Nighthawk

  She put the scope away and looked to Jian. “This is our chance. We have to get that computer.”

  31

  Urco led Kurt and Emma to the base of the second peak and, with a wolf whistle, called several of his people over. “I’ll go first,” he said, stepping into the harness for the ride to the top.

  As he disappeared upward into the night, Kurt glanced at Emma. “You don’t have to go,” he said. “I can send the data.”

  She shook her head. “I’d never live it down.”

  “In that case, think about it this way: it’s so dark, you won’t be able to tell how high you are.”

  “That doesn’t help,” she replied.

  A double flash from high above told them Urco was safely on the mountaintop. When the harness dropped out of the dark, Kurt grabbed it. “Ready?”

  Emma exhaled and nodded. “Here,” she said, handing him the computer. “My hands are shaking already. Won’t do us any good if I drop it.”

  Kurt took the laptop as she strapped herself in and gave the thumbs-up signal. “Top floor, please.”

  Emma was pulled upward into the dark. Because she was lighter, she rose faster. From Kurt’s angle, she almost seemed to be flying.

  His turn came moments later. With the harness around him, he held the rope with one hand and gripped the computer with the other. After the initial liftoff, he turned to look out over the camp. Only the fires near the center of camp and a few lights dotted here and there.

  He glanced upward. A soft glow surrounded the rigging at the top. It came from the flashlights that Emma and Urco carried, but it was dim and very far away, like a boat on the surface waiting for him to return from a night dive.

  As he neared the crest, the lights converged on him. On this particular peak, there was no need for a ladder to make the final ascent; instead, Kurt continued up until the top of the harness tapped against the pulley above him and his feet were level with a broad wooden platform. He stepped onto it with ease, disconnected the harness and handed Emma the computer.

  “You should have had that reporter meet you up here,” he mentioned to Urco.

  “Then he might never have left,” Urco replied.

  “That was quite enjoyable,” Emma said to Kurt. “I don’t know what you were worried about.”

  Kurt laughed at that and took a look around. There was a marked difference between this peak and the one he’d met Urco on earlier. For one thing, it was smaller—a dance floor instead of a football field. It had also been improved. Wooden planks had been nailed together and anchored in the stone. They covered most of the surface. Though some ground remained visible at the edges, the decking sloped away so sharply, it would have been treacherous to stand on.

  On Kurt’s right, two plastic storage bins had been nailed to the deck. On his left, a well-braced rig held the zip lines coming to and leading off of the platform. Beyond was nothing but pitiless black.

  “Love what you’ve done with the place,” Kurt joked.

  “The terrain made it necessary,” Urco said. “The ground here is too uneven, and terribly weathered. It made for poor footing, so we built this platform.”

  Kurt moved across the creaky boards to a spot beside Emma. She’d taken a seat near the very center and had already flipped the laptop open and was booting up.

  As she worked, a brief schematic appeared, depicting the horizon line, the constellations and the track of several NUMA satellites. The computer chose the satellite with the strongest signal.

  “Locked in,” Emma said. “Beginning transmission.”

  “I saw your vehicle,” Urco said out of the blue. “You seem to have gone through a great deal just to get here. You must want this airplane back very badly.”

  “We do,” Emma admitted.

  “It makes sense,” Urco replied. “We all want back what we once had.”

  A message popped up on the screen. Download complete. Processing data.

  As the computer began combining the data, it displayed a series of calculations. Emma stared as the numbers danced, but Urco acted blithely uninterested, and Kurt had a sudden impression of danger.

  He caught a sound in the wind and then heard a squeak from the rigging beside him. He turned to see the zip line from the higher peak tensing and moving. He glanced out into the night and spotted a dark shape rushing toward them.

  “Look out!”

  A stocky man with square shoulders came flying in on the line. He let go of the T-bar as he crossed the threshold and barreled into Urco.

  Another figure appeared out of the dark right behind him. This one, a lithe woman, landed with cat-like grace. She whipped out a pistol, targeted Emma and pulled the trigger all at once.

  The shot went wide only because Kurt lunged forward and knocked her arm to the side. With one hand on her wrist, Kurt took her to the ground. Several shots fired, but they drilled harmlessly into the wooden deck.

  She counterattacked by slamming a knee into his midsection. The bony impact struck with surprising power, but all Kurt cared about was the pistol. He kept her wrist locked in his grasp and banged her arm on the flooring until the weapon came free.

  She stretched for it with her other hand, but he punched it away. It slid off the deck and out into the dark.

  In the meantime, Urco struggled with the second attacker. They rolled toward the edge, oblivious to how close they were to falling, as they grasped each other and traded punches.

  Emma sprang toward them, wrapping her arm around the assailant’s thick neck, pulling him back. He reared up, arching his back and reaching for her in vain.

  Kurt kept his focus on the woman. She’d gotten loose, hopped to her feet and pulled out a knife with almost inhuman speed. He dropped to the ground as she slashed at him. The blade cut the air above, and he spun on his side, sweeping her feet out from underneath. She landed hard on her back, her head whiplashing into the deck. She made an odd noise and went limp, dropping the knife and rolling over onto her side.

  Since the woman appeared to be unconscious, Kurt turned his attention to the melee at the edge of the platform.

  By now, the big man had thrown Emma off his back, gotten to his feet and doubled Urco over with a shot to the solar plexus. A brutal shove sent Urco tumbling off the platform and onto the weathered slope of the mountain. He slid, grabbing for anything he could reach, but his hands found only loose rock.

  Emma dove for him, stretching out her arm. “No,” she shouted.

  She missed by several feet and Urco continued downward, his fingers scraping across the ground, until he vanished over the edge.

  Kurt knew he had to take this wrecking ball of a man out or they would all follow Urco to their deaths. He jumped toward the man and hit him with a leaping kick. Both feet connected with the small of the man’s back and he stumbled off the deck, vanishing into the dark. A soft thud marked his end seconds later.

  “Help me,” a voice cried from down below. “Please.”

  “It’s Urco,” Emma shouted.

  They rushed to the edge. Kurt noticed one of the excavation’s scaffolding ropes twisting back and forth. “Hold tight,” he shouted, “we’ll pull you up.”

  Kurt found a spot to anchor his feet, gripped the rope with both hands and leaned back. Emma joined him, and Urco rose, one foot at a time.

  When he cleared the edge and could assist them using his feet on the slope, the archaeologist all but charged back onto the platform. “Thank you,” he said, falling at their feet. “Thank the gods.”

  He rolled onto his back, breathing heavily. “Ms. Townsend, your fear of heights is well founded. I’m thinking of taking a similar position—”

  He stopped midsentence, interrupted by movement and the sound of steel wheels spinning, as one of the T-bars zoomed away down the zip line.

  They turned in unison. The woman was gone.
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  “She took the computer,” Emma pointed out.

  Kurt didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the other T-bar, connected it to the rope and launched himself after her.

  32

  Kurt leapt into the dark and was instantly flying. He gripped the T-bar, brought his knees up and felt the acceleration as the rollers spun ever faster.

  This line led from the middle peak down to the first, a distance of three hundred yards and a drop of two hundred feet. It wasn’t overly steep, which played to his advantage. Being heavier, and having taken a running start, Kurt closed the gap with the fleeing computer thief.

  He crashed into her and wrapped his legs around her waist. She squirmed and twisted loose, then spun and managed to kick him in the shin.

  With his momentum used up, they were now traveling at similar speeds. Considering that neither one of them wore a safety harness, her next move was wildly dangerous. She took one hand off of the T-bar and slashed at Kurt with the knife.

  The first hack made a small cut on his arm, drawing blood. A second try missed and Kurt kicked the knife out of her hand before she could try again.

  She was traveling backward now, fending him off with her feet. She didn’t see the end of the line coming and crashed onto the next platform with an ugly tumble.

  Kurt hit as hard. The impact sent him sprawling, but he was on top of her before she could move. Holding her to the ground, he bent her arm up behind her back. “I don’t like to hurt women,” he said, “but I’ll break your arm if you don’t stop fighting.”

  “Damn you,” she said. “I’ll kill you.”

  “You had your chance,” he replied, upping the pressure.

  She must have been incredibly limber because, even lying facedown, she managed to kick him in the back with her heel.

  At that point, Kurt had had enough. He grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head forward, banging her face on the ground. She went limp, out cold.

  Not trusting her to stay that way, he tied her up. By the time he was finished, Urco and Emma were sliding down the zip line toward him.

  “You got her,” Emma said, undoing her harness.

  “And the computer,” Kurt replied, opening the laptop to see if it had been damaged.

  As the flashlights illuminated the woman, Kurt saw that she was Asian. Most likely, from mainland China.

  “Looks like all three powers are now accounted for,” Emma said.

  The computer screen lit up, the soft glow illuminating Kurt’s face, as the program resumed its calculations. He stared, watching as the lines on the map slowly converged to mark the Nighthawk’s final resting spot.

  “No way!”

  “What is it?” Emma asked.

  He turned the computer around, displaying the map to Emma and Urco. A blinking pin marked the crash site.

  “Lake of the Condors,” Emma said.

  Urco’s eyes grew wide in the dark.

  Kurt grinned at the irony. “Looks like you’re going to see what’s at the bottom of that lake sooner than we thought.”

  33

  It was too dangerous to move at night. The road to the lake was every bit as treacherous as the drive up from Cajamarca. The woman they’d captured insisted that others would come for her.

  “She’s probably bluffing,” Kurt said. “But we’re far more vulnerable on an open road in the dark than here.”

  Both Urco and Emma agreed. Instead of driving out, they stoked the fires around the camp and borrowed a page from the Chachapoya, taking to the high ground and pulling up all the ropes. If there were Chinese agents or assassins out there, they’d have to scale the mountains by hand to stage an assault.

  “We’re not supposed to use these caves,” Urco told his volunteers, “but they belonged to your forefathers, so they should be yours, not the government’s.”

  Kurt went higher, heading up to the tallest peak. Alone, he made a satellite call to Rudi Gunn, who had returned to Washington. He got the good news first: Joe and the Trouts had arrived in Cajamarca. Then came the bad.

  “You were right,” Rudi said. “The NSA has been hiding something. And it’s big, even though it’s actually very small.”

  Kurt listened as Rudi explained what Hiram and Priya had found. The explanation was detailed, highly technical and riddled with physics, but Kurt got the basics. “That’s worse than I thought.”

  “Worse than any of us thought,” Rudi said. “Want us to send you more resources?”

  “No,” Kurt said. “It would take too long to get everything in place. Speed and stealth are our best friends, at the moment. If we’re right about the Nighthawk’s location, we can salvage it tomorrow and get the cargo out and off to wherever the NSA intended to store it. In the meantime, I’m starting to feel like Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre—suspicious of everyone and everything.”

  “Can’t say I blame you. We haven’t heard from the Russians since you and Joe got back on dry land, but I doubt they’re going to give up. And I’m certain we haven’t seen the last of our Chinese friends. According to Central Intelligence, they have an army of agents in Peru and Ecuador. Don’t be surprised if reinforcements show up when you least expect it.”

  “Which is why I need to change the plan.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  Kurt was thinking back to the service records of the Special Projects team. Considering who to choose for a difficult task. “I’m going to send you a set of specs,” he said to Rudi, “Relay them to Joe and the Trouts, and tell Gamay I’m sorry but she’s going to miss the raising of the Nighthawk.”

  “Understood,” Rudi said. “I’ll look for your message.”

  Kurt said good-bye, cut the link and slid the phone into his pocket. He was ready to head back down when the pulley squeaked as someone came up on the rope. A moment later, hands appeared at the top of the ladder.

  He was expecting Urco, but the determined face of Emma Townsend popped up over the edge instead.

  Kurt helped her off the ladder. “This is a surprise.”

  She moved toward the center of the peak. “Turns out sitting in a creepy cave with mummified bodies is worse than scaling heights in the dark.”

  Kurt laughed. He found the caves claustrophobic himself. “I think it’s time we leveled with each other,” he said. “I know how it works. I know you’re not at liberty to say much, so I don’t blame you, but at this point I need the truth.”

  “You have the truth,” she said.

  “I have part of it,” Kurt said. He sat down, picked up a stone and ran his finger over the smooth surface; the color was faded on one side but deep and rich on the other—two sides to every story. “When we first met, I wondered why they sent you with us,” he explained. “It really made no sense. You have a reputation as a troublemaker in the NSA—a trait I happen to admire—but one that makes you an odd choice to go with the group most likely to find the missing plane.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “Or build me up to be something I’m not. They sent everyone they could find. Everyone they could get their hands on.”

  “Sure,” Kurt said. “But we were on the scene three days before anyone else, which gave us a big lead. That, along with our well-earned reputation for finding missing things in the ocean, is why they put you with us. Because if we did find it, they needed someone along for the ride who knew exactly what we were recovering. And even among the shadowed halls of the NSA, very few know what’s really going on here. But between that Doctorate in Physics and your ties to NASA, you have to be one of the few.”

  She didn’t deny it. Nor did she admit anything. “Time is of the essence,” she said. “The Russians and the Chinese—”

  “Aren’t interested in the Nighthawk,” he said. “They want the cargo that it’s carrying. They want what it brought back.”

  She w
ent as silent as a stone.

  “I know about the Penning traps,” Kurt said, “along with containment units, the cryogenic equipment and the entire system you built to harvest and store antimatter. That’s why the Nighthawk had a polar orbit. That’s why it stayed in the dark, where the temperatures in space are closer to absolute zero. That’s why it was up there for three years, because it’s a very slow process.”

  He let that linger and wondered if he would have to press her further. Finally, she came around.

  “Not antimatter,” she said. “A different form of matter. A few scientists call it by the rather awkward name: un-matter. We prefer to call it mixed-state matter: long-chain molecules made of equal parts of regular matter and antimatter.”

  That was news. “I thought matter and antimatter annihilated each other the instant they touched.”

  “Normally, they do,” she said. “But at temperatures close to absolute zero, molecular structures break down. Matter no longer holds a physical shape and, instead, acts more like a wave than a solid particle. In that condition, matter and antimatter can mix without destructive results, the way two waves of different frequencies can exist superimposed on each other. Using magnetic force and cryogenics to confine and control this mixed-state matter, we realized it could be stored indefinitely. It wasn’t long before a member of our research team suggested there might be naturally occurring pools of mixed-state matter floating high above the poles, held stable within the magnetic field.”

  “So you built the Nighthawk to go test that idea.”

  “And we discovered a relative abundance of it.”

  “A relative abundance?”

  “Far more than we expected,” she said. “Filaments of the material, spinning in what are essentially magnetic bubbles. Fractions of an ounce, in most cases, but enough to be worth retrieving. So we spent a year modifying the Nighthawk, and we filled the cargo bay with a more advanced type of Penning trap, which we call a containment unit, and we sent it up again to collect what we could find.”