“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
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.