Oath of Office

Visitors to the Oval Office customarily dropped their smartphones in a basket out by Betty Martin’s desk, but Mary Pat had retrieved hers so she could use it to do research in real time, thumb-typing almost as fast as Ryan could talk.

“There’s a Sahar Tabrizi who is the dean of the physics department at University of Chile,” she said.

“That’s her,” Ryan said. “Do me a favor and see if she’s traveled to Iran in the last few weeks or months.”

Several intelligence agencies routinely kept tabs on the international travel of scientists deemed capable of furthering nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs. As an astronautical engineer, Tabrizi fit the bill. Mary Pat made two calls, before CIA gave her the nod.

“That’s affirmative, Mr. President,” she said. “Tabrizi flew into Tehran twenty-five days ago.” She sighed. “I gotta ask, Jack, would you care to enlighten the rest of us hairy unwashed heathens who don’t keep up with the world’s preeminent rocket scientists?”

“Are you familiar with the Kessler syndrome?”

“A doomsday scenario involving satellites,” Burgess said. “Conceived by a NASA scientist in the late seventies.”

“Correct,” Ryan said. “Donald Kessler postulated that objects in low earth orbit would eventually become so dense that they would begin to collide, causing a cascading event that would form a large debris field that would render low earth orbit uninhabitable by satellites.”

“Wait a minute,” Arnie van Damm said. “The International Space Station is in low earth orbit.”

“It is indeed,” Ryan said. “As are most of our surveillance satellites.”

“So,” Mary Pat prodded. “Dr. Tabrizi…”

“She takes the hypothesis to the next level,” Ryan said. “Where Kessler thought the number of satellites would domino, leading to a much higher frequency of strikes, Tabrizi theorizes that there is a single satellite in low earth orbit that, if destroyed, would create so much debris that the Kessler syndrome would be greatly accelerated. The collisions would continue to cascade, until everything in low earth orbit is destroyed in a matter of weeks.”

“Thankfully, “Burgess said, “our GPS and communication birds wouldn’t be affected.”

“True,” Ryan said. “Those satellites are much higher, but Tabrizi believes that the debris field would be so dense travel through low earth orbit would be like flying through a shotgun blast.”

“I’m not a rocket scientist,” Scott Adler said, “but you don’t think that’s overstating it a little?”

“Could be,” Ryan said. “But the KH satellites are each roughly the size of a commuter bus. I’ve seen what a speck of dust can do to a window of the Space Station. Forty thousand pounds of space junk has the potential to do a hell of a lot of damage. And, with each successive collision, we get more space junk. So, no, if Dr. Tabrizi’s calculations are correct, we’re not overstating it at all. Let’s have a look at that photo of General Alov and the protesters from our asset in Iran. It’s a good bet those three young men were executed because they saw Tabrizi with Reza Kazem.”

Mary Pat continued to do research on her smartphone. “It looks like she identified a single satellite that would start this chain reaction.”

“Yep,” Ryan said. “She calls it ‘Crux.’”

“Crux,” Mary Pat mused. “Which satellite is it?”

“That’s the problem,” Ryan said. “She never said.”

60

“Why?” Ghorbani asked. “What you do makes no sense.”

“On the contrary,” Kazem said. “It makes all the sense in the world.”

“But Reza,” Ghorbani said, trying a conciliatory tone, though Kazem knew full well the cleric would be happy to see him gutted at the moment. “If Tabrizi succeeds, then everyone will be harmed. Russia will be furious, but we have satellites as well — and we hope to have more, to eventually be on par with the West.”

“And we will be,” Kazem said. “In a matter of weeks instead of the decades that it would have otherwise taken.”

Ghorbani shook his head, curling his nose in a mixture of disgust and disbelief.

“You see,” Kazem pressed. “Iran depends on satellites for but a small portion of our military and civilian communications — and most of that to counter threats from the West. The United States is almost a hundred percent reliant on their eyes in the sky. Without their precious satellites, they will be blind. They will have no more will to stumble around in this portion of the world without their precious technology. I do not wish to serve as gas stations to the West as the Arabs do. We are better than that. This region has rightly belonged to a Persian Empire for seven thousand years. And this will return to us that history. All the so-called superpowers — Russia, China, the United States — will be rendered impotent. At worst, we will be given an equal playing field. At best, they will leave us alone.”

“The sooner I return to Tehran, the better,” the cleric said. “Or do you intend to throw me to my death as well?”