In eight minutes all three forces would collide.
And if the diplomats couldn’t put out the resulting wildfires, all hell would be loosed upon earth, the Moon Mask be damned.
Airborne over Europe
High in the air above Northern Europe, sixty four planes tore through the skies, racing towards an apocalyptic collision. Thirty F-15 Eagles, manned by multi-national crews from thirteen different countries hurtled towards thirty two Russian Sukhoi Su-35s, all with their sights set on one Sukhoi Su-30, carrying one Russian pilot, an American defector, and a case containing a simple piece of metal, moulded by an ancient culture into a shape resembling the human face. It was in itself unambiguous enough. Yet, even before its secrets had been cracked and the power of the tachyon harnessed, its mere existence threatened to plunge humanity into a potential world war.
The only man who had the ability to stop it realised so as the update was fed to him from the other side of the globe. If the fleeing aircraft could be knocked out of the sky before the two opposing task forces of warplanes intercepted one another, then maybe a catastrophe could be averted.
But that same pilot flew a plane without any weapons, designed to perform aerial acrobatics to swoon crowds of spectators, not to engage a heavily armed fighter jet- and that was if he could even catch up with it. His engines were already being pushed harder than safety limits recommended to keep within visual range of the fleeing plane, and his body was already being pummelled by gravitational forces the likes of which it wasn’t designed to withstand.
Nevertheless, coaxing just a little more out of the screaming engines, Nathan Raine pushed faster; the G-force crushed his lungs and pounded his skull, the engines burned furiously, and the Red Arrow began to close the gap.
United Nations Headquarters,
New York City, USA
“What the hell are you playing at, Sergei?” Langley demanded into the telephone receiver.
“I should ask you the same thing, Mister Ambassador,” his old sparring partner, Sergei Dityatev, replied, his ire equal to Langley’s own.
Just about everyone who was anyone was involved in the escalating crisis now. The U.S. and Russian Presidents were currently embattled in a teleconference; the UN Security Council was being hastily assembled; the NATO Supreme Commanders, the British Prime Minister, even the Chinese Premier, were all hurriedly rushing to their respective defence departments even while they hurled accusations of foul plan and treachery at one another. The delicate tapestry of world-wide politics was slowly starting to pull apart. But even within the UN and NATO alliance, no one could decide what action should be taken, nor who could authorise it. In a matter of minutes, the Supreme NATO Commander had threatened to recall the force sent to intercept the Moon Mask rather than sanction a hastily and un-thought-out aerial battle with Russian forces. Wars just didn’t happen this fast! There were discussions and hearings and meetings; there were votes, there were sanctions, there were diplomatic pressures. One didn’t just go to war in the space of less than an hour.
Yet the seriousness of the danger posed by the Moon Mask could not be ignored. NATO and the UN couldn’t just go to war on a whim. Yet neither could they allow control of the tachyon technology to disappear into the depths of Russia.
“Order your planes back, Sergei,” Langley urged forcefully.
“Hah!” the Russian Ambassador to the UN laughed. He had snuck out of the Secretariat Building sometime over the last hour and returned to his embassy. “Our planes are there as a direct response of your actions. You have sent thirty of your warplanes to shoot down one Russian jet that has done nothing wrong!”
“Nothing wrong?”
“Nothing wrong!” Langley could hear the fury and the mock-indignation in the ambassador’s voice. “That plane has an authorised flight plan to travel from Britain to Russia. It was in Britain by invitation, to take part in some fly over or display or some such. It was a guest.”
“It was there specifically to pick up the Moon Mask.”
“The Moon Mask is on board that plane?” Sergei made a poor attempt at playing innocent.
“Don’t bullshit me, Sergei. We both know what’s at stake here-”
“Very well, Alex, I shall not ‘bullshit you’, as you so eloquently put it. Yes, the timing of your team’s mission to the British airbase worked out perfectly. We had a legitimate reason to have a plane there, so we took advantage of the opportunity.” He paused a second to collect himself. “Did you really think my government would sit idly by and let the United States claim the Moon Mask for themselves? Did you really think we would sit in Moscow quaking in fear while we watched you build a tachyon bomb, thus confirming your self-appointed place as rulers of this planet? Hah! We cannot allow that. Already, you Americans have too much control. Already you decide the fate of nations so far removed from your own: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. You send your soldiers in, and you send your bombers in! You hide behind the emblem of the United Nations, but really it is the United States that holds the true power.”
“I’m not here to debate Iraq with you, Sergei. I’m here to stop a war!”
“If we stop a war, then we invite a holocaust!”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” Langley had tuned out of the chaos in the Tactical Operations Centre, focussing entirely on his counterpart’s words.
“For the Russian people, Alex, it is far better for us to go to war, than to allow America to become the world’s first and only Tachyon Power. Look what happened when you became a nuclear power. Look at Hiroshima! Look at Nagasaki!”
“Mistakes,” Langley cut in. “Bloody ones, yes. But ones we have learned from.”
“Hah!”
“It is irrelevant anyway, Sergei. This is a United Nations mission. The Moon Mask will come under the control of the UN, of which Russia is a part. Whatever decisions are made about it, Russia will have a say in. What, if any, scientific knowledge or technological advancement is made from it, Russia will be a full partner in, just like the US, just like Great Britain, and France-”
“Now you are ‘bullshitting’ yourself, Alex.” His harsh words cut through to Langley. “The United States never had any intention of sharing this knowledge. That is why you sent an American team to find the mask.”
“There was a unanimous decision to send the team that was already involved. That happened to be an American team, yes. But there are representatives from other countries on it, Russia among them.”
“The woman scientist? Hah! She is no Russian. She is a traitor. The daughter of a traitor.” Then Sergei sighed. There was a sense of defeatism in him and Langley felt a swell of hope. He glanced at the wall map. The lines were drawing ever nearer to intersecting. Is this the countdown to World War Three? he wondered.
“You are a good man, Alex,” Sergei continued softly. “I like you. But, I am sorry to say, you are an American. Whatever you believe is right, whatever you believe is wrong, America will claim the Moon Mask for herself. Think about it, Alex. How do you think your government even knew about the tachyon radiation? They sent a team to Venezuela to retrieve the mask long before it even came to our attention.”
“I-”
But Sergei didn’t let him speak. “You are an American. You are a member of your president’s cabinet-”
“I have taken an oath to the United Nations.”
“As have I. And yet, man’s most important oath is to his country. This is why I have ‘betrayed’ you Alex. And this is why you will betray me.”
The resignation in the other man’s voice was like the toll of death falling. Langley felt his legs give out from under him and he slumped into a chair against the desk. His eyes drifted up reluctantly to the wall map. Someone had decided to include a timer, a countdown, on the lower right hand corner. It read ‘3 mins, 34 secs’. The trajectories of the three groups of planes crept painstakingly closer. His eyes drifted to the small blinking dot which represented the commandeered
Red Arrow. It was closing the gap between itself and West’s plane, but Langley knew that was a lost cause too. Raine’s plane was weapon-less.
Yet, he should have known that he wouldn’t give up. Nathan Raine never gave up.
His thoughts wondered to Raine’s last mission in charge of the SOG team. He thought back to his subsequent discussions, his interrogation, his court martial hearings.
“We hereby find Major Nathanial Raine guilty of treason,” the judge’s voice still echoed in his head. And he was right. Nathan Raine had committed a gross act of treason against his country and was justifiably sentenced to a lifetime in prison.
And yet . . .
“You’re wrong Sergei,” he spoke into the receiver again. “A man’s most important oath is not to his country. It is to his conscience.”
With that, he hung up and rose to his feet, full of new-found resolve. He looked at the wall map again. 3 mins, 7 secs.
There was still time.
There was still hope.
There was still Nathan Raine.
42:
Supernova
Airborne over Europe
Nathan Raine didn’t even realise he was screaming as he flew the Red Arrow at phenomenal speed towards the growing dot that represented the afterburners of the Sukhoi Su-30.
The pain was awesome, fast approaching ten G’s, enough to kill a man. Every muscle in his body was tensed but nevertheless he could feel his blood draining. His vision began to tunnel, the clouds streaking by over, above and around the cockpit canopy. His ears rang loudly, a shrill and painful din, caused by his own scream of agony, frustration and adrenaline.
He’d flown faster than this before, but never without an anti-gravity suit. He remembered his training; he’d been flown up to five Gs by a burly, cock-sure instructor who was notorious for making his trainees black out in moments. Raine didn’t black out, though he did feel as though a sumo-wrestler had slam dunked him two dozen times.
But it was nothing compared to this.
The actual plane model was a BAE Hawk T1A whose maximum safe speed was around 600 mph. It could push to 800, but by burning off most of the fuel in his tank to lighten the load, Raine had coaxed it up to just shy of 1,000 mph. He knew the display plane was designed to withstand expert pilots pulling and pushing it at high velocity but he knew it wouldn’t withstand much more of this.
Nor would he.
“He’s closing on us,” the pilot’s voice crackled into West’s headset.
West sat in the co-pilot seat, clutching the lead-lined rucksack as though his life depended on it. Luckily, the pilot had thought to make sure there was an anti-g suit ready for him, though wriggling into it in the cockpit hadn’t been too easy.
The pilot had been tracking what he assumed was Nathan Raine pursuing in a Red Arrow since leaving Britain, but rather than wasting time shooting down an unarmed display plane, they’d decided to push on and rendezvous with the Russian squadron out of Kaliningrad. They could take care of him then.
“He’s climbing. I am going to shoot him down.”
“Don’t worry about him, buddy,” West said, his strong Brooklyn accent startlingly dissimilar to the pilot’s Russian accent. “He can’t do anything without-”
The thud was loud and thunderous. The plane lurched to the side, the wings wobbling from port to starboard as the pilot struggled to keep control. A dark shadow loomed above and when West looked up he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“He’s fucking insane!”
The underside of the Red Arrow was less than a meter above the canopy of the larger Sukhoi, the smaller plane’s length fitting above the Russian’s fuselage but in front of its tail. And the crazy son-of-a-bitch had just lowered down and struck the canopy with the underside of his own plane. How either pilot had managed to maintain control was incredible, but West had bigger concerns.
“Shoot him down!” he screamed.
“He’s too close!” Even if a heat-seeker swept around and hit the Red Arrow, the explosion would engulf them too.
“He’s coming down again!”
“Hold on!”
Moments before the underside of Raine’s plane would have struck the Sukhoi’s canopy for a second time, the Russian pilot drop away from under him, nose down as he dived. But Raine had been waiting for that- hoping for it even. He had barely managed to keep control of the Arrow after his first ‘gentle bump’ and wasn’t confident he could do so again. Even the extraordinarily responsive Red Arrows weren’t meant to fly that close to another plane.
Raine matched the Russian’s move, lurching the Arrow forward into a stomach-lurching nose dive. He kept close to the top of the Sukhoi, both to prevent the other pilot from trying to level out and to prevent him getting a heat-seeking missile lock on him.
He was no fool. This was the ultimate David Versus Goliath showdown. The moment the Sukhoi let loose a weapon he was done for. His only weapon was his own manoeuvrability. And imagination.
The two planes plummeted towards the ground. The coast of Denmark came into view and Raine could sense the Russian pilot’s rising panic. With the Red Arrow preventing him from levelling his descent, he suddenly realised he was going to plummet straight into the ground.
The ground rushed towards them faster and faster. Desperate, the Russian pilot began to pull up. Raine could do nothing but spin the Arrow into a barrel-roll and twist away. He levelled up close to the ground and shot forward. The Sukhoi similarly had managed to avoid destruction and with a roar of its afterburners it shot towards a distant line of mountains.
Raine stayed close and fast, matching West’s plane move for move. He stayed on their tail as the mountain range grew around them. The Russian pulled up the steep sided slope of the closest face and Raine mimicked the manoeuvre. But, unexpectedly, the Russian continued flying up and over into a wide arc, a loop-de-loop, and before Raine could even register what had happened, a missile burst forward from one of its wings and streaked towards him.
United Nations Headquarters,
New York City, USA
“What’s happening?” Langley demanded as he suddenly noticed the erratic behaviour of Raine and West’s planes. They were no longer moving towards the expected ‘collision’ point with the Russian and NATO planes but had instead dropped down, almost to sea level.
“Updating intercept time,” someone called and Langley noticed the countdown on the wall screen suddenly change. 3 mins, 57 secs.
Whatever Raine had done, he’d just bought them all some extra time.
Airborne over Europe
Raine was out of time!
The missile screamed towards him even as he flew up the pine-clad slope of the mountainside. He pulled hard on the control stick, more out of instinct than any rational reason, and the Red Arrow responded immediately, cart-wheeling away from the mountain just as the missile struck his previous position. A pluming explosion of rock and burning tree trucks burst out from the mountainside but Raine ignored the destruction as he flew headlong towards the Sukhoi.
“Shoot him! Shoot the bastard!” West practically screamed at his pilot.
This time, the Russian did. He pulled the trigger on the 30mm nose mounted cannon and spewed forth a hailstorm of bullets at the bright red plane.
Raine tipped his port wing and dropped in altitude, plummeting out of the path of the bullets. He regained control but West’s pilot wasn’t going to give up so easily. He dipped his nose and aimed the trail of bullets after Raine’s plane. They missed. Just.
Raine opened the throttle to its fullest extent and felt the sudden increase in g-force slam him back into his seat. The Red Arrow shot forward. He worked the control stick, banked around-
The Russian was there, trailing a line of bullets.
Raine hit the deck, dropping so close to the ground that his engines scorched the earth. Bullets tore up dirt and chattered through trees, splintering them, but the Russian plane overshot a
nd flew out to the west, back over the sea.
Raine twisted the controls and felt the rush of adrenaline. This was real flying, the seats-of-your-pants kind of stuff that he’d missed since leaving the Special Operations Group. He wasn’t a man who felt fear often, and when he did, he simply punched through it.
Like now.
Instead of high-tailing it out of there and waiting for the cavalry, he pulled back hard on the control stick, tipping the plane’s nose up into the sky and he climbed at a phenomenal rate before going past the point of no return and flipping over on himself. But instead of following through the loop, he broke out of it, aimed for the fleeing Sukhoi and began a lateral run.
“Who is this man?” West’s Russian pilot demanded. “He’s coming about and chasing us again!”
“I told you, he’s crazy,” West snapped. “So crazy that he’ll attack us again, even without any weapons. Finish him off, buddy, then get us the hell outta here.”
Less than three hundred feet above the choppy sea off the coast of Denmark, the Sukhoi banked sharply about and, like a bull charging a matador, thundered towards the defenceless Red Arrow. But despite the demonic demeanour of the black plane’s predatory presence, the Red Arrow’s course did not falter. Its booming engines echoed through the air as it sped towards its prey. Like combatants in a medieval jousting competition, both planes hurtled headlong towards a point of collision, their sharp, beak-like noses the javelins of the modern age.
But the Russian had no intention of playing fair.
Moon Mask Page 44