Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  “I’ve done what I always do, Nate,” Langley replied sombrely. “What needed to be done.”

  “Those planes aren’t American, are they?” Raine accused.

  “I imagine they are Chinese, launched from the deck of the Shi Lang.”

  “And how the hell would the Chinese know about the Eldridge?”

  Langley looked at him, eyes open and honest. “I told them. In a manner of speaking at least.”

  “Are you insane?” Raine demanded.

  Langley bristled. “If we fail to sabotage the Eldridge, the Chinese will succeed in sinking it.”

  “At the cost of hundreds, thousands, of lives . . . on both sides! Innocent lives-”

  “Soldiers, Nate!” Langley snapped. “Sailors. Men and women who have taken an oath to protect their respective countries at any cost!”

  “Honest men and women who deserve better than to be sacrificed as pawns in your game!”

  “This is no game! This is war!”

  “Sir,” the pilot cut in. “The George Washington is launching.”

  All eyes turned back to the scene below. The George Washington Carrier Strike Group was composed of six vessels- two missile cruisers, the Port Royal and the Gettysburg; two destroyers, the Roosevelt and the Porter; one Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine, the Olympia, no doubt stalking beneath the waves; and the USS George Washington herself.

  The Nimitz-class super-carrier was over a thousand feet long and was a veritable floating city, armed to the teeth. One such armament was the eighty F/A-18E Super Hornet fighters currently blazing away from the launch deck and thundering into the sky to protect the seventh ship, temporarily attached to the strike group; the USS Eldridge.

  They all watched in silence as the immense swarm of killing machines roared into a defensive pattern around the Eldridge, racing to meet the forty J-15 Flying Sharks launched from the deck of the Shi Lang.

  “Can they see us?” King asked nervously as the pilot slowed the Black Cat into a circle high above the developing sea-borne chess board unfolding below.

  “We’re totally invisible to them,” Langley confirmed.

  “Only until we begin our descent,” the pilot added anxiously. “Then they’ll be all over us like a rash. The Yanks and the Chinkys.”

  “Look!” Bill suddenly announced. Despite getting a much clearer indication of the situation on the radar, they all looked through the window to the west where forty dots of light powered towards them.

  Then the first shot was fired.

  It was distant. Quiet. A rumble not unlike thunder. A flash not unlike lightning. But before they knew it, a second shot was fired, then a third, and then above the speck of light that was the Eldridge, all hell broke loose. The Chinese Sharks and the American Hornets smashed their weapons into one another with unabashed abandon. Flashes of flame as aircraft exploded lit up the sky and reflected on the black waves.

  “You’ve created a bloody massacre!” Raine spat at Langley.

  Langley’s eyes were dark. “And yet, all we need is for one stray missile to slam into the Eldridge and this is all over.”

  “Why don’t we just fire a missile at it, instead of boarding it?” King asked.

  “We used up all our missiles in Jamaica,” Bill replied curtly.

  “We’re currently above the Mariana Trench,” Langley explained, “the deepest place on earth. The Phoenix File indicated that following the disaster at Philadelphia, the powers-that-be insisted that should anything go wrong this time, with the entire Moon Mask assembled, they wanted a failsafe.” He glanced at each man in turn. “What we need to do is activate that fail safe. Sink the ship . . . sink the Moon Mask. Simple.”

  “Simple?” the pilot questioned. Raine noticed beads of sweat running down his neck. “There’s a goddamn war going on above that ship! We’ll never get through all those fighters-”

  “Maybe you won’t,” Langley agreed. “But I know a man that will.”

  He turned his head and looked into the intense blue eyes of Nathan Raine. The CIA’s Special Operations Group was made up of only the best of the best; chosen from Delta Force, the Army Rangers and the Navy Seals. But Nathan Raine had excelled, at a young age, even among their ranks, becoming the youngest SOG team commander in the history of the organisation. Langley felt a pang of regret that his relationship with his former student was now over. But, he didn’t have a shadow of a doubt that if anyone could get them onto that ship, it was him.

  With a dramatic sigh of exasperation, Raine patted the pilot on the shoulder and took his place at the controls. “Okay, everybody might want to buckle up! This ain’t gonna be pretty!”

  There was a mad scramble as everyone rushed to find a seat and securely strap themselves in. The former pilot took the co-pilot’s seat, wrapped his harness around him, took a gold-plated crucifix from around his neck and kissed it as Raine pulled up on the steering yoke, climbing the Black Cat up to her service ceiling, high above the clouds.

  “Quit slobbering on that thing and give me a hand, will you?” he snapped at his co-pilot as he manoeuvred into range directly above the Eldridge’s position. “What’s your goddamn name, soldier?”

  “Godfrey,” the man replied, beads of sweat on his forehead.

  “Means ‘God’s Peace’, right?” The man nodded vigorously. Raine shrugged casually. “Could probably do with some of that right now. Hold on!”

  With that warning, Nathan Raine pulled hard on the steering yoke of the Black Cat and sent her into a gut wrenching nose dive. She shot down, as though little more than a bullet fired from a gun, her engines roaring.

  Raine grasped the controls tightly as they ploughed into the thick cloud bank. Moisture splattered across the windshield, obscuring his view until the wipers swished it away. A fork of lightning arced through the miasma, chased by a roll of thunder as the gathering storm finally hit its crescendo.

  Then they broke the cloud cover. Howling wind slammed into the plane and Raine struggled to keep her course steady and true. Rain slashed at them but, below, the darkness of the storm-tossed ocean was lit up by the dogfights of one hundred and twenty planes. Some spat bullets, others missiles. Some twisted and spun out of projectiles paths, others exploded, hurling flaming debris in all directions. But directly below them was the Eldridge and numerous Chinese Sharks swept towards her, firing missiles which so far had been intercepted by the U.S. Hornets.

  But none of the rights and wrongs of the situation could cloud Raine’s mind now. He was focussed on one thing and one thing only: reaching his destination.

  They shot straight down, the G-force tugging at the five men on board. Raine felt the rush of blood to his head, the pulsing of his eyeballs that felt like they were about to explode. Behind him, he heard King call out and pictured him pinned to his seat, pounded by the crushing force of gravity.

  Before he knew it, the swarm of aircraft that had seconds ago been so small, so infinitesimal, loomed large and ominous before them, blocking their path to the ship. One plane was almost directly below them and unless it moved out of their path the collision was going to blow them all to hell.

  And then all of a sudden the plane, Hornet or Shark he couldn’t tell, erupted into a fireball as Bill, strapped into the machine gun turret at the nose of the Black Cat, opened fire. Hundreds of bullets thundered out in seconds as the former SASR soldier held the trigger tight and never let go. A stream of fiery tracer bullets pounded relentlessly down on anything that crossed their path. Planes erupted all around them, up above, down below, to either side. Rain lashed, wind howled, the upper deck of the Eldridge raced to meet them and then, at the last possible moment, Raine pulled back and to the right on the steering yoke.

  The Black Cat struggled to break out of her nose dive and this time it was Raine who was screaming a manic war cry as, aided by Godfrey, he wrenched the yoke back as far as possible.

  The Eldridge grew to immense size, blocking out the ocean a
nd the war zone. Still, Bill fired, more out of instinct than reason, and the tracer bullets pinged off the ship’s deck in flashes of sparks.

  They were going to hit!

  It became a near certainty in Raine’s mind and he knew it was echoed in the thoughts of all the others. The dive had been too steep, too fast, and the Black Cat’s engines couldn’t break the unrelenting grasp of gravity.

  But then she broke free!

  The nose pulled up, breaking out of the vortex of rain and fire. Raine felt control return at the last possible moment. Inch by inch, they levelled out but the ship’s deck still swamped them. It was everywhere. Dull gun-metal grey. Blank, flat, smooth, just like he had seen on the ship’s schematics.

  He twisted to starboard and the plane, still losing altitude, raced over the deck. Just as she cleared the ship, Raine heard a faint screech of metal and the controls tugged to one side. He tugged back, kept them steady, and they dropped over the side of the ship and slammed into the black water. The angle was still too sharp, the speed still too fast and the impact was jarring. His restraints crushed his chest, blasting the wind from his lungs. The Black Cat’s nose ploughed beneath the waves, water rushed into the engines, stalling them, but then the nose broke the surface and the Flying Boat settled into the ocean.

  Silence hung in the plane for a moment as all five men caught their breath and thanked their gods. Above them, beyond the behemoth mass of the Eldridge’s hull, the aerial battle still raged, but, for now, their attentions were focussed on something closer at hand.

  It was Raine who broke the silence with an adrenaline-fuelled whoop of relief.

  “Let’s do that again!”

  58:

  Eldridge

  USS Eldridge,

  Pacific Ocean

  Having cast the Black Cat adrift upon the storm-tossed ocean, Benjamin King followed Raine and Langley up the access ladder bolted to the side of the Eldridge. The metal rungs were slippery and his cold, wet hands numb as he scrambled up behind them, Bill and Godfrey bringing up the rear.

  They paused for a second as Langley reached the top of the ladder and swung onto the main deck. King glanced behind him at the ocean. Despite being lit by the flashes of fire from the battle raging overhead and the lightning streaking through the clouds, the Black Cat had almost completely vanished into the darkness of night. Raine had explained that they couldn’t tether it to the Eldridge as the waves would crash her into the much larger vessel. They would just have to swim for her once the mission was completed.

  But Benjamin King had no intention of getting off this ship.

  Not in any conventional way at least.

  In fact, if things worked out as he planned, he would make it so that he never set foot upon her in the first place.

  “Benny, come on!” Raine hissed down to him. He too was now on the main deck, leaning back over to break into his reverie.

  “Move it, King,” Bill spat angrily from beneath.

  King pushed himself into motion, scrambled the rest of the way up the ladder and allowed Raine and Langley to help him over the safety barrier and onto the deck.

  “You okay?” Raine asked worriedly. Langley, no longer the grandfatherly old U.N. Ambassador but a highly trained Special Forces soldier, knelt before them, scanning the eerily featureless deck of the ship. The only thing that broke the barren metal landscape was the command superstructure in the middle. There, King knew, was where the running of the ship was handled. The bridge, he assumed, was at the top, with other critical sections on the decks beneath, right down to the one upon which he now stood. Below him though, he knew, except for a single control room at the rear, the hull was little more than a hollow tube. A particle accelerator built into the heart of a U.S. Navy warship!

  “I’m fine,” he answered Raine’s question.

  Bill scrambled stealthily onto the deck. “I told you we should have left him on the plane,” he hissed angrily at Langley, indicating King. “He’s gonna get us all killed.”

  Langley glanced at him. “As I recall, he managed to survive, and escape from, you,” he replied. “He’ll be fine.”

  As Godfrey joined them on the deck, they spread out, creeping along the barrier towards the superstructure.

  “Stay close to me,” Raine whispered to King.

  But Benjamin King had no intention of doing so.

  USS George Washington,

  Pacific Ocean

  Admiral Donald S. Harriman sat on the bridge of the enormous aircraft carrier, listening to the reports coming in from the aerial battle and forcing himself not to display any of the astonishment he felt.

  In almost thirty years of service, Harriman had never witnessed such astonishing events. Indeed, he felt certain that the aerial battle raging above was to be the first of a war between China and the United States. A war into which the rest of the world would inevitably be drawn.

  And yet the situation was all very peculiar.

  As a commander of a Carrier Strike Group, Harriman had of course been kept apprised of the deteriorating relations with China over the last days. But instead of being ordered to patrol the coast off China, or to return to the West Coast of the States as he might have expected, he had been ordered to play bodyguard to an experimental ship which he knew nothing about. A ship for which, without any of the usual political deliberation that he would expect, he had been ordered to fire upon and destroy any and all intruders into their designated area to protect. He couldn’t believe that such orders could be sanctioned, yet the President had personally spoken to him via a live satellite feed.

  None of it made any sense.

  A sudden flurry of activity dragged Harriman out of his thoughts.

  “Admiral, sir,” a voice snapped from one of the bridge consoles. “I have a new radar contact. Two planes, coming in fast from the north. They’re incredibly low over the water, sir, only about two meters above-” The radar operator cut himself off. “I’ve lost them sir!”

  “What do you mean ‘you lost them’?” Harriman demanded, rising to his feet and coming up behind the young sailor.

  “They just hit the water, sir . . .” The young man turned and looked at him, face pale. “They’re gone.”

  Beneath the Pacific Ocean

  The two MR-18 Ushakovs ploughed beneath the surge of the Pacific.

  The impact was shockingly hard and Nadia Yashina struggled not to cry out as her X-shaped restraints dug into her breast. In the seat in front of her, her pilot worked the controls which switched the dart-shaped vessel’s jet engines from their conventional configuration to water-jets. The intense heat instantly vaporised the water, working to both cool the engines while using the jettisoned steam to propel it through the water.

  Named for Boris Ushakov who had headed the engineering project of a ‘flying-submarine’ during World War Two, the MR-18 was the final realisation of that dream, seventy years in the making. It was also one of the few modern day triumphs for Russia to have finalised a working craft while the U.S. still struggled to get their own design off the drawing board.

  This was their first operational test.

  Streams of air bubbles flew up over the sharp nose of the submerged aircraft and rather than the thunderous roar of jet engines that had deafened her moments ago, she was now submerged in the womb-like silence beneath the stormy seas.

  She looked ahead, through the thick glass of the cockpit and the dark swirling waters of the Pacific towards her destination. Her redemption. Her salvation.

  She had told Nathan Raine no lie when she had told him about the night the soldiers had come to her home, killed her family, raped and tortured her. The scars adorning her body were genuine. The attack had been all too real. All too frightening.

  She had, however, omitted her shame.

  Her father was a traitor.

  She was the daughter of a traitor.

  The punishment was justified. The scars served as a reminder of th
e shame her father had brought upon her family.

  During her tenure at Moscow University, her genius level IQ came to the attention of those in power. She had been recruited into a top-secret program, designed to breed a new generation of what were described to her as ‘warrior-scientists’. The face of war had changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Brute force and nuclear deterrents weren’t going to keep the Motherland safe in the ‘Digital-Age’.

  Alongside earning her degree, Nadia also underwent intensive training by Spetsnaz soldiers. She had been deployed on a handful of missions under the ‘guise’ of a gap-year following her studies, but her superiors’ main interest lay in the work her father was doing on tachyons. Tachyon-energy, she had told them, could be used for so much more than creating a near inexhaustible energy supply for Russia. It could be used for so much more than even developing a bomb of awesome destructive power.

  Tachyons were the key to unlocking time itself.

  But her father would not share this knowledge with Russia. Instead, when they tried to take it by force, the ignorant pig had destroyed all his research.

  That night, the soldiers had come. Days later, Nadia had fled the wrath of Russia and sought political asylum in the arms of her enemy, Great Britain. There, she had rebuilt her life, knowing that she could never again step foot on Russian soil. An exile until the day she died. All because of her father’s misguided sense of pride and honour.

  But that had all changed in her lab on the summit of Sarisariñama when she had detected tachyons being emitted from the Moon Mask. It was her key to redemption.