Nighthawk Read online

  “You have them eating out of your hand,” she said. “But how do you intend to pay for this ship? Not to mention the cargo and the pirate’s booty Joe promised them?”

  Kurt shrugged and put the phone away. “I figured we’d use that expense account of yours. I took care of dinner, remember?”

  “Very funny,” she said. “But, I’m serious. We’re either going to end up walking the plank here or being drawn and quartered on the Capitol steps.”

  Kurt didn’t think so. “There’s a ten-hour difference between here and Malaysia, where the shipping company has its headquarters. They’re closed now. They won’t be open again until tomorrow morning, Malaysian Standard Time. By then, it will be dark in D.C. and the phones will be forwarded to the answering service. Between that and the normal speed of bureaucracy, it’ll be a week before anyone starts sorting out this mess. By then, we’ll have found what we’re looking for.”

  “And when it doesn’t turn out to be filled with barrels of uncut diamonds?”

  “I never mentioned diamonds,” Kurt said.

  “No, but the cargo you vouched for is worth fifty million dollars. And this ship is worth twice that much.”

  “And how much did the Nighthawk cost?” he asked. “Fifty billion? A hundred? How much would the NSA pay to keep it out of Russian hands? You’re worrying about the pennies and forgetting about the thousand-dollar bills. Trust me, by the time this becomes a problem we’ll have the Nighthawk’s actual position locked down and the most important parts of the aircraft on board. Instead of complaining about the cost of this ship and the cargo, someone will be pinning a medal on your chest and calling you a risk taker and bold leader and buying Captain Kamphausen and his friends their own ships, crewed by beautiful mermaids.”

  She took a deep breath and looked away out over the dark sea. “You really are crazy,” she whispered, before turning back to him with a smile. “What sort of Pandora’s Box have you opened for me?”

  “Must be your inner rebel,” he replied with a grin.

  “All I can say is, you’d better be right or we’re going to end up partners in a fruit stand for the rest of our natural lives.”

  “I could think of worse fates,” Kurt said. “But, trust me. It’s going to work out just fine.”

  13

  NUMA vessel Catalina

  Paul Trout thought his wife was playing a practical joke on him as she read the latest order, this time from Rudi Gunn. It made as little sense as the previous one.

  “Proceed to specified coordinates and begin dropping sonar buoys on north–south line. After three hours and twenty-seven minutes, begin concentric circles. One hour later, at the captain’s leisure, come to a full stop. At this point, make obvious preparations for deep-sea recovery operation, including launch of ROVs. Send coded transmissions and continue recovery operations until further orders.”

  “Recovery of what?” Paul asked.

  “It doesn’t say,” Gamay insisted. “Just that we need to make it look good.”

  “With what?” he added. “We just dumped our only manned submersible over the rail.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to improvise,” Gamay said.

  Paul shook his head. “Ours is not to reason why,” he said. “Let’s go give Callahan the news. Hopefully, his head won’t explode.”

  Four thousand miles away, Constantin Davidov thought his head might do just that. He’d been traveling in the passenger compartment of a Russian Mi-14 helicopter for the better part of a day. The huge blue-gray-painted craft was the newest, extended-range model, stripped of weapons and armor and given two large auxiliary fuel tanks. It was known to its pilots as the Carrier Pigeon, since it was used to ferry men and equipment over extremely long distances. The men on the ground called it the Clay Pigeon because it was filled with so much jet fuel that it was ponderous, heavy and slow, making it an easy target.

  All Davidov knew was that nineteen hours in such a craft, including several air-to-air refueling passes, qualified as torture and should have been banned by the Geneva convention.

  When the ungainly craft finally touched down on the deck of a Russian guided missile cruiser, he all but jumped from his seat to get off the torture machine. Not waiting for permission, he stepped through the door out into a pouring rain.

  The weather was deteriorating in all directions as the guided missile cruiser Varyag and several other ships continued headlong into a storm halfway between Hawaii and the South American coast. Davidov didn’t care. A ship in a Category 5 storm was preferable to another minute in the oversized eggbeater.

  As the Mi-14 was strapped down, Davidov was led inside and shown to a cabin. By the time he’d showered and pulled on a clean uniform, the ship was pitching noticeably. He found he had to grip the rail to keep from losing his balance as he moved down the passageway.

  He was escorted through “officer country,” to the quarters of Rear Admiral Sergei Borozdin, whose door was guarded by two Spetsnaz commandos. After displaying his credentials, he was shown in immediately.

  Borozdin was sitting behind a desk, pretending not to notice the arrival of his old friend. It was a game they played. The two men had come up together, one through the Navy, the other in the party machinery itself—KGB, NKVD and the consular services. They rarely met these days but, when they did, the liquor flowed.

  Despite the stereotype of vodka-drinking Russians, both men preferred scotch, specifically single malts from the highlands of Scotland, preferably aged at least fifteen years.

  Davidov had brought with him a fine example. He offered it to Borozdin. “Aberlour,” he said. “Gaelic for Mouth of the Chattering Burn. It’s only a twelve-year-old, but it was aged in a Spanish sherry cask.”

  Borozdin looked the bottle over with reverence. “The least you could do for sending my fleet into this cyclone.”

  Despite the gruff words, Borozdin was pleased. He grinned and reached for two glasses, pouring a taste. “I swear to you, Constantin. If Putin ordered me to destroy Scotland with a nuke, I would refuse and take my chances with the firing squad.”

  Davidov laughed and Borozdin filled both of their glasses. The aroma was unique, with a hint of raisins. The first sips were heavenly.

  Even then, Davidov swore he could still hear the helicopter blades hacking at the air above him, could still feel his body shaking from nose to feet. “It’s too bad about this storm,” he said as the Varyag rolled appreciably to starboard.

  With each swell, the ship rolled and nosed down and then came back up. The waves were hitting the fleet from the front quarter, and they were getting worse by the moment.

  “If we weren’t so far behind,” Borozdin said, “I would let it pass and proceed in its wake. We’ve already had to send one of the tenders back; two of its hatches were damaged.”

  The Varyag was shepherding a fleet of salvage ships and auxiliaries toward the search zone. It was larger, faster and heavier than the other ships. It was faring better, as a result.

  “We must press on,” Davidov said. “At least the storm is delaying the Chinese as well.”

  “But what about the Americans?” Borozdin asked. “They’re our real problem. This damned cyclone has done nothing but aid them and ruin our plans. If it hadn’t appeared, they wouldn’t have brought the Nighthawk back early. We would have been in position to catch it when it fell. Now the storm delays us even as the Americans steam south from California in good weather.”

  “Yes,” Davidov said wearily. “I know. Not to worry. It shouldn’t matter.”

  Borozdin cocked his head and looked at his old friend suspiciously. “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “It’s true, the Americans seem to have this cyclone on their side,” Davidov said, smirking. “But we have a Typhoon on ours.”

  A few seconds passed before Borozdin got the reference. “TK-17,” he said, referencing the ID number
of the vessel in question.

  Davidov nodded. “She’s gone right under the storm and is almost in position. By this time tomorrow, the Nighthawk will be in her hold and on its way to Kamchatka. The Chinese and Americans will never know we’ve taken her and her precious cargo. They will search forever . . . in vain.”

  Borozdin looked pleased, but the smile quickly left his face. “Then why are we plowing directly into a Force 5 gale?”

  “Appearances,” Davidov said, finishing his tumbler of the Aberlour. “They must be kept up. Otherwise, the Americans and the Chinese might begin to suspect something.”

  Davidov finished, pushed his empty glass toward Borozdin and waited. His old friend broke into a toothy grin and gladly poured a second helping of the liquid fire. “To the Typhoon,” he said, raising his glass.

  Davidov did likewise. “To the Typhoon.”

  14

  MS Reunion

  Seventy miles east of the Galápagos Islands chain

  Kurt stood on the starboard bridge wing of the six-hundred-foot cargo vessel looking through a pair of large binoculars. In the distance, he could just make out four red-hulled boats on the blue ocean. They were lifeboats from the Reunion, repurposed to search for any sign of the Nighthawk.

  Taking a page out of Rudi Gunn’s plan, they’d put four boats in the water and sent them to the east in formation. Traveling abreast of one another and two miles apart, the small fleet covered an eight-mile-wide swath at a single pass. Each of them trailed a pair of fish: torpedo-shaped tubes packed with the most advanced sensing equipment in the NUMA catalog, including top-of-the-line side-scan sonar emitters and a sensitive magnetic alloy detector NUMA had only recently developed.

  The new detectors were far more precise than the old magnetometers that simply scanned for iron content. According to Joe, they could tell not only what alloys it was examining but where the alloy was produced and the name of the shift supervisor on duty during the mixing.

  The fact was they were using the most advanced equipment in the world and covering forty square miles of ocean floor each hour. The pace had led Kurt to predict they’d locate the missing craft by lunchtime, though at half past breakfast they’d yet to find a thing.

  Patient as Job, at least for now, Kurt turned to Emma. She sat in front of a high-definition screen, studying the results. As the four lifeboats moved in unison, they transmitted the data from the sonar emitters and other instruments back to the Reunion, where a special laptop computer processed the signals from all the different sensors into one image.

  The resulting picture was a comprehensive, detailed view of the ocean floor, far sharper than any standard sonar scan. It was comparable to switching from an old tube TV to a modern high-definition display.

  “This is incredible,” Emma said, using the controls to pan and zoom in on different sections of the image. “No wonder Steve Gowdy wanted NUMA on the job.”

  Kurt lowered the binoculars down and took a seat beside her. “Something tells me our proximity and availability had more to do with it than our expertise. Had the seven sisters of the poor been out here with a fishing boat, he’d probably have hired them, too.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But you definitely bring more than proximity to the table.”

  Kurt accepted the compliment, sat back in the chair and watched the computer screen along with her. He knew the software would point out and highlight anything that didn’t belong on the seafloor, but he liked to keep an eye on the scan as much as he could. For one thing, computers were not infallible. For another, until they found something, there was literally nothing else to do.

  He leaned back and craned his neck around to alleviate the soreness that had set in. As he did, Captain Kamphausen strode over. He, too, was sensing the tedious nature of the search. “Somehow, I thought looking for sunken treasure would be a little more exciting than this.”

  “Mowing the lawn isn’t my favorite exercise either,” Kurt replied. “Never liked it as a kid and I don’t like it any better now.”

  The captain laughed, moved to the radio and checked in with his crew. Meanwhile, Joe came in, juggling three cups of coffee; he placed one in front of Kurt, handed one to Emma and kept one for himself. “Find anything yet?”

  “Nothing interesting,” Kurt said. “The only real excitement turned out to be an old anchor that must have fallen off a ship sometime recently. Other than that, nothing but a few outcroppings of lava rock jutting from the abyssal plain.”

  “That’s to be expected,” Joe said. “The Galápagos Islands are volcanic.”

  Kurt reached for the coffee cup. He tested the heat and swallowed some coffee down, wincing in the aftermath. “How much sugar did you put in there?”

  “Only seven packets,” Joe said.

  “Only seven?” Kurt replied.

  “I figured a sugar rush would keep you on your toes.”

  Kurt placed the cup into a holder. “I’ll be bouncing off the walls if I drink any more of that.”

  Before Joe could reply, a soft tone and a flashing red highlight on the screen suggested they’d found something new.

  “What is it?” Emma asked.

  Kurt leaned over the keyboard and used the touch pad to zoom in on the highlighted area. “I’m not sure.”

  He adjusted the angle and allowed the computer to extrapolate the data. They soon got a closer view of the targets. In a wide swath there were several objects and a series of small craters and gouge marks in the otherwise flat expanse of sediment.

  “Looks like something rained down from above,” Joe suggested.

  Kurt nodded and checked the magnetometer. “Can’t be sure what we’re looking at, but it’s definitely man-made.”

  Emma was not as easily convinced. “How can you be sure? I don’t see anything but holes in the mud.”

  Kurt pointed to the reading of the alloy detector. “Because those holes are hiding something built of high-strength stainless steel and magnesium.”

  He pressed a button and the printer came to life, spitting out a chemical profile of the target in question. It was approximately twenty percent magnesium and fifty percent aluminum, with lower concentrations of iron and other metals.

  As the boats continued to move along, the image on the screen changed slowly. Several additional targets appeared, but they were too small and too far off to be rendered in any kind of detail.

  “Can we get in closer?” Emma asked.

  Kurt was about to zoom in when the image blurred and a large swath of the screen went dark.

  “What happened?”

  “It’s a shadow,” Joe said from behind them. “The side-scan sonar is sending its pulse across the seafloor at a nearly flat angle, like the sun getting low on the horizon. When something gets in the way of the echo, it creates a long shadow, like those you see stretching across a street in the late afternoon.”

  Kurt zoomed out and a jagged shape appeared. A ridge of volcanic material jutting up from the seafloor. Everything beyond it was invisible.

  “We could have the boats circle back and get another scan from a different angle,” Joe suggested.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Kurt said. “Let the boats continue on until they reach the edge of the search zone and then have them make the turn as planned. While they do that, we’ll take the Angler down and check out what we’ve found. If it turns out to be anything important, we’ll be able to confirm. And if not, we won’t have brought the whole search to a halt in the process.”

  “Makes sense,” Joe said. “And it gives you something to do.”

  Kurt grinned. “There’s a method to my madness.”

  “You keep thinking that,” Joe quipped.

  “I’m going with you,” Emma said. “If it turns out to be debris, it’s likely to be in rough condition: mostly small pieces and mangled and bent fragments. I’m the on
ly one here who’ll be able to make a positive ID.”

  “You don’t have to come down to do that,” Kurt said. “You can watch on the monitors up here.”

  “I prefer to see things in person,” she said. “Besides, when am I going to get another chance to dive to the bottom of the sea in a high-tech submarine?”

  “The lady has a point,” Joe said.

  Kurt didn’t mind the company. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got one ticket to the bottom of the sea.”

  Twenty minutes later, Kurt and Emma were sitting in the command seats of the Angler as Joe used the Air-Crane to lift them off the deck and carry them toward the target zone.

  Though the submersible was hooked on securely, it still swayed beneath the fuselage of the orange-painted helicopter.

  “I’ll be glad when we get into the water,” Emma said. “How close are we?”

  “Approaching the drop zone,” Joe’s voice replied over the intercom.

  “You mean the Lower us gently into the sea zone, don’t you?” Kurt replied.

  “Of course,” Joe said. “Wouldn’t want to give you too much frustration for one day.”

  As they neared the drop zone, Joe slowed the helicopter to a hover and brought it down toward the surface. At the same time, Kurt ran one last check to ensure the Angler was watertight and that all systems were go.

  “Ready for our bath,” Kurt said.

  “Roger that,” Joe replied.

  The submersible lurched downward as the cable began to unwind. It descended the rest of the way smoothly and then settled into passing swells, rising and falling softly, once it reached the sea.

  A metallic clink sounded as the hook was detached and the line reeled in.

  “Catch-and-release program completed,” Joe called out. “You two are on your own.”

  “Roger that,” Kurt said. “Deploying communications buoy and beginning descent. See you in a couple of hours.”