Nighthawk (NUMA Files 14)

“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.”

“And now it’s sitting at the bottom of a lake,” Kurt noted. “And those containment units are running on battery power. What happens when the batteries run out?”

“You know what happens,” she snapped. “A very large explosion.”