He did know that. He just wanted to hear her say it. “How large?”
She spoke without emotion. Clinical and cold. It was the dry tone of a distant scientist, not someone who might be vaporized at any instant. “Eight ounces of antimatter exposed to an equal amount of matter will cause an explosion the equivalent of a ten-mega-ton bomb detonating. Our best estimate puts the load on board the Nighthawk somewhere in the range of two hundred kilograms. Almost four hundred pounds.”
“Four hundred pounds!?”
“Approximately,” she said. “If it all reacted simultaneously—and once some of it reacts, it will all react—the explosive force will be nearly eight thousand mega-tons, or eight giga-tons. The blast will be five times larger than the combined effect of detonating every nuclear weapon in the world’s combined arsenal in the same place at the same exact time.”
Kurt just stared at her. He didn’t know whether to laugh at the stupidity of what they’d done or curse them for their arrogance. “And you brought this material to Earth willingly? Compiled it all in the same place? Are you people insane?”
“What would you have us do?” she asked. “Once we figured out this material was up there, it wasn’t going to be long before the Russians and the Chinese made the same discovery. Would you rather they had it? Do you want the designers of Chernobyl playing around with this stuff? The builders of the already crumbling Three Gorges Dam?”
“Of course not,” Kurt said. “But what’s to stop them from retrieving their own supply?”
“The fact that we took it all,” she said. “It accumulates very slowly. It’ll be a thousand years before there’s a harvestable amount floating around up there again.”
“Great,” Kurt said. “Maybe civilization will have dragged itself back from the Stone Age by then.”
“You think I don’t know the danger?” she said. “Do you think it doesn’t weigh on me?”
He looked up at the dark night sky. The stars were bright out here, so far away from the nearest city. Tiny balls of fusion, which the Earth would become for a brief instant if they didn’t find the Nighthawk and keep the containment units functioning.
He turned back toward her. “At least I finally understand why you were all so certain the Nighthawk came down in one piece.”
“We knew the core had to be intact or we’d have all seen the results already.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Seventy-two hours,” she said. “Maybe less. It depends how much light is reaching the solar panels on the wings.”
“And if the containment units or the cryogenic system fail early?”
“A Nebraska-sized hole in the Andes,” she said. “A hundred trillion tons of rock instantly vaporized and blasted into the atmosphere. A ninety percent reduction in photosynthesis and biological activity. No one will have to worry about global warming anymore because the Earth will be in frigid darkness for at least five years.”
Not a pleasant scenario, he thought. “And if we get it back to the United States?”
“The material will be split up into thousands of tiny samples, each no more than half an ounce. They’ll be stored in a labyrinth of underground facilities that the NSA has been building for the last three years. A failure at one site will be no worse than a small bomb going off in an underground test location because there will be no other material for it to react with.”
All emotion had left Kurt. There was only one thing that counted now. “Then we’d damn well better find it and get it locked down.”
“My thoughts exactly,” she replied.
34
A staccato thumping echoed through the high mountain pass. Ground-dwelling animals looked up nervously and then darted away as a thundering orange machine flew between peaks and its great whirling shadow passed over them.
Joe Zavala was at the controls of the Air-Crane once again. The big helicopter was slow and stable, but it wasn’t the easiest bird to control in a crosswind. As a result, he was more focused on the flying than the scenery. At least his passengers were enjoying the view.
“Now, this is a view fit for the gods,” Urco’s voice called out over the intercom.
Joe glanced back for an instant. The cockpit of the Air-Crane was packed. Kurt sat in the copilot’s seat while Emma, Urco and Paul Trout sat on the jump seats behind them.
“It’s too bad we couldn’t see it at sunrise,” Urco added.
In fact, Joe had seen plenty of the mountains at sunrise, making another run that only he, Kurt and Paul knew about. It had pushed back their arrival at La Jalca. “Sorry about that,” Joe said. “We were slightly delayed.”
“Are we trying to make up time by flying through the mountains instead of over them?” Paul asked.
“Talk to Kurt,” Joe said. “I just go where I’m told to.”