“That’s right, Nate. Get your ass back to safety.”
“But—”
Raine heard someone speak to Langley, something about a ‘problem’ before his old commander snapped at him. “That’s an order!” He cut the communications link.
“What’s the problem?” Langley demanded from the young man who had interrupted him.
“Sir, NSA satellites have just picked up a large force of planes taking off from an airbase near Kaliningrad.”
Langley felt his heart skip a beat. A thousand shocked expressions threatened to tumble out of his mouth — What? Are they insane? Are you sure? Where are they headed? Maybe it’s a coincidence. Are they really going to intercept West? Would they actually open fire on a NATO squadron?
Instead, reverting to his military training, he turned to face the large wall map, his eyes focussing in on the tiny coloured block which represented the Kaliningrad Oblast. A tiny area of not even six thousand square miles, the Oblast, Russia’s western most extremity, was totally cut off from her motherland by the boarders of Poland to the south, Lithuania to the north and east, and the Baltic Sea to the west.
“Model and number?” he ordered.
“Intel coming in now.” There was a long pause. Too long. “Speak to me,” he demanded.
“Sukhoi Su-35.”
“Dear god,” Langley whispered to himself. The Su-35, he knew, was one of Russia’s latest additions to her military hammer. Easily a match one on one with an F-15 Eagle, the Su-35 was armed to the teeth with 30mm cannons, R-73 air-to-air missiles and an array of laser guided rockets and bombs.
“How many?” he asked.
“Looks like two squadrons, sir. Around thirty planes in all.”
So it was a one-on-one round to the death. “Take into account the top speeds of all the aircraft — West’s, ours and Russia’s — their current positions, and super-impose their trajectories on the map,” he ordered.
Moments later, CGI animation lit up the plasma screen display. Langley watched in horror as three lines drew menacingly away from the three dots that represented West’s plane, the NATO forces and the Russian interceptors. They cut across the map like a surgeon’s knife slicing through the flesh of the earth until they collided in one spot high above the nodule of land sticking up from the top of Germany: Denmark.
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.
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.
“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.”