Nighthawk

20

Kurt, Joe and Emma said their good-byes to the crew of the Reunion a few hours later. To their surprise, it was a warm send-off, despite the fact that no diamonds had been recovered. With the ship back on course and scheduled to make its delivery on time, even the fruit company rep stopped worrying. He took the ream of paperwork he’d been preparing for NUMA’s lawyers and tossed it overboard.

Kamphausen, in particular, appeared sad to see them go. He all but crushed Joe in a bear hug. “Haven’t had this much excitement in years,” he insisted.

With Joe at the controls, the Air-Crane lifted off and turned east, headed for Guayaquil once again. Emma was in the copilot’s seat and Kurt sat in the jump seat between the two of them.

Little was said as the flight progressed. Emma seemed pensive even before they took off and grew quiet during the flight, staring out the window for long stretches.

Kurt tapped her on the shoulder. “Are you okay?”

She turned his way. Her eyes suggested she was troubled, but the look was quickly covered. “Just disappointed,” she said. “We’re back to square one.”

He nodded. “In a single day’s work you uncovered a pair of top secret Russian projects. That’s got to be good for something — at least a smile.”

“Our mission was to find the Nighthawk,” she said.

“Relax,” he said. “We’ll find it.”

She glanced at her watch. “We’d better.”

As she turned back to the window, Kurt considered her demeanor. She played it like she was feeling disappointment, but Kurt saw it differently. It was stress. She looked as if she was carrying the world on her shoulders and that the world was getting heavier.

He unlatched his harness, folded up the jump seat and moved aft. Their backpacks rested there, along with a hard-sided suitcase in which the flight data recorder from the Russian bomber had been stored. Next to the case lay an assortment of refreshments and a parting gift from the crew of the Reunion: a fruit bowl covered with plastic wrap. It held limes, apples, oranges and, of course, an assortment of kiwis.

Kurt grabbed an orange and then paused. He glanced over his shoulder toward the cockpit. Emma was still staring out the window. Joe was busy flying.

He hesitated for only a second and then did what he felt needed to be done. Finished, he returned to the cockpit with refreshments for everyone.

An hour later, they were on the ground. Two cars waited for them on the airport ramp. Standing in front of one vehicle was Rudi Gunn. Climbing out of the second were a pair of men in dark suits.

“Friends of yours?” Kurt said to Emma.

“Not friends,” she said. “Colleagues. I recognize the guy on the left. He works for Steve Gowdy. A personal right-hand man.”

Kurt had expected something like this. He grabbed the luggage and climbed out through the door.

The three groups met on the tarmac. Names were exchanged and ID badges flashed until everyone had been introduced.

Emma handed over the hard-sided case. “Inside, you’ll find a flight data recorder from a supersonic Russian bomber. Modified Blackjack, by the look of the wreckage.”

The lead agent, whose name was Hurns, took the case. “What about the submarine?”

“Extensively modified Typhoon,” she said, handing over a portable hard drive. “Photos and video are on here. We got some very clear shots.”

Hurns nodded. “The brass are going to be thrilled. At this rate, you’ll be a legend before you turn forty.”

His words didn’t seem to affect Emma in the least. “We all have our jobs to do,” she said. “I’m staying on with the NUMA group until this mission is complete. Tell Steve I’ll contact him as soon as I have anything else.”

Hurns nodded. Carried the case to the trunk of the car and placed it inside. “We’ll leave you to it,” he said.

As the two agents from the NSA drove off, Rudi Gunn took over. He leaned against the side of his car with his arms folded and a stern look on his face. He addressed Kurt. “So what’s this I hear about NUMA going into the vegetable business?”

“Fruit business,” Kurt corrected. “It’s an interesting story. If you’d like, I’ll tell you on the way.”

“On the way to where?”

“Consulate building,” Kurt said. “We need a secure satellite link so we can test a theory I’ve come up with.”

Rudi glanced Joe’s way.

“First I’ve heard of it,” Joe said.

Emma shot Kurt a suspicious glance, but he just smiled.

“Okay,” Rudi said. “I’m game. But this better be good. We’re already getting a lot of flak from the NSA about your methods.”

“Give me a few hours and judge for yourself,” Kurt said.

Rudi raised an eyebrow of suspicion and opened the driver’s door. “I will.”

At the American consulate building in Guayaquil, Rudi spoke to the ranking official and clearance to use the communications suite was soon provided.

A quick look at the room revealed a high-tech masterpiece: consoles everywhere, flat-panel displays, computers and keyboards, even a virtual reality headset. All connected through encoding and decoding machines.

Kurt explained. “During my stint with the CIA, I had to use the consulates a few times. I was always impressed by the amount of technology they packed into one small space. It was often better than the stuff we were using on the outside since it didn’t have to be portable.”

Joe and Emma sat down wearily. It had been a long forty-eight hours. Only Kurt seemed to have any spring in his step.

Rudi remained guarded. He hadn’t slept much. When he wasn’t deflecting questions about NUMA commandeering a cargo ship or fighting off pressure from Steve Gowdy and the NSA to rein Kurt in, he’d been ducking calls from the fruit company and NUMA’s general counsel. So far, they had nothing to show for all the commotion. Eventually, order and sanity would have to be restored, if only to satisfy Rudi’s own sense of discipline.

Kurt placed his backpack on the central table and unzipped the main compartment. He pulled out a scuffed and dented piece of equipment. It was a dull-orange color and plastered with Russian writing on all sides.

“What is that doing here?” Emma asked, jumping from her seat.

“I pulled it out of your case while we were flying,” Kurt said.

“Obviously,” she replied. “But why? I was ordered to send it back to the lab. It’s NSA property now.”

Kurt held up a cautioning finger. “Actually, based on the law of Admiralty, this flight data recorder is the property of NUMA… Or, perhaps, the Russian Air Force, since it would be hard to prove they’d abandoned it or relinquished an ownership interest in it. But, as we’re not sending it back to Moscow, I took it upon myself to assert NUMA’s claim.”

Joe clenched his teeth and shrank down in his seat a bit.

Rudi sighed and looked up at the ceiling, perhaps wondering why the gods had placed Kurt Austin in his life.

Emma just stared at him. “Gowdy is going to flip out.”

“We’re protecting him,” Kurt said. “There’s a leak in his department. The bomber and the Typhoon prove it.”

“And you know this how?” Emma asked.

“Think about it,” Kurt said. “The Nighthawk goes off course and vanishes. At the same time, in the same vicinity, a Russian supersonic bomber falls out of the sky and crashes into the sea. We mistake one crash for the other and race to the location only to find a top secret Russian submarine already on the scene. That’s not a coincidence.”

Emma sat back. “No, it’s not. But I don’t see how that indicates a breach of security.”

“Don’t you?” Kurt said. “To reach the search area when it did, that submarine had to leave Murmansk several weeks ago. And it’s not the only vessel to end up in the right place at the right time. There are two separate fleets, one Russian, one Chinese, both steaming across the Pacific at flank speed right now. Both made up primarily of deepwater search-and-salvage vessels, both within a day’s sailing of a crash site that didn’t exist forty-eight hours ago, despite the fact that their home ports are ten thousand miles to the east.”

“The fleet movements are suspicious,” Emma admitted, “but explainable. Both units were on maneuvers, training exercises. The Chinese and Russian liaison teams informed us about them months ago. It’s a little thing we do to keep from starting World War III.”

Kurt didn’t back off. “Of course they informed you months ago. Because they knew the Nighthawk was going to go down months ago.”

“How could they know that?”

“Because they’re the ones that brought it down.”

“Brought it down?”

He nodded. “By hacking the Nighthawk’s command system. Codes that are jealously guarded by your NSA friends at Vandenberg. Which means the NSA has a mole, a very highly placed one, and that gives me every good reason not to share this flight data, or anything else, with them.”

She went silent. Kurt let the words sink in.

“You’re out on a very long limb here,” Rudi said. “Even if some of those assumptions are true, it doesn’t…”

“No,” Emma said, interrupting him. “Kurt’s right.”

All eyes turned her way.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. We’ve never been able to figure out why the Nighthawk went off course in the first place. One technician noted that Nighthawk was having a problem trying to process conflicting commands. It made no sense at the time. We assumed it was a computer glitch. But the bomber, the Typhoon, the salvage fleets conveniently on the scene — it all suggests the Russians and/or the Chinese reprogrammed the Nighthawk and tried to get it to splash down in the ocean where they could pick it up with ease.”

Rudi said, “But if that’s the case, why wouldn’t their fleets be in the crash zone instead of several days’ sailing from it.”

“Because we brought it back early,” she said. “The storm off Hawaii was tracking toward the California coast. It was expected to hit during the initial landing window. We didn’t want to risk dealing with the weather, so we moved the reentry up five days. Without that change, both salvage fleets would be within a hundred miles of the Galápagos Islands chain just waiting for the Nighthawk to drop out of the sky and into their hands.”

“Even the location makes sense,” Joe added. “Aside from the terrain around the Galápagos, the sea is ten thousand feet deep for hundreds of miles in every direction.”

“And the bomber?” Rudi asked.

“Probably a chase plane,” Emma said. “The Nighthawk is coated in third-generation stealth materials. It’s completely invisible to radar. But coming through the atmosphere, its skin heats up to three thousand degrees. A supersonic bomber with an infrared tracking system could follow it for miles, zeroing in on its heat signature and following it until it slowed to landing speed and parachuted softly into the sea.”

Kurt nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking. But something went wrong. And even though the bomber went down, there might be a clue to the Nighthawk’s whereabouts on the data recorder. A clue we don’t want broadcast to Moscow or Beijing.”

“What if someone has found it already?”

“They haven’t,” Kurt said, “or their fleets would have turned around.”

Emma nodded. “All right,” she said. “Do your magic. Send the data back to NUMA and let’s find out what the Russians were doing.”

Kurt presented the black box. “Can you tap into it?”

Joe nodded. “Dataports look fairly standard. I’ll do some quick tests and then send the information to Hiram. Max will be able to decipher it better than we can.”

As Joe went to work, Rudi stepped out to make a call and Kurt took a seat next to Emma. The color had returned to her face. “You like the game?” Kurt said.

“I like to win,” she replied.

“So do I.”

They sat for a moment. “So what did you give them anyway?” she asked.

“Who?”

“My colleagues, Hurns and Rodriguez. When I lifted that case, there was something heavy in there.”

Kurt leaned back in his chair and put his feet up. “A very nice parting gift. One I’m sure they’ll appreciate on their long flight home.”

The NSA-owned Gulfstream was halfway to Houston before Agent Hurns let his curiosity get the better of him. On this mission he was a courier, assigned to pick up and deliver a package. He wasn’t supposed to open it and have a look, but he couldn’t help himself.

He suggested as much to Rodriguez.

“I’m game,” his partner said.

They left their seats, walked aft and lifted the metal-sided suitcase onto a table. With quick fingers, Hurns popped both latches and opened the case.

His face went blank. “What the heck is this?”

Rodriguez stared over his shoulder. “It appears to be a bowl of fruit,” he said, reaching in for a ripe kiwi.

A handwritten note was tucked in between two oranges. It read: