Russia must not control the Moon Mask.
In the skies above the coast of Denmark, squashed between two forces of advanced warplanes closing at colossal speed, a single Red Arrow flew straight and true, directly towards the heat-seeking missile which raced towards his engines. It had launched only a second ago, yet for Nathan Raine it had felt like an eternity. He hadn’t had chance to ponder his position, to consider the sixty savage beasts waiting to hurl themselves at one another, closing all the time. Nor had he even realised that the fate of the world rested on his shoulders. The politics of nations, the power plays of world leaders, the gesturing of political forces never entered his head. They didn’t matter.
Raine’s world had focussed down to him, the Russian, and the missile that lay between them.
In the blink of an eye, moments before the missile struck, Raine yanked the steering yoke, spinning the Red Arrow into a barrel roll. The missile shot past. Raine dived. The missile re-established its lock, swung about. The Russian plane banked and began to climb. Raine pulled back, sweeping the Arrow up towards the underbelly of his more-powerful prey. The missile followed, trailing a streamer of smoke.
The Russian and NATO planes grew larger all around, the roar of their engines deafening.
West’s pilot realised Raine’s plan and flipped his own plane expertly to port. The Red Arrow shot up past its cockpit and West realised he must have been hit because he was trailing smoke.
Raine spun the Red Arrow on its axis, a barrel-roll as he climbed over the Sukhoi’s cockpit then levelled out. The smoke was thick and intense, clogging and all encompassing. The Russian pilot found himself temporarily blind.
“Why’s the smoke red?” West heard himself ask.
The Sukhoi dropped slightly as the pilot tried desperately to escape the cloud of bright red smoke which now engulfed them. From the ground, the scene far overhead looked as incredible as it did bizarre as the Red Arrow released its tanks of coloured vapour, usually used to swoon crowds of spectators as they criss-crossed through the sky. But now the Arrow had dumped its load over the canopy of the Sukhoi’s cockpit and the split second it took the Russian plane’s disoriented pilot to realise what was happening was all that was needed.
The heat-seeking missile pierced the cloud of red smoke and, the Sukhoi having drifted, blinded, into its path, drove itself into the underbelly of the plane!
Raine screamed loudly, a roar of adrenaline, pain and fear as he threw the Red Arrow away from the blossoming cloud of destruction. It looked as though a nebula was bursting into life above Denmark as the cloud of smoke billowed outwards like a supernova.
“Target is down, I repeat, target is down!” The NATO squadron leader yelled urgently into his radio.
A similar report, relayed from the Russian commander, echoed through the speakers of the Russian president’s office but he was already in motion, grabbing the radio and screaming into it. “Abort! Abort!”
The command was echoed through the channels, from presidents, supreme commanders, generals and ultimately to the pilots of both forces.
Just as sixty-two warplanes converged on the blossoming explosion that marked the position of their target, they veered away at the last possible moment. Their engines boomed as the two opposing forces weaved in and out of one another, so close that the pilots of their respective counterparts could be seen through the cockpit canopies of their fighters. It was a thunderous melee of deadly, terrifying machines designed for the sole purpose of bringing death and destruction to one another, yet not a single bullet was fired.
Instead, as though they had passed through a storm cloud, all the planes swept out from the tangle of metal that could easily have been the ignition point of a third world war and powered away from one another.
“What did I tell you,” Gibbs barked at Robertson in the O.C. of RNAS Culdrose, raising his voice to be heard over the collective sounds of relief from the staff that had watched the events closely. “You’ll get your plane back in one piece.”
“Mayday, mayday,” a voice crackled over the speakers as if on cue. Nathan Raine. “I’m going down, I repeat, I’m going down.”
Whatever burning chunk of debris had hit the tail of the Red Arrow had obliterated its engines. Raine banked about shallowly and headed out over the coast. Already he could feel his altitude dropping and his speed dipping. Nevertheless, the plane’s own momentum still had it travelling at close to four hundred miles an hour as it cleared the west coast of Denmark and dropped towards the glistening blue that raced by underneath.
“I’m bailing out.” He fed his coordinates to the operator at Culdrose, then reached down and pulled the eject lever. A small chemical explosion catapulted the canopy from the top of the plane and Raine barely had time to register the sudden rush of wind that hit him as he and the pilot’s seat were shot out from the dying bulk of the plane and launched into the air. The parachute plumed open instants later and he watched as the sleek Red Arrow slammed into the ocean, crumpling on impact. It bobbed there for a moment, buoyant, before its own weight and its flooded cockpit dragged it under.
Despite the situation, Benjamin King couldn’t help himself as he stood watching the events in the O.C. at Culdrose. He leaned in between Gibbs and Robertson, remembering the former’s promise to return the ‘borrowed’ plane safe and sound.
“I told you so,” he smiled smugly.
43:
The Destroyer of Worlds
Alexander Langley slumped into his chair in his office at the United Nations Secretariat Building and rubbed his throbbing temples.
In the space of only a few days, the world had gone from something loosely resembling order into undisputed chaos. In his mind’s eye, Langley saw the earth as little more than a dry haystack with half a dozen people gathered around holding magnifying glasses over it. At any time, a single spark was going to ignite the whole thing.
It had been so much easier when he had been a soldier in the field. All he had needed to focus on was the mission, and his team. And that was how he had played this entire Moon Mask crisis, focussing purely on that one aspect of the mission — the retrieval of the mask. Even now, he had just devoted enormous amounts of resources to cordoning off the crash site in Denmark while the NATO forces there searched for the transponder signal from the mask’s case. The case had been designed to withstand a nuclear detonation so he had no concerns about it not having survived, yet he found himself wishing it hadn’t.
Now I am become death; the destroyer of worlds.
Oppenheimer’s infamous statement following the detonation of the world’s first artificial nuclear explosion had been plaguing him ever since finding out about the threat that these tachyons posed.
He was the man selected to find this power and contain it. Protect it. But now, as he stepped back to look at the bigger picture, to look beyond the simple retrieval of the Moon Mask and consider the eventualities involved with its being reassembled, he found himself wondering just who he was protecting it from.