Nighthawk

67

The scene in the NUMA communications room had become chaotic. With the impending disaster all but certain, all government assets had been turned toward coordinating the efforts to minimize the damage.

Orders were being sent out, troops mobilized. People directed to shelter underground. Anything and everything that could be thought of and acted upon in two hours was being done.

Highways were closed to southbound traffic. Aircraft were ordered to proceed as far north as possible and land within the two-hour window. Information was relayed to Central and South American countries, though there was no assistance to lend and by morning it would be every man, nation and group for themselves.

Into this maelstrom, Emma’s attempt to communicate foundered. No line was free, no satellite communication available. No ear open to listening. Everyone too busy sending out orders and making requests.

Everyone except Priya, who’d moved quietly into the background. She thought she’d be safe, but figured by morning she would have no way to contact her family in London. She decided to send them an e-mail now before the worst happened.

As she sat down at the computer, a blinking icon told her she’d gotten an urgent message. It was from Paul Trout.

Emma thinks there might be another option to prevent disaster. We need to speak with Rudi and NASA Flight Dynamics. CANNOT get thru.

“Rudi,” she said, waving him over.

Rudi was in the midst of five different things and had two other staffers talking in his ear.

“Rudi!” she shouted.

He turned.

“Emma needs to talk with you. She says there may be a way to avert the disaster!”

In the cold, dark cockpit of the bomber, Kurt focused on every static-skewed word.

“The Daedalus Project,” Emma said. “Remember I told you about it? We planned to use small nuclear explosions for deep-space propulsion. We thought we might be able to accelerate a spacecraft to nearly a tenth the speed of light. The explosions occur behind the craft, the shock wave hits what is known as a pusher plate and sends the craft surging forward without destroying it. I believe we can do something similar with the Nighthawk using the mixed-state matter. It won’t be one big explosion but a long trail of smaller ones. If we vent the right amount of mixed-state matter through the original intake port, it will create a burst of energy and a continuous wave, accelerating the Nighthawk back into space before the subsequent explosion.”

“Won’t the mixed-state matter explode the second it hits air?” Kurt asked.

“As long as it remains cold enough, it lives in harmony. In its current condition, it will exit the collection port at 2.7 degrees Kelvin. The air temperature at one hundred and twenty thousand feet is somewhere in the neighborhood of negative eighty degrees. That’s still a boiling two hundred and ten degrees Kelvin, and the mixed-state matter will react in less than half a second, but since the Nighthawk will be moving at four thousand miles an hour, that half-a-second delay will create enough space to build a wave rather than blow the craft apart.”

Kurt listened intently, visualizing the attempt. “A wave?”

“A fast and powerful one,” Emma replied.

“Max and the NASA Flight Dynamics team have done the calculations,” Hiram said. “It could work.”

Kurt grinned. Major Timonovski and the copilot nodded as well.

“We’re not dead yet,” Joe said. “You can’t imagine how happy that makes me.”

Even Davidov was smiling through the pain. “If we survive, a bottle of twenty-year-old scotch for each of you.”

“What do we have to do?” Kurt asked over the radio.

“You have to take the bomber up to its maximum speed and altitude and then release the Nighthawk,” Emma said. “Reboot the control system with the alpha code and then download a series of commands that we will transmit to you momentarily.”

“That doesn’t sound too hard,” Kurt said. “What’s the catch?”

“The Nighthawk’s antennas are on the top. They have to be or they would burn off on reentry. That means you’ll have to be above and in front of the Nighthawk.”

“Which means we get hit with the wave as well.”

“We could try to use an Air Force satellite,” she said. “But there’s so much ionization in the atmosphere that—”

“No,” Kurt said, cutting off the discussion. “We get one shot at this. Let’s do it right.”

Joe gave the thumbs-up. Davidov nodded enthusiastically. “Da,” Major Timonovski said.

The flight engineer nodded as well and switched on the antenna dish they’d used to override the Nighthawk’s program seven days ago. After a few checks, he turned to Kurt. “Tell them we are ready.”

It took several minutes for the bomber to get up to supersonic speed and climb above eighty thousand feet. There, it switched over to the scramjets.

The burst of power pushed Kurt back into the seat and he listened as Timonovski called out the Mach number and altitude. Because Joe knew how to fly, he’d been given the copilot’s seat. Kurt and Davidov sat behind them in the jump seats, and the flight engineer was at the command station where the Falconer had been days before.

“One hundred and nineteen thousand,” Major Timonovski said. “Maximum altitude and velocity in five… four… three…”

“Releasing Nighthawk,” the flight engineer said.

To avoid Blackjack 1’s fate, they flew in a parabolic arc, ejecting the Nighthawk as they went over the top.

“Nighthawk clear,” the flight engineer said. “Stabilizer intact.”

Once the Nighthawk drifted back far enough, Timonovski brought the bomber up above and in front of the unmanned space plane.

“Separation, two miles,” the flight engineer said. “Initiating alpha code.”

At the press of a button, the information was sent. Now they waited. Finally, a response came in.

“Nighthawk up and functioning,” the flight engineer said. “Transmitting new orders.”

As Kurt watched the others perform their duties, he triple-checked his shoulder harness and gripped the handhold beside the jump seat. There was nothing else for him to do.

“Nighthawk confirms orders received and processed,” the flight engineer said excitedly. “Initiation in thirty seconds. All systems green.” He turned to Timonovski. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Timonovski put the bomber into a turn, banking away from the Nighthawk’s course. The turn had to be gradual because of the incredible velocity, but the farther the two courses diverged, the better chance they had of surviving the wave that was about to hit.

The Blackjack was pulling hard. Kurt felt the g-forces pressing him down into the seat. He strained to look at his watch. The second hand ticked along the orange face. Each click seemed a lifetime. And then they were all used up.

A flash of blue light filled the sky. Kurt shut his eyes and still saw the glare.

“Hang on!” Joe shouted.

The shock front hit the bomber like a crashing wave. Despite their speed and course away from the Nighthawk, the impact was intense as the surge picked the bomber up and shoved it forward.

“Don’t fight it,” Kurt grunted.

Timonovski did as Kurt suggested, going with the wave instead of turning against it. Still, the ride was violent, the systems inside the cockpit fried out in seconds, the fuselage buckled and, after ten seconds of buffeting, the left wing folded and the plane rolled over into a dive.

Unseen from inside the bomber, the Nighthawk had done precisely as ordered, ejecting a tiny stream of the antimatter out behind it. The reaction was nearly instant, but instead of one giant flash, it left a trail of hundreds and then thousands of flashes in a series that lit up the night sky. At the head of this expanding flare of blue light, the tiny black craft was propelled toward space, accelerating at a rate that would have killed a human occupant.

Seen from the ground, the burst of light looked like glowing ripples in a pond, with each circle of light expanding into the others until the interference pattern formed a maddening kaleidoscope of luminescence, streaking upward and outward to the east.

Perspective was hard to come by from down there. And no one who viewed it with the naked eye could really follow the band of swirling light as it lengthened and stretched before terminating in a blinding flash high above the planet.

The experiment had worked. In three minutes, the Nighthawk covered just under five thousand miles, accelerating to a maximum velocity of nearly one hundred and seventy thousand miles per hour, the fastest man-made object of all time.

It was still accelerating when the heat and vibration caused a catastrophic failure in one of the containment units, but by then it was far enough from the Earth’s surface to be nothing more than a mind-blowing fireworks display in the night sky.

The men in the falling bomber never saw it; they were knocked about mercilessly and traveling in the opposite direction.

Inside the cockpit, Kurt felt himself whiplashed one way, then the other. He was certain the plane would come apart at any second. Miraculously, it held together, despite the fact that one wing had been ripped off and most of the tail was gone.

It didn’t take long to realize that they were in a nosedive. Light from the artificial sun had temporarily illuminated the Earth and its sea far below.

They were corkscrewing down like Blackjack 1 had, falling from the sky like a gull with a broken wing.

The spinning motion was disorienting. The loss of pressure threatened to cause him to black out. He remembered the other crew’s long descent with only the computer talking.

“We need to eject!” Kurt shouted to Major Timonovski.

The pilot didn’t answer. He was still strapped in his seat, but with every move of the plane he was being thrown back and forth like a rag doll.

“Joe, we have to punch out!”

Joe seemed no better than Timonovski. Davidov looked to be awake but too weak to move, and the flight engineer was hanging in the straps, a huge gash to his forehead.

Kurt had no idea how high they were, no idea what would happen if they ejected, but he’d seen the wreckage of the other bomber on the bottom of the sea. That impact he knew they would not survive.

He looked around for an ejection handle. Everything was labeled in Russian. Finally, he spied a red bar with two orange stripes.

He reached for it.

Grasped it.

And with one hard pull, yanked it up and back.

An explosion shook the plane, fire surrounded the cockpit and everything went black.