Nighthawk

by Clive Cussler

  “They have to slip up at some point,” Paul said.

  “They will,” Joe assured him. “Until then save your strength and do everything you can to lull them into thinking they’ve won.”

  “It’s not about us,” Emma said. “I know you want to escape, but there’s a far bigger danger here.”

  “One we can’t prevent without first getting free. You can’t give up,” Joe urged.

  “Getting free will require fighting,” she explained. “Most likely, shooting. All within a stone’s throw of the frozen supply of mixed-state matter. One stray bullet could set off the disaster. If it means preventing that, I’m fine giving up.”

  One of Urco’s men came out of the tall grass, where he’d probably been listening. His approach killed off any further conversation. He moved in behind Emma, cut her loose and stood back. “Come with me,” he said. “Urco wants your help.”

  Emma stood and was led away. Joe sensed she was close to despondency, but then she didn’t know there was still hope. She hadn’t been privy to Kurt’s backup plan. He had wanted it that way. And now, seeing how much power Urco had over her, and how deeply the fear of a disaster had clutched at her heart, Joe was glad he’d kept the secret. He could imagine Emma telling Urco what she knew all in the interest of preventing a catastrophe.

  As Emma and the guard left, Joe glanced at Paul.

  Paul nodded. He was ready. Joe was ready, too; he’d already been working the zip tie back and forth, twisting his wrists this way and that, in order to weaken the plastic. Before long, it would be weak enough to snap.

  Then Joe would rest, waiting for the sound of a rifle firing from somewhere high in the rocks.

  Gamay would take out several of their captors before the men knew what hit them. Joe and Paul would spring into action at the same moment and, with a little luck, the tide would be turned.

  47

  As soon as Kurt’s strength returned, he began moving across the rocks behind the waterfall. Not planning to get back in the water, he shed his cumbersome air tank, damaged helmet and deflated BCD. Hooking them together, he tossed them in the water. Empty, the aluminum cylinder would float, but the deflated BCD, with its integrated weights, would drag them down.

  They vanished and Kurt continued on foot, looking for a place to start his climb. He would have to climb upward and then over, where the ridge was thick with foliage thanks to the constant overspray from the waterfall.

  Climbing it would be easy; getting there was more difficult. The footing behind the waterfall was treacherous. Kurt watched every step. Halfway in, he noticed something that didn’t belong in a pristine mountain lake. A sheen of discoloration lay across the wet rocks. Even in the flat light, he could see all the colors of the rainbow.

  Oil and water, he thought. Or, more likely, gasoline.

  It vanished where the churning water mixed it into the depths but clung to the stones, leading like an arrow into the mouth of a large cave.

  That second boat had to come from somewhere.

  Kurt picked his way to the mouth of the cave, gazed around the edge and into the darkness. He saw nothing and heard only the echo of the thundering waterfall, but the slick of petrochemical color beckoned him to enter.

  He eased back into the water and swam into the cave. The farther in he went, the darker it became, but his eyes adjusted and he began to make out the details. Eighty feet back, the cave jagged to the right and widened; around the bend lay outlines of a camp.

  Gas cans, propane canisters and a cookstove sat beside a group of plastic crates that looked exactly like the ones he’d seen at La Jalca. Bedrolls and wool blankets were laid out on a higher section. Spare oxygen tanks for the divers leaned against the cave wall. Beside them sat a stack of boxy items covered with plastic liners.

  The camp was empty. Not exactly a surprise, considering the activity out on the lake and in the clearing where the Nighthawk had been placed.

  “More burial chambers,” Kurt whispered, thinking of Urco’s statement when they’d cruised near the waterfall. “I would like it if they remain undisturbed. Of course you would. Your men were hiding back here.”

  Kurt swam to the edge, climbed out of the water and began to pick through the offerings. He found a pair of binoculars and a flashlight but left them where they were since they would obviously be missed.

  He dug into one of the plastic boxes and found a container filled with strips of dried beef. Realizing how hungry he was, he took a sample and chewed on it as he searched the rest of the cavern.

  He found no guns or knives, but one of the bins had several boxes of ammunition in it. Another was empty except for cut lengths of color-coded wire. A third held bricks of orange clay that were wrapped in clear plastic. The alphanumeric code S-10 had been written on the outside of each.

  “Semtex,” Kurt muttered, using the brand name of the compound. “What would you be doing with Semtex?”

  The orange clay was a plastic explosive. Manufactured in the Czech Republic, S-10 was the latest version. It was similar to American-made C-4. Each of the bricks would be powerful enough to obliterate a car.

  Kurt counted the supply. Assuming the crate had been full, at least half the explosives were already missing.

  Finding no other weapons, Kurt pulled one of the bricks free and tucked it into a pocket. Without a blasting cap or an electrical charge, it would be difficult to set off, but it still might come in handy.

  Closing the lid on the explosives crate, he moved to the back of the cave, rifled through another box and then moved over to the plastic tarp and the stack of equipment it covered.

  Moving a rock that held the tarp down, Kurt peeled the material back and found himself staring at a rectangular piece of equipment that looked incredibly familiar.

  Fuel cell.

  Not only was it a fuel cell, it was identical in size, shape, design and color to the ones Joe had flown in on the Air-Crane. It was even marked the same; stenciled writing on the outer case read Type 3 Hydrogen Fuel Cell, Property of the United States Government.

  Kurt touched the control panel, his fingers gliding across a bank of switches until he found the power button. He switched it on and received an immediate indication that it was working and producing power. A display lit up, indicating fully pressurized reservoirs of hydrogen and oxygen. Enough for twenty-six hours of continuous operation.

  Under the next tarp was an identical unit. Behind them lay two more. Marks on the ground suggested two other units had been there and were now missing. Looped power cords, neatly banded together sat in a crate beside the units.

  Why were they here?

  “Explosives without detonators,” Kurt said to himself. “Replicas or stolen fuel cells, what are you up to Urco?”

  The sound of an outboard motor approaching echoed down from the mouth of the cave. Kurt switched off the fuel cell, covered it up and placed the flat rock back on top.

  The buzzing motor grew louder and then cut out as a light played across the water. Kurt retreated quietly into the recesses of the cave and took cover.

  Peering out over a rock formation, he watched a gray inflatable with three men in it pull around the bend and drift to the shore. It bumped against the rocks, stopping beside the cookstove.

  Two of the three men got out. They carried the deflated yellow air bags and stuffed them one on top of another into a gap in the rocks. That done, they went directly for the fuel cells.

  “Cuántos?” the first one said.

  “Llevar todos,” the second one replied, pulling up the tarps. “Una para los americanos, una para el chino, los otros son para los rusos, y para los amigos de Rio.”

  He laughed as he finished.

  “Y los explosivos?”

  “Estan dentro,” the man replied. “Boom!” he said, chuckling further.

  The other men laughed as well. Th
ey selected one of the fuel cells, tested it, as Kurt had, and then switched it off.

  The man in the boat grew impatient. “Vamanos.”

  The men onshore got moving. They carried all four of the fuel cells to the small boat, loaded them inside and then climbed aboard and pushed off.

  As soon as they were clear of the rocks, the outboard was lowered back into the water and started with a hard pull. It coughed out a fog of blue smoke as it came to life and the men eased out of sight, heading toward the mouth of the cave.

  Kurt waited until he’d heard them speed away and then cautiously stepped from his hiding place. He didn’t speak much Spanish, but some of the words were obvious to him.

  His mind went to the Semtex he’d found and the joke that had brought out a round of laughter.

  “Los explosivos,” Kurt whispered. “Boom!”

  48

  Emma followed her guard as he walked across the beach, cut through the grass and traveled up into the clearing where the Nighthawk sat. On the far side, Urco stood among the containment units.

  Two of the eight units had been removed. They now rested on the stony ground, each of them connected to a fuel cell.

  “Check these over, please,” Urco said.

  “What am I looking for?” she asked.

  “I want to be sure everything is functioning properly and that they’re safe to move.”

  It was a simple task. She crouched beside the units and did a quick diagnostic review, all the time wondering why he’d bothered to say please.

  “The magnetic bottles are stable,” she said. “The cryogenic systems are operating within accepted parameters. The fuel cells are generating clean power.”

  “Good,” Urco said.

  She stood. “I assume you want me to remove the other units?”

  “In time,” he said. “For now, we should discuss your role in things.”

  “My role?”

  He only smiled and said, “Walk with me.”

  With little choice in the matter, she nodded. “Lead on.”

  They left the guard behind, entering a path cut through the foliage that twisted toward higher ground. Machetes had done the work; freshly cut stalks and fallen blades of the long grass lay across the ground. They’d been trampled down by a fair amount of foot traffic already.

  “Are we entering some kind of maze?” she asked.

  “We’re already deep inside one,” he insisted. “Working together is the only way out.”

  “We were working together,” she replied, “right up until the point where your men attacked us, killed Kurt and took the rest of us hostage.”

  “Not hostages,” he said, “captives. Captured thieves, actually.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re a thief,” he said. “A well-dressed, Stanford-educated thief. Your entire organization has larceny in its heart and, by extension, the nation you serve. But you’ve been caught—red-handed, as they say—in the middle of the greatest robbery the world has ever known.”

  “You’re the one who took the—”

  “No,” he said, turning on her and cutting her off. “I only relieved you of the stolen goods. It was you and your government that engaged in this theft. You chose to fly this craft up into the heavens and gather the mixed-state matter from the magnetic field. You chose to bring it home to your hidden bunkers at Vandenberg, where you and your people would hoard it for your own purposes.”

  “We only did that because—”

  He wouldn’t let her speak. “There are five separate treaties governing activities in outer space,” he snapped. “The United States is a signatory on each and every one. Three of them were drafted by American statesmen. Collectively, they forbid every activity you’ve so recently engaged in, from the militarization of space to the national appropriation of any part of space or any celestial body, such as the Moon.”

  As he railed at her, she recalled the ethical arguments internally discussed at the NSA prior to the mission. Arguments put forward and then so easily swatted aside. “We claimed nothing,” she said. “We merely retrieved free-floating particles.”

  “Are you really going to play the lawyer with me?”

  She fell silent and he turned and led her out of the grass and onto a plateau. From here, they looked over the lake seventy feet below. In the distance, the waterfall fell, with its hushed and ceaseless voice.

  He turned back her way and bore down. “Like everything else in space, these free-floating particles are reserved as part of the common heritage of all mankind. They belong to everyone on Earth and to no one person or government in particular.”

  The furor in his voice surprised her. Why, she thought, should he care about such things? How would he even know about them? Or about the wording of some obscure treaties?

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “You still don’t recognize me?” he said, sounding almost disappointed. “Fortunately for me, I suppose. I feared you might spot me when we dined together beneath the cliffs of La Jalca.”

  He reached to the side of his face as if to scratch at his ear but instead of scratching began to pull at his beard, slowly removing the portion on the right side of his face. His skin was burned beneath it, not terribly disfigured but scarred and hairless.

  “The other side of my beard is real,” he replied, “but I can grow nothing over here.”

  An indentation in his jawline told her the bone had been broken and never healed correctly; a portion of it might have been removed.

  “It was the crash and the fire,” he explained.

  Suddenly, the pieces came together for her. This man was involved in hacking the Nighthawk’s control system. He knew about the NSA mission and the antimatter. He was well versed in the international treaties regulating the use of space. And he knew her.

  “Beric?” she said.

  “So you do remember.”

  She barely recognized him even now. Years had passed. Age and scars had changed his face. His eyes held no kindness, only bitterness and twisted anger. “I don’t understand? How? Why? Your plane exploded. They told us it was a terror group. They told us we were all in danger.”

  “I was in danger,” he insisted, as he raised his voice. “And the terror group was based in Washington, D.C. Ironically enough, you now work for them.”

  “The NSA?” she said. “Why would they want to harm you? Surely you can’t believe what you’re saying.”

  “I have proof,” his voice accusatory as he moved closer to her. “And what’s more, they had a motive. If you recall, I was involved in the initial studies that determined the possibility of antimatter getting trapped in the magnetic field. I was the one who suggested it might be a more stable form of mixed-state matter—if it remained cold enough. The head of the program came to me shortly after I submitted my findings. He said they’d been discussing a plan, not just to search for the antimatter but to actually harvest it. I objected strenuously. They insisted the purpose was peaceful, but when the funding is coming from the military and the National Security Agency, that stretches credibility just a bit.”

  Her head was spinning, but she took in every word.

  “We shall use this for propulsion to push rockets to Mars in eight weeks,” he said in a false voice. “To the outer planets in less than a year. Even to deep space. But it wasn’t long before someone mentioned the possibility of a weapon.”

  His voice growing louder, he shook his head in disgust. “I threatened to go to the press. To put the information out on the Internet. To tell the whole world, no matter what they did to me. I knew what you’re probably discovering right now: it is a mistake, a Pandora’s Box we’ve brought into our homes and managed to hold shut only by the thinnest of margins.”

  She saw it now. It was a mistake. A disaster in the making. She wished she’d never been a part of it. />
  “I was threatened with deportation, should I speak a word—thirty years in solitary confinement. I agreed to keep quiet, but they watched me constantly. It seems my word wasn’t enough. On that short flight to New Orleans they made their move. My plane exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. It left me like this. I ended up clinging to an abandoned oil rig, my face a cake of blood. I found a life raft the next day and waited for the tide. I made it to shore under cover of darkness. And I chose to remain hidden. I knew if they found me, I would be dead.”

  She stared at the scarred complexion, wondering how he’d survived and who had stitched him back together so badly. A doctor with a gun to his head, perhaps. Or maybe he’d done it himself. His affect was hideous; he sounded paranoid. She wondered if he’d blown up his own plane to fake his death. Was he so deranged that the difference between good and evil was lost on him? “So you came here and began plotting revenge?”

  “At first, I only wanted to survive and disappear,” he insisted. “I created Urco. As I learned more and more about the destruction of man by man, it became clear to me.”

  He hesitated; taking a step back, he changed the subject. “Why did you leave NASA and join the clandestine world of the NSA?”

  “Because of what happened to you,” she whispered. “After your death, and the endless news of terrorism and war in other parts of the world, I realized that most of the planet was filled with evil. And that evil must be fought at every turn.”

  “You were a pacifist,” he said.

  “So were you.”

  He nodded slowly and reapplied his beard. “It seems we’ve both realized the truth. Pacifism in a violent world is another term for suicide. Only the evil and violence I see resides in government buildings and ivory towers.”

  “There’s a difference between governments and terrorists.”

  “Only in the scale of their atrocities,” he insisted. “Learning that was the key to everything. Despite my desire to simply leave it all behind, I soon learned that the Nighthawk project had been transferred to the NSA and that the unthinkable was going to be attempted. I began to obsess over ways to expose it without exposing myself. Ways to prevent what you might do. Eight long years has led to this.”