Nighthawk Read online

  The replay came loud and clear. “We saw it on the surface. No idea what caused it, though.”

  “Do you still have the Typhoon on the scan?”

  “Yes, but the latest return is blurred.”

  “The Typhoon is moving, too,” Joe concluded. “They wouldn’t be doing that unless they were chasing something.”

  He turned his attention back to the instrument panel. Everything was operating in the green. With a firm twist of the throttle, Joe commanded full power. The weight came off the landing gear and the orange helicopter rose from the deck. With a kick of the rudder, Joe turned the nose to starboard and accelerated toward the widening circle of white water in the distance.

  The Angler continued to ascend, moving upward at two hundred feet per minute. Kurt watched the light grow around them and Emma tried to pick up something, anything, on the hydrophone.

  “It’s blown-out,” she said.

  Kurt wasn’t surprised; his ears felt as if they’d almost blown out as well. “Never mind,” he said. “Just get ready to abandon ship in case they fire another torpedo our way.”

  She pulled a life jacket on as Kurt continued to pilot the submersible. They could see the surface now: a shimmering, waving mirror of silver that meant freedom.

  As soon as the sub breached the surface, Kurt grabbed the radio. “Reunion, this is Angler,” he said. “We’re on the surface and need immediate pickup. Do you copy?”

  “Let’s just hope our antenna didn’t get blown off,” Emma said.

  Kurt pressed the transmit switch again. “Reunion, this is Angler, do you read?”

  Joe was cruising across the water at an altitude of three hundred feet when he heard the radio call. Seconds later, he spotted the white and red submersible bobbing in the swells.

  He turned the volume up. “Kurt, this is Joe. I have you in sight. We’ll be on you in thirty seconds.”

  “Thirty seconds?” Kurt replied. He sounded shocked.

  “We’re already airborne. We thought you might need help.”

  Joe brought the Air-Crane onto a matching course, setting up to grab the Angler off the water. As he finished the turn, he noticed something else: a long white trail of bubbles coming in from the west. “Don’t look now but you have a torpedo heading your way.”

  “We’ll bail out,” Kurt replied.

  “Stay put,” Joe said. “I think I can get you before it hits.”

  “You’ll never hook on in time,” Kurt said.

  “We don’t need a hook,” Joe said. “We have a magnet.”

  The submersible was moving, but it was ponderous on the surface. The white line of bubbles from the torpedo was tracking quickly toward them.

  Joe cut in front of it, brought the Air-Crane down closer to the water. “Lower the magnet.”

  Kamphausen let out fifty feet of cable. The heavy, bell-shaped electromagnet trailed out behind them. He aimed for the red strip across the top.

  “Activate the magnet,” Joe said. “Full power. We’re only going to get one shot at this.”

  “Coils are powered,” Kamphausen shouted. “Electromagnet is live!”

  From the corner of his eye, Joe saw the compass spin wildly as it picked up a new source of magnetism. They were thirty feet above the waves and closing in on the submarine at a shallow crossing angle. The torpedo trail was coming from directly behind them. Kamphausen could see it; Joe couldn’t.

  “It’s going to be close,” he said.

  Joe slowed as he came in behind the sub and matched its course. The magnet skipped across the water, and the cable scraped across the sub’s back. The magnet came free of the water, hit the stern of the small sub and bounced.

  It looked as if the impact might cause it to skip over the top, but the powered side of the magnet was drawn toward the flat iron spine of the submersible. It snapped onto the hull with a solid clunk. The winch strained and let out several feet of cable before the brake locked it tight. The Air-Crane was pulled downward as the tension on the cable threatened to whip the helicopter into the sea, but Joe countered the effect and the Angler surged forward, riding high in the water for a moment before pulling free. It swung forward underneath the Air-Crane, shedding curtains of seawater behind it.

  Joe was too busy stabilizing the Air-Crane to worry about the torpedo. Kamphausen held his breath as it passed underneath.

  Nothing happened. No explosion. No detonation. The torpedo didn’t even turn to acquire a new target. It just continued on a straight line and traveled off into the distance.

  Kamphausen watched it go and gave it a mock salute. “Good riddance,” he said.

  Joe laughed and turned back toward the Reunion with the Angler flying beneath them.

  Nine hundred feet below, Tovarich and the rest of the Typhoon’s crew waited for a detonation that never came.

  “What happened?” Tovarich asked finally.

  “Nothing, sir,” the sonar operator replied.

  “I know that already,” Tovarich said, the fury barely restrained. “What went wrong this time?”

  “Nothing, sir,” the tactical officer said. “Torpedo still running straight and true.”

  “So it missed?”

  “No, sir, it . . . it was right on target . . . It’s just . . .” he replied, baffled by the situation.

  “It’s just what?” Tovarich demanded.

  “It’s just that the American submersible is gone.”

  The captain stared at his sonarman in disbelief. “What do you mean gone?”

  “It’s no longer in the water, Captain.”

  Tovarich hauled the man out of his seat. He’d begun his career as a sonarman. He’d show these two amateurs how it worked. He snatched the headset and listened intently, adjusting the frequencies, the bearing and the sensitivity settings. He heard what they heard: the torpedo running but not the submersible.

  “Give me an active ping!”

  The emitter sounded almost immediately and the return came moments later. The torpedo was there, running off into the distance, as was the stationary freighter he assumed the NUMA submersible to be working from. But the submersible itself was gone.

  Tovarich pulled the headset off. “Detonate the torpedo,” he said. “And return to the crash site. Once the cleanup is finished, set course for the deep. I’ll be in my quarters. Alone.”

  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 abl
e 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.”