Nighthawk

by Clive Cussler

“Then we should get out of the way.”

  Kurt shook his head. “Moving now would give them our location. As long as we remain still, we should appear no different than a rock formation or part of the wreckage.”

  As Kurt spoke, another ear-splitting pulse came forth. The NUMA submersible rang like a bell and still Kurt held his ground.

  A swirling cloud of sediment swelled forth, beneath and in front of the approaching vessel. It made it seem like the behemoth was riding on a cushion of dust.

  “Hang on,” Kurt said.

  The disturbance hit the Angler and the small submersible was spun around and swept to one side.

  Kurt used the thrusters to straighten the sub out and watched in awe as a mountain of rust-colored steel passed over them, filling the view from one edge of the canopy to the other. It passed by slowly, almost endlessly. The submarine crossing above them was as wide and long as the cargo vessel floating on the surface.

  Finally, the propellers came into view.

  As they neared, the Angler was pulled off the bottom by the turbulence and drawn toward the spinning props. It was swept in close and then spat out behind the passing leviathan, tumbling in the submarine’s baffles. Kurt fought to control the ride, but had little power against what was essentially an underwater tornado.

  The Angler spun and rolled and banged against an outcropping of rock. Several warning lights blinked on. And then everything went black.

  Up on the Reunion, Joe and Captain Kamphausen watched the events live until the video feed suddenly cut out. Without sound or commentary, it was hard to tell what happened. The last image caught on tape was a shot of the churning brass propellers.

  “Did it hit them?” Kamphausen wondered aloud.

  Joe picked up the microphone. “Angler, what’s your status?”

  He waited a few moments before making another attempt. “Come in, Angler. Kurt, are you there?”

  When he received nothing in response, Joe put the microphone down and played the video one more time, studying the blast of sediment and the last, ominous view.

  “I don’t think the props got them,” he said. “A close call, nothing worse. But the communications line must have been cut.”

  “Why didn’t he move?” the captain asked. “He just sat there like a deer in the headlights.”

  “Kurt doesn’t freeze up,” Joe replied. “He must have felt it was safer to stay put. A tactic I would agree with. It’s very surprising that a vessel that large would be traveling that close to the seafloor.”

  Joe checked the last burst of telemetry data from the Angler’s control systems in hopes of gaining more insight. What he saw concerned him. A list of warning lights had come on right before the line was cut.

  “Battery pack,” he said, reading off the labels. “Pumps. Gyrostabilizer. They must have hit something pretty hard for all of those systems to go out at once.”

  Kamphausen offered a grim look. “What exactly does all that mean? Are they drowning?”

  “I doubt it,” Joe said. “The Angler has a strong hull, so I’m assuming they’re dry. But they may be facing the submariner’s worst nightmare.”

  “Worse than drowning?”

  “Being marooned alive on the bottom,” Joe said. “With electrical problems and the pumps off-line, they may not be able to surface.”

  “Is there any way we can help them?” Kamphausen asked. “Or do we just have to wait and see?”

  “Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be a big problem,” Joe said. “I’d just drop another sub in the water, hook a line on them and tow them back to the surface. Failing that, I’d don a hard suit and hook a cable to them and winch them up. But since we don’t have either of those things, we’re going to have to improvise.”

  “What about that submarine that almost ran them over?” Kamphausen said. “Judging by the rust on the hull and the general state of neglect, I’d say it was a Russian boat. Is it too much to assume they’re after whatever you’re after?”

  “We’d be foolish to assume anything else,” Joe replied.

  “Are we in any danger?”

  “I doubt they’ll torpedo a surface ship like the Reunion,” Joe said. “That would be inviting war and their rapid destruction from our sub-hunting aircraft. But the depths of the sea are a different story.”

  “How so?”

  “To a large extent, what happens down below, stays down below,” Joe replied, co-opting the famous Las Vegas advertising slogan. “They could easily eliminate the Angler by ramming it, or hitting it with a torpedo, or by sitting on it and crushing it down into the silt. In all cases, no one up here would ever know what happened. And that, I cannot allow.”

  Kamphausen scratched his head. “But how can we stop them?”

  “By getting them off the bottom before anything else happens.”

  Kamphausen nodded, looked around as if he was thinking deeply and then turned back to Joe. “I’ve got nothing.”

  “Fortunately, I’ve got an idea,” Joe said. “But it’s going to take a little work. I assume you have a few generators on this ship.”

  “Several.”

  “Show me to the largest one you’ve got. And have your engineering team meet us there with a complete set of tools.”

  Kamphausen looked at him suspiciously.

  “Don’t worry,” Joe said. “I’ll put it all back together when I’m done.”

  Nine hundred feet below, Kurt and Emma sat in darkness. The huge submarine had passed over the top of them and continued on into the dark. The turbulent ride had slammed them against a ledge of volcanic rock, tripped a few circuit breakers and lit up several warning lights on the panel before shutting off all the lights.

  Using a flashlight, Kurt found the main panel, pushed the circuit breakers back in and brought the Angler back to life. “No real damage,” he determined.

  “Listen,” Emma said.

  The hydrophone was still picking up the sound of the propellers, but the intensity level had waned. Before long, it ceased altogether.

  “They’ve come to a stop,” Kurt said.

  “Better than having them double back.”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” Kurt replied. “But what are they doing down here in the first place? Considering the size and shape of that sub, I make it out as a Russian Typhoon, a ballistic missile submarine. Not exactly cut out for search-and-rescue work.”

  “Maybe it was the nearest vessel they had with sonar capability,” Emma suggested.

  Kurt wasn’t so sure. He straightened his headset and tried to reach Joe. “Joe, are you out there? I’m hoping you got the number of the truck that almost ran us down.”

  There was no answer. Not even static. “I think the Typhoon cut our line as it passed overhead,” Kurt replied. “We’ve lost communications with the surface.”

  “Maybe we should count ourselves lucky and head up,” she suggested. “See if Joe can identify this aircraft and let everyone know this is a dead end.”

  Kurt considered that, but a curious mind and a sharpened sense of suspicion ran in his family just like the silver-gray hair he’d inherited at a young age. “That would be the smart thing to do,” he admitted. “But something doesn’t make any sense here. Did you report this location to anyone?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t told a soul.”

  “Neither have I. So, there couldn’t be a leak.”

  “What about our partners on the Reunion?”

  “I can’t imagine a Russian agent being stowed away on a refrigerated agriculture ship I chose at random,” he replied. “And even if we were that unlucky and someone up there did pass our location to the Russians, what are the odds they would have a Typhoon submarine within a few hours’ sailing time of our location?”

  “Astronomically low,” she said. “The few Typhoons they have
left spend most of their time in port, and when they do sail, they rarely venture far from home.”

  Kurt knew that, too. He also knew the Typhoons were in the process of being retired from service. “By all rights, that sub should not be here.”

  “Maybe we should worry about it another day,” Emma said. “They’ve already scanned the debris field with their sonar. If we’re lucky, they’ll bring their salvage fleet out here and spend a few days recovering aircraft parts off the bottom before they realize this wreckage doesn’t come from the Nighthawk.”

  Kurt was one step ahead of her. “That’s just it,” he said. “I think they already know.”

  His hand went back to the console and he raised the volume on the hydrophone. A new sound was emanating from the dark, a pulsing noise that sounded more like water running through a pipe.

  “Bow and stern thrusters,” he said. “They’re keeping station out there in the dark. I suggest we go find out why.”

  16

  Are you afraid they’ll see us?” Emma asked, commenting on their stealth approach.

  “Submarines like the Typhoon don’t have windows to look through,” Kurt said, “but they might have cameras or ROVs and submersibles of their own to deploy. They also have passive listening devices that are highly sensitive. Hugging the bottom will absorb any sound we make.”

  They both fell silent and Kurt continued tracking toward their target by making small adjustments to the hydrophone. When a rock formation appeared on the video screen, he weaved around it. When they came to a slope of sediment piled up against a wide ridge, he put the Angler into an ascent.

  They tracked the slope upward and came over the top.

  “Look,” Emma said.

  Kurt looked up from the screen. An eerie blue glow loomed in the distance.

  With enough light to navigate by, he switched off the UV system and retracted the Angler’s namesake boom. Continuing over the ridge and down the other side, they approached the lighted area.

  From a distance, the glow was nothing more than a shimmering orb of water, dark blue in color and revealing no details. As they moved closer, it turned green, and eventually took on a yellowish tint similar to natural light.

  Because of the total darkness surrounding them and the weightless state of the submarine, it felt as if they were approaching a strange planet in the depths of space.

  As they closed in, Kurt cut the throttle and allowed the Angler to drift. “Our friends have set up shop.”

  The glowing orb had become a swath of daylight that ran for several hundred feet. It was cast by row after row of high-powered floodlights on the underside of the Typhoon. The bulk of the huge submarine remained hidden in the inky black water, but the seafloor beneath was lit up like a stadium. The reflected light illuminated the underside of the Typhoon and the maroon-colored paint the Russian Navy preferred to use below the waterline.

  Several pod-like shapes were visible beneath the keel.

  “Divers in hard suits,” Kurt said.

  They were descending toward the seafloor like tiny probes dropped from an alien vessel. Their destination was a large concentration of wreckage, including an upturned wing and the T-shaped tail of a large aircraft.

  “Vertical stabilizer,” Emma said. “Fuselage section over there. And that looks like an engine pod. I told you this wasn’t the Nighthawk.”

  A clanking sound came through the hydrophone and then a hiss of bubbles.

  “Pressure door opening,” Kurt said. “Most likely, the lockout room where those divers came from or a compartment from where they can release an ROV.”

  More clanking sounds rang out through the hydrophone and a narrow slit of light appeared in the underside of the Typhoon. It grew wider as a pair of huge doors in the bottom of the hull drew back from each other. They locked in place, leaving a hundred-foot opening in the bottom of the submarine. As Kurt and Emma watched in amazement, a huge clamshell bucket descended from the center of it, its jaws stretched wide.

  The bucket crashed into the wreckage with abandon. Sediment swirled in the light, and as the hydraulic jaws closed, the screech of rendered metal cried out through the water.

  Kurt watched intently as the tail section of the aircraft was hauled up into the open bay of the submarine. “The Russians have built a submersible version of the Glomar Explorer.”

  The Glomar Explorer was the most famous salvage vessel in the world. Built by the CIA, using the celebrity status of Howard Hughes as a cover, it had performed its secret task once, and only once, pulling most of a sunken Russian submarine off the bottom of the Pacific in 1974.

  Disguised as a mining ship, the Explorer had moved into position, lowered a cradle, and hauled up three-fourths of what had been the K-129, bringing the wreckage through a huge door in the bottom of the hull and hiding it in what the engineers called the moon pool.

  Russian spy ships watching from several miles away never knew what happened. When the truth leaked, the Russians were furious. They were also embarrassed and put on notice that anything in the sea was fair game. They’d maintained a large salvage fleet ever since—a substantial portion of which was currently sailing for the Galápagos—but this Typhoon, this huge submarine converted into a clandestine salvage vessel, was something new.

  At least it was new to Kurt. “You guys at the NSA know anything about this?”

  “This is a surprise. But it makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Take the missile tubes out and the Typhoon has huge storage capacity. It can move about undetected, dive to twenty-five hundred feet and pluck things right off the bottom, all unseen by the world’s satellites.”

  “Wish we’d thought of it,” Kurt said. “While we’re tracking their surface fleet and telling ourselves we have several days before they get here, these guys are already on scene. Which begs the question: Exactly what scene is this? If this wreckage isn’t the Nighthawk, then what are we looking at? And why are the Russians so interested in it?”

  “Maybe we should get a little closer and find out,” she said.

  “Look who’s become a risk taker,” Kurt replied, grinning.

  “It’s a risk-reward scenario,” she said. “A few photos of this Typhoon will help soften the blow of not finding the Nighthawk out here.”

  Kurt bumped the throttle forward once more. “Who am I to stand in the way of shameless self-promotion?”

  “I assure you,” she said, “I’m thinking purely of the national interest.”

  Kurt suppressed a laugh—on the odd chance it might have carried through the water to the Typhoon’s hydrophones.

  The closer they got, the louder the racket became. As they watched the effort from the darkness, it became clear that haste was the priority. As soon as the retrieval bucket deposited a load of wreckage in the Typhoon’s cargo bay, it was run back out, repositioned and dropped once again. There was no caution to the work and no attempt to preserve or protect any technology they might be recovering.

  The reason dawned on Kurt. “They’re not trying to salvage anything. They’re trying to haul it away and hide the evidence before anyone else finds it here. Which means—”

  “This is a Russian aircraft,” Emma said, finishing his thought. “Maybe it’s a recon flight that went down while searching for the Nighthawk.”

  Kurt shook his head. “This crash happened almost simultaneously with the Nighthawk’s disappearance.”

  “A chase plane, then,” Emma suggested. “The Russians have tried that before.”

  By now, they were near enough to make out gearing and teeth on the inner part of the wing. He was maneuvering to get the camera focused when a brief flash caught his eye.

  Kurt shut off what remained of the interior lighting and waited. A full minute ticked by before the light made another appearance. It was quick. Here and then gone. A white spark in the dark water of the sea.
r />   “Low-powered strobe light,” he said.

  “Black box,” Emma suggested, referencing the nearly indestructible data and voice recorders common on most military and commercial aircraft.

  “Let’s see if we can get at it without drawing too much attention to ourselves.”

  He eased the submersible forward with a deft touch, traveling past that shattered wing and holding station near a tear in the forward part of the fuselage. The curved body of the aircraft had been opened and peeled back. The section beneath it was exposed. The tiny strobe flashed again from within.

  “See if you can reach it.”

  Emma went back to the controls and extended the arm to its maximum length. “No,” she said. “Can you get any closer?”

  “Hang on,” Kurt said. He backed off and moved forward again, using a quick burst of the throttle. The Angler bumped against the wreckage, scraping against it and pushing a section of the airframe out of the way.

  When the strobe flashed again it was brighter and closer and they were all but inside the airframe. Emma extended the arm once more. The claw at its end opened. The lower half slid underneath a metal handle on the housing of the data recorder and Emma closed it down tight.

  “Got it,” she said, retracting the arm.

  The black box—which was actually orange and covered with gray Cyrillic writing—came out of its slot with a little effort. Once it was clear, Emma retracted the arm and dropped it into the starboard cargo container.

  “Good work,” Kurt said.

  He put his hand on the throttle and prepared to back out but paused when the sound of the Typhoon’s thrusters surged through the water with a different timbre.

  Emma looked up. “The Typhoon is repositioning.”

  Kurt already knew that. He could see the lighted swath of ocean floor moving toward them.

  He reversed thrust, trying to back out of the open section of the fuselage, but instead of moving in a straight line, the Angler was yanked to the side and pulled around.

  “We’re caught on something,” he said, craning his head around to see what had hooked them.