‘Get me DDO Wiley on the phone, now!’ Montgomery barked at his secretary as he stormed back into his office. The CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations was responsible for all United States covert spy operations around the world, and Howard J. Wiley was now the second-most powerful man in the CIA. He often knew more than the director, an appointment held in the past by influential men like George Bush Snr and William J. Casey.
‘Who the fuck does this O’Connor think he is?’ Vice President Montgomery demanded after DDO Wiley came on the secure line.
‘I’ve just heard, Mr Vice President. I can assure you, he’ll be disciplined.’
‘Disciplined? He needs to be fucking well sacked! If the O’Connors of this world get their way, we’ll be inviting Ahmadinejad and his mad mullahs to a fucking barbecue on the lawns of the White House! Get him out of Washington. He’s far too cosy with those jerk-offs in the State Department. Send him off to keep an eye on Mugabe and his gangsters. Or better still, fuck him off to Alaska. The last time I was there it was forty below. Perhaps living with the goddamned huskies and bears will give him a better perspective.’
‘Consider it done, Mr Vice President,’ DDO Wiley responded, but he was wasting his breath. The line had already gone dead.
22
T he blizzard was the worst in living memory. Icy winds tore up the Copper River Valley at over a hundred kilometres an hour. O’Connor glanced at the security-camera screen and shivered involuntarily. The mercury had dropped to minus fifty degrees. Alaska was a hell of a place to spend a forty-second birthday, he thought grimly, as another sub-zero blast shook the HAARP control centre.
HAARP stood for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, an ostensibly harmless scientific project, run out of a base in the Alaskan wilderness near Gakona, 320 kilometres north-east of Anchorage, but O’Connor was already wondering about the schedule of experiments. Outside the snow was piling up around the 180 high-powered antennae that were spread over nearly fifteen hectares. Each over twenty metres high and not dissimilar in shape to the backyard Hills Hoist, the combined antennae were capable of producing a staggering 3.6 billion watts of radio frequency power.
‘That storm’s packing one heck of a punch out there.’ Dr Tyler Jackson, the CIA’s senior scientist at HAARP, ducked through the outer door and ambled inside the control centre, brushing the snow from his long angular face and sandy beard. Ducking was a habit the gangly scientist had developed at an early age, but Jackson was now in his sixty-fourth year, and close to retirement. He had been with the Firm for over forty years, but, like O’Connor, he didn’t always agree with the party line coming out of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
‘Not the only storm brewing,’ O’Connor replied. ‘The Iranians have just test-fired another Sejil-2 missile.’ In the two weeks since O’Connor had arrived at Gakona, a camaraderie had developed between the two men. Both had strong scientific backgrounds, both were cleared to the highest levels of security, and both were serving their country amidst the privations of the harsh conditions of Alaska.
‘Have a look at this.’ O’Connor rebooted the satellite images showing a powerful twenty-six-tonne missile rising majestically into the Iranian night sky from its launch pad at the missile test site at Semnan, outside of Tehran.
‘They’ve come a long way in a very short time,’ Jackson agreed. ‘Their next step will be a three-stage motor… which will put cities like Rome and London in reach.’
O’Connor nodded. ‘It may not be that far off, when you consider their first space launch – you could see bits and pieces falling off the rocket as it left the launch pad – yet barely a year later they’ve got a satellite into a stable orbit.’
‘You think they’re getting help? I’ve been a bit out of the loop up here.’
‘I know they’re getting help. I’ve seen the reports from one of our agents inside Iran. For starters, they needed maraging steel for the missile casing. That’s a low-carbon, ultra-high-strength steel that’s critical for low-weight missile skins. It’s a controlled item under international agreements, but the Iranians have managed to buy it; so someone’s selling. The tungsten copper alloy bars they needed for their solid-propellant control vanes are also a prohibited item, but somehow they’ve managed to get hold of them as well… probably out of China.’
‘Why the tungsten alloy?’
‘Solid propellant exhaust contains aluminium oxide, which is extremely abrasive,’ O’Connor explained, ‘but the Iranians have designed jet vanes that can withstand the entire sixty-second burn of the first stage of the rocket. If they can overcome the problems of an external heat shield and they develop a nuclear warhead, the balance of power in the world is going to change dramatically.’
‘You think they’re getting close?’
O’Connor nodded. ‘The reports we’re getting out of Iran indicate they’re constructing a new uranium enrichment plant near the old city of Qom, but it’s buried so deep into solid rock it will be almost impossible to attack, at least with ordinary bombs. The Pentagon is developing what it’s dubbed a “massive ordnance penetrator” that contains thousands of kilograms of explosives. It’ll be delivered by the stealth bomber, but even that may not be enough to deal with blast doors that are deep underground.’
‘Which probably explains the pressure we’re now under to fast-track our experiments here,’ Jackson said grimly, ‘which is madness.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘The science is untested, which is reason enough to be cautious.’
‘Try telling that to the Vice President.’
‘Exactly. Or some of the gung-ho brass in the Pentagon. Have you seen the proposals for Operation Aether?’
‘Not the detail.’
‘It’s in three phases. The first involves a burst of three billion watts to heat and raise the ionosphere, to see if we can deflect a missile off course, and the last phase aims to develop ways of controlling the weather, which the military have been trying to do since Vietnam. But as dangerous as those experiments might be, it’s the second phase that worries me most.’ Jackson loaded a thumb drive into the computer on O’Connor’s desk and fired up a PowerPoint presentation. It was headed ‘Top Secret’.
‘The second phase involves the generation of extremely low frequency, or ELF, waves directed at the earth’s core, rather like the way the mining industry uses seismic tomography to search for deposits of oil and natural gas.’
‘But the mining industry only uses power of about thirty to forty watts?’
‘Precisely. At higher power levels we know we can X-ray the ground, and that can be useful in providing imagery on tunnels and bunkers, but the Pentagon wants to know if we can generate power levels at the extreme end of the range that can actually destroy underground installations – Iran’s nuclear facilities being high on their list.’
O’Connor let out a low whistle. ‘Are we seriously thinking of bombarding the earth’s core with three billion watts?’
‘There are powerful forces in Washington who are determined to see if it will work, and I’m afraid the director is just a puppet who’ll do as he’s told. Are you familiar with the Chandler wobble?’
O’Connor nodded. In 1891 an American astronomer, Seth Carlo Chandler, discovered that the earth wobbled on its axis by up to fifteen metres.
‘Well,’ Jackson continued, ‘a highly respected Indian seismologist has pointed to data from the International Earth Rotation Service. In the three months leading up to the devastating earthquakes and tsunamis of 2004, the Chandler wobble increased significantly. Normally we might get one earthquake a year above seven on the Richter scale – what we call a “great earthquake” – but in 2004 there was a massive earthquake in the Macquarie Trench off New Zealand on 23 December, and that one measured 8.1. Just three days later, we had an even bigger earthquake… around nine if I remember correctly… triggering the tsunamis that killed hundreds of thousands on the coasts of Asia. The frequency of those great earthquakes is increasing, and the Chandler wobble is maintained by mass distribution within the molten outer core, as well as the crust and oceans.’