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Page 45.
Scene 20. Claire Lightfield: Tropic of Cancer
 Claire Lightfield glanced at the wall clock in her bunker under the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C.—11:00 a.m. Her half-day shift would be ending at noon, and with it her nuisance duty for the month. She planned to take a long lunch, do a little shopping on the way to Sigma 2020's headquarters in the new CIA Annex in Langley. She had a husband and a little boy at home, who would love a little present. Of course, she also had her eye on a darling new purse, all black and shiny patent leather, shaped like a long book, with a matching pair of black suede gloves.
As she was reveling in these thoughts, at 10:59, one of her encrypted land lines buzzed. She leaned closer to the wide, banana-shaped desk, which bristled with monitors, keyboard, speakers, and telemetry equipment. She picked up. "Duty Officer." It was a required succinct statement, designed to give nothing away, even though the line was nominally secure.
"Claire, it's Johannes Rector." He sounded harried.
"Yes, Rector?" Nobody ever called Johannes Rector by any other name, even his beautiful wife. Claire pressed a button on a bank of lights, which switched the line to the highest degree of encryption as well as digital security.
It was called ULTRA/BIN/CRYPTOMAX.
There was only one higher security status on the building's phone lines: PRESIDENTIAL/BIN/CRYPTOMAX/ULTRA. We aren't there yet, she thought. It was a type of conversation you never wanted to have, because it might mean that a comet the size of Connecticut was hurtling toward earth, or the planet was breaking in half, or terrorists had seized Palm Springs, California, and were holding top corporate executives and U.S. Senators hostage.
Rector crackled: "What have you got on an Anaconda launch from Kourou?"
"Nothing special." At that moment, as a chime through the building announced the eleven o'clock hour, on the dot, something changed at the French/ESA launch center just east of the Caribbean coast of South America. "Wait," she told Rector. "Hold on."
Among Claire's many monitors, a small one for launch anomalies began blinking orange in warning, then red for total alarm. The same gadget made a low rising and falling whine, very low, which she tapped off like an unwelcome alarm clock.
The other thing that caught her attention was a rise in pitch among the usually calm voices of European controllers at Kourou. Her hearing was confirmed by a wine-red square that started blinking on and off, signaling distress had been detected in the launch engineers' voices.
Claire's duty desk monitored, in rotation, the voices of the world's launch centers. The software on this specialized telemetry system was designed to look for certain key phrases like explosion, abnormal, deviant, abort, and the like. Engineers at Kourou were speaking some of those words in French and in European-accented English.
"What's going on?" Rector asked.
Another secure line started burping and flashing. "Hold it," Claire said to Rector, and spoke into the other phone: "Duty Officer."
As she spoke, the consternation of Capricorn's handlers became more evident. They seemed to have lost control of the Capricorn satellite.
Claire did a double-take as she looked up the GASS acronym: Global Anaconda Space Services Company. Now what did Camelback Corporation's primary commercial competitor have to do with this satellite?
"Special Agent Lightfield, this is Colonel Howard at Sigma 2020, liaison with the Pentagon. We have a situation."
She switched that line also to ULTRA/BIN/CRYPTOMAX. "Yessir?"
"Can I get you on a conference call with Senators Bloviant and Hawgbile?"
"I'm—" –handling about ten things all at once— She swallowed her objections and said: "Go ahead." The world is blowing up. There go my lunchtime shopping plans.
"Rector, I'm talking to the Senate Committee."
"I'll hang in there a few minutes. I just need you to confirm: is it an Anaconda mission? Is something going wrong?"
Colonel Howard said: "Claire?"
She told Rector "Yes, and yes."
"Call me when you can." Rector rung off.
"Yes, Colonel Howard?"
"Quick briefing. Anaconda gave a speech this morning, offering some new technology for assassinating Third World nutjobs before they start wars. We're not sure how they plan to execute the jobs, but the Consortium is seriously considering buying in, and there is consideration of making OPOTUS Copy G on the briefings traffic. To put it mildly, Anaconda has our full attention with their Project David as they call it."
As Claire sat before her blinking, crawling, whining instruments, she waited with earphones over her blondish helmet of hair. She heard rustling, coughing, papers shuffling, bodies dropping into roller-chairs, fingers tapping the flying saucer mike in the center of the table as the crisis conference got underway.
Meanwhile, she watched a remarkable visual unfolding on a large display screen high up under the ceiling. Technicians and intelligence officers, male and female, gathered before Claire's station to witness the event.
In her monitoring speakers, the normally phlegmatic, calm controllers at Kourou sounded extremely edgy, cutting across each other with verbal outreads and statuses.
On the screen, a diagram of landing and descent trajectories cut across a virtual globe. The globe was dissected into longitude and latitude lines in fine green. Ascending or launch trajectories showed in blue—at the moment, there were two, one from Kourou, the other from JFK (the German solar satellite). There were no descents shown, which would have been in yellow. If a shot were in trouble, it would be blood red. At the moment, the Kourou shot officially switched from amber alert color to vivid red.
Orbital trajectories could be seen on another screen, but they were the responsibility of the Astro-Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena. At least six duty officers monitored the earth's busy orbital traffic on other screens.
On the big screen above Claire's head, two dotted lines appeared. One was the Tropic of Capricorn, just over 23 degrees south of the Equator and parallel to it. The other was the Tropic of Cancer, just over 23 degrees north of the Equator and parallel to it. These were the official boundaries of earth's tropics, or tropical zones, spanning the globe between them. Tropical meant those areas on earth where the sun reached a point directly overhead at least once each year. About half the world’s population lived between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, as did most of the dictators and tyrants—a hunting ground for the OST.
As Claire watched, and as others gasped around her, the wayward Anaconda satellite deviated toward the north. Its intended orbit had been on the Tropic of Capricorn, for which the Capricorn satellite was named.
On the diagram glowing above, the craft itself was a pulsing dot, like a blood clot moving along a straight artery. The trajectory behind it was solid red. The apparent frontal trajectory was a dotted red line.
Barring any major course corrections by the unseen hand that had taken control of the launch vehicle, Capricorn would soon cross the Tropic of Cancer.
Whatever the satellite's mission might have been over the southern tropics, in the Third World—as defined over a half a century earlier by France's President Charles de Gaulle—it was now to be executed over the First World in the northern hemisphere.
We don't even understand who the players are, Claire thought, much less what their mission was or has become.
As she listened to the meeting—with the spidery mike before her, branching from her headset—she spoke to nobody in particular. It was a reflex, as if she were explaining the inexplicable to her own mirror self. Or it was like an autopsy, spoken by the medical examiner to a microphone as she cut out parts of a corpse, seeking the cause of death. "It traveled as far as a position about 1,400 miles south of the Azores on acquisition orbit, then Kourou and Toulouse lost control. The craft deviated on a fifteen minute burn, vectoring northeast at 45 degrees to its planned trajectory. Traveling at a velocity of 17,500 mph US, the craft is now over Mongolia and…making one more course correction…" An audible outcry rose from the men and women standing around her, independently echoed by French controllers in Kourou, Toulouse, and the South Pacific. "…now dead on the Tropic of Cancer."
The craft continued pulsing red for a minute or two as it stabilized in orbit at the northern edge of the earth's tropics. Already, it would be streaking at about 200 miles (320 km) altitude over Venezuela. In this orbit, it would be visible at night to the helpless controllers at Kourou, who could only watch it passing overhead like a blinding little pinprick in the tropical night sky, and wonder why?
At this altitude, it would not survive long. Atmospheric drag would pull it down and it would burn up in the atmosphere. For what?
As Claire watched, the screen cleared. For a minute it was blank. Then a refreshed image returned. The Capricorn launch was gone, into the hands of APL trackers as well as those of ESA and the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES)—France's government space agency of industrial and commercial purpose application.
She sat back in her chair and pulled off her earphones for a moment. Dabbing her brow with a tissue, she heard APL duty officers cursing and groaning as the renegade red dot pulsed on their orbital monitoring screens. That was two rows of cubicles away from her own. The clock read 11:29, and she wondered if she might yet make it out of here on time. She could monitor the conference, incoming only, on a secure ULTRA/BIN/CRYPTOMAX line in her car.
An idea was forming in her mind, driven home by the satellite’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO). As she sat waiting for her replacement to arrive for the noon to four shift, she did some public searches on the Keyhole and Corona satellite series. This was a top secret series of what were today called Digital Intelligence or DIGINT satellites. Famously, it was supposed they could read a license plate in a Moscow parking lot from a LEO of 165-180 miles. The craft could, in fact, be lowered with thruster rockets to run a series of photos or a stretch of film, then pushed back over 200 miles altitude to avoid atmospheric drag and an unplanned, catastrophic reentry.
When a segment of exposures was in the can, so to speak, the satellite ejected them to fall gently into the atmosphere. Once past the troposphere, on average under 50,000 feet, a small parachute would open. The increasingly thick and humid atmosphere would slow the capsule's descent. A specially rigged interceptor plane would scoop the descending canister out of thin air, and return it to the CIA (Keyhole) or USAF (Corona) for processing.
Was it possible—had someone adopted this ancient Cold War technology to a new, sinister 21st Century purpose? Was this what Holmes had just spoken about? A special satellite that would change history, as happened with the shootings of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, JFK…and as should have happened with the likes of Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, or Adolf Hitler? Claire did not want to leap to conclusions, but her conjecture made some sense as she considered it in depth. It was her only working hypothesis for the moment.
Screens across the tracking center showed the red downward trajectory of the ESA satellite as it plunged toward its death. At the same time, a fine light-blue dot began pulsing—the insidious parasite satellite, belonging to an unknown force of great power and wealth, with an agenda that would soon become manifest. The Anaconda host satellite, Capricorn, had just been sacrificed for this new killer object in orbit on the Tropic of Cancer.
She donned her headphones again, just in time to hear someone coughing and making a boring speech full of ah's and um's and other filler sounds as people began attempting nervous explanations, when nobody really knew anything yet.
On a separate ULTRA/BIN/CRYPTOMAX line, Claire privately called Rector to discuss her Keyhole-Corona hypothesis. Someone had reinvented the wheel, but with teeth.
TOP
Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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