Page 110 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest
Juan turned around. “If it does, Fierro wins—and the world is doomed.”
?
Eric and Murphy were seated again at their joint computer terminal. The long minute hand on the analog wall clock had already devoured three minutes.
“How much energy do you think it would take to power up a boat like theBaktun?” Eric asked. “Especially for the kind of research work they’re doing.”
Murph scratched his wispy beard. “Depends on exactly what they’re doing, but my guess would be a lot. Just training large-model AI requires megawatts of electricity—enough to power a small town. That’s why Microsoft recently signed a deal to resurrect the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island. And theBaktun’s energy source would have to be both continuous and stable, especially for the organoid components.”
Eric snapped his fingers. “That boat we tangled with—the demon ship? I bet it was gobbling up a ton of power. AI-powered weapons, multiple platforms, cloaked…probably high speed, too.”
“If I were building the world’s first AGI computer on a ship-based platform, I’d do everything I could to protect it. And I’d put it out in the middle of nowhere. So, yeah. It makes perfect sense. TheBaktunis our demon ship.”
“That means we need to focus our radar search for an aircraft headed into the Pacific,” Eric said. “And not just the Pacific, but that dead zone in the east where we had our gunfight.”
“How far out?”
“At least a thousand nautical miles. Could be farther out, or maybe theBaktunwill come in closer for the rendezvous, depending on the range of the airplane or helicopter Fierro’s using.”
“We might find a few ships out there, but I doubt we’ll find any private aircraft. I mean, except for someone highly motivated to go out there.”
“You mean motivated like Fierro?”
“Why don’t we just call the Navy?” Murph asked.
“And tell them what? ‘Please deploy your scarce resources in searchof an unidentified boat we think might be in the Pacific and board or sink her for no legal reason?’ And all based on a criminal hacker’s photograph of an orchid? The Navy would never go for it. Neither would POTUS, especially on such short notice.”
“I guess that just leaves us,” Murph said. “Even though most of what you said applies to us, too.”
Eric nodded. “You know what Cabrillo always says. Our mandate is to color outside the lines, especially when our country is under threat.”
“Better grab our crayons, then.”
?
Murph and Stone got to work, brainstorming a plan of attack to find theBaktun.
The earliest Fierro could have taken off from a field near his mansion was twelve hours ago. That was enough time to fly either directly to theBaktunor to an airport along Central America’s Pacific coast to refuel or acquire a different airplane. Unless Fierro planned to parachute onto the ship, it had to be a long-range seaplane.
Now what?
“Trust the Cray,” Murphy said. TheOregon’s Cray supercomputer was one of the fastest pre-quantum machines on the planet, loaded up with every imaginable kind of software. It was the perfect tool for brute-force data acquisition and processing.
Eric hacked into regional air traffic control databases and downloaded twelve hours of radar and satellite tracking logs. These logs provided details like call signs, aircraft IDs, positions, altitudes, speeds, and headings. He and Murph then searched for seaplanes and found several in flight.
But one had lifted off from a private Nicaraguan airfield. The ShinMaywa US-2 was heading due west toward the dead zone, where theOregonhad once battled theBaktun.
The two researchers then tracked the US-2’s progress on the radar log. About two hundred fifty miles off Nicaragua, its radar signaturevanished as it left radar range. Satellite tracking picked it up until about nine hundred thirty nautical miles, when its signal suddenly disappeared.
“What happened to it?” Murph asked. It wasn’t possible for the satellite to lose the signal. There weren’t any obstructions between the aircraft and low-earth orbit.
“He killed his transponder.”
“Why now?”
“Maybe because he landed.”
Murph dropped a virtual pin at the GPS location where the transponder shut off, and then drew a fifty-mile radius around it just as Cabrillo reappeared in the doorway.
