She retrieved the second piece of metal and then found a hydraulic strut.
“What do you think?” Kurt asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I have to admit these appear to be aircraft parts, but there’s nothing definitive. Let’s keep moving.”
Kurt nodded and took them farther to the south, tracking along a trail of small scars in the sediment.
“Are those impact points?” Emma asked.
Kurt nodded. “A metal rain fell here. The smaller items buried themselves, leaving these marks. Only the bigger ones or those that came down with less speed remained on the surface.”
“So this is a debris field?”
He nodded.
Emma looked grim. “If this is the Nighthawk, we’ll need to find the core. All the technology our adversaries are after is hidden there.”
Kurt bumped the throttle, adjusted course and guided them forward. They passed by a smattering of small parts and additional gouges in the silt, stopping only when they found another large section of shredded metal, which looked like torn and tattered paper.
“This isn’t good,” Emma said. “That looks like a fuselage section.”
“It must have hit the water at high speed,” Kurt said.
She shook her head. “It shouldn’t have,” she replied. “Every simulation we’ve run suggests the onboard computer was still operating. It should have flared as it descended and then deployed its parachutes and come down softly.”
Kurt paused. He found it odd how strongly convinced everyone in the NSA was that the aircraft was in one piece. “The evidence doesn’t support that,” he said, tired of hearing about what should have happened.
“The core must still be intact,” Emma said urgently. “Keep going. We need to find it.”
It sounded like wishful thinking to Kurt, but he moved on, guiding them in a zigzag pattern. Once he’d established the width of the debris field and the direction it ran, they made steady progress, with more and more debris appearing out of the darkness, eventually stopping when they discovered several large sections of what had to be an airframe, lengths of wires and insulation wafting in the current, and the unmistakable shape of a wheel still attached to a hydraulic strut.
“Landing gear assembly,” Emma said dejectedly.
The wheel hub lay on its side. Every shred of its tires had been ripped free and the hydraulic strut had been bent at a forty-degree angle. A curved section of blackened sheet metal that looked like part of the fuselage lay just beyond it.
“So much for the core being in one piece,” Kurt said.
Emma didn’t respond. She was staring into the dark. The look on her face suggested anger and confusion. She focused on the wheel, squinting until a small furrow appeared in her brow. “Go in closer.”
Kurt nudged the throttle and guided the Angler gently into position, trying not to stir up too much sediment.
As they closed in on what appeared to be the nose gear, Emma moved to the edge of her seat. The anger vanished. “It’s too big,” she said.
Kurt could see that. “We can’t carry it up,” he said. “But we can attach a cable and winch it to the surface.”
“No,” she said, turning toward him. “It’s too big to come from the Nighthawk. To speed up development, we took the landing gear from the smaller X-37. It gave us more interior space and less weight, but it made the Nighthawk look odd when you saw it sitting on the ground. Like a big dog with short legs.”
She pointed back through the canopy. “The diameter of that wheel is too large. The strut is too long, even though it’s broken off.”
“We’re looking through curved glass,” Kurt said. “It magnifies things.”
Emma glanced at him and then back through the canopy. She scanned the wheel first and then turned her attention to the wreckage out beyond. “There’s too much debris,” she added. “Too much material all together. I’m telling you, this isn’t the Nighthawk.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Some other plane that crashed. Maybe it’s that missing airliner from Malaysia. Maybe it’s an old military transport that came down years ago.”
Kurt shook his head. “The wreckage is pristine,” he said, quashing that theory. “It’s recent. If this material had been down here any length of time, it would be corroded and encrusted with marine life. The craters in the sediment where each piece made an impact would be filled in like footprints in a snowstorm. Besides, we heard this plane hit the water—it came down within twenty minutes of Vandenberg losing contact with the Nighthawk.”