Steve Martini - Trader of secrets

The potential for destruction was catastrophic. Major collisions with large asteroids were known to have caused extinction-level events in the planet’s history. It was, in fact, an irony to Leffort that the antenna array erected in the Yucatan jungle and the building from which he was now working sat less than a hundred miles from the center of one of the largest asteroid strikes in global history.

Sixty-five million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid, estimated to be six miles in diameter, slammed into the western Caribbean just a few miles off the Yucatan coast. It created a crater one hundred and ten miles in diameter, believed to be the largest impact structure on the face of the earth. The heat generated by the collision vaporized entire forests. It ejected mountains of material into space. Much of this would have ignited into incandescence upon reentry into the atmosphere, superheating the air and setting off monumental wildfires around the globe.

The Chicxulub impactor was believed to have buried itself in the earth’s crust in less than a second, creating seismic sea waves thousands of feet high. It is also believed that it was the effects of this asteroid striking the earth that spelled extinction for the dinosaurs.

It was only natural that nations would deploy their science to find ways of warding off such future threats to man’s survival. Soon a proliferation of acronyms abounded-NEAR, NEAT, NEOSSat, and NEOwise and the Torino Scale-all created for measuring the size and potential for impact of each threat.

From there it was but a question of time before some enterprising soul saw the potential for arresting the threat only to transform it into history’s ultimate weapon. Harness an asteroid of the right size and composition, temper its velocity and guide it with precision, and your enemy could be wiped from the face of the earth as if swatted by the hand of God.

Leffort mused at the constantly changing state of the world and the narrow-minded vision of its “leaders” with their rigid timeworn concepts of geopolitics.

Decades earlier the United States had studied and dismissed the use of NEOs as potential weapons of mass destruction. The studies concluded that the kinetic energy stored in these missiles of nature far surpassed the destructive power of anything man-made, including the most devastating nuclear warheads. Yet they waddled in their own ignorance. They dismissed NEOs on grounds that they couldn’t be fashioned to fit the prevailing stratagem of the moment, the Cold War concept of MAD-Mutually Assured Destruction.

The defense experts operated on the assumption that the time needed to harness and hurl meteors and asteroids at selected targets on the surface of the earth, while scientifically possible, would cost too much and take too long to be a feasible and effective deterrent to those adversaries that already possessed nuclear arms.

They put the studies on the shelf to collect dust and waited. Since then the world had been turned upside down by the concept of asymmetrical warfare.

Acts of insurgency now used methods of attack and civilian terror no longer confined to conventional battlefields. The dread of nuclear-tipped missiles over Manhattan was replaced by the threat of dirty bombs or nuclear devices smuggled in the hold of a ship or on the back of a truck. The use of subnationals as proxies of terror to mask acts of war by sponsoring states became the norm. Rules of restraint based on deterrence, the old fear of massive retaliation, had gone the way of the goony bird.

In such a world, the veiled promise of nature’s own instruments of destruction could not go unnoticed for long. DARPA and the Defense Department dredged up the old studies and dusted them off. Suddenly they realized the risk. The science of steering objects in space was a known technology mastered by a growing number of states. Streaking fire across the sky, an iron asteroid sufficiently large to survive Earth’s atmosphere, whether by cataclysmic impact with Earth or by atmospheric burst, would deliver more death and destruction in a moment of time than any preemptive nuclear strike. And in the sign of the times, all of this could be carried out under cover of an unfathomable act of nature.

Surprise came from the first large steel container up forward in the belly of the C-130. As the plane lifted off from the runway and began to climb out over the Atlantic, a hatch up on top suddenly popped open. Sarah heard it and looked up, but she didn’t see anything.

They were crouched on the floor against the side of the plane-Sarah, Herman, Bugsy, and Adin. A few seconds later a man appeared, looking down at them from over the edge of the container.

Bugsy barked at him and lunged to the end of his leash as Sarah struggled to hold him.

“Easy,” said Adin. He petted the dog and looked up. “It’s only Teo. I was hoping it would be you.” He glanced up at the man. “You can eat him later,” Adin told Bugsy.

“Who else would it be?” said the man.

“I could think of at least a half-dozen colonels, all of them younger than you,” said Adin.

“Yes, but none of them as good. It’s getting a little warm inside,” said the man. “Do you mind if we join you?”

“What if I said yes?” Adin smiled up at him.

“Then to hell with you.” Wearing military fatigues and combat boots, the man looked considerably older than Adin, maybe in his late forties or early fifties. He climbed down using the red cargo netting suspended from the inside wall of the plane. Regardless of his age he was quite fit, short, and stocky, his face tanned as if he’d lived his life on a golf course in Palm Springs. His balding forehead was etched with craggy lines and deep furrows. His most memorable feature was his beaming smile. “This the young lady you were telling me about?”

“What has he been saying?” said Sarah.

“Allow me to introduce you. Sarah Madriani, this old man is Teo Ben Rabin. Colonel Ben Rabin to some. But you can just call him Uncle Ben,” said Adin.

“Only behind my back,” said Ben Rabin.

“And do yourself a favor,” said Adin. “Don’t believe anything he says.”

“Nice to meet you.” Sarah smiled, nodded, and shook his hand.

“Teo, I’d like you to meet Herman Diggs.”

Ben Rabin stepped gingerly around the dog, keeping a little distance. “I like to keep all my fingers,” he said.

“Mr. Diggs is our navigator for this trip,” said Adin. “By force of character, you might say. He refused to tell us where we were going unless we took him along.”

“A man after my own heart,” said Ben Rabin. “Shalom. Welcome aboard.”

Herman nodded and shook his hand.

“Are you feeling all right?” said Ben Rabin. He was looking at Herman.

“I’m not great in airplanes,” said Herman. “Specially with the fuel tank and the fumes, sittin’ sideways like this.”

“You’re looking a little green around the gills,” said Ben Rabin. “You want, I will find you a seat up top with the flight crew. The air up there is a little better.”

“Might take you up on that,” said Herman.

“Give me a minute.”

Herman nodded.

“I take it he’s not really your uncle.” Sarah looked at Adin.

“Only in spirit,” he told her. “The colonel is a man with many nephews.”

Ben Rabin pounded on the side of the steel container. “You can come out now!” He yelled at the top of his voice. “The rest of my relatives.” He looked at Sarah and smiled. “We were beginning to wonder how long it was going to take before we got airborne. It is damn hot in there.”

“Makes you wonder what it was like in the Trojan Horse?” said Adin.

“Something like that.”