Nighthawk

30

By dusk, the cooking fires had been stoked and several long wooden tables set for a communal meal. Urco introduced Kurt and Emma to the rest of the volunteers and insisted that their arrival was cause for celebration.

Before the food was served, Urco led the group in a traditional invocation. “It’s a Chachapoya prayer,” he explained. “It cautions us not to begin the feast until all the guests are present and accounted for.”

“Another way to remember the people whose world you’re excavating?” Emma asked.

“Precisely,” Urco said. “We even live like them. In ancient times there was far less trade than today. Each society, each village, had to be self-sufficient. And so are we. We catch rainwater in barrels, grow manioc in the southern section of the clearing. We have the llamas in the corral.”

“Adorable animals,” Emma said.

“I wouldn’t get too attached to them,” Kurt whispered.

“Why?”

“I think you’re about to eat one.”

She looked ill for a second.

“You can’t be self-sufficient in everything,” Kurt said.

Urco disagreed. “I assure you, we are. As are all the villages our volunteers come from. I tell you, the rest of civilization could cease to exist and we would never know it.”

“I can understand the desire to live that way,” Emma said. “But wouldn’t all the effort put into growing crops and raising animals be better used here, at the dig site? If the food was shipped in, it would leave you more workers to handle the other chores.”

“The road to civilization is both long and treacherous,” he said. “Both in the real and metaphorical sense. Being self-sufficient keeps us from being dependent on that road in any form. And since I’ve recently heard that it was closed…”

Kurt laughed and took a drink of water.

A moment later, the food was served: bread made from manioc flour, some type of diced vegetable and what looked like venison. The aroma was heavenly.

“Enjoy it, my friends,” Urco said. “As soon as we’re done, I’ll show you what you came to see.”

Kurt nodded, buried the impatience he felt and enjoyed a hearty and unusual dinner. As things were cleared away, Kurt and Emma went back to the Range Rover to collect a few items they would need and then rejoined Urco near the bank of solar panels. “We use these to power our modern equipment.”

“So you’re not dependent on civilization,” Emma said, “but you are beholden to the sun.”

“True,” Urco replied. “But the sun is far more reliable. Five billion years and counting. Something tells me modern civilization will never match that.”

“So this is where you were when you saw the light in the sky?” Kurt asked.

“Yes,” Urco said. “I came up the trail from our tents and checked the flashlights. We were going to look into a newly discovered cave that day, so we needed as much light as possible. Satisfied that everything was fully powered, I came over to this stand where our video cameras were connected to their chargers.”

He led them to a cradle where two cameras were supported and attached to the power station via cables.

“I picked up this one,” he said, grabbing it. “Turned it on and waited. As it powered up, I happened to see a flicker of light in the sky. Once I realized it wasn’t a star, I brought the camera up and filmed it.”

He held the camera up to his face, showing them how he’d done it and pretending to track the fiery target across the sky. “It went from north to south,” he said, tracing the arc with his fingers. “It vanished behind those peaks.”

“Did you hear anything?” Emma asked.

“Like what? An explosion?”

“Anything at all,” Emma said. “Explosion, popping, the sound of jet engines.”

“Nothing,” Urco said. “You can hear the audio on the recording. Just me huffing and puffing.”

Kurt studied the sky, black and punctured with stars. A slight glow from the new moon gave them just enough light to see the outline of the mountains. “Let’s do it.”

She placed her laptop computer on a nearby table and began tapping away. “Can you set up the tripod for me?”

Kurt unfolded the legs of the aluminum tripod. “Where exactly were you standing?” he asked Urco.

“Right about here,” Urco said, moving several feet to his right.

Kurt extended the legs of the tripod, attached the camera to the central mount and raised it up until it was resting at the same level as Urco’s eyes. That done, he connected an HDMI cable from Emma’s computer to the camera and switched it on. “All yours.”

Emma nodded and continued to tap away at the keyboard. Kurt slid behind her and watched as she replayed the original video, pausing it several times. When it finished, she ran it all the way through once again.

“We need an exact distance from here to the peak.” She handed Kurt a laser range finder.

Kurt turned it on and pointed it at the jagged ridge until he got a reading. “Seven hundred and forty-two feet.”

She typed it in and two outlines appeared on the screen, one displaying the peaks as they appeared through the NUMA camera and the second displaying the peaks from the video Urco had taken.

At Emma’s command, the camera moved left and right and then back to the left. She tapped the up arrow and the camera tilted just a bit. The computer took it from there and fine-tuned the image until the two outlines merged exactly. “That’s it.”

At the touch of a button, Emma received the heading of what they assumed to be the Nighthawk.

“What about speed and altitude?” Kurt asked.

“For that, we’ll need to match this with the new descent profile your friend Hiram is working up.”

Emma tried to initiate a satellite linkup, but it failed.

“It’s the mountains,” Urco said. “You’ll have to go up top.”

“You mean, on those ropes?”

“It’s the only way to get a signal,” Urco explained. “How do you feel about a night ascent?”

She sighed. “Worse than I did about a daytime’s.”

Hidden in the dark among the same type of scrub trees that had scratched their exposed skin, Daiyu watched Kurt through a spotting scope. He was talking with the woman and the bearded man. She focused on his lips, trying to make out what he was saying.

“What are they doing?” Jian asked.

“They’re calculating something,” she said. “They’re using the video we were told about to get a bearing on the Nighthawk.”

“We should be doing that,” Jian suggested.

She and Jian had arrived just after sunset, ditching the truck near one of the fields and hiking the last few miles on foot. They’d made a study of the camp and were trying to decide how best to get at the Americans without having to fight their way through the forty Peruvian men and women of the archaeology group.

“They’re trying to connect to their satellite,” she said, reading Emma’s lips, “but they can’t get a signal. They’re going to higher ground.”

She put the scope away and looked to Jian. “This is our chance. We have to get that computer.”