Nighthawk

  Kurt looked at the map. They were halfway between Colombia and Cuba. Five hundred miles in any direction wouldn’t be enough.

  “We can’t put sufficient distance between ourselves and civilization to do much good,” he said. “We’ve got to come up with another plan.”

  Joe offered a desperate thought. “There’s a windbreak in front of the Nighthawk. If we slowed to the very minimum controllable speed—”

  Major Timonovski shook his head. “There is no hatch leading to the top of the fuselage.”

  “What if we depressurized the plane and cut a hole in the skin?”

  “The skin is titanium,” Davidov replied. “Double-thick. Even if we could, there’s no hope in what you’re considering. No matter how we try to secure you, it’s not possible to keep you from being swept off the upper surfaces once you’re out in the airstream. You’ll never be able to get in the cargo bay.”

  “If we can cut our way out of the Blackjack, maybe we can cut our way into the Nighthawk from below,” Joe said. “Tunnel our way through.”

  Unknown to the men on the bomber, the communications were being shared with the White House, Vandenberg and the café in Cajamarca. Emma’s voice chiming in alerted them to that fact.

  “You won’t be able to cut into the Nighthawk from below,” she said. “The entire structure is designed to resist the heat and shock of reentry. Even if you had a high-intensity acetylene torch, you’d never get through.”

  Kurt found himself smiling. Strange, he thought, considering the situation. But he was glad to know at least she and the Trouts were safe. “What if we use the scramjets?” he suggested. “Instead of conserving fuel, we get this thing up to maximum speed and altitude. How high can this bomber go?”

  “One hundred and twenty thousand feet,” Timonovski replied.

  “The problem is, the gamma ray burst,” Rudi told them. “The higher you go, the farther the devastation spreads. At that height, there will be less physical destruction, but the radiation, the shock front and the electromagnetic pulse will cover sixteen times as much surface area. The simulation we’ve run suggests that you nose-down at maximum velocity. It will concentrate the damage in one area, but it’s still going to be bad.”

  “How bad?” Kurt said.

  “The other burst was seven hundred miles from Hawaii. It set off seismometers all over the globe. Hawaii’s gone dark. The Aleutians have gone dark. The entire Pacific Rim has gone dark. There are likely to be tsunamis and a hot shock front. If we had any satellites working out there, we’d expect to see fires and damage on most shores, effects the equivalent of a large earthquake, but we were lucky that it was so far away. The majority of the radiation and destructive energy dissipated prior to making landfall.”

  Kurt looked at the faces around him. Russian and American alike were calm and resigned. “You know how far we can go,” Kurt said. “Give us a location when you have one. Until then, we’ll conserve as much fuel as possible.”

  As Kurt spoke, Major Timonovski adjusted the flight setting to its most efficient mode. The wings came forward and the engines powered back. The Blackjack 2 rose up and slowed down like a ship meeting a large, lazy swell.

  It was peaceful, Kurt thought to himself, quiet. Truly, the calm before the storm.

  66

  Emma stood in the empty Internet café and felt her knees go weak. Not only would Kurt and Joe be killed but the detonation would inflict lethal damage across a large swath of the Americas and the Caribbean.

  “This can’t be happening,” she whispered.

  She sat down on the floor, tried to breathe and found her lungs would not draw in any air. “This can’t be happening,” she said again.

  Gamay approached. “Breathe slowly,” she urged. “You’re hyperventilating.”

  “I killed them all,” Emma said, tears streaming down her face. “Kurt and Joe, and a hundred million more.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I was part of it!” she snapped, going instantly from despair to anger.

  She knew what Gamay was trying to do, but she didn’t want to be told how it was going to be all right. It most certainly was not going to be all right.

  “They’re carrying twice the mixed-state matter that was on the Chinese plane. Even from the middle of the Caribbean Sea, the shock wave will cover half the South. Every living soul from Houston to Tampa will be incinerated, irradiated or drowned in a hundred-foot wave. Along with half of Mexico, Central America and every living being on every island in the Caribbean.”

  Gamay just stared at her. There was nothing to say.

  Emma stood and turned away. In her darkest moment, when she would have rather died than be witness to what was about to happen, the defiance of Hurricane Emma flared the brightest. “I will not accept this,” she said. “I will not!”

  She pulled free of Gamay’s attempt at kindness and willed her tired mind back into action. There had to be a way. There had to be!

  She went over the properties of the mixed-state matter, the design of the containment units, tried to calculate the minuscule odds that they would survive if the Semtex detonated. But there was no way to stop the reaction; no known way, aside from the frigid cold of absolute zero, to stop matter and antimatter from annihilating each other.

  She paced around the room searching for an answer. The frustration boiled over as she bumped a small table. In a fit of rage, she pushed it across the room. It slid with surprising ease, toppled and gouged a line in the painted concrete floor.

  Emma stopped in her tracks, staring at a lengthy scratch. It was white on blue, like a vapor trail in the dusky sky.

  Paul took a step toward her.

  “Stop,” she said without looking his way. Something had come to mind.

  Vapor trail . . . Contrail . . . The thought lingered in her consciousness. Streams of tiny ice crystals released by passing aircraft, high in the frigid sky.

  The thought hit with so much force, she almost fell over. “There is a way,” she whispered. “There is a way!”

  She turned with a snap. “Get Rudi back on the line. I need to talk to Kurt. I need to talk to him now. Before time runs out.”

  67

  The scene in the NUMA communications room had become chaotic. With the impending disaster all but certain, all government assets had been turned toward coordinating the efforts to minimize the damage.

  Orders were being sent out, troops mobilized. People directed to shelter underground. Anything and everything that could be thought of and acted upon in two hours was being done.

  Highways were closed to southbound traffic. Aircraft were ordered to proceed as far north as possible and land within the two-hour window. Information was relayed to Central and South American countries, though there was no assistance to lend and by morning it would be every man, nation and group for themselves.

  Into this maelstrom, Emma’s attempt to communicate foundered. No line was free, no satellite communication available. No ear open to listening. Everyone too busy sending out orders and making requests.

  Everyone except Priya, who’d moved quietly into the background. She thought she’d be safe, but figured by morning she would have no way to contact her family in London. She decided to send them an e-mail now before the worst happened.

  As she sat down at the computer, a blinking icon told her she’d gotten an urgent message. It was from Paul Trout.

  Emma thinks there might be another option to prevent disaster. We need to speak with Rudi and NASA Flight Dynamics. CANNOT get thru.

  “Rudi,” she said, waving him over.

  Rudi was in the midst of five different things and had two other staffers talking in his ear.

  “Rudi!” she shouted.

  He turned.

  “Emma needs to talk with you. She says there may be a way to avert the disaster!”

/>   In the cold, dark cockpit of the bomber, Kurt focused on every static-skewed word.

  “The Daedalus Project,” Emma said. “Remember I told you about it? We planned to use small nuclear explosions for deep-space propulsion. We thought we might be able to accelerate a spacecraft to nearly a tenth the speed of light. The explosions occur behind the craft, the shock wave hits what is known as a pusher plate and sends the craft surging forward without destroying it. I believe we can do something similar with the Nighthawk using the mixed-state matter. It won’t be one big explosion but a long trail of smaller ones. If we vent the right amount of mixed-state matter through the original intake port, it will create a burst of energy and a continuous wave, accelerating the Nighthawk back into space before the subsequent explosion.”

  “Won’t the mixed-state matter explode the second it hits air?” Kurt asked.

  “As long as it remains cold enough, it lives in harmony. In its current condition, it will exit the collection port at 2.7 degrees Kelvin. The air temperature at one hundred and twenty thousand feet is somewhere in the neighborhood of negative eighty degrees. That’s still a boiling two hundred and ten degrees Kelvin, and the mixed-state matter will react in less than half a second, but since the Nighthawk will be moving at four thousand miles an hour, that half-a-second delay will create enough space to build a wave rather than blow the craft apart.”

  Kurt listened intently, visualizing the attempt. “A wave?”

  “A fast and powerful one,” Emma replied.

  “Max and the NASA Flight Dynamics team have done the calculations,” Hiram said. “It could work.”

  Kurt grinned. Major Timonovski and the copilot nodded as well.

  “We’re not dead yet,” Joe said. “You can’t imagine how happy that makes me.”

  Even Davidov was smiling through the pain. “If we survive, a bottle of twenty-year-old scotch for each of you.”

  “What do we have to do?” Kurt asked over the radio.

  “You have to take the bomber up to its maximum speed and altitude and then release the Nighthawk,” Emma said. “Reboot the control system with the alpha code and then download a series of commands that we will transmit to you momentarily.”

  “That doesn’t sound too hard,” Kurt said. “What’s the catch?”

  “The Nighthawk’s antennas are on the top. They have to be or they would burn off on reentry. That means you’ll have to be above and in front of the Nighthawk.”

  “Which means we get hit with the wave as well.”

  “We could try to use an Air Force satellite,” she said. “But there’s so much ionization in the atmosphere that—”

  “No,” Kurt said, cutting off the discussion. “We get one shot at this. Let’s do it right.”

  Joe gave the thumbs-up. Davidov nodded enthusiastically. “Da,” Major Timonovski said.

  The flight engineer nodded as well and switched on the antenna dish they’d used to override the Nighthawk’s program seven days ago. After a few checks, he turned to Kurt. “Tell them we are ready.”

  It took several minutes for the bomber to get up to supersonic speed and climb above eighty thousand feet. There, it switched over to the scramjets.

  The burst of power pushed Kurt back into the seat and he listened as Timonovski called out the Mach number and altitude. Because Joe knew how to fly, he’d been given the copilot’s seat. Kurt and Davidov sat behind them in the jump seats, and the flight engineer was at the command station where the Falconer had been days before.

  “One hundred and nineteen thousand,” Major Timonovski said. “Maximum altitude and velocity in five . . . four . . . three . . .”

  “Releasing Nighthawk,” the flight engineer said.

  To avoid Blackjack 1’s fate, they flew in a parabolic arc, ejecting the Nighthawk as they went over the top.

  “Nighthawk clear,” the flight engineer said. “Stabilizer intact.”

  Once the Nighthawk drifted back far enough, Timonovski brought the bomber up above and in front of the unmanned space plane.

  “Separation, two miles,” the flight engineer said. “Initiating alpha code.”

  At the press of a button, the information was sent. Now they waited. Finally, a response came in.

  “Nighthawk up and functioning,” the flight engineer said. “Transmitting new orders.”

  As Kurt watched the others perform their duties, he triple-checked his shoulder harness and gripped the handhold beside the jump seat. There was nothing else for him to do.

  “Nighthawk confirms orders received and processed,” the flight engineer said excitedly. “Initiation in thirty seconds. All systems green.” He turned to Timonovski. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Timonovski put the bomber into a turn, banking away from the Nighthawk’s course. The turn had to be gradual because of the incredible velocity, but the farther the two courses diverged, the better chance they had of surviving the wave that was about to hit.

  The Blackjack was pulling hard. Kurt felt the g-forces pressing him down into the seat. He strained to look at his watch. The second hand ticked along the orange face. Each click seemed a lifetime. And then they were all used up.

  A flash of blue light filled the sky. Kurt shut his eyes and still saw the glare.

  “Hang on!” Joe shouted.

  The shock front hit the bomber like a crashing wave. Despite their speed and course away from the Nighthawk, the impact was intense as the surge picked the bomber up and shoved it forward.

  “Don’t fight it,” Kurt grunted.

  Timonovski did as Kurt suggested, going with the wave instead of turning against it. Still, the ride was violent, the systems inside the cockpit fried out in seconds, the fuselage buckled and, after ten seconds of buffeting, the left wing folded and the plane rolled over into a dive.

  Unseen from inside the bomber, the Nighthawk had done precisely as ordered, ejecting a tiny stream of the antimatter out behind it. The reaction was nearly instant, but instead of one giant flash, it left a trail of hundreds and then thousands of flashes in a series that lit up the night sky. At the head of this expanding flare of blue light, the tiny black craft was propelled toward space, accelerating at a rate that would have killed a human occupant.

  Seen from the ground, the burst of light looked like glowing ripples in a pond, with each circle of light expanding into the others until the interference pattern formed a maddening kaleidoscope of luminescence, streaking upward and outward to the east.

  Perspective was hard to come by from down there. And no one who viewed it with the naked eye could really follow the band of swirling light as it lengthened and stretched before terminating in a blinding flash high above the planet.

  The experiment had worked. In three minutes, the Nighthawk covered just under five thousand miles, accelerating to a maximum velocity of nearly one hundred and seventy thousand miles per hour, the fastest man-made object of all time.

  It was still accelerating when the heat and vibration caused a catastrophic failure in one of the containment units, but by then it was far enough from the Earth’s surface to be nothing more than a mind-blowing fireworks display in the night sky.

  The men in the falling bomber never saw it; they were knocked about mercilessly and traveling in the opposite direction.

  Inside the cockpit, Kurt felt himself whiplashed one way, then the other. He was certain the plane would come apart at any second. Miraculously, it held together, despite the fact that one wing had been ripped off and most of the tail was gone.

  It didn’t take long to realize that they were in a nosedive. Light from the artificial sun had temporarily illuminated the Earth and its sea far below.

  They were corkscrewing down like Blackjack 1 had, falling from the sky like a gull with a broken wing.

  The spinning motion was disorienting. The loss of pressure thre
atened to cause him to black out. He remembered the other crew’s long descent with only the computer talking.

  “We need to eject!” Kurt shouted to Major Timonovski.

  The pilot didn’t answer. He was still strapped in his seat, but with every move of the plane he was being thrown back and forth like a rag doll.

  “Joe, we have to punch out!”

  Joe seemed no better than Timonovski. Davidov looked to be awake but too weak to move, and the flight engineer was hanging in the straps, a huge gash to his forehead.

  Kurt had no idea how high they were, no idea what would happen if they ejected, but he’d seen the wreckage of the other bomber on the bottom of the sea. That impact he knew they would not survive.

  He looked around for an ejection handle. Everything was labeled in Russian. Finally, he spied a red bar with two orange stripes.

  He reached for it.

  Grasped it.

  And with one hard pull, yanked it up and back.

  An explosion shook the plane, fire surrounded the cockpit and everything went black.

  68

  Emma arrived in Washington five days after what they were calling the event. It took that long because so much of the world was in chaos. Half the world’s satellites were down, most of the communication systems were down, aircraft were being routed by hand and most of those were being used to fly relief supplies to the Pacific.

  When she finally arrived in D.C., she discovered that land lines were temporarily back in fashion as a line of two hundred people was waiting to use three working pay phones.

  She skipped the line. Found a cab and rode into the city. After a long debriefing with the NSA, she walked across town to NUMA. There she found Rudi, Hiram and Priya.

  They had old-fashioned paper maps in front of them. Various areas were outlined in green, yellow and red.

  “How bad is it?” she asked.