Nighthawk (NUMA Files 14)

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 . . .”