Nighthawk

by Clive Cussler

  “Very funny,” Paul replied. “I’m serious. Kurt has reason to believe they’re hiding something regarding the Nighthawk and its mission. Good reason. And since he’s the one out there risking his life—”

  He must have been on speakerphone because Priya chimed in. “I’m not an expert in such matters, but isn’t that frowned upon . . . or perhaps illegal?”

  “It’s not exactly encouraged,” Hiram admitted. “But we’ve done it before and never really gotten more than a slap on the wrist.”

  “Apparently, the NSA is more forgiving than their reputation suggests,” she replied.

  “Preventing a worldwide catastrophe with the information we borrowed might have had something to do with that,” Paul said.

  “I have no problem with this,” Hiram said. “You know that. But we have been warned. Maybe I should run it by Rudi or Dirk.”

  “And ruin their plausible deniability?”

  “Good point,” Hiram said. “Okay. We’ll give it a shot.”

  Paul knew that meant it would get done. “Kurt wants the information as soon as you can get it. Preferably, before his romantic Sunday drive gets the best of him.”

  Hiram promised to do his best and the call ended. Paul looked around to find a large crow staring back at him from another section of the roof.

  “Thank God, you’re not a parrot,” he said.

  The crow cawed and spread its wings. It flew off to the south, and Paul climbed back down into the warmth of the café.

  “Get through?” Gamay said.

  He nodded and checked the clock on the wall. “Joe is still several hours away.”

  Gamay had already purchased a steaming cup of soup and an alpaca hat. “Yep,” she said, settling in and tapping away on a keyboard. “Looks like this café is our temporary home.”

  Back in Washington, Hiram and Priya were left to figure out the details of their latest hacking scheme.

  “Whether we should do this or not is one thing,” Priya said. “But how we do it is the more important question.”

  “You’re not worried?” Hiram asked.

  “Worst thing they can do is deport me back to Merrie Olde England. And while I can’t stand all the rain, you and Rudi will be the ones who go to jail.”

  “Not likely,” Hiram said. “But it isn’t going to be easy to break their code. Each time Max and I have hacked the NSA, they’ve responded by raising their game. Their security is quite good.”

  “We could overwhelm them with a brute force attack,” Max suggested over the speakers.

  Hiram looked up—as he often did when speaking to Max. “Let’s try something less reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”

  Priya was already tapping away at her computer. “The NSA may have built the Nighthawk in secret, but they didn’t design it from scratch. Design cues were taken from the space shuttle and the X-37. Ms. Townsend even said something about the Nighthawk using common parts from the X-37. If that’s the case, NASA probably shared data on the construction process. And that means we might be able to hack into NASA instead of the NSA.”

  “Great idea,” Hiram said.

  “I prefer the word brilliant.”

  “Then brilliant it is,” Hiram replied. “To collaborate with NASA, our friends at the NSA would have set up a secure and authenticated connection. If we do as you say and break into NASA first, we can get into the NSA computers through the back door and they might think they’re just sharing data with the Johnson Space Center.”

  Max chimed in. “I assign a seventy-three percent chance of success to the plan. And if they do discover the hack, they’ll investigate NASA first, giving us more time to make a run for it.”

  “Without legs, you’ll be going nowhere,” Hiram said. “I’m afraid they’ll melt you down for scrap.”

  “I could get wheels,” Max suggested. “Like Dr. Kashmir.”

  For an instant, Hiram felt awkward, but Priya laughed. “Trust me, Max, having wheels isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  Hiram laughed as well. “We’ll talk about your mobility issues some other time, Max. Let’s break into the space center’s network and see if their computers are still on speaking terms with the National Security Agency.”

  It was the better part of the day before Priya and Max were able to gain access. Eventually, they had to go through the systems at Cape Canaveral and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory before discovering a link to the NSA database. Shortly, they were receiving copious amounts of information on the Nighthawk’s design, test flights and mission parameters.

  Priya and Hiram looked at what they could but relied on Max to determine what was important or not, as they soon had over a thousand pages of information.

  As Max continued to sort things out, Priya found herself studying the technical papers related to the Nighthawk’s construction. “Look at this,” she said, waving Hiram over to her desk.

  He peered down at the image on her computer.

  “These are the blueprints and design specs for the X-37.” She pointed. “And these are the plans for the Nighthawk. See anything interesting?”

  Hiram pulled his glasses off, cleaned them with a soft cloth and put them back on. “They’re very similar. Almost identical.”

  “The only real difference is size,” she said. “If we scale an original set of plans up, they match. Same engine, same navigation system, same wing design, same heat shield. In fact, aside from a coating of stealth material that burns off on reentry, the heat shield is not much different than the tile system used on the space shuttle since the eighties.”

  “So much for the technological leap forward they keep claiming,” Hiram said. “It’s little more than an updated version of an older vehicle.”

  He stood up and addressed Max. “Are you sure we’re looking at the correct plans?”

  “Affirmative,” Max replied.

  “How certain are you?”

  “There’s a 99.98 percent probability that the plans you’re looking at match the vehicle that was launched and is now being sought in South America.”

  “That’s pretty certain,” Priya said.

  Hiram agreed. “It doesn’t make sense. The Russians took an immense risk to grab it. They exposed their secret Typhoon submarine, in an attempt to retrieve the wreckage from where they thought it had crashed, and both they and the Chinese seem willing to risk a war to find it.”

  “With the attempts on Kurt and Ms. Townsend so far, I’d say a skirmish has already begun,” Priya added.

  Hiram nodded. He looked over the plans once again, double-checking the propulsion specifications and the structural blueprints. “If it isn’t the machine that matters, then it has to be something else. Something related to the mission.”

  “Perhaps it collected one of our spy satellites. Or one of theirs.”

  “Maybe one of each,” Hiram said. “That would get them hot under the collar.”

  “If we knew where it went, we might learn more,” she suggested.

  “Max, what can you tell me about the Nighthawk’s mission profile?”

  The computer voice responded instantly. “The NSA launches the Nighthawk out of Vandenberg on a modified Titan booster. The vehicle inserts into a polar orbit and stays aloft for extensive periods of time. Seventy-five days on the first launch, eight hundred and fifty-one days on this latest mission.”

  “And yet,” Hiram said, scanning through the page count, “we seem to have far more data from the first mission than the second. Are you holding something back on us?”

  “Mission 1 was a test mission,” Max said. “Data from all phases of the mission was freely shared with NASA. Mission 2 was an operational event. Fully classified. Only prelaunch data and orbital track information was provided.”

  “Can you match up the Nighthawk’s orbital track with known satellites?”

 
; There was a slight pause—unusual for Max, considering how fast her processing speeds were. “The Nighthawk made 14,625 complete orbits and one partial orbit before reentry. At no time did its path intersect with the position of any known satellite. Available data suggests the Nighthawk maneuvered specifically to avoid any orbital convergence.”

  “Anything else unusual about the path?”

  “For ninety-one percent of its time in space, the Nighthawk remained in the Earth’s shadow.”

  “So the Nighthawk was staying out of sight,” Hiram said. “Can’t hijack another satellite when you’re hiding in the dark and avoiding them like the plague.”

  “I’m not sure it could retrieve something if it wanted to,” Priya said. “Look at this. On the initial blueprints, the cargo bay is an empty space, just like the cargo bay on the shuttle. But on the last set of prelaunch schematics, the entire bay has been filled with equipment.”

  Hiram’s curiosity grew, he pulled up a chair and settled in beside her. “What kind of equipment?”

  “Cryogenic storage containers, advanced lithium batteries and a bank of devices called Penning traps—which must use powerful magnets because the control center and the propulsion bay have been electromagnetically shielded to prevent magnetic interference.”

  “Penning traps,” Hiram said, trying to remember where he’d heard that term before.

  “According to the schematic, they take up the whole bay.”

  Hiram nodded. He was suddenly very grim. The truth was coming to him and he didn’t like it one bit. “Max, can you correlate the Nighthawk’s orbit with evidence of the northern lights?”

  “Affirmative,” Max said. “The Nighthawk was present in a northern polar orbit during all major flares of the aurora borealis. It was also present over the South Pole during the major and minor flares of the aurora australis, otherwise known as the southern lights. Its positioning indicates direct emersion within the vortex point of the Earth’s magnetic field.”

  “Vortex point?” Priya asked.

  “Where the lines of the Earth’s magnetic field converge above the North and South Poles, before they dive down into the Earth.”

  By now, Priya had picked up on his tone. “Do you know what they’re doing?”

  “Testing a theory,” he said. “A very dangerous theory.”

  She looked at the schematics again, running her finger across the imaginary Penning traps. The term itself gave her the answer. “They brought something back. Didn’t they?”

  Hiram nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “And it’s something far more deadly than any satellite could hope to be.”

  30

  La Jalca Canyon, Chachapoya ruins

  By dusk, the cooking fires had been stoked and several long wooden tables set for a communal meal. Urco introduced Kurt and Emma to the rest of the volunteers and insisted that their arrival was cause for celebration.

  Before the food was served, Urco led the group in a traditional invocation. “It’s a Chachapoya prayer,” he explained. “It cautions us not to begin the feast until all the guests are present and accounted for.”

  “Another way to remember the people whose world you’re excavating?” Emma asked.

  “Precisely,” Urco said. “We even live like them. In ancient times there was far less trade than today. Each society, each village, had to be self-sufficient. And so are we. We catch rainwater in barrels, grow manioc in the southern section of the clearing. We have the llamas in the corral.”

  “Adorable animals,” Emma said.

  “I wouldn’t get too attached to them,” Kurt whispered.

  “Why?”

  “I think you’re about to eat one.”

  She looked ill for a second.

  “You can’t be self-sufficient in everything,” Kurt said.

  Urco disagreed. “I assure you, we are. As are all the villages our volunteers come from. I tell you, the rest of civilization could cease to exist and we would never know it.”

  “I can understand the desire to live that way,” Emma said. “But wouldn’t all the effort put into growing crops and raising animals be better used here, at the dig site? If the food was shipped in, it would leave you more workers to handle the other chores.”

  “The road to civilization is both long and treacherous,” he said. “Both in the real and metaphorical sense. Being self-sufficient keeps us from being dependent on that road in any form. And since I’ve recently heard that it was closed . . .”

  Kurt laughed and took a drink of water.

  A moment later, the food was served: bread made from manioc flour, some type of diced vegetable and what looked like venison. The aroma was heavenly.

  “Enjoy it, my friends,” Urco said. “As soon as we’re done, I’ll show you what you came to see.”

  Kurt nodded, buried the impatience he felt and enjoyed a hearty and unusual dinner. As things were cleared away, Kurt and Emma went back to the Range Rover to collect a few items they would need and then rejoined Urco near the bank of solar panels. “We use these to power our modern equipment.”

  “So you’re not dependent on civilization,” Emma said, “but you are beholden to the sun.”

  “True,” Urco replied. “But the sun is far more reliable. Five billion years and counting. Something tells me modern civilization will never match that.”

  “So this is where you were when you saw the light in the sky?” Kurt asked.

  “Yes,” Urco said. “I came up the trail from our tents and checked the flashlights. We were going to look into a newly discovered cave that day, so we needed as much light as possible. Satisfied that everything was fully powered, I came over to this stand where our video cameras were connected to their chargers.”

  He led them to a cradle where two cameras were supported and attached to the power station via cables.

  “I picked up this one,” he said, grabbing it. “Turned it on and waited. As it powered up, I happened to see a flicker of light in the sky. Once I realized it wasn’t a star, I brought the camera up and filmed it.”

  He held the camera up to his face, showing them how he’d done it and pretending to track the fiery target across the sky. “It went from north to south,” he said, tracing the arc with his fingers. “It vanished behind those peaks.”

  “Did you hear anything?” Emma asked.

  “Like what? An explosion?”

  “Anything at all,” Emma said. “Explosion, popping, the sound of jet engines.”

  “Nothing,” Urco said. “You can hear the audio on the recording. Just me huffing and puffing.”

  Kurt studied the sky, black and punctured with stars. A slight glow from the new moon gave them just enough light to see the outline of the mountains. “Let’s do it.”

  She placed her laptop computer on a nearby table and began tapping away. “Can you set up the tripod for me?”

  Kurt unfolded the legs of the aluminum tripod. “Where exactly were you standing?” he asked Urco.

  “Right about here,” Urco said, moving several feet to his right.

  Kurt extended the legs of the tripod, attached the camera to the central mount and raised it up until it was resting at the same level as Urco’s eyes. That done, he connected an HDMI cable from Emma’s computer to the camera and switched it on. “All yours.”

  Emma nodded and continued to tap away at the keyboard. Kurt slid behind her and watched as she replayed the original video, pausing it several times. When it finished, she ran it all the way through once again.

  “We need an exact distance from here to the peak.” She handed Kurt a laser range finder.

  Kurt turned it on and pointed it at the jagged ridge until he got a reading. “Seven hundred and forty-two feet.”

  She typed it in and two outlines appeared on the screen, one displaying the peaks as they appeared through the NU
MA camera and the second displaying the peaks from the video Urco had taken.

  At Emma’s command, the camera moved left and right and then back to the left. She tapped the up arrow and the camera tilted just a bit. The computer took it from there and fine-tuned the image until the two outlines merged exactly. “That’s it.”

  At the touch of a button, Emma received the heading of what they assumed to be the Nighthawk.

  “What about speed and altitude?” Kurt asked.

  “For that, we’ll need to match this with the new descent profile your friend Hiram is working up.”

  Emma tried to initiate a satellite linkup, but it failed.

  “It’s the mountains,” Urco said. “You’ll have to go up top.”

  “You mean, on those ropes?”

  “It’s the only way to get a signal,” Urco explained. “How do you feel about a night ascent?”

  She sighed. “Worse than I did about a daytime’s.”

  Hidden in the dark among the same type of scrub trees that had scratched their exposed skin, Daiyu watched Kurt through a spotting scope. He was talking with the woman and the bearded man. She focused on his lips, trying to make out what he was saying.

  “What are they doing?” Jian asked.

  “They’re calculating something,” she said. “They’re using the video we were told about to get a bearing on the Nighthawk.”

  “We should be doing that,” Jian suggested.

  She and Jian had arrived just after sunset, ditching the truck near one of the fields and hiking the last few miles on foot. They’d made a study of the camp and were trying to decide how best to get at the Americans without having to fight their way through the forty Peruvian men and women of the archaeology group.

  “They’re trying to connect to their satellite,” she said, reading Emma’s lips, “but they can’t get a signal. They’re going to higher ground.”