Nighthawk

16

Are you afraid they’ll see us?” Emma asked, commenting on their stealth approach.

“Submarines like the Typhoon don’t have windows to look through,” Kurt said, “but they might have cameras or ROVs and submersibles of their own to deploy. They also have passive listening devices that are highly sensitive. Hugging the bottom will absorb any sound we make.”

They both fell silent and Kurt continued tracking toward their target by making small adjustments to the hydrophone. When a rock formation appeared on the video screen, he weaved around it. When they came to a slope of sediment piled up against a wide ridge, he put the Angler into an ascent.

They tracked the slope upward and came over the top.

“Look,” Emma said.

Kurt looked up from the screen. An eerie blue glow loomed in the distance.

With enough light to navigate by, he switched off the UV system and retracted the Angler’s namesake boom. Continuing over the ridge and down the other side, they approached the lighted area.

From a distance, the glow was nothing more than a shimmering orb of water, dark blue in color and revealing no details. As they moved closer, it turned green, and eventually took on a yellowish tint similar to natural light.

Because of the total darkness surrounding them and the weightless state of the submarine, it felt as if they were approaching a strange planet in the depths of space.

As they closed in, Kurt cut the throttle and allowed the Angler to drift. “Our friends have set up shop.”

The glowing orb had become a swath of daylight that ran for several hundred feet. It was cast by row after row of high-powered floodlights on the underside of the Typhoon. The bulk of the huge submarine remained hidden in the inky black water, but the seafloor beneath was lit up like a stadium. The reflected light illuminated the underside of the Typhoon and the maroon-colored paint the Russian Navy preferred to use below the waterline.

Several pod-like shapes were visible beneath the keel.

“Divers in hard suits,” Kurt said.

They were descending toward the seafloor like tiny probes dropped from an alien vessel. Their destination was a large concentration of wreckage, including an upturned wing and the T-shaped tail of a large aircraft.

“Vertical stabilizer,” Emma said. “Fuselage section over there. And that looks like an engine pod. I told you this wasn’t the Nighthawk.”

A clanking sound came through the hydrophone and then a hiss of bubbles.

“Pressure door opening,” Kurt said. “Most likely, the lockout room where those divers came from or a compartment from where they can release an ROV.”

More clanking sounds rang out through the hydrophone and a narrow slit of light appeared in the underside of the Typhoon. It grew wider as a pair of huge doors in the bottom of the hull drew back from each other. They locked in place, leaving a hundred-foot opening in the bottom of the submarine. As Kurt and Emma watched in amazement, a huge clamshell bucket descended from the center of it, its jaws stretched wide.

The bucket crashed into the wreckage with abandon. Sediment swirled in the light, and as the hydraulic jaws closed, the screech of rendered metal cried out through the water.

Kurt watched intently as the tail section of the aircraft was hauled up into the open bay of the submarine. “The Russians have built a submersible version of the Glomar Explorer.”

The Glomar Explorer was the most famous salvage vessel in the world. Built by the CIA, using the celebrity status of Howard Hughes as a cover, it had performed its secret task once, and only once, pulling most of a sunken Russian submarine off the bottom of the Pacific in 1974.

Disguised as a mining ship, the Explorer had moved into position, lowered a cradle, and hauled up three-fourths of what had been the K-129, bringing the wreckage through a huge door in the bottom of the hull and hiding it in what the engineers called the moon pool.

Russian spy ships watching from several miles away never knew what happened. When the truth leaked, the Russians were furious. They were also embarrassed and put on notice that anything in the sea was fair game. They’d maintained a large salvage fleet ever since — a substantial portion of which was currently sailing for the Galápagos — but this Typhoon, this huge submarine converted into a clandestine salvage vessel, was something new.

At least it was new to Kurt. “You guys at the NSA know anything about this?”

“This is a surprise. But it makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Take the missile tubes out and the Typhoon has huge storage capacity. It can move about undetected, dive to twenty-five hundred feet and pluck things right off the bottom, all unseen by the world’s satellites.”

“Wish we’d thought of it,” Kurt said. “While we’re tracking their surface fleet and telling ourselves we have several days before they get here, these guys are already on scene. Which begs the question: Exactly what scene is this? If this wreckage isn’t the Nighthawk, then what are we looking at? And why are the Russians so interested in it?”

“Maybe we should get a little closer and find out,” she said.

“Look who’s become a risk taker,” Kurt replied, grinning.

“It’s a risk-reward scenario,” she said. “A few photos of this Typhoon will help soften the blow of not finding the Nighthawk out here.”

Kurt bumped the throttle forward once more. “Who am I to stand in the way of shameless self-promotion?”

“I assure you,” she said, “I’m thinking purely of the national interest.”

Kurt suppressed a laugh — on the odd chance it might have carried through the water to the Typhoon’s hydrophones.

The closer they got, the louder the racket became. As they watched the effort from the darkness, it became clear that haste was the priority. As soon as the retrieval bucket deposited a load of wreckage in the Typhoon’s cargo bay, it was run back out, repositioned and dropped once again. There was no caution to the work and no attempt to preserve or protect any technology they might be recovering.

The reason dawned on Kurt. “They’re not trying to salvage anything. They’re trying to haul it away and hide the evidence before anyone else finds it here. Which means—”

“This is a Russian aircraft,” Emma said, finishing his thought. “Maybe it’s a recon flight that went down while searching for the Nighthawk.”

Kurt shook his head. “This crash happened almost simultaneously with the Nighthawk’s disappearance.”

“A chase plane, then,” Emma suggested. “The Russians have tried that before.”

By now, they were near enough to make out gearing and teeth on the inner part of the wing. He was maneuvering to get the camera focused when a brief flash caught his eye.

Kurt shut off what remained of the interior lighting and waited. A full minute ticked by before the light made another appearance. It was quick. Here and then gone. A white spark in the dark water of the sea.

“Low-powered strobe light,” he said.

“Black box,” Emma suggested, referencing the nearly indestructible data and voice recorders common on most military and commercial aircraft.

“Let’s see if we can get at it without drawing too much attention to ourselves.”

He eased the submersible forward with a deft touch, traveling past that shattered wing and holding station near a tear in the forward part of the fuselage. The curved body of the aircraft had been opened and peeled back. The section beneath it was exposed. The tiny strobe flashed again from within.

“See if you can reach it.”

Emma went back to the controls and extended the arm to its maximum length. “No,” she said. “Can you get any closer?”

“Hang on,” Kurt said. He backed off and moved forward again, using a quick burst of the throttle. The Angler bumped against the wreckage, scraping against it and pushing a section of the airframe out of the way.

When the strobe flashed again it was brighter and closer and they were all but inside the airframe. Emma extended the arm once more. The claw at its end opened. The lower half slid underneath a metal handle on the housing of the data recorder and Emma closed it down tight.

“Got it,” she said, retracting the arm.

The black box — which was actually orange and covered with gray Cyrillic writing — came out of its slot with a little effort. Once it was clear, Emma retracted the arm and dropped it into the starboard cargo container.

“Good work,” Kurt said.

He put his hand on the throttle and prepared to back out but paused when the sound of the Typhoon’s thrusters surged through the water with a different timbre.

Emma looked up. “The Typhoon is repositioning.”

Kurt already knew that. He could see the lighted swath of ocean floor moving toward them.

He reversed thrust, trying to back out of the open section of the fuselage, but instead of moving in a straight line, the Angler was yanked to the side and pulled around.

“We’re caught on something,” he said, craning his head around to see what had hooked them.

“I can see it from here,” Emma said. “The frame around the retrieval container is snagged on the wreckage.”

Kurt moved the sub forward and then backed up again, trying to pull free. But it was no use. The Angler was hooked.

A third try did nothing to free them, and the wreckage around them began to brighten as the peripheral light from the Typhoon reached the area.

Kurt had no choice. He rotated the thrusters and forced the Angler back into the wreckage, crashing down and shutting everything off.

“What are you doing?” Emma asked, in shock.

“Hiding,” he said. “It’s the only choice we have.”

The light around them grew brighter, filtering through gaps in the airframe like morning sun through high windows. The throbbing sound of the Typhoon’s thrusters grew until the submarine appeared directly above them, rotating slowly until it was aligned into the current once again.

The maroon hull was marked with long scars of corrosion and algae while the lighted gap of the cargo bay shimmered with a sterile white glow.

Two divers in hard suits traveled up toward it, ascending with smaller pieces of debris in their nets and vanishing into the flooded hold. A moment later, the huge bucket reappeared. It traveled on rails in the cargo bay ceiling, stopping and locking into position almost directly above the Angler.

“This is not good,” Emma whispered.

Kurt couldn’t have agreed more.

The bucket remained stationary for what seemed an eternity, its clamshell jaws opening slowly and locking into position. Finally, with nothing more than a pitiful squeak, it began to drop.

There was no mistaking its destination. The huge bucket was dropping straight for the wreckage pile and the NUMA submersible hiding in it.