The Rock

VOYAGER

Outside the orbit of the farthest planet in the solar system, the effects of the sun are still present. A continuous stream of charged particles from the sun's magnetic field is swept by the solar wind and creates a huge bubble-like structure known as the heliosphere. From mankind's perspective it serves a most useful function by keeping the solar system relatively free of interstellar matter and slowing the entry of cosmic rays.

Voyager 2, intrepid visitor of four planets and fifty-seven moons during the past eighteen years, was only a third of the way to the edge of the heliosphere but well beyond the orbit of Pluto-a vast, empty hinterland where there is little for the probe's scanners to search out and examine. Indeed, most of the equipment on board the Voyager was turned off shortly after the probe passed Neptune in August of 1989. Since that time only the spectrometer-a device that detects ultraviolet radiation-has been kept active.

With its large dish oriented back into the plane of the planets and the high-gain antenna in the center centered on Earth, Voyager heads for the edge of the heliosphere, projected to reach it by the year 2000. The plutonium power on the probe is expected to run out in 2020. After that, it is estimated that it will take Voyager millions of years before it comes close to another star.

When Voyager was launched in 1977, there were people who believed shooting out into space what was essentially a guidebook back to Earth might not have been the most prudent idea. Those worries were overruled. After all, the scientists argued, the radio and television rays from Earth were much farther out already than Voyager would ever reach intact. Those rays not only pinpointed Earth's stellar location but also depicted life-and not a very flattering one, as a survey of the channels indicates-on Earth.

At precisely 0100, Greenwich mean time, the transmitter secreted away in the guts of the probe powered up and began pulsing out a binary code representing the readings from the spectrometer for the past twenty-four hours. The radio waves began their four-hour, ten-minute, twenty-three-second trip back to Earth to be gathered in at the deep-space communications center near Alice Springs, Australia, where a giant dish would grudgingly turn from higher priority missions to gather in Voyager's data during its fifteen minute daily allocation of dish time.

Seven minutes later-four and a half billion miles into its seventeen-year journey and midway through the transmission-Voyager 2's journey ended abruptly.

Hawkins felt the pounding of a massive headache behind his eyes. For the past several hours they had learned quite a bit about meteor-burst transmitting, Ayers Rock, digital encoding, and various other information, but it had added little to their understanding of the situation.

Mentally tuning out the headache, Hawkins slapped the end of his pointer on the surface of the easel. "All right, I know this seems rather simplistic, but bear with me. Basically we've got four items here."

"I don't think you should have those arrows. None of those items necessarily follows from the previous one." Levy's quiet voice filled the room. "I would admit that the Voyager information was the step prior to the message, since that information was used in making up the message. But how did our names come up?"

Hawkins shrugged. "We'll get to that later. I'm more concerned about the connection with the bombing. There's one more of those nuclear weapons out there missing. If whoever is behind these messages is involved with the bombs, we need to find that out."

Hawkins didn't think they should talk about the touchstone theory in front of Lamb. Levy's point had been valid, but if it was true, there wasn't too much they could do about it. Besides, there were still several other factors that didn't quite fit into that theory-at least not that he could see. It was those other factors that they were examining now.

"Look at those reception sites and add in the Rock." Levy was holding up a world map with the six red circles. "What does the spatial layout make you think?"

"One for each inhabited continent," Hawkins noted. Something had been bugging him for a while. "What if the others were diversions?"

"What?" Fran looked puzzled.

"What if the only true message was sent to South Africa, but the other ones were sent to throw us off track?" Hawkins warmed to the theme. It was something he might have done. "We're sitting here looking at where those beams terminated, but that doesn't necessarily mean there has to be anything there. We have no record of transmissions from those sites."

"Or there might have been something there once upon a time and it no longer exists," Levy commented. "But getting back to the layout of the six sites: Let's stop being egocentric and turn our gaze outward. Note that three are in the northern hemisphere and three are in the southern. Note that each set of three is laid out in a pattern that splits the world into three roughly equal parts."

Lamb had entered while Hawkins was showing the diagram, and he now spoke for the first time. "If you wanted to set up monitors to cover the whole world you might space them out like that. Maybe the Russians put together some sort of monitoring system in the past and the explosion at Vredefort damaged it?"

Levy was shaking her head thoughtfully. "No. That's not what I'm talking about. Think about where we're sitting right now. Why is this tracking station here in Australia?"

"So we can always have contact with our satellites and probes when they're on the far side of the globe from the United States," Fran answered.

"Right," Levy said, and waited.

Fran was the first to catch on. "Wait a minute! Are you saying that these six sites are the same thing? Monitoring or relay sites to space? But there's nothing there at the other sites!"

"There was nothing in Ayers Rock that we knew of until it sent out the message," Hawkins noted.

Levy pointed back at Hawkins's diagram. "We all seem to be ignoring the fact that the message relayed the data off Voyager 2 with the addition of our names. Yet Voyager is almost out of the solar system. How could someone have gotten that information?"

"They don't necessarily have to have gotten it off the satellite itself," Batson replied. "That information is available in data bases here on Earth."

"So someone could have just used that Voyager information as a diversion," Lamb said.

Hawkins turned to Lamb. "When this crater woman gets here, we need to pump her for everything about Meteor Crater. I'm sure they've done sonar and electromagnetic resonance soundings in the crater. If not, we need to get some people out there. Maybe there's something in that area similar to what's in the Rock."

"Maybe." Lamb seemed bothered by Levy's quick dismissal of the Russian angle. "The Russians would have wanted to do something like that-set up sites around the world like we have. They could get access to the Voyager plate information-it's public information. Hell, maybe this thing in the Rock dates back to Sputnik"

"What exactly do you think you have in the Rock?" Batson asked. He thumped a folder down on the table in front of him. "I've been going through the data picked up so far and it seems to me that all you know for sure is that there is an anomaly on your sonar and electromagnetic resonance mapping. Nothing on sound. Nothing on radio waves since the one broadcast. All your sonar and EMR tells you is that there is something other than solid rock down about five hundred feet. And the latest data indicate that it is approximately forty feet in diameter and fifteen in depth."

"True," Lamb acknowledged. "That is all we have."

Batson shook his head. "But for all we know that could have been in there forever. No one ever thought of doing any of those tests on the Rock prior to the messages. There is no sign of entryway or exit."

"We've got troops going over the exterior of the Rock and the surrounding area double-checking for that." Lamb replied. "We think it's possible the entry tunnel might be on the northwest side, which has been off limits for years to all but the Aborigines for religious purposes. Something might have been dug on that side and hidden."

"If you find no tunnel, how did it get in there?" Fran asked.

The question went unanswered.

"It gets back to the question of what 'it' is," Batson said. "It also has to be able to transmit through all that rock out into space with sufficient power to override your normal SATCOM traffic. I'm no expert on it, but I'd say we'd have a hell of a time rigging a transmitter to go through five hundred feet of solid rock."

"It's possible," Lamb answered. "We ran that problem through the computer. No one ever thought of doing it through rock before-no reason to-but if it was necessary, and you have a very strong power source, then you could transmit through rock on certain microwave frequencies."

"But where's the power source, then?" Fran asked. "There are too many problems without answers here. She liked working with hard data-here there was no data, just pieces of a puzzle. Except the entire puzzle seemed to be a solid sheet of blackness that they were fumbling with in the dark, trying to connect each piece at a time to another one simply by feel.

"I think this could all be an elaborate setup," Lamb said.

"Setup?" Hawkins repeated. "For what purpose?"

"This is about the bombs," Lamb said. "It's got to be. I think someone is trying to divert our attention from the one still out there. Like Major Hawkins said, our primary concern must-"

He paused as an excited Major Spurlock threw open the door. "Voyager 2 is off-line."

"What?" Lamb asked, confused.

"We just lost it in mid-transmission." He went over to the computer and punched in. "Here, look." The team gathered around and peered over his shoulder. He explained as he typed. "In 1990 the Voyager Planetary Mission was completed and the name was changed to the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) and its priority was lowered."

Digits on the screen transformed themselves into readable data-readable, that is, to someone with a doctorate in astrophysics and experience watching Voyager data play across the screen.

"We give fifteen minutes of down link time to Voyager every twenty-four hour cycle," Spurlock continued. "We get it here, then burst it back into space to an INTELSAT V-F8 Communications Satellite in synchronous orbit above Australia. The satellite relays it to Vallejo Earth Station in California. The logical thing then would be for Vallejo to forward it directly to JPL-Jet Propulsion Labs, who's responsible for Voyager-just down the road, but that isn't what happens. Instead, Vallejo pulses the radio wave back into space to a CONTELASC ASC-l communications satellite, which relays it to the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, which makes a copy of the transmission for their master data banks. Goddard then bounces the message to JPL in California using a GE AMERICOM SATCOM F2R satellite." Spurlock examined the screen. "Normally we don't even look at the data-just relay it. JPL called me just three minutes ago and told me that the data had ended early. I checked and this is what I found."

Data scrolled up and then abruptly ended. "I thought at first that the data had ended because the transmission was finished, but there was still eight minutes of dish time left when this break came and it always takes the full amount of time for all the data to get in."

"Could it be a computer malfunction?" Levy asked.

"I've checked that," Spurlock replied. "No."

"Maybe the damn thing's transmitter just broke," Lamb said.

"We can check on it," Spurlock said.

"How?" Hawkins asked.

Spurlock's fingers pounded the keys as his mind did the math.

"It will take over eight hours before the radio signal I just sent will hit Voyager 2, bounce off the high-gain antenna dish, and return to Earth-basically just like a radar wave would work. A successful bounce back means that Voyager is still out there and the problem lies inside the probe somewhere."

"And if you get no bounce back?" Lamb asked.

"Then Voyager is gone," Spurlock answered.

A long silence filled the room.

"Hell of a coincidence," Hawkins finally muttered.

Lamb shook his head. "You all know as much as I know. I need you to give me some answers. It was your names and not mine transmitted by the Rock." He looked at his watch. "I've got some other things I need to attend to."

Lamb made his way to the door and the door swung shut behind them, leaving the team to ponder this additional piece of information.

Hawkins looked at the team members. "Anyone want to get some chow?"

Fran stood up and stretched out her shoulders. "I could use a little break."

Hawkins looked at Levy and Batson, but both indicated negatively. Together, Fran and he left the conference room and made their way to the small mess hall in the basement of the building.

"Sounds like you know Mr. Lamb from somewhere else," Fran commented.

"We've worked together before," Hawkins answered.

"You two go back a ways?"

"Five years," Hawkins acknowledged.

They entered the small cafeteria and Hawkins held off on any further conversation until they had their food and were sitting in a booth.

"You saw my folder. Over four years ago I was picked to form a new special-operations unit. A team that would do the jobs that Delta or any of those other high-speed units wouldn't be able to for practical and political reasons. We were answerable only to the President.

"My military career was finished the minute I went on that team, as were those of the other nineteen men and four women who joined."

"You have women on your team?" Fran was surprised.

"Yes. They passed the requirements and it's very useful on certain ops to have a woman. Throws the bad guys for a second or two, and sometimes that's all you need." He smiled. "Besides, women think differently in certain circumstances and sometimes that different perspective can be very useful.

"Anyway-since we wanted to be totally dedicated to doing the job, we all recognized that we had to stop thinking about the military being our career. Our career was Orion-that's what we were called. So I got Lamb to approve a half a million dollars being deposited in a special bank account for each team member. Twelve million dollars is pretty cheap when you consider the cost of a jet fighter. That allowed each of us to concentrate on the job and not worry about whether we would have a retirement someday or whether those with families would have their people taken care of."

"Sounds kind of mercenary," Fran commented.

"I suppose," Hawkins agreed. "However, it's also realistic. We no longer existed. We weren't army anymore. We weren't in any records anywhere, so we didn't even have to bother to come up with a cover story like they do in Delta. We had no monthly paycheck. No promotion boards. Nothing." He pointed at his uniform. "This is the first time I've had this on in three years. My rank of major is permanent.

"Anyway-at first things went well. We ran four real-world operations our first year. All successful. No losses. Then came the new administration. I briefed the President on our team and our mission. However, it seemed like the new administration had different ideas about what we were to be used for. The President appointed Lamb as our liaison and tried slipping in some questionable missions and I had to call him on it."

"What kind of questionable missions?"

Hawkins shrugged. "It doesn't matter. Suffice it to say they were based in the U.S. and involved eliminating certain persons. You've got to remember that everything we were doing was illegal-both in the United States and outside of it. It got kind of hard to see the lines sometimes, because there really weren't any lines. So we basically had to believe the information that Lamb was feeding us. He and I went round and round sometimes about how much my people needed to know. He believed in the minimum and I believed in the maximum. On top of that, I don't believe all the minimum information he gave us was legitimate. I couldn't exactly go check on all of it. That's not to say that whatever we did wasn't in the ultimate good interests of the United States. I believe it all was, but it's just that in the intelligence arena there's a lot of manipulation going on-getting people to do mission A for reasons that are actually connected to mission B-if that makes any sense.

"And that brings us to the present situation. I think we're getting the minimum information. And I'm not sure how much of the minimum is true. I'm not even sure if my name really was on the message or if the message is real."

Fran smiled. "Games within games, eh?"

Hawkins's face was dead serious. "That's the gray world you're in now. I've lived in it for many years. The number-one rule: Trust no one. Believe nothing you're told."

"Even what you tell me?" Fran asked.

"Yeah. Even what I tell you, if you're smart." Hawkins ran a hand through his hair. "The last thing my team was working on was trying to track down those two missing nuclear weapons. They disappeared from a Soviet stockpile in what is now Kazakhstan. We got that through a HUMINT-human intelligence-source sixteen days ago. Apparently the bombs have been missing for about three weeks now. We believe a former Russian general sold them to the highest bidder. Of course, the damn Russians, or whatever the hell you call them now, didn't bother announcing the news. How the bombs got out of the country and where they went we don't know. One of those bombs is now accounted for."

Fran nodded. "Vredefort Dome."

"Right. We thought we had a line on the other one in Colombia-a drug kingpin who certainly had the money to buy one and the smuggling capability to get it from Russia to South America."

"But why would he want a nuclear bomb?"

Hawkins shook his head. "I don't know. Lamb wouldn't tell me that. I had to guess. Why would anyone want a bomb? The ultimate power, I suppose. Blackmail. Whatever. Lots of people would like one. Turns out he didn't buy one, though. We went in and extracted him. He knew nothing about it." Hawkins shrugged. "At least we took him out of the drug network, although some other scumbag will take his place."

"Four years is a long time to be doing that sort of work," Fran commented.

Hawkins shrugged. "It's all I have."

Fran pointed at the ring on his left hand. "What about your wife? Do you have kids?" As soon as she said it, she could sense the shift in Hawkins. The hard planes of his face coalesced into a mask.

"We had no children and my wife doesn't need me much now."

Fran was confused. "Are you divorced?"

"No." There was a long, awkward silence.

Fran decided not to pursue that subject any further. "What do you think the connection with the bombs is?" This was getting very close to her computer printouts. They hadn't even told her about the other bomb still out there, just about the blast at Vredefort Dome. That other bomb on the loose would have made the results even worse-if it was possible to contemplate worse than what the numbers had shown.

"I don't know. As Debra said-the Vredefort explosion came before the transmission. I think the South African radicals got one bomb and used it in the best possible way they could. I don't think they could have afforded the other one. We just picked up some Intel after I got here that Libya might have the other one. I don't know. My team is still on the trail. That's the only thing that makes me think that something very important is happening-they pulled me off my team to come here. And the fact that Lamb is here. He doesn't like wasting his time on wild goose chases."

Fran thought about what her computer had predicted. "I told you my job is statistical projection. Well, I did a run after the explosion at Vredefort Dome. Fed in all the economic and political data available-although they didn't tell me there was another bomb still out there. Not that it could have turned out much worse than it did."

"I know," Hawkins said. "I just looked at the projections."

Fran pushed the plate of food aside, uneaten. "The weird thing is that this whole incident with Ayers Rock is what I'd call a wild card. There's no way anyone could have predicted this. It really skews the data."

"Is that good or bad?" Hawkins asked, thinking about the spreadsheets and summaries he had just talked about with Lamb.

"I don't know. The original future courses and their probabilities were pretty grim, so any change may be for the better. There was a fifty-nine percent chance of-"

They both looked up in surprise as an agitated Debra Levy appeared at their table with Don Batson in tow and interrupted. "There's been another transmission!"

They followed Debra through the hallways to the main control room of the communications center. The room had been cleared except for members of the team, Major Spurlock, and Lamb. Spurlock was typing away at a computer keyboard, his attention focused on the screen in front of him.

"This one is different," he said. "It's on a shifting frequency, and the content that I can get isn't in the same format."

"Let me see," Levy said. Spurlock relinquished his chair and Levy sat down. Her fingers flew over the keyboard while the other members watched. After a few minutes she sat up in the chair. "He's right. It's different in more than one way." She stared intently at the screen, ignoring the rest of the people in the room.

"But we know it came from the Rock, right?" Lamb asked.

"Yes, sir." Spurlock pointed out the large windows at the dishes. "We've kept dish four dedicated at minimum attitude in the Rock's azimuth. It picked this message up."

"Was it directed up like the first one?" Hawkins asked.

Spurlock sat at another console, leaving the one he had been at to Levy, who was working again. "This one went out with a lot less power. If we hadn't been watching for it, we never would have caught it. This was more a broadband transmission at low power in all directions. I don't think it was specifically directed at anyone spot."

"What about down links?" Lamb asked. "Was it trying to communicate with the other locations like the first one?"

"No, sir. Like I said, this one was just sort of put out there-we have no idea where it was directed to. It most certainly was not a meteor burst transmission like the first. In fact, it might not necessarily be a coherent transmission."

"What does that mean?" Fran asked.

"I mean it might just be a microwave burst of energy, not necessarily a message." Spurlock shook his head. "I don't know… I've never seen anything like this. If it was a transmission, I'm not sure what kind of transmission it was."

Lamb was exasperated. "You'd better start explaining this a hell of lot better than you are, mister, because right now you aren't making a damn bit of sense."

Levy's voice cut in. "I think I know what has happened. At 0246 hours Zulu, or Greenwich mean, dish four picked up a microwave transmission from the vicinity of the Rock. It was monitoring a wide band width centered on the frequency of the original transmission, but scooting up and down the frequencies on a fixed rotation every twenty seconds to make sure it didn't miss anything going out on those. The transmission it picked up was not directional. The transmission lasted a total of approximately twenty-three seconds, as best as can be estimated."

Lamb leaned forward. "What do you mean 'as best as can be estimated'?"

Levy was staring at the computer screen. "The transmission was picked up initially at fourteen twenty megahertz. The computer locked on and when the frequency started shifting, the computer shifted with it. The frequency started shifting up in the spectrum, then blanked out for two seconds, then was picked up at sixteen sixty-two megahertz, then again blanked out for two seconds on the way back down. The dish picked it up again, shifting back down the spectrum until it disappeared at fourteen twenty."

"Cut to the chase," Lamb said. "What was the content of the transmission?"

"I don't know right now," Levy said. "Part was in standard binary, but Major Spurlock's and my own analyses have currently detected no discernible code."

"Who sent it?" Lamb asked. "The same transmitter that sent the first one?"

"Most likely, but that can't be guaranteed," Levy said.

"I contacted Colonel Tolliver's people out with the advance party at the Rock," Spurlock said. "The marines assure me that no one out there transmitted. Their equipment did not pick it up because they're operating lower down in the band."

Spurlock removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose nervously. "This transmission is very strange-unlike anything I've ever seen or can find a record of. The latest military radios use frequency-skipping to maintain security. This message skipped around in frequency, but it also did something else, something quite unusual, during those times when it totally disappeared from the spectrum. I don't think the transmission stopped there-I think it skipped into a form that we could not monitor. We also don't know to whom the message was transmitted. The power level was not particularly high, but by skipping off the atmosphere it could be picked up by a receiver that was expecting it, pretty much anywhere in the world."

"If whatever is in the Rock wanted to communicate with us," Hawkins said, "it could have done that like it did with the first message-using the information off the Voyager plate. If this transmission was sent in a way that we wouldn't even have picked up if we weren't specifically listening, and in a format we can't decode, that makes me think we weren't the designated receiver for it. Someone or something else is the intended receiver, and they did get it. The question is, who and where?"

Lamb sat still for a few seconds, distilling the confusing information. "So basically what you're telling me is that we have something in the Rock transmitting an unknown message, using means we are not sure of, to a party we don't know the identity of. Is that correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"So about the only thing we do know is that someone was meant to pick this up-someone who could decipher it," Lamb said.

"Yes, sir," Spurlock said.

Lamb pointed at the computer. "We need that message broken. I've got to know what's going on. I want you to make that your number-one priority-is that clear?"

"Yes, sir, it's clear," Spurlock answered. Levy didn't even bother to turn her head. She was already on a different plane of reality, working on the problem.

Lamb left the control, closely followed by Hawkins.

''What have you got on Levy?" Hawkins asked Lamb in the security of the message center.

Lamb smoothed out the computer printouts and ran his finger down the lines. "Debra Lynn Levy. Born 1972, Brooklyn, New York. Her father worked for the Transit Authority as a subway mechanic. Mother worked as a secretary. No history of exceptional mental aptitude in the family. Then she was born. She began speaking at age fourteen months. Reading at two years. She was in a Head Start day care program and they referred her to Professor Allen Steinwatz at New York University, who was quite well known for his work with child prodigies.

"Steinwatz convinced the parents to allow him to accelerate her education. She graduated high school at nine. She attended MIT and graduated with a doctorate in quantum physics at fifteen. For the next seven years she worked as a researcher in the physics department there. She started teaching at seventeen but apparently there was some problem with students eight to ten years older than her taking her seriously."

"What about her personal life?" Hawkins asked.

Lamb shook his head. "Nothing. She works, teaches, and goes home. We've still got people doing some checking, but we have no record of any boyfriend-or girlfriend, for that matter."

Lamb folded over a page. "There was something interesting, though. A year ago she had a breakdown and was committed to a mental institution for two months."

"What was the cause of the problem?" Hawkins asked.

"We're having trouble getting the hospital records.

It's a very elite place in upstate New York." He looked at Hawkins. "Why the interest in Levy?"

Hawkins shook his head. "I don't know. There's something about her that makes me feel uneasy. I can't put a finger on it. Let's just call it a gut feeling."

That was good enough for Lamb. "I'll get the records."

"Any problems other than the breakdown?"

Lamb looked at the security folder on her. "No. Only the fact that she's young and has never been exposed to this type of situation before."

"What about this crater person-Pencak?"

"She's on the way. We picked her up three hours ago. Should be here late tonight or early tomorrow."

"What about her background?" Hawkins asked. Lamb frowned. "Not good. She's a class-one weirdo who also happens to do some brilliant work concerning strange geological formations." His face twisted, the muscles around his deformed cheek jumping. "We've got her listed in the computer as having made six trips to the former Soviet Union. First one in '59. Last one in '87."

Hawkins understood how Lamb felt about that. "What else?"

"Langley and the FBI had a folder on her. She had a Russian boyfriend for a while-they wrote back and forth quite a bit. A Felix Zigorski, an aerodynamics expert who was involved with their space program. It all seemed pretty innocent, but they wanted to keep an eye on her."

"Back up," Hawkins said. "Tell me about her from the start."

Lamb scanned the faxed printout. "Not much here. Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1938. Her parents had a farm there. Both were killed in a car wreck when she was sixteen. She was banged up pretty bad and also severely burned. She was in the hospital for a while and then on her own-no known living relatives. Sold the farm and went to the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. Undergraduate major was physics. Got a doctorate in geology. Then she went to Meteor Crater and has been there ever since. She teaches occasionally as adjunct faculty at various universities. Travels a bit. Writes articles for scientific journals."

"Personal life?"

"Nothing so far. Apparently she doesn't look too good. She lost an eye in the accident and was badly scarred."

Hawkins stretched out his back muscles. "I'm going to have to keep an eye on her."

"That you are." Lamb absently ran a hand over the reports on his desk. "How are you doing?"

"I'm fine."

"How's your wife?"

"The same," Hawkins answered succinctly, his tone indicating that issue was not to be discussed.

Lamb switched the subject quickly. "I had security go through the team members' personal baggage and they found several bottles stashed in Batson's small carryon bag. I had them confiscated-this isn't the time or the place to put up with that stuff."

Hawkins shook his head. "Sounds like we've got a winning team here. Anything else I should know about?"

Lamb pressed a button on his desk and the door opened. Colonel Tolliver who'd been waiting outside walked in, his fatigues drenched with sweat. "Colonel Tolliver just flew in from the Rock. What's the tactical situation?"

Tolliver pulled out a rag and wiped sand from his forehead. "The Rock is secure. We're a hundred and eighty feet in and the drilling is going well."

"Strategic SITREP?" Lamb continued.

Tolliver frowned. "The Russian Task Force is making the Australians very nervous. My Aussie counterpart says he's getting a lot of pressure from his higher-ups to find out what the hell is going on. That's besides the flak about the drilling."

"What's the location of the task force?"

"They're in the Coral Sea still heading south. Intelligence believes they will go around the east coast of Australia and position themselves to the south in the Great Australian Bight, a thousand miles to the south of here.

"One of the dish antennas on the Gagarin is oriented directly toward our location. The other tracks the sky above Australia in a sweep pattern. We're picking up a lot of secure SATCOM traffic between the Task Force flagship and Moscow."

"How long before they're in position?"

"Thirty-six hours."

"Think they picked up the second transmission?" Lamb asked.

Tolliver shrugged. "We were on top of the Rock and didn't pick it up because we weren't up in that band width. Depends if the Russians were-we have no way of knowing."

Something had been in the back of Hawkins's mind. "Is there any activity at the site in Siberia?"

Lamb reached behind him and pulled out some papers. "Yes. Our eye in the sky is picking up extensive military maneuvers being carried out there. They're looking for something."

"Their Rock," Hawkins mused out loud. "What else?"

"Langley is concerned that the Russians will try to infiltrate the project here."

Hawkins nodded. He knew that. He was worried about it, too, and having Levy here already and bringing in Pencak didn't thrill him. He looked at Tolliver. "Remind your men that we're looking for more than direct military action. It's more likely that any action that occurs will be covert. They're to check everyone and take nothing for granted. It's possible we've already been infiltrated."

"Yes, sir." Tolliver paused. "Of course, you know that the most likely source of a compromise is one of the outsiders that have been called in."

Lamb fixed the marine with a cold stare. "I know that."

He dismissed Tolliver and then looked back at Hawkins. "Things are not going well in the big picture. There's already political instability in several Third World countries. The governments are keeping the loss of the gold reserves quiet, but some of those leaders are already scrambling to cover their own position-never mind worry about the welfare of their people. It looks like there will be at least four new governments before the end of the year."

He let out a deep breath and again changed the subject. "Anything from your people on the bomb search?"

"They're pursuing two possibilities," Hawkins replied, "One is Libya."

"He certainly had the money to buy a bomb," Lamb noted. "And it fits with some other Intel I've been getting. Qaddafi's suddenly begun making noises again about his line of death in the Gulf of Sidra. The President is thinking about using the Sixth Fleet to push him on it. Intel believes that Qaddafi wants to draw the fleet in and then have a small boat-or more likely a submarine-with the bomb on board try to get near one of the carriers and detonate it."

Hawkins frowned. "Why is the President reacting, then?"

"That's his job. All I know is that a carrier task force is cruising the thirty-third parallel waiting on the President's word to cross." Lamb sounded frustrated. "I'm sort of out of the loop here, sitting on my ass in the middle of Australia." He shook his head. "What's Orion's status on Libya?"

"They've infiltrated two small recon teams. Nothing yet, according to the last transmission."

"What's the other lead?"

Hawkins picked a slim file folder marked TOP SECRET/Q CLEARANCE. "They picked up a smuggler who disclosed under questioning that he delivered something to an Arab. A check of his cargo hold picked up slight traces of radioactivity. That and the smuggler's description of the package makes it possible it was one of the bombs. He transported his cargo from a point on the northern shore of the Black Sea down to the Mediterranean and cross loaded offshore of Syria to the Arab."

"Do they have a line on the Arab?"

"Not yet, but they're pushing it hard."

"Could it have gone to Qaddafi?"

"Possible. Or it could be someone else-that is, if it was one of the bombs. It could even have been the South African bomb on its way down there."

Lamb rubbed his forehead wearily. It could be anyone in that cesspool known as the Middle East. The Syrians would love to use one on the Israelis. The Lebanese against each other. The Jordanians against just about anyone. "All right. Let me know right away if you break anything out on that second transmission."

Hawkins didn't move. "You've been deploying some of my people in Orion about, without consulting me."

"Yes, I have. We're both out of the loop here. We have to be prepared for some contingencies, and your people are the best ones trained for action if we need it.

Hawkins nodded and left the van, accepting the fact but intensely disliking that he had to accept it. He had a feeling they no longer were in control of much of anything-this whole business seemed to be an exercise in reaction, which was not a mode of operations that he preferred.

When Hawkins got back to the control center, Fran and Don were gathered in front of the computer, peering over Spurlock's shoulders, awaiting the answer to their eight-hour question on Voyager. Levy did not appear to have moved from her position in front of the other computer. On Spurlock's screen the messages from the computer slowly scrolled up as the seconds went by.

Spurlock looked at the digital readout on the upper left-hand corner of the screen. It slowly clicked off the seconds, winding down. "Five seconds," he muttered unnecessarily.

The last digit flickered into a zero and then stopped. Spurlock blinked and looked at the screen.

He grabbed the keyboard and furiously typed out a message.

The reply was brief and to the point.

His fingers slammed the keys again.

Spurlock wasn't going to give up.

There was a ten-second pause during which Spurlock's fingers gouged the arms of his chair.

Spurlock let his fingers slide off the keyboard and turned to the others. "Voyager 2 is gone."

"Gone?" Fran repeated.

"It's no longer out there."

"Maybe just the satellite's dish is damaged and that's why you didn't get a bounce back," Hawkins offered.

"Even without the dish we would have gotten some sort of signal off the body of the satellite itself, a radar image." He pointed at the screen. "There's nothing out there where Voyager should be."

Silence settled over the room as each person contemplated what that meant. After a minute Levy slid her chair back from the keyboard. She didn't even appear to have heard what had happened to Voyager as she turned to the other members of the team.

"I think I have some answers to the questions raised by the second transmission."

"Have you broken the code?" Hawkins asked.

"We don't have the entire message. Actually," she said, "I think there are several messages, one of which was directed to us but the main part of which was directed elsewhere."

"Give us what you do have," Hawkins said.

Levy tapped the screen. "It's very strange. I think the part that slides up and down the microwave scale-from fourteen twenty to sixteen sixty-two megahertz-was actually a lead in and out to the main transmission-sort of like tuning a radio. I think the key message was in the blank parts."

"How can that be?" Lamb asked, confused.

"Well, I think-and it's only a theory-that the message is getting skipped about in time, somehow." Seeing a blank look on the others' faces, Levy continued. "When you transmit a message, you have several options in order to make it difficult for someone else to intercept and decrypt: You can vary the amplitude, the frequency, the message itself. But the best way would be simply to not have the message intercepted in the first place. If I had a way of transmitting where I could bounce the message back or forward a little in time, it would make it impossible for the person listening to pick it up."

"Is that technology possible?" Hawkins asked.

"We don't have it."

"Do the Russians?"

"Possibly, but not likely," Levy said. "Remember, that this is only speculation on my part."

Her eyes took on the unfocused look that Hawkins was getting used to. "The key to it all is that microwave transmissions are made up of atomic matter. This makes the possibility of being able to skip them about in time infinitely likelier than achieving the same end with larger objects. In fact, it is quite well accepted in the scientific community that there are a myriad of tiny wormholes-which are essentially time tunnels, or what you often hear about in science fiction as a warp tunnel-at the subatomic level.

"If you could surround the core of your message with negative energy matter, it would keep it intact through the hole. And since negative energy matter can be generated relatively easily, the real key to the problem is to generate a tiny wormhole-and of course to have a destination. Basically you would have a miniature tunnel through space, which means a small degree of time-shifting, since the message is not following a normal spatial path.

"The significance of such a message, though, is not that we can't intercept it in the first place, but rather that it is essential for an advanced race that is spread over the cosmos to be able to have what we would consider almost instantaneous communication over vast distances. Even at the speed of light a message from the nearest star system-Alpha Centauri-would take over four years to make it to our solar system. But if you could make use of these wormholes, you could get your message to your intended audience almost instantaneously across vast distances."

Levy halted, noting the way everyone was staring at her. "Well, that's what I think might be happening here, and not only can't I prove it but even if I could, there's not much you or I could do about it because we don't have the technology to receive it." She idly tapped her fingers on the desk. "If we did, space travel at a speed greater than light would be the next logical step, and we can barely put a satellite up into space. This technology is light-years ahead of what we have here on Earth now."

"Do you have any idea what such a transmitter would look like?" Hawkins asked.

"No. But, as I said, it would certainly be different from anything we've ever seen. Of course it might be so small that it could be easily concealed or it might be larger than the Great Pyramid. I have no idea. I only know the subatomic theories involved."

"You said that there was a part of the message that you think was directed to us," Fran noted. "Did you get that part at least?"

Levy nodded. "At the very beginning and the very end-beginning at fourteen twenty and sixteen sixty two megahertz, where it would be likely that we would be listening, there were two words in the same digital form as the first transmission. It took me a while to decode it, because even with just the two words expressed digitally, the frequency was shifting. The binary code was spread over ninety megahertz in each case."

Hawkins restrained his impatience with great difficulty. "Could you please tell us what that message is?"

Levy turned and hit one key on the computer and pointed. Hawkins looked at the two words.

"Is this someone's idea of a joke?" Batson demanded.

Levy shook her head. "No. That format is the same as the one used on Voyager and the first transmission." She pointed at the computer. "That's the Rock talking." She smiled dreamily.

"It's just saying hi."

Hawkins reached into the desk drawer behind him and drew out several aspirin. With a swig of water he downed three.