by Mark Walden
The clamps securing the Shroud to the deck released and the dropship’s idling engines roared into life as it began to lift off. Raven leapt into the air and slashed at one of the giant turbine engines, the crackling blade of her katana scything through the armoured casing. There was a loud bang and a cloud of black smoke belched out of the engine as Raven was knocked to the ground by the ailing thruster’s downdraught. The hangar doors began to grind open and the air rushed out of the rapidly depressurising bay. Raven rammed her sword into the deck and clung on as the howling wind tried to drag her towards the widening gap between the hangar doors. After a few seconds the bay doors were far enough open and Furan’s Shroud moved forward, straining for lift with just one functioning engine, and passed through the gap and out into the sky. Raven cursed loudly in Russian as the dropship’s stealth systems engaged and it disappeared from view.
She immediately felt the bitter cold and lack of oxygen at this altitude, battling for breath as hypoxia began inevitably to set in. She struggled to her feet. Furan had escaped – there was nothing she could do about that now. She just needed to concentrate on getting the others off the Dreadnought. The only problem was that she had no idea how. She walked slowly over to where Darkdoom sat huddled with Nigel.
‘Furan escaped,’ Raven whispered hoarsely, the air almost too thin for speech. Darkdoom just nodded and then winced as the largest explosion yet tore through the ship and the deck slowly started to tip.
Suddenly there was a roar of engine noise from behind Raven and she turned to see a Shroud manoeuvring carefully into the hangar bay. She felt a flood of relief as the secondary loading ramp under the Shroud’s nose descended to reveal Francisco standing in the hatchway, frantically waving at them.
‘Go!’ Raven barked at Darkdoom, who simply nodded and hurried with Nigel over to the waiting Shroud. Raven ran over to where Wing knelt, desperately pulling at the handle of the jammed hangar entrance door.
‘We have to go now,’ Raven croaked at Wing, fighting to fill her lungs with what little oxygen there was.
‘I’m not leaving without Otto,’ Wing said firmly.
There was an explosion somewhere on the other side of the door.
‘Wing,’ Raven said quietly, ‘Otto’s not coming.’
Wing punched the steel door, wanting with all his heart to believe that she was wrong but knowing she was not. He nodded once and they both ran towards the Shroud, sprinting up the ramp as it closed. The dropship backed carefully out of the hangar and rotated in the air before its engines flared and it rocketed away from the doomed Dreadnought.
‘This is Wildcat to all wings,’ the flight leader said into his mask, ‘engage and destroy.’ His orders were quite clear: he was to take out the giant aircraft before it crossed into United States airspace. He didn’t know what it was or where it was from, but he was going to make damn sure it never made it that far.
‘Joker Tally,’ his wingman signalled, indicating that he was initiating his attack run.
Wildcat looked out over his starboard wing and Joker’s F-22 banked hard towards the target.
‘Fox two,’ Joker signalled and a Sidewinder missile streaked out from the belly of his jet and speared into the threat aircraft’s superstructure, detonating in a huge ball of fire. The flight leader watched as multiple other missile trails followed in its wake, turning the giant aircraft into a blazing wreck that began a terminal descent towards the Atlantic.
He was about to begin his own attack run when he noticed something out of the corner of his eye.
‘Sweet Jesus,’ the flight leader whispered, shocked. ‘Joker, form up on my wing now!’ He banked his aircraft hard and sent it roaring in pursuit of the unmistakable shape of Air Force One as it plummeted towards the ocean below.
Otto struggled to his feet as the giant plane’s airframe shuddered. It was eerily quiet; there was no engine noise, but the fact that they were not nosediving towards the Atlantic meant that at least they had been released at a high enough speed to be in some sort of glide. He resisted the urge to calculate how long they had at this angle of descent before they hit the ocean. Unfortunately, he didn’t have to do the maths to know that it wouldn’t be long.
He ran out of the President’s office and down the short aisle leading to the cockpit. He rattled the handle on the armoured door but it was firmly locked. He quickly tried to think of a way through the door but he knew it was pointless: cockpit doors were designed to withstand exactly that kind of improvised assault.
He ran back to the President’s office as the plane shuddered again, more violently this time. He realised that the floor was already at a steeper angle than it had been just a few moments before.
‘I need you to unlock this,’ Otto said quickly, placing the opened case on the desk in front of the President and raising the retinal scanner into position.
‘It won’t do any good,’ the President replied. ‘It’s reliant on the plane’s communications array to transmit commands, and unless I’m way off the mark, we don’t have any power.’
‘Leave that to me,’ Otto said and closed his eyes. The systems he felt all around him were dead. There was no power and without the engines running there was no way to generate any. He extended his senses, hunting for any trace of power, any electronic circuit that showed signs of life. There was the faintest glow in a far corner of the dead grid that surrounded him. He reached out for it: it was a simple switch powered by a battery. Without even really knowing what he was doing, he mentally threw the switch.
Underneath them, a ram air turbine popped out of the belly of the giant aircraft, the small fan spinning furiously in the high-speed air passing over the skin of the aircraft. The tiny machine produced just enough emergency power to activate some of the plane’s critical systems and Otto sensed some of the dead electronic grid that surrounded him flaring into life. He reached for the communication system, checking that it had enough power for what he wanted it to do.
He opened his eyes briefly and looked at the President, who was looking at him like he’d gone crazy.
‘I agree that now would be a good time for prayer,’ the President said, ‘but I was hoping you might be able to do something a little more tangible.’
‘Oh, I’m not praying,’ Otto said, ‘but you can if you think it will help. What I really need you to do is to put your eye up to that thing.’
The President looked curiously at him for a moment before putting his eye to the scanner, which bleeped, and the access light inside the case turned green.
Otto closed his eyes again. Now he was going to have to do something that he had never done before, something that, if he was honest, he really didn’t want to do at all. He immersed himself in the digital world once again, reaching out for the communications systems and connecting with them.
‘OK, mystery guest inside my head, if you’re going to help me, now would be the time,’ Otto whispered to himself.
For several long moments Otto felt nothing, and then a familiar voice whispered in his ear.
‘We are stronger together than apart.’
Otto tensed as he felt the power of his abilities increase ten-fold. He sensed the data connections between the ailing aircraft and the ground and raced along them, feeling his consciousness expand geometrically as it coursed through the world’s data networks. He felt like a god, his mind seeming to fill for an instant with the sum total of human knowledge, overwhelming him, burying him, erasing his personality.
‘No,’ Otto said, gritting his teeth and pulling back before he passed the point of no return. He focused the power he felt, reaching out for a ground-based transmission station in the right part of the globe and sending a handshake communication, searching for the right receiver.
‘There!’
He brushed against the systems controlling Thor’s Hammer, greeting the satellite with the right binary handshake before channelling the command codes from the briefcase next to him into its command core. The satellite immed
iately recognised his authority and cancelled the launch sequence. Only then did Otto allow himself to read the countdown to launch embedded within the system. There had been nine seconds left on the clock when he had countermanded the launch instructions.
Otto felt a searing pain in his head, as if something was swelling inside his skull. He wanted to pull back, to withdraw from the vast labyrinths of data, but there was still more to do. He took a deep breath and kept searching. Finding what he needed, he integrated himself seamlessly into the computer systems of the company he required, brushing aside their multiple layers of network security as if they were barely there at all. He searched out and downloaded the schematics and digital manuals that he wanted, absorbing them, learning their content as thoroughly as if he’d been studying them for years. Only then did he allow himself to return to his body. He slumped forwards on to the floor of the President’s office, a thundering pain in his head and blood pouring from his nose. The President struggled against the cuffs securing him to his chair, wanting to assist Otto, but he was powerless to help.
‘It’s over,’ Otto said, his voice broken and weak. ‘I’ve aborted the launch.’
‘What do you mean?’ the President asked, sounding confused. ‘How could you . . . ? I mean . . .’
‘You’ll just have to take my word for it,’ Otto said through gritted teeth. He was exhausted. All he wanted was to sleep, for something, anything, to stop the constant stabbing pain in his head, but there was still one more thing he needed to do.
He closed his eyes again, focusing through the pain, and reached out using the knowledge he had just acquired to interface with the avionics system. He started the engines and began to pull the giant plane out of its terminal dive. He tried hard to ignore the numbers from the altimeter as Air Force One’s nose slowly came up. The plane shook, the battered airframe groaning under the excessive loads that were being put on it. Their altitude dipped below a thousand feet just for a moment before Otto sensed that the nose was at the right angle and pushed the engines to their capacity and beyond, dragging the giant plane back into the sky and sending it climbing slowly up to a proper cruising altitude. Otto re-engaged the autopilot; he no longer had the strength or desire to even think about changing its destination. It would make little difference anyway: wherever this particular plane landed there would be a reception party waiting for them. Otto had a dim sense that this was probably not a good thing before he gave in to the pain in his head and lost consciousness.
.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Where’s Otto?’ Laura asked as Wing sat down in the seat next to her.
‘I . . . I do not know,’ Wing said sadly, staring at the Shroud’s floor.
‘What do you mean?’ Laura asked frantically. Wing just shook his head.
‘Oh God . . . no,’ Laura gasped, the reality of what Wing was saying slowly sinking in. She let out a sob as the tears came and Shelby hugged her.
‘Come on,’ Shelby said, fighting back tears herself, ‘it’s going to be all right.’ But even as she said it she knew it wasn’t true.
‘What is being wrong?’ Franz asked Nigel as his friend sat down next to him.
‘Otto didn’t make it,’ Nigel said sadly.
‘Oh . . .’ Franz said, looking for a moment like he was going to say something but then thinking better of it.
Lucy sat and watched the reactions of her classmates, suddenly feeling very much like an outsider again. She’d heard all the talk about how dangerous life at H.I.V.E. was and had initially assumed it was just exaggeration, but now she was starting to realise that it was not.
Raven climbed the ladder to the flight deck and Nero got up, offering her the second seat behind the pilot, which she gratefully accepted.
‘What happened?’ Nero asked.
Raven quickly recounted the events on board the Dreadnought.
‘So Otto was on board Air Force One when it was released?’ Nero asked.
‘I believe so, yes,’ Raven replied, suddenly feeling very tired.
‘Any sign of it on radar?’ Nero asked.
‘It disappeared from our radar about five minutes ago,’ the pilot said. ‘It was at two thousand feet and still dropping just before it went out of range.’
He did not need to tell them what that meant.
‘Excuse me for a moment. There’s one more thing to check,’ Nero said. He climbed down the ladder to the lower deck and Raven let out a long sigh. A minute or so later he returned.
‘You’ll be glad to hear that Yellowstone national park appears still to be there,’ Nero said. ‘Professor Pike has just checked the very latest satellite imagery and there are no signs of any sort of thermonuclear detonation anywhere in the area.’ He gave Raven a small, sad smile.
‘He did it,’ Raven said, closing her eyes. ‘He damn well did it.’
The men in the air-traffic control tower at Andrews Air Force Base watched nervously as the 747 touched down perfectly. They had been unable to make any sort of contact with Air Force One as it had come in to land. It had been shadowed by an entire squadron of F-22s as it had crossed into United States airspace. Any other aircraft would have been shot down long before it was allowed to land at an air force base with no ground-to-air contact having been made. The pilots of the fighters escorting the plane had reported no response from the flight crew and there was every reason to believe that she had to be landing on full automatic. Nobody had any idea what had happened since they’d lost contact with the President’s plane, but the fact that it appeared to have been intercepted by an unknown hostile aircraft of a type no one had ever seen before suggested that something very bad might have happened. As the tyres touched the landing strip with only the tiniest puff of white smoke, emergency vehicles of every imaginable type raced on to the tarmac behind it, pursuing it in a speeding convoy of flashing lights.
The first vehicles to arrive as the plane rolled to a stop in the middle of the runway were a series of black trucks that formed a protective cordon around the plane. Men in body armour poured out of the rear doors as a mobile staircase was backed up to the plane’s forward hatch. The first man up the stairs opened the hatch and held it while the squad swept on to the plane, weapons raised. The scene on board was almost incomprehensible: there were unconscious bodies littering the aisles, and when they got to the President’s office it only got stranger. The President was sitting in his chair, and open on the desk in front of him was the nuclear ‘football’. On the floor was an unconscious young boy with snow-white hair who was wearing what looked like some sort of high-tech body armour. The President lifted his hands as far as he could, revealing that he was actually handcuffed to his chair.
‘Would one of you gentlemen be kind enough to get me out of these things?’ he asked.
‘Come in, I have something that I think you should see,’ Nero said, gesturing for Raven to sit down on the other side of the desk. A large screen slid down from the ceiling on the other side of his office.
‘This was recorded earlier, just before we arrived back at H.I.V.E.’ Nero said.
‘And now we go live to Kevin Harding, our Washington correspondent, who has the latest from Andrews Air Force Base,’ the studio bound newscaster said, ‘Kevin . . .’
‘Thank you, Kim,’ the reporter replied. Behind him was a wire fence and a gated military checkpoint. ‘There’s still no official word from the White House as to what might have caused today’s emergency landing of Air Force One, with a spokesman saying merely that contact with the plane had been lost due to “unforeseen technical difficulties”. The spokesman went on to say that the President and all of the other passengers on board were fine but were receiving medical checks just to be on the safe side after problems developed with the ventilation system on board during the transatlantic flight.’
The report cut to footage of the President leaving the medical centre on the base and waving to crowds of journalists as he walked to his waiting car.
The
reporter appeared on the screen again. ‘While it is still not clear what the exact nature of the technical fault that caused the emergency landing was, one of the passengers, who wished to remain nameless, was quoted as saying that it was “quite a ride”.’
‘Thanks, Kevin,’ the anchor replied with a smile. ‘More on that story as we have it. In other news today, the controversial unscheduled nuclear test in Nevada yesterday continues to spur speculation –’
Nero pressed a button on the remote and the newscaster froze in mid-sentence.
‘It didn’t crash,’ Raven said, sounding astonished.
‘Apparently not, which, assuming he was still on board, would suggest that Otto may still be alive,’ Nero said.
‘If he’s alive, I’m going to get him back,’ Raven said without hesitation.
‘Of course you are,’ Nero replied, ‘but first we have to find him. I have several of my sources within the US intelligence community working to establish Mr Malpense’s current status and location. Unfortunately, the security surrounding any details of this event is rather tight at the moment, but I hope to find out more soon.’
‘So they’re going to cover it all up.’
‘Yes, but that’s hardly surprising. They are, understandably perhaps, keen to keep the news that their entire country was seconds away from armageddon as quiet as possible. It isn’t the first time an event of this kind has been swept under the rug. As you well know, the vast majority of G.L.O.V.E.’s operations go unreported in the media. It isn’t in the security forces’ interests for people to know how often we are actually successful. G.L.O.V.E. may not have been responsible for this, not directly at least, but the principle is the same.’
‘What about these Disciples that Drake mentioned?’ Raven asked.