Nighthawk

14

Kurt stood on the starboard bridge wing of the six-hundred-foot cargo vessel looking through a pair of large binoculars. In the distance, he could just make out four red-hulled boats on the blue ocean. They were lifeboats from the Reunion, repurposed to search for any sign of the Nighthawk.

Taking a page out of Rudi Gunn’s plan, they’d put four boats in the water and sent them to the east in formation. Traveling abreast of one another and two miles apart, the small fleet covered an eight-mile-wide swath at a single pass. Each of them trailed a pair of fish: torpedo-shaped tubes packed with the most advanced sensing equipment in the NUMA catalog, including top-of-the-line side-scan sonar emitters and a sensitive magnetic alloy detector NUMA had only recently developed.

The new detectors were far more precise than the old magnetometers that simply scanned for iron content. According to Joe, they could tell not only what alloys it was examining but where the alloy was produced and the name of the shift supervisor on duty during the mixing.

The fact was they were using the most advanced equipment in the world and covering forty square miles of ocean floor each hour. The pace had led Kurt to predict they’d locate the missing craft by lunchtime, though at half past breakfast they’d yet to find a thing.

Patient as Job, at least for now, Kurt turned to Emma. She sat in front of a high-definition screen, studying the results. As the four lifeboats moved in unison, they transmitted the data from the sonar emitters and other instruments back to the Reunion, where a special laptop computer processed the signals from all the different sensors into one image.

The resulting picture was a comprehensive, detailed view of the ocean floor, far sharper than any standard sonar scan. It was comparable to switching from an old tube TV to a modern high-definition display.

“This is incredible,” Emma said, using the controls to pan and zoom in on different sections of the image. “No wonder Steve Gowdy wanted NUMA on the job.”

Kurt lowered the binoculars down and took a seat beside her. “Something tells me our proximity and availability had more to do with it than our expertise. Had the seven sisters of the poor been out here with a fishing boat, he’d probably have hired them, too.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But you definitely bring more than proximity to the table.”

Kurt accepted the compliment, sat back in the chair and watched the computer screen along with her. He knew the software would point out and highlight anything that didn’t belong on the seafloor, but he liked to keep an eye on the scan as much as he could. For one thing, computers were not infallible. For another, until they found something, there was literally nothing else to do.

He leaned back and craned his neck around to alleviate the soreness that had set in. As he did, Captain Kamphausen strode over. He, too, was sensing the tedious nature of the search. “Somehow, I thought looking for sunken treasure would be a little more exciting than this.”

“Mowing the lawn isn’t my favorite exercise either,” Kurt replied. “Never liked it as a kid and I don’t like it any better now.”

The captain laughed, moved to the radio and checked in with his crew. Meanwhile, Joe came in, juggling three cups of coffee; he placed one in front of Kurt, handed one to Emma and kept one for himself. “Find anything yet?”

“Nothing interesting,” Kurt said. “The only real excitement turned out to be an old anchor that must have fallen off a ship sometime recently. Other than that, nothing but a few outcroppings of lava rock jutting from the abyssal plain.”

“That’s to be expected,” Joe said. “The Galápagos Islands are volcanic.”

Kurt reached for the coffee cup. He tested the heat and swallowed some coffee down, wincing in the aftermath. “How much sugar did you put in there?”

“Only seven packets,” Joe said.

“Only seven?” Kurt replied.

“I figured a sugar rush would keep you on your toes.”

Kurt placed the cup into a holder. “I’ll be bouncing off the walls if I drink any more of that.”

Before Joe could reply, a soft tone and a flashing red highlight on the screen suggested they’d found something new.

“What is it?” Emma asked.

Kurt leaned over the keyboard and used the touch pad to zoom in on the highlighted area. “I’m not sure.”

He adjusted the angle and allowed the computer to extrapolate the data. They soon got a closer view of the targets. In a wide swath there were several objects and a series of small craters and gouge marks in the otherwise flat expanse of sediment.

“Looks like something rained down from above,” Joe suggested.

Kurt nodded and checked the magnetometer. “Can’t be sure what we’re looking at, but it’s definitely man-made.”

Emma was not as easily convinced. “How can you be sure? I don’t see anything but holes in the mud.”

Kurt pointed to the reading of the alloy detector. “Because those holes are hiding something built of high-strength stainless steel and magnesium.”

He pressed a button and the printer came to life, spitting out a chemical profile of the target in question. It was approximately twenty percent magnesium and fifty percent aluminum, with lower concentrations of iron and other metals.

As the boats continued to move along, the image on the screen changed slowly. Several additional targets appeared, but they were too small and too far off to be rendered in any kind of detail.

“Can we get in closer?” Emma asked.

Kurt was about to zoom in when the image blurred and a large swath of the screen went dark.

“What happened?”

“It’s a shadow,” Joe said from behind them. “The side-scan sonar is sending its pulse across the seafloor at a nearly flat angle, like the sun getting low on the horizon. When something gets in the way of the echo, it creates a long shadow, like those you see stretching across a street in the late afternoon.”

Kurt zoomed out and a jagged shape appeared. A ridge of volcanic material jutting up from the seafloor. Everything beyond it was invisible.

“We could have the boats circle back and get another scan from a different angle,” Joe suggested.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Kurt said. “Let the boats continue on until they reach the edge of the search zone and then have them make the turn as planned. While they do that, we’ll take the Angler down and check out what we’ve found. If it turns out to be anything important, we’ll be able to confirm. And if not, we won’t have brought the whole search to a halt in the process.”

“Makes sense,” Joe said. “And it gives you something to do.”

Kurt grinned. “There’s a method to my madness.”

“You keep thinking that,” Joe quipped.

“I’m going with you,” Emma said. “If it turns out to be debris, it’s likely to be in rough condition: mostly small pieces and mangled and bent fragments. I’m the only one here who’ll be able to make a positive ID.”

“You don’t have to come down to do that,” Kurt said. “You can watch on the monitors up here.”

“I prefer to see things in person,” she said. “Besides, when am I going to get another chance to dive to the bottom of the sea in a high-tech submarine?”

“The lady has a point,” Joe said.

Kurt didn’t mind the company. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got one ticket to the bottom of the sea.”

Twenty minutes later, Kurt and Emma were sitting in the command seats of the Angler as Joe used the Air-Crane to lift them off the deck and carry them toward the target zone.

Though the submersible was hooked on securely, it still swayed beneath the fuselage of the orange-painted helicopter.

“I’ll be glad when we get into the water,” Emma said. “How close are we?”

“Approaching the drop zone,” Joe’s voice replied over the intercom.

“You mean theLower us gently into the sea zone, don’t you?” Kurt replied.

“Of course,” Joe said. “Wouldn’t want to give you too much frustration for one day.”

As they neared the drop zone, Joe slowed the helicopter to a hover and brought it down toward the surface. At the same time, Kurt ran one last check to ensure the Angler was watertight and that all systems were go.

“Ready for our bath,” Kurt said.

“Roger that,” Joe replied.

The submersible lurched downward as the cable began to unwind. It descended the rest of the way smoothly and then settled into passing swells, rising and falling softly, once it reached the sea.

A metallic clink sounded as the hook was detached and the line reeled in.

“Catch-and-release program completed,” Joe called out. “You two are on your own.”

“Roger that,” Kurt said. “Deploying communications buoy and beginning descent. See you in a couple of hours.”

As Kurt flooded the ballast tanks, seawater crept up the curved glass of the canopy, bathing the cockpit in a blue-green light. As they submerged completely, the thundering racket of the helicopter diminished to a muted staccato beat.

Kurt vented the forward tanks and the nose of the Angler tilted downward to begin the submarine’s plunge into the deep. A fiber-optic cable, connected to a floating buoy, trailed out behind them. All radio and video communications would be transmitted through it.

The water grew darker, and the pitch steepened until the nose was pointing downward at an eighty-degree angle.

Though she was strapped in, Emma instinctively put her hand on the console to compensate for the sensation of falling forward. “It’s like we’re on a roller coaster and we just went over the crest of a hill.”

“I didn’t want to bore you,” Kurt said.

“Is this why they call it the Angler?” she asked. “Because it dives so steeply?”

“No,” Kurt said. “But we are nose heavy. It’s designed that way. By descending almost straight down like a raindrop, we travel faster and save on power and oxygen.”

“And sacrifice a little bit of comfort,” she said, hanging forward in the straps of her seat. “How fast are we going?”

Kurt pointed to the depth gauge and a digital readout that noted the rate of descent. “About three hundred feet per minute. We could go faster, but this is a nice, safe speed. We’ll level off before we hit the bottom, I promise.”

The submersible continued to dive. Aside from the odd creak and groan, all sounds vanished and the world outside the canopy grew rapidly darker, changing from sea green to indigo blue to a deep violet color. Finally, it became an impenetrable black curtain.

Kurt dimmed the interior lights to help their eyes adjust and soon they needed only the glow of the various switches, indicators and gauges to see comfortably inside the sub.

“There’s a certain ambiance to this,” Emma said. “Almost like candlelight.”

“And I forgot to bring the wine.”

“A huge oversight, in my opinion,” she replied.

With an eye on the depth gauge, Kurt began to trim the submarine. By using the ballast controls to pump air into the forward tanks, he raised the nose and decreased the rate of descent at the same time. “Coming up on the seafloor. Or should I say down?”

“How about turning on the porch lights?” she said.

“Afraid of the dark?”

“No. Afraid of running into things in the dark.”

Kurt reached above his head and flipped a series of switches. A battery of lights around the base of the Angler came to life. Initially, they lit up nothing but the sedimentary particles flying upward past the windows.

The particles were actually stationary or moving slowly downward, but as the Angler was dropping at a much faster rate, the particles were more like snowflakes moving in the wrong direction.

A yellow light began to flash. “Terrain detected, one hundred feet,” a computerized voice said.

Kurt pumped more air into the tanks and slowed the descent further. The gray sediment layer of the seafloor began to appear in the cone of light beneath them.

“Terrain, fifty feet,” the computer voice said.

“So much for ambiance,” he said, looking around for a way to switch the voice off. He’d never liked talking cars and he didn’t want a talking submarine either.

“Terrain, thirty feet,” the computer said. “Descent stopped.”

They were now suspended in the water at a depth of nine hundred and seventeen feet.

Kurt pressed the radio switch. “We’re on the ground floor,” he said. “Give me a bearing.”

Joe’s voice came back, slightly distorted. “Target should be no more than three hundred yards from you, on a heading of one-five-zero degrees.”

Kurt dialed up the heading and the Angler’s inertial navigation system took over. The batteries kicked in and small thrusters on either side of the sub began to spin. Instead of propellers at the stern, which could only drive them forward, the Angler had two compact propulsion pods jutting out on stubby wings near its tail. They could be rotated to point forward, back, up or down, making it easy to move the sub in any direction.

For now, they drove the sub across a carpet of gray silt that stretched unbroken into the dark like a field of dirty snow.

“It’s so bleak,” Emma said.

There were no colorful reefs or schools of fish, only the occasional tube worm and small outcroppings of volcanic rock that hadn’t yet been buried by the marine snow.

“It always makes me think of the Moon,” Kurt said as he flicked another switch and the telescoping boom began to extend from the top of the submersible.

“What’s that?” Emma asked.

“That is the reason they call this sub the Angler,” he said. “Joe named it after the anglerfish. A well-known denizen of the deep with a very particular method of getting food.”

“I know all about those fish,” Emma said. “They trick other fish into swimming near their mouths using a lighted antenna. When a smaller fish is attracted to the lure, they open their big mouths and chomp on it.”

“Exactly,” Kurt said. “In fact, I’m fairly certain chomp is the exact term marine biologists use to describe it.”

She laughed.

Outside, the boom locked in place with a dull click; its tip was now extended out in front of the sub by fifty feet. Kurt flipped a switch and a slight electric buzz became audible in the speakers of the intercom system. But aside from the static, and an almost invisible halo around the boom, nothing else happened.

“Looks like someone forgot to change the lightbulbs,” Emma said.

Kurt flipped another switch and a pair of cameras on a lower part of the boom came to life. The video was displayed on a flat screen in the center panel between the two seats. It showed a view of the terrain stretching several hundred feet ahead of them. Undulations in the sediment were clearly visible; mounds of lava rock appeared here and there. In one spot, a deep-sea crab flared white and then vanished as it buried itself in the silt.

Looking through the canopy with the naked eye, none of this was visible.

“High-intensity violet and ultraviolet light,” Kurt said. “It penetrates seawater far better than the visible spectrum, but since human eyes are not sensitive to UV frequencies—”

“You use cameras tuned to pick it up,” she said, finishing the thought for him. “Ingenious.”

“It allows us to explore the dark much more efficiently,” he said. “And if you’re feeling a little pale, it doubles as a tanning salon. Though a minute or two in the beam would leave you burned.”

They continued across the flat expanse, dividing their attention between what they saw on the screen and the view through the curved front window. As they neared the target, Kurt took manual control of the sub and brought them in closer.

The first thing they came in contact with was a flat piece of metal that had been bent and twisted. On the screen, a second piece could be seen nearby, complete with a hinge and some wires attached to it.

Kurt moved closer and the two pieces of debris became visible in the normal light.

“You were right,” Emma said. “Definitely man-made.”

Kurt eased up to the first target and held station against the current. “See if you can grab it with the claw,” he said, pointing to a pair of joysticks in between the two seats.

“I warn you,” she said. “I never get anything when I play this game at the carnival.”

“No one does,” he said. “That’s why the stuffed animals are covered in an inch of dust.”

Emma tested the controls, which resembled those of a miniature remote-controlled car. Pushing one of the sticks forward, she extended a metal arm with a claw-like pincer on the end. Manipulating the claw until it was directly over one of the targets, she plucked the four-foot strip of metal from the silt on the first try.

“Great job,” Kurt said.

“Now what?”

“Drop it in the bin,” he said, pointing to a twelve-foot-long bin attached to the Angler’s port side.

With a twist of the joystick, she drew the arm back in and positioned it over the recovery bin. “Good?”

Kurt nodded.

She pressed the release button and the metal strip fell from the claw into the bin, hitting with a soft bump.

“If you fill that one up, we still have a second bin on the starboard side,” Kurt told her. “They’re detachable. We can send them topside by using inflatable air bags, if we need to, or we can keep them in place and carry them home when we surface.”

“Perfect for cleaning the ocean floor,” Emma said.

She retrieved the second piece of metal and then found a hydraulic strut.

“What do you think?” Kurt asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I have to admit these appear to be aircraft parts, but there’s nothing definitive. Let’s keep moving.”

Kurt nodded and took them farther to the south, tracking along a trail of small scars in the sediment.

“Are those impact points?” Emma asked.

Kurt nodded. “A metal rain fell here. The smaller items buried themselves, leaving these marks. Only the bigger ones or those that came down with less speed remained on the surface.”

“So this is a debris field?”

He nodded.

Emma looked grim. “If this is the Nighthawk, we’ll need to find the core. All the technology our adversaries are after is hidden there.”

Kurt bumped the throttle, adjusted course and guided them forward. They passed by a smattering of small parts and additional gouges in the silt, stopping only when they found another large section of shredded metal, which looked like torn and tattered paper.

“This isn’t good,” Emma said. “That looks like a fuselage section.”

“It must have hit the water at high speed,” Kurt said.

She shook her head. “It shouldn’t have,” she replied. “Every simulation we’ve run suggests the onboard computer was still operating. It should have flared as it descended and then deployed its parachutes and come down softly.”

Kurt paused. He found it odd how strongly convinced everyone in the NSA was that the aircraft was in one piece. “The evidence doesn’t support that,” he said, tired of hearing about what should have happened.

“The core must still be intact,” Emma said urgently. “Keep going. We need to find it.”

It sounded like wishful thinking to Kurt, but he moved on, guiding them in a zigzag pattern. Once he’d established the width of the debris field and the direction it ran, they made steady progress, with more and more debris appearing out of the darkness, eventually stopping when they discovered several large sections of what had to be an airframe, lengths of wires and insulation wafting in the current, and the unmistakable shape of a wheel still attached to a hydraulic strut.

“Landing gear assembly,” Emma said dejectedly.

The wheel hub lay on its side. Every shred of its tires had been ripped free and the hydraulic strut had been bent at a forty-degree angle. A curved section of blackened sheet metal that looked like part of the fuselage lay just beyond it.

“So much for the core being in one piece,” Kurt said.

Emma didn’t respond. She was staring into the dark. The look on her face suggested anger and confusion. She focused on the wheel, squinting until a small furrow appeared in her brow. “Go in closer.”

Kurt nudged the throttle and guided the Angler gently into position, trying not to stir up too much sediment.

As they closed in on what appeared to be the nose gear, Emma moved to the edge of her seat. The anger vanished. “It’s too big,” she said.

Kurt could see that. “We can’t carry it up,” he said. “But we can attach a cable and winch it to the surface.”

“No,” she said, turning toward him. “It’s too big to come from the Nighthawk. To speed up development, we took the landing gear from the smaller X-37. It gave us more interior space and less weight, but it made the Nighthawk look odd when you saw it sitting on the ground. Like a big dog with short legs.”

She pointed back through the canopy. “The diameter of that wheel is too large. The strut is too long, even though it’s broken off.”

“We’re looking through curved glass,” Kurt said. “It magnifies things.”

Emma glanced at him and then back through the canopy. She scanned the wheel first and then turned her attention to the wreckage out beyond. “There’s too much debris,” she added. “Too much material all together. I’m telling you, this isn’t the Nighthawk.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Some other plane that crashed. Maybe it’s that missing airliner from Malaysia. Maybe it’s an old military transport that came down years ago.”

Kurt shook his head. “The wreckage is pristine,” he said, quashing that theory. “It’s recent. If this material had been down here any length of time, it would be corroded and encrusted with marine life. The craters in the sediment where each piece made an impact would be filled in like footprints in a snowstorm. Besides, we heard this plane hit the water — it came down within twenty minutes of Vandenberg losing contact with the Nighthawk.”

“I’ll take your word for that,” she said. “But you have to take mine as well. The debris we’re seeing is not from our vehicle.”

Kurt hadn’t heard of any crashes in this part of the world. But there was no point in arguing. He clicked on the radio. “Reunion, are you getting all of this?”

“The video feed is good,” Joe said. “Looks like you’ve hit the mother lode.”

“According to my copilot, it’s fool’s gold,” Kurt said. “I’m going to haul some of the debris up for you to inspect; maybe you can figure out what kind of plane this came from.”

“Sounds good,” Joe said. “Look for something definitive.”

Kurt scanned around them for a smaller piece of debris that might reveal the make and model of the wreck. “What about that circuit board?” he said, pointing to a length of wiring attached to a green computer panel.

“Good idea,” Joe said over the radio. “The electronics might be traceable.”

Kurt maneuvered the Angler into position, overshot just a bit and then cut the throttle, allowing the sub to drift back over the target.

With the thrusters off, the Angler was utterly silent. In the sudden quiet, he noticed something he hadn’t heard before: a vibration in the water; a low, repetitive hum, coming from somewhere in the distance.

Emma heard it, too. “What is that?”

It sounded like a ship to Kurt. He got back on the radio. “Reunion, are you on the move?”

“Negative,” Joe replied. “We’re full stop. Half the crew are out on deck, sunning themselves. Why?”

“Do you see any traffic?”

There was a slight delay before Joe replied again. “Also negative. There’s not a ship on the horizon.”

Despite that fact, Kurt was certain they were hearing a ship’s propeller.

“If it’s not up there…” Emma said.

She didn’t have to finish. Kurt was thinking the same thing. He deployed a hydrophone. It wasn’t a true sonar receiver — in fact, it was just a basic microphone encased in a waterproof container designed to record whales and other sounds of sea life — but by turning it a few degrees at a time, he was able to get a better fix on the strange hum.

Heard through the speakers, the sound was deep and ominous, and growing louder by the moment. “It’s coming from behind us,” Kurt said. “And it’s coming this way.”