Operation Damocles Read Online Free PDF Page B

information, especially with contract personnel.”
    “The Stanford group is particularly sensitive,” said Castor. “You can imagine what would happen with something like this if it leaked at a university. They had the best opportunity, based on knowledge of payload specifics, but as far as we can tell, none of them have had any in-depth experience with the workings inside Kennedy Space Center, or with NASA in general. Everything—individual backgrounds, politics, work history—they all check out. Too obvious anyway.”
    Dykes observed thoughtfully, “Somebody currently working within the agency may have helped the perpetrators, but it would still be possible for someone on the outside, if they knew our operation well enough, and if there was enough money involved to buy information from a loose-lipped employee. Hell, it’s even possible that an employee in Inspection or Packing gave out enough information to do the job over a few beers, and doesn’t even realize it.”
    “We had better devise new security procedures for launch,” said Patterson. “I would rather we did it than some heavy-handed zealots from the military and the National Security Agency.”
    “Amen!” said Dykes.

VI

    Three weeks later, the Columbia incident was almost forgotten. It was a quiet, moonlit night on July 10, at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base, in the heart of the Mojave Desert region of southern California. Near the south perimeter of the Marine Corps reservation was an old, all-but-forgotten World War II B-17 airfield that once was known as the Eidermann Army Air Corps Heavy Bomber Maintenance Depot.
    The full moon and the clear desert sky combined to make it a scene of ethereal beauty. Bright moonlight on wind-rippled hillocks of sand contrasted with stark shadows, as though a divine paintbrush had lightly touched the tops of dunes, sagebrush and stones, leaving a dappled reflection of ghostly silver on a canvas of blackest velvet. Moonlight on the roofs of hangars and the tops of crated equipment cast inky wells of darkness under building eaves, and on the leeward sides of equipment and containers. In the new, frugal Marine Corps, there were no sentries walking guard duty, not at remote, low-security places like Eidermann. Only surveillance cameras witnessed the silent, ghostly magic of the desert night.
    At 0200 hours, Eidermann erupted skyward in a cataclysmic flash of energy, followed instantly by a pounding concussion and blast wave that shattered windows ten miles away in the small town of Twentynine Palms. Electricity crackled and arced within a blinding, incandescent hemisphere of expanding plasma, hotter than the surface of the sun. The growing fireball dimmed from a painful white glare to red boiling blood, and finally, to a black, ominous cloud, rising to obscure the moon.
    People in Twentynine Palms and all over the Marine base were thrown from their beds by the ground-shock, a seismic wave that spread outward from the point of impact in an expanding circle, like a ripple from a stone tossed into still water. A pool table in one of the local bars bounced two feet into the air, and broke in half when it landed. The two players standing near it, along with the few other patrons of the bar, were thrown sprawling to the floor amid spilled drinks and broken glass.
    Half the Marine base went dark as one of its two electrical substations tripped offline, and the town power system blinked out completely. A mighty, thrumming drone ran through the earth, so heavy in timbre and powerful in amplitude that it hurt the teeth; it seemed to vibrate the very bones of one’s body. The acrid, stinging smell of ozone permeated the air. St. Elmo’s fire danced along those overhead utility lines still standing, the ghostly electrical flames eventually melting away into the wires.
    Water mains broke and geysers of water shot from the middle of flooding roads. Streets and parking lots resembled a battlefield that had been cratered by