The Orion Plan Read Free

contingency plans for asteroid threats. We’d all benefit from closer cooperation, don’t you think?”
    She couldn’t tell how serious he was. Hanson was obviously smart, but he didn’t seem so trustworthy. There was a good chance he was just flirting with her, just like the airmen. “Sure, that’s a good idea,” she said. “But maybe we should find out what happened to this asteroid first?”
    â€œYes, absolutely. First things first.”
    Hanson stepped forward again and gripped Ugly Glasses by the shoulder. “Okay, time’s up. What do you have?”
    The airman looked up from his radar screen. He seemed puzzled. “Sir, our last radar contact with the object was at an altitude of twenty-one miles over the town of South Amboy, New Jersey. There were no further contacts along its track, so it must’ve exploded at that altitude.”
    â€œAh, twenty-one miles.” Hanson let go of the boy’s shoulder and looked at Sarah. He didn’t grin, but he wasn’t exactly hiding his satisfaction either. “I’ll have to congratulate my staff for predicting it so well.” He turned back to the airman. “And did the radar detect any fragments from the explosion?”
    â€œYes, sir. And that’s what made it so confusing.” The boy grimaced. His glasses had slid halfway down the bridge of his nose. “Most of the fragments were tiny, just specks of dust, but one piece was pretty big.”
    Hanson frowned. “Define ‘pretty big.’”
    â€œAt least a foot wide, sir. But the weird thing is its trajectory after the explosion. The blast kicked it almost horizontally to the northeast. It traveled more than thirty miles in that direction before hitting the ground.”
    Sarah’s throat tightened. Even a foot-wide chunk could cause major damage if it struck the ground at high speed. She stepped toward the airman. “Can you show the radar track for that fragment?”
    The boy looked frightened now. “I … I can draw a partial trajectory. Our radars couldn’t track it after it dropped below two thousand feet, but—”
    â€œJust show it.”
    A moment later the airman drew a new path on the jumbo screen. This red line ran thirty-three miles northeast from South Amboy. It terminated at the northern tip of Manhattan.

 
    TWO
    Inwood Hill Park, New York City | June 20, 2016 | 4:19 A.M . Eastern Daylight Time
    Joe was dreaming of his daughter when the noise woke him. In the dream he chased Annabelle across the playground near their apartment building in Riverdale. This was a memory from the old days, before Joe’s wife kicked him out of the apartment. Annabelle raced past the playground’s swings and seesaws, her long brown ponytail bouncing against her back, her neon-pink T-shirt flapping at her waist. Joe couldn’t keep up with her, she was too fast. He yelled, “Slow down!” but she kept running.
    Then the noise hit him, a deep, ground-shaking thump that echoed in his chest. At the same time, something mashed against his nose. In pain, Joe opened his eyes, thinking that someone had punched him in the face while he slept, but all he saw was blackness. For a moment he thought he was gone—dead, buried, finally out of his misery. He felt a roiling, nauseating fear in his stomach, so strong it made him gag. But after a couple of seconds of sickness and terror he realized why he couldn’t see anything: the box he was sleeping in had collapsed. He was looking up at a three-foot-by-five-foot rectangle of cardboard—the top of the box—which had smacked against his face and now hung, hopelessly crumpled, an inch above his eyes.
    Joe didn’t move a muscle, didn’t make a sound. Although his mind was still fuzzy from all the malt liquor he’d drunk, one thing was clear: the box wouldn’t have hit his face so hard if it had collapsed on its own. Someone