Moon Mask (77 page)

King noticed Raine staring hard at his former commander, his face a mask of betrayal. First Nadia. Now Langley.

“So cut to the chase,” he said. “What do you want from me and Benny?”

Langley frowned, as though the answer was the most obvious in the world. Indeed, King supposed, it was.

“I want you to help us,” he stated. “Right now, the
Eldridge
is preparing to travel back in time and unravel the tapestry of history. I’ve done what I can so that if we fail they may still be stopped, but the truth is we are humanity’s last line of defence here. This is what the ‘group’ was developed for: to prevent mankind from self-annihilation. And if that ship succeeds with its mission, who knows what might happen? We all know the old grandfather paradox. You go back in time, kill your grandfather and prevent yourself from ever being born. But then how did you go back and kill him?” He shook his head. “There are theories of alternate universes, parallel timelines, you name it. But one way or another, the world as it is today will cease to exist if we don’t stop Gibbs. Time is a tapestry, made up of infinite threads sewn into place. You pull on one thread, Nate, and the entire tapestry falls apart.”

Raine and Langley stared at each other for long moments. Whatever happened, King knew, their friendship was over, another casualty of the Moon Mask. Another betrayal.

“You managed to eliminate the rest of Bill’s team,” Langley said.

“That’s because you sent them to kill us!” Raine snapped.

“I sent them to protect the Moon Mask. To destroy it.” His words brought King up short. After everything, were they really just going to destroy it? And if they did, then what about Sid?

“We’ll help you,” King spoke up, breaking into the other men’s tense moment. Nevertheless, Raine’s eyes were cold and penetrating as they bore into Langley.

“We’ll help you,” he echoed. “But then you let us go. And if I ever see you again,” he added threateningly, “I will kill you.”

57:

The Eye of the Storm

Airborne over the Pacific

“Sir
, we’re approaching the GPS coordinates you gave me.”

In the rear hold of the Black Cat, Raine, King, Langley and Bill turned at the sound of the pilot’s voice.

Following the tense moments as Langley laid his cards on the table, the four men had proceeded to suit up. They all now wore black commando gear, Kevlar vests, and had numerous weapon’s strapped to their persons. Even King now looked relatively comfortable in the military garb, a P-90 slunk over his shoulder, hand grenades stashed in his vest and a handgun strapped to his leg. But it wasn’t so much the outfit that made the man who ordinarily deplored violence look different. It was his eyes. Through the pain that was evident, Raine also noticed a hard determination quite unlike anything he had seen in him before.

A thirst for revenge.

“Shit,” the pilot cursed. “I’ve got multiple radar contacts converging on the
Eldridge’s
position.”

Langley pushed forward to look through the front window beyond the pilot’s head. The storm clouds had thickened as they had flown deeper into the heart of the Pacific and they streamed across the Black Cat’s nose as the plane shot towards the coordinates he had discerned from the Phoenix File.

“Okay, drop us below the cloud cover,” he ordered.

Peering over Langley’s shoulder, Raine felt the shift in pressure as the plane began a gradual descent. He knew from first-hand experience that the plane was all but invisible to radar and to the naked eye; nevertheless he kept glancing at the radar panel in the centre of the cockpit’s control board. On it he could see six stationary ‘blips’ at sea level which he presumed was the
Eldridge
and her escort ships. But, moving towards them from the west was a mass of small dots, moving fast at altitude.

Langley’s earlier comment came back to him.
I’ve done what I can so that if we fail they may still be stopped.
He felt a shiver of dread snake up his spine.

“What have you done, Alex?”

There was a lengthy pause while Langley continued to stare out the window. At last, the plane dropped below the clouds and the black expanse of the world’s largest ocean opened up beneath them. With the storm clouds blocking out the stars, the void below them looked like the infinite blackness of ultimate despair. The only lights on the water came from the six United States Navy warships, a Carrier Strike Group, Raine realised. Their running lights flickered upon the chop of the significant waves thrown up by the increasingly powerful wind.

“I’ve done what I always do, Nate,” Langley replied sombrely. “What needed to be done.”

“Those planes aren’t American, are they?” Raine accused.

“I imagine they are Chinese, launched from the deck of the
Shi Lang
.”

“And how the hell would the Chinese know about the
Eldridge
?”

Langley looked at him, eyes open and honest. “I told them. In a manner of speaking at least.”

“Are you insane?” Raine demanded.

Langley bristled. “If we fail to sabotage the
Eldridge,
the Chinese will succeed in sinking it.”

“At the cost of hundreds,
thousands
, of lives . . . on both sides! Innocent lives-”

“Soldiers, Nate!” Langley snapped. “Sailors. Men and women who have taken an oath to protect their respective countries at any cost!”

“Honest men and women who deserve better than to be sacrificed as pawns in your game!”

“This is no game! This is war!”

“Sir,” the pilot cut in. “The
George Washington
is launching.”

All eyes turned back to the scene below. The George Washington Carrier Strike Group was composed of six vessels- two missile cruisers, the
Port Royal
and the
Gettysburg
; two destroyers, the
Roosevelt
and the
Porter
; one Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine, the
Olympia
, no doubt stalking beneath the waves; and the
USS George Washington
herself.

The
Nimitz-class
super-carrier was over a thousand feet long and was a veritable floating city, armed to the teeth. One such armament was the eighty F/A-18E Super Hornet fighters currently blazing away from the launch deck and thundering into the sky to protect the seventh ship, temporarily attached to the strike group; the
USS Eldridge.

They all watched in silence as the immense swarm of killing machines roared into a defensive pattern around the
Eldridge,
racing to meet the forty J-15 Flying Sharks launched from the deck of the
Shi Lang.

“Can they see us?” King asked nervously as the pilot slowed the Black Cat into a circle high above the developing sea-borne chess board unfolding below.

“We’re totally invisible to them,” Langley confirmed.

“Only until we begin our descent,” the pilot added anxiously. “Then they’ll be all over us like a rash. The Yanks and the Chinkys.”

“Look!” Bill suddenly announced. Despite getting a much clearer indication of the situation on the radar, they all looked through the window to the west where forty dots of light powered towards them.

Then the first shot was fired.

It was distant. Quiet. A rumble not unlike thunder. A flash not unlike lightning. But before they knew it, a second shot was fired, then a third, and then above the speck of light that was the
Eldridge,
all hell broke loose. The Chinese Sharks and the American Hornets smashed their weapons into one another with unabashed abandon. Flashes of flame as aircraft exploded lit up the sky and reflected on the black waves.

“You’ve created a bloody massacre!” Raine spat at Langley.

Langley’s eyes were dark. “And yet, all we need is for one stray missile to slam into the
Eldridge
and this is all over.”

“Why don’t
we
just fire a missile at it, instead of boarding it?” King asked.

“We used up all our missiles in Jamaica,” Bill replied curtly.

“We’re currently above the Mariana Trench,” Langley explained, “the deepest place on earth. The Phoenix File indicated that following the disaster at Philadelphia, the powers-that-be insisted that should anything go wrong this time, with the entire Moon Mask assembled, they wanted a failsafe.” He glanced at each man in turn. “What we need to do is activate that fail safe. Sink the ship . . . sink the Moon Mask. Simple.”

“Simple?” the pilot questioned. Raine noticed beads of sweat running down his neck. “There’s a goddamn war going on above that ship! We’ll never get through all those fighters-”

“Maybe you won’t,” Langley agreed. “But I know a man that will.”

He turned his head and looked into the intense blue eyes of Nathan Raine. The CIA’s Special Operations Group was made up of only the best of the best; chosen from Delta Force, the Army Rangers and the Navy Seals. But Nathan Raine had excelled, at a young age, even among their ranks, becoming the youngest SOG team commander in the history of the organisation. Langley felt a pang of regret that his relationship with his former student was now over. But, he didn’t have a shadow of a doubt that if anyone could get them onto that ship, it was him.

With a dramatic sigh of exasperation, Raine patted the pilot on the shoulder and took his place at the controls. “Okay, everybody might want to buckle up! This ain’t gonna be pretty!”

There was a mad scramble as everyone rushed to find a seat and securely strap themselves in. The former pilot took the co-pilot’s seat, wrapped his harness around him, took a gold-plated crucifix from around his neck and kissed it as Raine pulled up on the steering yoke, climbing the Black Cat up to her service ceiling, high above the clouds.

“Quit slobbering on that thing and give me a hand, will you?” he snapped at his co-pilot as he manoeuvred into range directly above the
Eldridge’s
position. “What’s your goddamn name, soldier?”

“Godfrey,” the man replied, beads of sweat on his forehead.

“Means ‘God’s Peace’, right?” The man nodded vigorously. Raine shrugged casually. “Could probably do with some of that right now. Hold on!”

With that warning, Nathan Raine pulled hard on the steering yoke of the Black Cat and sent her into a gut wrenching nose dive. She shot down, as though little more than a bullet fired from a gun, her engines roaring.

Raine grasped the controls tightly as they ploughed into the thick cloud bank. Moisture splattered across the windshield, obscuring his view until the wipers swished it away. A fork of lightning arced through the miasma, chased by a roll of thunder as the gathering storm finally hit its crescendo.

Then they broke the cloud cover. Howling wind slammed into the plane and Raine struggled to keep her course steady and true. Rain slashed at them but, below, the darkness of the storm-tossed ocean was lit up by the dogfights of one hundred and twenty planes. Some spat bullets, others missiles. Some twisted and spun out of projectiles paths, others exploded, hurling flaming debris in all directions. But directly below them was the
Eldridge
and numerous Chinese Sharks swept towards her, firing missiles which so far had been intercepted by the U.S. Hornets.

But none of the rights and wrongs of the situation could cloud Raine’s mind now. He was focussed on one thing and one thing only: reaching his destination.

They shot straight down, the G-force tugging at the five men on board. Raine felt the rush of blood to his head, the pulsing of his eyeballs that felt like they were about to explode. Behind him, he heard King call out and pictured him pinned to his seat, pounded by the crushing force of gravity.

Before he knew it, the swarm of aircraft that had seconds ago been so small, so infinitesimal, loomed large and ominous before them, blocking their path to the ship. One plane was almost directly below them and unless it moved out of their path the collision was going to blow them all to hell.

And then all of a sudden the plane, Hornet or Shark he couldn’t tell, erupted into a fireball as Bill, strapped into the machine gun turret at the nose of the Black Cat, opened fire. Hundreds of bullets thundered out in seconds as the former SASR soldier held the trigger tight and never let go. A stream of fiery tracer bullets pounded relentlessly down on anything that crossed their path. Planes erupted all around them, up above, down below, to either side. Rain lashed, wind howled, the upper deck of the
Eldridge
raced to meet them and then, at the last possible moment, Raine pulled back and to the right on the steering yoke.

The Black Cat struggled to break out of her nose dive and this time it was Raine who was screaming a manic war cry as, aided by Godfrey, he wrenched the yoke back as far as possible.

The
Eldridge
grew to immense size, blocking out the ocean and the war zone. Still, Bill fired, more out of instinct than reason, and the tracer bullets pinged off the ship’s deck in flashes of sparks.

They were going to hit!

It became a near certainty in Raine’s mind and he knew it was echoed in the thoughts of all the others. The dive had been too steep, too fast, and the Black Cat’s engines couldn’t break the unrelenting grasp of gravity.

But then she broke free!

The nose pulled up, breaking out of the vortex of rain and fire. Raine felt control return at the last possible moment. Inch by inch, they levelled out but the ship’s deck still swamped them. It was everywhere. Dull gun-metal grey. Blank, flat, smooth, just like he had seen on the ship’s schematics.

He twisted to starboard and the plane, still losing altitude, raced over the deck. Just as she cleared the ship, Raine heard a faint screech of metal and the controls tugged to one side. He tugged back, kept them steady, and they dropped over the side of the ship and slammed into the black water. The angle was still too sharp, the speed still too fast and the impact was jarring. His restraints crushed his chest, blasting the wind from his lungs. The Black Cat’s nose ploughed beneath the waves, water rushed into the engines, stalling them, but then the nose broke the surface and the Flying Boat settled into the ocean.