Nighthawk

33

It was too dangerous to move at night. The road to the lake was every bit as treacherous as the drive up from Cajamarca. The woman they’d captured insisted that others would come for her.

“She’s probably bluffing,” Kurt said. “But we’re far more vulnerable on an open road in the dark than here.”

Both Urco and Emma agreed. Instead of driving out, they stoked the fires around the camp and borrowed a page from the Chachapoya, taking to the high ground and pulling up all the ropes. If there were Chinese agents or assassins out there, they’d have to scale the mountains by hand to stage an assault.

“We’re not supposed to use these caves,” Urco told his volunteers, “but they belonged to your forefathers, so they should be yours, not the government’s.”

Kurt went higher, heading up to the tallest peak. Alone, he made a satellite call to Rudi Gunn, who had returned to Washington. He got the good news first: Joe and the Trouts had arrived in Cajamarca. Then came the bad.

“You were right,” Rudi said. “The NSA has been hiding something. And it’s big, even though it’s actually very small.”

Kurt listened as Rudi explained what Hiram and Priya had found. The explanation was detailed, highly technical and riddled with physics, but Kurt got the basics. “That’s worse than I thought.”

“Worse than any of us thought,” Rudi said. “Want us to send you more resources?”

“No,” Kurt said. “It would take too long to get everything in place. Speed and stealth are our best friends, at the moment. If we’re right about the Nighthawk’s location, we can salvage it tomorrow and get the cargo out and off to wherever the NSA intended to store it. In the meantime, I’m starting to feel like Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre—suspicious of everyone and everything.”

“Can’t say I blame you. We haven’t heard from the Russians since you and Joe got back on dry land, but I doubt they’re going to give up. And I’m certain we haven’t seen the last of our Chinese friends. According to Central Intelligence, they have an army of agents in Peru and Ecuador. Don’t be surprised if reinforcements show up when you least expect it.”

“Which is why I need to change the plan.”

“What did you have in mind?”

Kurt was thinking back to the service records of the Special Projects team. Considering who to choose for a difficult task. “I’m going to send you a set of specs,” he said to Rudi, “Relay them to Joe and the Trouts, and tell Gamay I’m sorry but she’s going to miss the raising of the Nighthawk.”

“Understood,” Rudi said. “I’ll look for your message.”

Kurt said good-bye, cut the link and slid the phone into his pocket. He was ready to head back down when the pulley squeaked as someone came up on the rope. A moment later, hands appeared at the top of the ladder.

He was expecting Urco, but the determined face of Emma Townsend popped up over the edge instead.

Kurt helped her off the ladder. “This is a surprise.”

She moved toward the center of the peak. “Turns out sitting in a creepy cave with mummified bodies is worse than scaling heights in the dark.”

Kurt laughed. He found the caves claustrophobic himself. “I think it’s time we leveled with each other,” he said. “I know how it works. I know you’re not at liberty to say much, so I don’t blame you, but at this point I need the truth.”

“You have the truth,” she said.

“I have part of it,” Kurt said. He sat down, picked up a stone and ran his finger over the smooth surface; the color was faded on one side but deep and rich on the other — two sides to every story. “When we first met, I wondered why they sent you with us,” he explained. “It really made no sense. You have a reputation as a troublemaker in the NSA — a trait I happen to admire — but one that makes you an odd choice to go with the group most likely to find the missing plane.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “Or build me up to be something I’m not. They sent everyone they could find. Everyone they could get their hands on.”

“Sure,” Kurt said. “But we were on the scene three days before anyone else, which gave us a big lead. That, along with our well-earned reputation for finding missing things in the ocean, is why they put you with us. Because if we did find it, they needed someone along for the ride who knew exactly what we were recovering. And even among the shadowed halls of the NSA, very few know what’s really going on here. But between that Doctorate in Physics and your ties to NASA, you have to be one of the few.”

She didn’t deny it. Nor did she admit anything. “Time is of the essence,” she said. “The Russians and the Chinese—”

“Aren’t interested in the Nighthawk,” he said. “They want the cargo that it’s carrying. They want what it brought back.”

She went as silent as a stone.

“I know about the Penning traps,” Kurt said, “along with containment units, the cryogenic equipment and the entire system you built to harvest and store antimatter. That’s why the Nighthawk had a polar orbit. That’s why it stayed in the dark, where the temperatures in space are closer to absolute zero. That’s why it was up there for three years, because it’s a very slow process.”

He let that linger and wondered if he would have to press her further. Finally, she came around.

“Not antimatter,” she said. “A different form of matter. A few scientists call it by the rather awkward name: un-matter. We prefer to call it mixed-state matter: long-chain molecules made of equal parts of regular matter and antimatter.”

That was news. “I thought matter and antimatter annihilated each other the instant they touched.”

“Normally, they do,” she said. “But at temperatures close to absolute zero, molecular structures break down. Matter no longer holds a physical shape and, instead, acts more like a wave than a solid particle. In that condition, matter and antimatter can mix without destructive results, the way two waves of different frequencies can exist superimposed on each other. Using magnetic force and cryogenics to confine and control this mixed-state matter, we realized it could be stored indefinitely. It wasn’t long before a member of our research team suggested there might be naturally occurring pools of mixed-state matter floating high above the poles, held stable within the magnetic field.”

“So you built the Nighthawk to go test that idea.”

“And we discovered a relative abundance of it.”

“A relative abundance?”

“Far more than we expected,” she said. “Filaments of the material, spinning in what are essentially magnetic bubbles. Fractions of an ounce, in most cases, but enough to be worth retrieving. So we spent a year modifying the Nighthawk, and we filled the cargo bay with a more advanced type of Penning trap, which we call a containment unit, and we sent it up again to collect what we could find.”

“And now it’s sitting at the bottom of a lake,” Kurt noted. “And those containment units are running on battery power. What happens when the batteries run out?”

“You know what happens,” she snapped. “A very large explosion.”

He did know that. He just wanted to hear her say it. “How large?”

She spoke without emotion. Clinical and cold. It was the dry tone of a distant scientist, not someone who might be vaporized at any instant. “Eight ounces of antimatter exposed to an equal amount of matter will cause an explosion the equivalent of a ten-mega-ton bomb detonating. Our best estimate puts the load on board the Nighthawk somewhere in the range of two hundred kilograms. Almost four hundred pounds.”

“Four hundred pounds!?”

“Approximately,” she said. “If it all reacted simultaneously — and once some of it reacts, it will all react — the explosive force will be nearly eight thousand mega-tons, or eight giga-tons. The blast will be five times larger than the combined effect of detonating every nuclear weapon in the world’s combined arsenal in the same place at the same exact time.”

Kurt just stared at her. He didn’t know whether to laugh at the stupidity of what they’d done or curse them for their arrogance. “And you brought this material to Earth willingly? Compiled it all in the same place? Are you people insane?”

“What would you have us do?” she asked. “Once we figured out this material was up there, it wasn’t going to be long before the Russians and the Chinese made the same discovery. Would you rather they had it? Do you want the designers of Chernobyl playing around with this stuff? The builders of the already crumbling Three Gorges Dam?”

“Of course not,” Kurt said. “But what’s to stop them from retrieving their own supply?”

“The fact that we took it all,” she said. “It accumulates very slowly. It’ll be a thousand years before there’s a harvestable amount floating around up there again.”

“Great,” Kurt said. “Maybe civilization will have dragged itself back from the Stone Age by then.”

“You think I don’t know the danger?” she said. “Do you think it doesn’t weigh on me?”

He looked up at the dark night sky. The stars were bright out here, so far away from the nearest city. Tiny balls of fusion, which the Earth would become for a brief instant if they didn’t find the Nighthawk and keep the containment units functioning.

He turned back toward her. “At least I finally understand why you were all so certain the Nighthawk came down in one piece.”

“We knew the core had to be intact or we’d have all seen the results already.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Seventy-two hours,” she said. “Maybe less. It depends how much light is reaching the solar panels on the wings.”

“And if the containment units or the cryogenic system fail early?”

“A Nebraska-sized hole in the Andes,” she said. “A hundred trillion tons of rock instantly vaporized and blasted into the atmosphere. A ninety percent reduction in photosynthesis and biological activity. No one will have to worry about global warming anymore because the Earth will be in frigid darkness for at least five years.”

Not a pleasant scenario, he thought. “And if we get it back to the United States?”

“The material will be split up into thousands of tiny samples, each no more than half an ounce. They’ll be stored in a labyrinth of underground facilities that the NSA has been building for the last three years. A failure at one site will be no worse than a small bomb going off in an underground test location because there will be no other material for it to react with.”

All emotion had left Kurt. There was only one thing that counted now. “Then we’d damn well better find it and get it locked down.”

“My thoughts exactly,” she replied.