“By way of introductions, the gentleman who brought you back here is Captain James Epson. Seated across from me is U.S. Air Force General Marcus Holloway, who sits on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
Dane felt a strange numbness come over him as the sheer magnitude of whatever assignment they were about to be asked to do hit home. Joint Chiefs of Staff? He shot a quick glance over at Bones, whose puzzled expression clearly said, What the…?
“Gentlemen: I’ll get right to the point. We’ll tell you what you need to know, nothing more. Don’t ask questions. We’re telling you everything we can. A lot of very smart people, smarter than us, have developed the plan of action we’re about to brief you on.”
Bones raised his hand like a kid in a classroom. The admiral scowled at him but waited for him to speak. Bones said, “Sir, are these smart people in the military?”
“Bonebrake, you do realize you just asked a question after I said not to? I can answer this one, but don’t let it happen again, is that clear?”
“Yes, sir, it’s clear.”
Dane couldn’t help but notice that Bones had not apologized. The guy was ballsy.
“Most of those who developed this mission are not in the military per se, but work for U.S. intelligence agencies that advise the military branches, including Mr. Sardowski, here, who is an analyst with the CIA based out of Langley.”
The guy in the suit gave Dane and Bones a curt nod. Dane and Bones sat still and mute as they processed this revelation. Central Intelligence Agency?
The admiral continued while the naval officer presented Dane and Bones with a paper form and a pen.
“We know that as SEALs you’re sworn to secrecy on every mission. But before we begin let me stress that this goes far beyond that. In order to participate in this assignment, you’ll need to be given Top Secret clearance. We’ve already taken the necessary steps to expedite the process. All you need to do is to sign the papers in front of you. But a word of caution. Not a single syllable of what you’re about to hear in this airplane ever comes out of your lips, is that understood? No matter how drunk you get at a party,” he said, staring at Bones for emphasis, who nodded his agreement while signing the document. Dane took a bit more time to read his, but also signed. While the officer snatched away the papers, the admiral resumed his talk.
“Our goal is to deliver your briefing with time left over for you to get as much sleep as possible. You’re about to embark on one hell of an assignment. So listen up, here we go.”
He nodded to Captain Epson, who promptly pressed a key on a remote control, activating a PowerPoint presentation on the wall-mounted screen. A photo of what looked to Dane and Bones like some kind of early diving bell sitting on a wheeled platform appeared on the screen.
Epson directed a laser pointer in a circular motion around the object on the monitor.
“This is NASA space capsule Liberty Bell 7.” He let that sink in for a moment on the bemused Dane and Bones as he advanced to the next slide. It also depicted the capsule on a wheeled platform, but in this shot a spacesuited astronaut stood next to the craft.
Epson went on. “This photo was taken in 1961, shortly before the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, three hundred miles off Cape Canaveral, not far from the Bahamas, and was lost in a retrieval accident. Gus Grissom, the lone occupier of the capsule, was rescued, while the capsule sank to the seafloor. It has remained there for the last thirty-eight years undisturbed, at a depth of almost three miles, or 15,000 feet.”
The admiral’s gaze shifted to the marine chart laid out on the table, and Dane and Bones followed suit. “We believe it to be a flat, featureless bottom,” he noted, dragging a pointer finger across the chart. Then he looked up at the Air Force General, who stared right at Dane and Bones while he spoke.
“The Mercury-Redstone 4 mission, so-named for the rocket that carried the Liberty Bell crew capsule as part of the Mercury manned space program that preceded the more famous Apollo series, had two agendas.” The General looked around the table at his colleagues as if to see if any of them would object to where he was going. None of them indicated as such, so the Joint Chiefs of Staff representative resumed his delivery to a mystified Dane and Bones.
“The official, publicly known agenda was a short suborbital flight to demonstrate America’s space prowess to the Russians. You boys weren’t even born yet, but at the time the Cold War was heating up with Russia having launched their Sputnik satellite a few years earlier, and from there the space race was on.”
Dane nodded. He’d always been fascinated by the space race and the Apollo moon missions in particular.
“But the unofficial agenda of that mission is why you’re here today. As I said, the U.S. was looking to use the fourth Mercury mission as a message to the world, and in particular the Soviets, that America was the preeminent space power. But beyond that, the Kennedy Administration had something up their sleeve.”
Dane looked away from the photo of Grissom and the capsule on screen to gauge the faces of the other men. All of them appeared dead-serious, almost grimly determined. Dane saw the Admiral eye the General and lift a hand in his direction from where it had been resting on the table. Stop.
The Admiral took over. “Liberty Bell 7 carried a as part of her payload a small nuclear bomb.”
Dane gave a low whistle. For a few seconds the only sound was the rumble of the jet’s engines as they cut through the evening sky.
The Admiral spoke up again. “We can't tell you why that device was on board, so don't ask.”
The General nodded and then resumed his talk by clicking to the next slide.
“This shot was taken from a U.S. Navy air craft carrier, and shows Gus Grissom treading water while the Liberty capsule is flooding. Poor ol’ Gus was blamed for the rest of his career and even afterwards for accidentally blowing the explosive hatch bolts prematurely.”
Dane could almost hear Bones’ gears churning to put out a dirty joke, but the loquacious Indian seemed to realize he’d pushed right up to the edge with his earlier question, and he remained silent along with the rest of the room.
“But the truth is, he did it on purpose. He did it to sink that capsule because of what it contained on board: an unexploded nuclear bomb that no one was supposed to know about,” the General interjected once again, reading the questions apparent on the SEALs’ faces. “The reason the bomb was never detonated, and that no one has ever heard of a nuclear weapon aboard a U.S. spacecraft, was because of Gus Grissom. Once he was in space, apparently he got cold feet and refused to carry out his orders. He got scared or something. The psychologists still aren’t exactly sure — but the upshot of it was that he absolutely would not cooperate to carry out the flight objective, making the working atmosphere non-conducive to completing the mission.”
“So instead,” the Admiral resumed, “it was arranged that NASA would announce they had successfully completed a short sub-orbital hop that just happened to have a little glitch on splashdown. They carried a few ordinary science experiments aboard, nothing special.”
Sardowski made his voice heard for the first time since the briefing began. “The end result of all this is that the A-bomb is still resting inside the capsule on the ocean floor,” he stated. “And until now that hasn’t posed much of a problem. Back in 1961, deliberately sinking that capsule was a good move if you didn't want it to be found. Undersea salvage capabilities were far behind what’s needed to raise the capsule. But in recent years that began to change, and very recently…” The CIA man paused to hit a key on his laptop, advancing the slide to one that showed the logo of a popular cable television network.