With that, Matt found himself dismissed. He returned to his hotel, packed, and by 1300 hours, he was airborne and heading west.

Four hours later Matt pulled into the driveway of the duplex he'd lived in ever since his divorce seven years earlier.

His wife had held out as long as she could, but in the end, she'd admitted she could no longer handle the military life. Matt had been transferred every few years, and that was something which had sounded exciting when they first got married, but after ten years she just couldn't continue doing it. They'd remained friends, and neither of them had failed to see the irony in the fact that ever since the breakup, Matt had been stationed permanently at the Arizona facility.

This wasn't the first time Matt Fitch had been given a seemingly impossible task to perform. Over time, he'd learned that the best way to deal with these types of problems was to do nothing at all, at least for a little while. Stopping and thinking first tended to produce better results than diving blindly into a situation. So that evening, all he did was place a call to James Cowan.

He informed Cowan that he wouldn't be in the next day. He hung up and went down to the basement to dig out his golf clubs.

The next day wasn't the best golfing he'd ever done, but it wasn't the worst either. But more importantly, he now felt clear-headed and ready to get to work.

Chapter Eleven

Professor Rupert Mallox was the head of the Astronomy program at West Coast U. He'd been teaching astronomy for eighteen years, ten of them at the WCU.

The discovery of the comet's properties by two of his students a few months ago was by far the most significant discovery in his department's, if not the world's, history and he'd forced them to rerun their calculations four times before he'd accept their results.

Rupert had since tried several times to get someone to investigate and confirm the comet's apparent radioactive properties. Over the last few years, there'd been several false alarms regarding asteroids and meteors which could hit the Earth. These concerns had caused significant anxiety to the public before they were determined to be nothing of importance.

After several unsuccessful attempts at getting anyone to take his comet claims seriously, he'd given his brother-in-law a call. Rupert's wife, Deborah hailed from New York and her brother, Martin, was the aide to the senior US Congressman from Florida.

Martin knew the right people to talk to, and in no time at all, the good folks at NASA had reluctantly agreed to look into the matter for him.

Rupert suspected there would be a reasonable explanation as to why this threat was no more severe than any of the others. Nevertheless, this data seemed to very clearly show an imminent threat, and it needed to be checked out.