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?”