone nearby. She was probably too early. Her friends were still panhandling or buying booze or scoring drugs. They'd come trudging up the hill over the next few hours, but Dorothy felt too sick today to wait for them. She'd just have to leave her cans and packages on the ground and hope someone would find them.

She was about to start emptying her bag when she caught a glimpse of a cardboard box. It was in sad shape, crushed almost flat, and it sat in the middle of a big mud hole on the hillside. At first Dorothy thought the box had been abandoned, but when she looked closer she saw a pair of legs and filthy sneakers sticking out of the open end. What's more, she actually recognized the sneakers from the loops of duct tape wrapped around their toes. The man inside the flattened box was named Joe Graham. He was one of Dorothy's favorites, one of her best friends on Inwood Hill.

All of the homeless in the park were wary of strangers, so she called out “Hey, Joe?” before going any closer. He didn't answer. She waited a few seconds, then called out to him again. “Hey, it's me, Dorothy. What the heck happened to your box?”

Again, no answer. His legs and sneakers remained perfectly still.

She was a little worried because she'd never seen Joe asleep during her previous visits. He was a newcomer to Inwood—he'd lived in the park for only the past four months—and though his clothes and health were getting steadily worse, he still kept a regular schedule. Every day he ate lunch at the soup kitchen on Dyckman Street, and instead of panhandling he did odd jobs for some of the neighborhood stores. And he was always polite to Dorothy, even when he was blitzed. She credited his good behavior to the fact that he was a Southerner. During their very first conversation he'd mentioned that he was born in Alabama, specifically in the small town of Union Springs. Dorothy knew the place well—it was just twenty miles from her own hometown. She and this unfortunate white man came from the same county.

“Joe?” She raised her voice. “Are you all right?” Dorothy stepped toward the mud hole, her slip-on shoes sinking into the ooze. She was probably getting worried over nothing. In all likelihood, he'd simply passed out a bit earlier than usual today. But she approached the collapsed box anyway and listened carefully for the sound of his breathing. She heard nothing and got even more nervous.