“Scratch that bright idea off the list,” Sutton droned. “Now what are we supposed to do?”
No one answered. The group seemed to be at a loss.
But Reg had an idea, one that had been brewing ever since the battle above Jerusalem. He craned his neck back and studied the polished face of the jet-black tower. He noted that the large portal that allowed the alien attackers to pass in and out of the ship was still open. What would happen, he wondered, if I ducked inside? Since his Tornado obeyed a different set of aerodynamic principles than the attackers, which could come to a dead stop and still remain airborne, he could guess the most likely outcome: He would merely splatter himself against an internal wall or other immovable object. But the destroyer was now completely covering the city below, and unless something was done quickly to disrupt the alien attack, hundreds of thousands of lives would be lost.
As the other pilots in his group discussed their next move, Reg tuned them out and kept his eyes on the portal, wondering if he should take the risk of flying into the alien ship. The question wasn’t whether he would survive—that seemed unlikely—but whether he’d accomplish anything. In a way, it was the same question he’d been asking himself ever since the Gulf War. He’d spent the last several years in Saudi Arabia trying to work off the insurmountable debt he owed to the people of the area. Was the kamikaze mission he was contemplating a way of settling the score?
Shouting from the other pilots snapped him back into the present. The clicking noise had returned to the radio.
“We’re getting another message from the Americans,” Thomson told them. “It’s brief. Hold on a moment while we decode it.” Thirty seconds later, Thomson came back onto the airwaves. By that time, the destroyer had come to a dead stop above the city, centered over the Great Mosque. “Good news, excellent news. Finally, we have—”
“WHAT DOES IT SAY?”
“Right. Sorry about that. It says: Small missile strike against firing cone at center bottom causes chain-reaction explosion. Guarantees total kill.”
“A total kill, you say?”
“That’s what it says here,” Thomson assured them. “‘Guarantees total kill.’”
Yossi cracked a joke. “And we get our money back if we’re not one-hundred-percent completely satisfied, right?”
After a last glance at the open portal, Reg pointed the nose of his jet at the ground. “Follow me,” he called to the others. “Let’s go find that firing cone.”
As the group shed altitude and took a look at the underside of the destroyer, they realized that reaching the center would be no easy task. More than a hundred of the surviving alien fighters had massed themselves in the deep shadows and were flying in agitated circles, firing their pulse cannons down at the city. At the same time, the people of Mecca had no intention of going down without a fight. They’d installed dozens of surface-to-air missile stations and were using them with impunity. Their rockets flew straight up and smashed into the ship’s hard underbelly.
As they patrolled the perimeter of the gigantic ship and surveyed the scene, a set of enormous doors at the center of the ship began to retract. Soon, all of Mecca was bathed in the resplendent green light that spilled out of the destroyer’s interior.
“Listen up,” Reg said. “We’ve going to play follow the leader, and we’ve only got one chance to do it right. We’ll go in single file, fast and tight, nose to tail. I’ll take the point and keep the path clear until I’m out of ammunition. After that, Miriyam moves to the front. When she’s empty, you back there in the second Iraqi plane, what’s your name?”
“Mohammed.”
“I’ve been watching you. Nice shooting back there. Do you have any missiles left?”
“Yes, of course. I hate to waste them.”
“Excellent. You’re up third. The rest of you save your missiles for the target.”
“And then?” someone asked.
“If we’re not dead by then, we’ll think of something. Now fall in behind me,” he called, before leading them under the edge of the destroyer.
Even though the sun was beginning to set, the sudden transition from the light of the open sky to the oppressive gloom below the ship meant the pilots had to fly blind until their eyes adjusted. Maintaining his speed, Reg focused on the lowering hatch doors and the green light that showed between them. Entering the airspace under the destroyer was like flying into an enormous round room with no walls to hold up the ceiling. Reg stayed as high as he dared, only two hundred feet below the underside of the ship, which was studded with rectangular structures that looked like hanging storage containers. These large, boxlike structures were arranged in precise rows, and the gaps between them created a dizzying optical illusion of slow-motion movement as the jets raced past. Adding to the disorientation was the fact that the main source of light was the reflected green glare coming from the city below. This created the sensation of flying upside down over a dark industrial landscape.
Fighting through his own confusion, Reg steered his group gently away from oncoming bands of attackers, doing his best to conserve his weaponry. After destroying a handful of the attackers, he shouted, “I’m out! Miriyam, take over.”
The Israeli captain took a different approach. Instead of avoiding confrontations with the enemy planes, she steamrollered straight ahead and blasted everything that stood in her path. Very soon, the last of her missiles was spent, and she called for Mohammed to take over.
Just then, a surface-to-air missile streaked upward and demolished the Iraqi MiG carrying the last of Mohammed’s fellow countrymen. The young pilot took over the point position, but was clearly unnerved. He began veering off course, leading the team off course.
“Follow the street!” Reg coached, and it was obvious to everyone what he meant. The wide paths between the outcropping buildings above them formed wide, straight “boulevards” that ran from the edges of the ship to its center. Although the firing cone and the hanging doors were still miles away, the “street” was directly above and provided a clearly marked path to their destination.
Just as Mohammed regained his bearings, trouble came streaking toward him in the form of an alien attack squadron. A tightly clustered group of at least forty fighters was headed directly toward them. Mohammed hesitated for a moment, stricken with indecision. By the time he activated his missiles and sent them flying, he knew it was too late for the pilots behind him to fan out and try to slip past the onrushing enemy squadron. All nine of the missiles he’d fired connected with their targets, but the rest of the alien force continued toward him, firing their pulse cannons as they came. The balls of condensed energy sliced wildly through the air, narrowly missing Mohammed’s MiG. Acting on instinct, the young Iraqi shouted out an order to the rest of the crew.
“UP! UP! Pull up!”
Since they were already skimming the underside of the city destroyer, the other pilots couldn’t believe what they were hearing.
“There’s no more room,” yelled Sutton, who was flying in the second slot. “We’re up as far as we can go.”
But when Mohammed lifted away, giving him a clear look at the aliens bearing down on them, Sutton jerked back on his controls and followed the Iraqi pilot upward. One by one, the rest of the team quickly followed suit.
Besieged by a hailstorm of pulse blasts, and moving at close to Mach speed, Mohammed led them higher and higher until they were flying down the center of one of the so-called streets, which was barely wide enough to accommodate their wingspans. The hanging buildings on either side of them rushed past in a blur, the ceiling was only a few feet from the tops of their cockpit canopies, and more than one pilot was screaming at the top of his lungs. With a razor-thin margin of error, they held their collective breath and concentrated on steering straight down the narrow pathway until the attackers shot past them below.
When they ducked back into the open air, the alien squadron was well out of range, and they appeared to have an unobstructed path to the center of
the ship. As the pilots cursed and panted and wiped the sweat from their brows, Reg congratulated Mohammed. “That was a nifty bit of work, lad.”
“Nifty?” Tye asked, incredulous. “It was like flying through a shoe box. Remind me never to get into a coach with either one of you two maniacs.”
Mohammed stayed in the lead position, steering toward the gap between two of the giant hatch doors. The firing cone, visible beyond them, was now fully extended. In a matter of moments, its destructive power would pulverize Mecca.
“More bad news,” Sutton reported. “We’ve got a bogey ahead and to the left.”
Reg peered down and saw that, indeed, an aircraft was streaking upward at a steep angle into their path. But it wasn’t an alien attacker. It was a Saudi F-15.
Reg keyed his radio. “Commander Faisal, I thought you’d be halfway to Riyadh by now. Decided to come back and join us?”
“I have come to save my people!” he shouted back. Unfortunately, Faisal wasn’t traveling alone. He had picked up one of the alien attackers, and it was closing behind him.
“You’ve got company,” Reg told him. “There’s an attacker below and behind. Don’t bring him up here, we’re in position.”
“There is no time!” Faisal screamed back. An intense beam of white light was shooting from the tip of the firing cone, fixing itself on one of the tall minarets of the Great Mosque. “They are going to fire!”
Faisal continued on his course, oblivious to both the alien behind him and the fact that his trajectory conflicted with Reg’s squadron’s. When the other pilots recognized the danger he was putting them into, they shouted at him to lead the attacker away. Faisal jigged and juked as the attacker began to fire its pulse weapon, but maintained his bearing.
“He wants the first shot,” Khalid said. “He’s going to cut us off.”
“I’ll take care of this,” Reg said, diving out of line. He jammed the controls forward, milking every kilonewton of power from his twin turbofans. When he leveled off, he was right behind Faisal. “Turn off, Faisal!” Reg threatened.
“Shoot him down,” one of the pilots urged.
Reg was sorely tempted. He wasn’t actually out of missiles. He was still holding a Skyflash under his left wing, just in case. He sighted on Faisal’s F-15 and wrapped his hand tight around the grip trigger. But instead of downing the treacherous Saudi commander, he abruptly cut the fuel supply to his engines. Then he accelerated again as the alien fighter moved ahead of him. In a few seconds, he had positioned himself, locked on, and fired. The alien ship blew apart in a bright green flash.
Faisal jostled his way to the front of the line. To avoid a collision, Mohammed was forced to swing away only seconds before reaching the giant hatch doors. In order to shoot the gap and save himself, Mohammed swerved back toward the group, forcing everyone to decelerate. By the time they came into the clearing around the firing cone, Faisal’s missiles were already streaking away.
“Fire! Fire everything!” Reg yelled.
Scores of missiles shot toward the glittering weapon. Faisal’s AMRAAMs got there first and blew two large holes into the massive green structure. Debris rained into the sky. A moment later, when the other missiles struck, a chain reaction began to travel up the firing cone and into the body of the destroyer, just as the American communiqué had promised.
Reg looked up into the glowing recess of the ship. A massive open chamber surrounded the dangling gun tower. And through the blaze of the explosions, he caught a momentary glimpse of the destroyer’s interior: The central chamber was a single room approximately three miles across, with towering vertical walls. Hundreds more of the attacker ships were moored in clusters around the periphery. It looked like the inside of a high-tech beehive.
“It’s starting to blow; let’s get out of here!”
The quick series of muffled explosions that traveled up the pylon-shaped firing cone were giving way to stronger and stronger blasts. Shrapnel and smoke filled the air.
As the pilots turned and raced to get out from under the destroyer, there was a brief, dizzying moment when their planes appeared to lose speed and come to a dead stop. But it was only another optical illusion, caused when the destroyer above them began to move. With astonishing power, the megaship accelerated to high speed in only a matter of seconds. It quickly outpaced the jets, leaving them behind as it streaked away to the southeast. Just as it began to lift away, a massive explosion ripped through the top of the dome like a shotgun blast blowing through the top of a skull. It hobbled forward at reduced speed until an even larger explosion tore away its entire left side. Still moving, it began to list and sink toward the desert floor.
Cheering and screaming, the surviving pilots chased it out over the desert, emptying their guns and using the last of their missiles against the dying giant. Exploding from within, it lost momentum and finally plunged toward the earth. It bellied out on a rocky plateau, bounced once into the air, then slid for several miles before coming to rest in a huge cloud of dust.
Through it all, Reg maintained his calm, professional demeanor. As a wild celebration broke out in the air around him, he climbed to a higher altitude and scanned the darkening horizon. He checked his gauges and flipped through the various radio frequencies as if he were just finishing up another, day at the office. He couldn’t help taking a dim view of the disorderly air show going on below him. It went against every habit he had developed during his years as a teacher. Every channel was filled with deafening, whooping cries of victory. Ecstatic pilots flew barrel rolls and loop-the-loops over the burning wreckage, firing their guns recklessly as they went. Clenched fists pounded out their excitement on the walls and canopies of a hundred cockpits.
Reg tried to ignore them. He tried to remain calm. He fought against the urge to join the celebration for as long as he possibly could. But the revelry was infectious, and soon he was grinning from ear to ear. Then he found himself pumping his fist in the air.
“We did it!” he shouted. “I can’t believe it. We beat the bloody bastards!”
The giddy realization that they’d done the impossible, that they’d saved the planet from these seemingly invincible foes, surged through him all at once, and he found himself shouting and laughing along with the others. He got on the radio and added his voice to the sea of noise. He roared and laughed. He shouted until his throat was hoarse and his eyes were filled with tears, ecstatic that he was victorious and alive.
Order began to restore itself when Faisal began calling out a message in an enthusiastic tone of voice. He shouted happily back and forth in Arabic with some of the other pilots. Reg could tell he was delivering instructions of some sort, but the only thing he could understand was the name of a city—At-Ta‘if. By the time he found Khalid on the radio, Faisal was long gone.
“He says he’s already spoken to the king,” Khalid translated over the noise of the celebration. “We’re directed to land at At-Ta‘if because the king wants to congratulate all of us personally. There’s going to be a party.”
“I should bloody well hope so,” said someone with a Londoner’s accent.
“Is that you, Tye?” Reg asked. “I thought you’d be in Paradise with those seventy virgins by now.”
“Seventy-two, actually. No, not yet, Major. Maybe I’ve got nine lives. What say we get out of here and go see about this party with the king?”
“You go ahead. I’m going to wait for the smoke to clear so I can take another look at the ship, just to make sure. Did Sutton make it?”
“Hate to disappoint you, Major, but yes, I did,” Sutton said.
“Glad to hear it. You two follow the others to At-Ta‘if and warm things up for me.”
They pulled away, and Reg patrolled the sky, waiting for the evening winds to clear the dust and smoke away from the downed destroyer: He wasn’t alone. Twenty or thirty other pilots were also biding their time, flying laps around the crash site until they could inspect the kill. Khalid was one of them. He sounded hesitan
t and distracted over the radio, not like he’d just helped win a stunning victory.
“Khalid,” Reg said, “I thought you’d be off meeting the king by now. What’s the matter?”
“I’m worried about Faisal,” he explained. He reminded Reg that an hour before he’d disobeyed orders and deserted his squad during an attack. Even though it proved to be the right move, he didn’t know how Faisal would react.
“If Faisal’s as shrewd as I think he is,” Reg said, “he won’t want an investigation. He wasted the lives of a whole squadron. Besides, he got what he wanted. Mecca wasn’t destroyed, and now he’ll probably run around telling everyone that he’s personally responsible for saving it.” Reg chuckled at the idea. Khalid, who knew Faisal better, didn’t.
Reg thought about it for a minute and came up with an idea. He radioed Thomson, still at the tent in the Empty Quarter. Earlier, the colonel had mentioned that he was tape-recording their transmissions. “Thomson, do you think you can get me a copy of that tape?”
“I’m not sure,” he answered. “The tape doesn’t belong to me, and the equipment out here isn’t exactly state-of-the-art, but I can try. Any particular part of it?”
“The whole thing. And, Colonel, it’s important. See what you can do.”
“No promises, Cummins. I’ll see you at At-Ta‘if in a couple of hours. Word is that the Saudis have some planes coming to pick us up. We’re all a bunch of bloody heroes, mate.”
“Roger. See you there.”
The air over the destroyer began to clear. The sun had already extinguished itself in the Red Sea, but in the last lingering light of day, Reg and the others saw what was left of the ship. To their dismay, they noticed that roughly a quarter of it was still intact. When it hit the ground, the whole vehicle had splintered, cracked into millions of pieces the same way a car’s windshield breaks during a collision. Like tempered glass, it sagged in places but still retained some structural integrity.
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