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.
“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.
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 and 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.
With mechanical precision, a heat-seeking missile dropped off its starboard wing, the chemical reaction of its rockets ignited, and it leapt away from the Sukhoi at incredible speed, zeroing in on the Red Arrow’s super-hot engines.
“Here they come!” someone shouted in the TOC, his voice carrying with it a wave of panic. All eyes now watched the wall board as the blinking digital representations of the NATO and Russian forces swept towards their own collision point.
In the air above Denmark, the squadron leader of the NATO planes checked in with his own commander.
“Roger that. We have a visual of the target.”
In the lead plane of the Russian forces, the squadron leader’s hands were slick with sweat as the gripped the control stick of the motherland’s newest fighter jet. Ahead of him, he could see the tiny silhouettes of two planes engaged in a dogfight, while beyond them was the swarming black mass of thirty more fighter jets.
NATO jets.
Enemy jets.
His orders were clear. Protect his comrade no matter the cost.
“All pilots,” he radioed. “Prepare to engage.”
All across the globe, those in power, those in the know, watched status screens, monitors and live video feeds of the turmoil in the skies above northern Europe.
The Russian President’s hands were shaking, despite his outwardly cool demeanour. History would judge him this day. The moment one of his fighter jets obeyed his orders and opened fire on a NATO plane, he would be plunging Russia, and the world, into war. Yet the alternative meant annihilation for his country.
It wasn’t supposed to have come to this. It should have been a quick snatch and grab operation. There would have been political fallout; diplomatic relations would have soured for a few months, just like those with China, but ultimately the status-quo would have been maintained, only this time with Russia holding all the aces.
Russia had to control the Moon Mask.
The American President watched the swarm of NATO forces that he had urged, pressured, even threatened, race towards an aerial collision with those of his nation’s age-old enemy.