It fell to Emma to break it. “What about the Russians?” she asked from the screen. “What about Kurt and Joe? Have we heard from them?”
“All we know is that the Blackjack and the Nighthawk are airborne,” Colonel Hansen said. “A satellite pass forty minutes ago showed the rural airfield to be empty. We’ve launched AWACS from Pensacola and Corpus Christi to look for the bomber’s radar signature. Several squadrons of F-22s are being readied to intercept.”
“Intercept?” Emma asked. “Why would we need to intercept it?”
“To protect ourselves,” Hansen said. “If the Russian government doesn’t believe our claim and they or the pilot act rashly—the way Zhang threatened to a minute ago . . . well, we’re dealing with a hypersonic aircraft, covered in stealth materials, that could make it from the coast of South America to Atlanta in twenty minutes. We can’t allow that. So we have to find it first and be ready to act when we talk to Moscow.”
“But why would they act rashly?” she asked.
Rudi knew why. Everyone in the room and at the White House and out at Vandenberg knew why. He suspected Emma would have easily guessed the reason if she weren’t exhausted.
He jumped in and explained. “Because they’ve almost certainly exceeded the speed and altitude thresholds that will prime the detonators. And unlike the Chinese plane, there is no physical way for the occupants of the bomber to get at the Nighthawk and disarm them.”
Understanding washed over Emma’s face in high-definition. Understanding and grief. “There’s no way to stop it,” she whispered to herself. “The pilots are dead men. And if Kurt and Joe are on board, they’re dead men, too.”
63
The HL-190 transport represented the state of the art of Chinese aerospace industry. Intended first as an aircraft to fly dignitaries around the world, its interior was trimmed in high style. Active noise cancellation created a superquiet cabin. The air kept at a perfect seventy-two degrees and fifty-one percent humidity by a high-tech system that had twenty sensors spaced throughout the plane. The soft leather seating and lushly carpeted floor were designed specifically to caress the bodies and feet of those used to sitting down and giving orders.
Daiyu had no use for any of it. If not for the remarkable speed with which the aircraft flew, she’d have rather flown back to Shanghai in a sparse military transport.
To her surprise, the burly man who’d accompanied her from the lake seemed to be of a similar mood. Urco had called the man Vargas. He was as rough-spun as any of the group. If he’d been Chinese, he would have lived in a rural village, pushed a plow and carried heavy loads to and from ox-drawn carts, tossing them in and out as if they weighed nothing.
He’d remained awake for the entire flight, and she wondered if this was the first time he’d ever flown. His eyes appeared to be pricked open and slightly bloodshot as if he’d taken a powerful stimulant. After five hours in the air, he’d said no more than a dozen words.
Only when the plane banked to the right did he speak up. “Why are we changing course?”
“Probably to avoid some weather,” she said. It wasn’t likely. At fifty-one thousand feet, the HL-190 flew above almost all the world’s weather. “Would you like a drink?” she asked. “It might help you to relax.”
She stood up and walked to the bar. “Rice wine? Or maybe you’d prefer gouqi jiu; it’s made from wolfberries.”
He shook his head. “Water.”
She gave him a bottle of Voss.
“Urco must trust you a great deal to send you alone for millions of dollars in diamonds. What will you do with them? And by that I mean what will he do with them since, obviously, you’ll deliver the package to him without keeping any for yourself?”
The questions flowed from a combination of boredom and training. It was part of her instinct to divide slaves from their masters.
He stood and glared at her.
She stared back, unflinching, and he decided to take a walk down the carpeted aisle. He stopped and looked out through one window, then went to the other side of the plane and looked out another.
Daiyu didn’t need to look; he would see nothing but darkness out there.
“How far have we gone?” he asked.
“More than halfway. You should sleep. It will pass the time faster.”
“No,” he grunted.
“Suit yourself.”
The intercom buzzed. “Daiyu, please come to the cockpit. General Zhang wishes to speak with you.”
She walked forward, passing Vargas and ignoring his stare.
She entered the cockpit and noticed they were continuing to turn, veering to a more northerly course still. She took a headset from Lieutenant Wu.
“Daiyu,” General Zhang said. “I must congratulate you for the progress of your mission. You’ve made me proud.”
He sounded very dour for a man offering congratulations. “Thank you, General, but as you know it is not necessary,” she said. “I do as I’m ordered for the nation. It is my mother and father, as you taught me.”
“Yes,” Zhang said. “And through no fault of yours, it is now in danger.”
He went on to explain what he had learned from the Americans. Twice she asked him if he was certain. Twice he admitted he could not be sure the Americans were telling the truth, but he saw no reason for them to lie.
“Our engineers have studied the problem,” he added. “They’ve found no way to use the aircraft’s electrical system to keep the containment unit safely powered. The voltage and current do not match. You’ll have to remove the explosives from the fuel cell without damaging it.”
“And then?”
“Eject them from the aircraft.”
That was easier said than done, but if they depressurized the cabin, it could be accomplished.
“There may be a problem,” she admitted. “Urco’s courier. It’s possible he knows of the plan. He seems very grim. Perhaps contemplating what lies ahead.”
“Martyrs usually are,” Zhang said. “Dispose of him first. We cannot risk any interference.”
“It will be taken care of,” she said.
Zhang signed off. Lieutenant Wu took the headset back and offered her his sidearm.
She shook her head. “Give me your knife.”
With the knife hidden in her sleeve, Daiyu opened the door. Vargas was standing right there.
He lunged first, grabbing her with both hands, lifting her off the floor and throwing her down the aisle.
She landed, sprang back to her feet and rushed back to the cockpit.
Vargas had already plowed forward into the cramped space. He was throwing punches and slamming heads against the wall. With a downward swing of his huge right arm, he clubbed Lieutenant Wu to the ground and then broke his back with a stomp of an oversized foot.
He grabbed the copilot’s neck and snapped it with a lethal twist.
Daiyu launched herself at him, aiming the knife for his spine. Even at his size, a severed spine would render him useless. She missed to the right, hitting his fleshy back and plunging the blade as deep as it would go. She twisted it quickly and pulled it out.
Hot blood poured from the wound, but the mountain of a man barely responded.
He turned, backhanded her across the face and went for a choke hold. She threw one arm up beside her neck as a bar. It prevented him from crushing her windpipe or choking the life out of her, but he now had control.
With the power of a hydraulic press, he squeezed her neck and arm until she felt her elbow crack and separate. Excruciating pain shot through her body. She ignored it and brought a knee into his midsection. She might as well have been thumping a rock wall.
He barely reacted, held her tight and reached for her fallen knife. She twisted around in a desperate attempt to break free, came face-to-face with Lieutenant Wu’s lifeless eyes and remembered his o
ffer of the sidearm. She thrust her free hand into his jacket, wrapped her fingers around the weapon’s carbon fiber grip and—
The knife went into her back.
Daiyu went stiff from the impact, felt the blade being pulled free and then being plunged into her a second time. The second puncture was far less painful than the first. A third was barely felt, as she shuddered and slumped to the floor.
Vargas stood awkwardly; he was bleeding badly from a wound he could not reach. It didn’t matter. He knew his own end was near—he’d known it since the moment he’d left the lake. It was well accepted, he thought. At least he would die in the clouds that his ancestors had always aspired to reach.
He pulled the knife from Daiyu’s back, went to the wounded pilot and pressed the bloody blade to his face.
“Call them,” Vargas said. “Tell them she did as she was told and then resume course to Shanghai.”
“But?”
“Do as I say!”
With Vargas holding the knife to his eye, the pilot got on the radio and made the call. He said everything Vargas had ordered him to say. The Chinese General said some brisk words and then ordered them back on course without emotion.
Vargas watched the pilot turn the aircraft. Urco had shown him on the computer what to look for on the computer screens.
When the plane leveled off again, Vargas smiled and then he cut the pilot’s throat.
Lying in a pool of blood, Daiyu understood completely. Vargas was on a suicide mission. And now he’d overcome the only two obstacles he faced: her and Zhang. She was as good as dead, and with Zhang believing the explosives and the detonator had been removed, the Chinese authorities would welcome the aircraft to Shanghai with open arms.
The bomb would detonate as they descended and the matter and antimatter would mix instantly.
Deadly opposites, she thought. Yin and yang destroying each other, as she’d always believed they would.
She was the barrier, the only thing preventing the destructive mix. But she would be dead in minutes from the loss of blood. Even if she could somehow kill Vargas, she couldn’t crawl ten feet, let alone take the fuel cell apart and disarm the explosives.
Her eyes started to dim, but her other senses remained for the moment and she realized there was something in her hand. It was Wu’s pistol.
She knew what she had to do. She couldn’t stop the explosion, but she could choose where it happened. And out over the sea was preferable to the destruction happening above her homeland.
Vargas was standing there, his hands on the back of the pilot’s chair. She aimed at his head and pulled the trigger.
The shot hit home, splattering blood across the windshield.
Killed instantly, Vargas fell forward. His heavy body landed on the control column. The impact disconnected the autopilot as the computer wrongly assumed that the captain was reasserting human control.
The HL-190 nosed down and began to descend.
Daiyu could just make out the altimeter. They quickly passed below fifty thousand feet. The dials continued to unwind. Forty-nine thousand . . . Forty-eight . . . Forty-seven . . .
64
Kurt saw through the peephole as Davidov made a sudden move toward the control panel. He’d overheard every word and knew what Davidov was planning.
There was no time to shout a warning, no time to do anything but act. With quick precision, Kurt raised the HK45, aimed at Davidov through the door and pulled the trigger twice.
The HK45 boomed and the armor-piercing shells punched through two layers of steel and struck Davidov in the ribs and the thigh. The statesman crumpled to the floor in pain.
“I’m begging you,” Kurt shouted to the pilot. “Level the plane off and open the door.”
Pushing Davidov aside, the pilot stretched from his seat and released the door. It swung open and Kurt stepped inside. “What altitude are we at?”
“Thirty-five thousand feet,” the pilot said.
“Too high,” Kurt said. “Almost certainly too high.”
As if to prove the point, a sudden flash lit up the coal black sky outside the cockpit windows. It came in a staggered flicker, white-purple and then white-blue. It blinded like a nearby lightning strike would, but it was distant and soundless and so far off that the entire western horizon slowly came to life.
As the glowing color spread higher and farther, it gave way to a darker blue and then a greenish color reminiscent of the aurora borealis. It took on a texture, churning in long filaments, twisting and curling back in on itself in a mesmerizing, hypnotic display.
There was no sound, no shock wave, but the radios soon squealed and the computer screens skewed oddly to the right. On the panel above, whole rows of circuit breakers tripped, one after the other.
By now, Joe and the flight engineer had joined Kurt in the bomber’s cockpit. As the flight engineer began resetting the tripped breakers, Joe stared out the window.
“What is that?” Davidov said from his position on the floor. He was in pain but not lethally hit. The double-layered steel door had taken much of the force out of Kurt’s shots.
“The Chinese plane,” Kurt said quietly.
“The Chinese . . .” Davidov grunted from his position on the floor.
“I told you,” Kurt said. “He gave a deadly present to all of us.”
Far beyond the horizon, out over the Pacific, a ball of fire, the likes of which no human had ever seen, expanded in spherical shells that stretched fifty and then a hundred and then two hundred miles across before finally fading.
Lightning shot out of the inferno in all directions, along with an electromagnetic storm of X-rays, gamma rays and other forms of ionized radiation. The upper atmosphere was ionized instantly, while down below enough seawater to fill Lake Erie was instantly vaporized. The fire and the shock wave left a circular depression that dented the Pacific to a depth of two hundred feet.
As the shock wave subsided and the ocean sought to level itself, a ring of enormous waves surged into the depression from all sides, eventually colliding and being thrust back outward again.
Several thousand miles away, Kurt, Joe and the Russians were seeing only the reflection of the events. An effect known as a light echo filtered through thousands of miles of atmosphere and was distorted by the curvature of the Earth. Yet not one of the five men on board the Russian bomber could take their eyes off of it.
“Something must have gone wrong,” Joe said. “They can’t have reached China yet.”
Kurt helped Davidov up and into a jump seat. The wound to his ribs was broad but not deep; the wound to his leg hadn’t hit any vital arteries.
“How far . . . how far away?” Davidov asked.
“Five thousand miles,” Joe estimated, “give or take.”
“To reach us from five thousand miles away . . .” Davidov said without finishing his thought.
“The Chinese had two units on board,” Kurt said. “Fifty pounds of mixed-state matter. We’re carrying twice that.”
Davidov nodded and gripped the edge of the seat. “Why? Why would anyone want this? What has Russia done to him?”
“It’s not going to explode over Russia,” Kurt said, “but as you cross Europe.”
Kurt explained the rest of what they knew. Davidov seemed more shocked with each revelation.
“We need to use your communications system,” Kurt said. “We need to reach our people and find out if there’s any possible way to prevent what we just saw from happening again.”
65
Reaching anyone from the bomber proved to be difficult. Every satellite over the Pacific had been rendered inoperative, and though they were over the Caribbean, there was a spillover effect. Communication networks were crashing. And most of the Western world’s active resources were busy trying to ascertain the extent of the damage.
Finally, af
ter making contact with a Russian communications satellite over the Atlantic and being relayed through a commercial phone exchange in Poland, they were linked into the NUMA communications room.
“What altitude are you at?” Rudi Gunn asked immediately.
“Thirty-five thousand,” Kurt replied.
The signal was poor because of the ionization in the atmosphere and the mismatch between the Russian equipment and NUMA’s, but Kurt could hear the silence plainly. “We’re too high,” he said, not waiting for Rudi to tell him that. “We know that. What are our options?”
“There aren’t any,” Rudi said.
Kurt had expected this. He exchanged glances with the other men in the cockpit. “We figured that, too. We’ll turn out to sea,” he said. “Do you have a preferred course for us?”
“We do,” Rudi said. “We’ve picked a spot in the mid-Atlantic as far from any landmass as possible. All aircraft have been ordered out of the area and to land as soon as possible. All ships have been ordered to move away from the location at their best possible speed, though for many of them it won’t matter.”
“We can’t make the mid-Atlantic,” Major Timonovski said. “We don’t have the fuel.”
“This is an intercontinental bomber,” Joe said.
“We had to reduce the weight in order to clear the trees. We dumped ten thousand gallons back there.”
“How far can we fly on what we have?” Kurt asked.
“Five hundred miles,” Timonovski calculated. “Not much more.”
“What about aerial refueling?” Joe asked. “We heard on the cockpit voice recorder from Blackjack 1 that you were going to refuel near Caracas.”
“Yes,” Davidov said, “that was the original plan. But when the intercept failed, the tanker was ordered back to Russia. Our plan was to land in Cuba. We would be starting our descent in twenty minutes.”
“Could we link up with an American tanker?”
“We use a different type of fuel,” Major Timonovski said. “Modified to work with the scramjets.”