Moon Mask (82 page)

And then there was silence. The heat diminished, the action died away to stillness. Utter silence.

It hung in the darkness for long seconds, a great gnawing predator which fed on the last reserves of King’s courage. Exhausted and defeated, his plan to save Sid now lost, Benjamin King broke down in the darkness and began to cry.

Then, as the silence felt like it was about to stretch into infinity, a great wrenching sound of tortured metal screeched through the chasm of the
Eldridge’s
belly. The catwalk, hanging on by severed tendons of melted cables, pulled away from the bulkhead and began to plummet into the abyss.

61:

On the Catwalk

USS Eldridge,

Pacific Ocean

Nathan
Raine leapt into action!

The catwalk dropped away beneath him, folding inwards on itself like a pack of cards. It had torn completely away from the access hatch and so he ran towards its fixed end, tethered to the hull above the control room.

His body screamed at him. Gibbs’ knife was still lodged deep in his shoulder, his hair had matted under the heat. His skin was red raw with blisters. His lungs ached and he hacked as he ran. But, so long as he was alive, he had vowed long ago, he wouldn’t give in. He would keep on running!

The catwalk dropped suddenly from under him. He fell to his hands and knees and felt himself roll towards the edge. He reached out, grasped the tortured metal banister, now twisted and obscure-

A boot slammed into his fingers, crushing them. He instinctively released his grip and felt himself slide back. The catwalk, suspended by a handful of supports from above and tethered above the control room, was collapsing one section at a time. Bits of it broke off and crashed to the deck far below, but most of it remained in one long piece, its own weight working against it and wrenching one support out at a time.

He dug his fingers into the grating and halted his descent with an agonising jolt to his shoulder. He glanced up and saw Gibbs, his own arms wrapped around the safety banister.

Raine had still been lying on the catwalk when the fireball had hit, but Gibbs, standing, had taken the brunt of it. Charred flesh hung from his scalp. One eye was shut and the skin around it looked as though it had melted. The hair on his head had seared into one knot of nylon. By all rights, the man should have been dead, but he clung onto life for the sole purpose of ensuring that if he was to die, then Nathan Raine was going with him. The crazed glint to his one open eye told Raine that there would be no reasoning with the man.

Another loud tear of metal wrenching from its socket and the catwalk lurched again! Raine and Gibbs dropped. O’Rourke’s body was jolted free of its perch, eyes wide with the shock of death, skin scarred and disfigured. It rolled passed Raine and tumbled, along with clattering debris, off the catwalk.

The sight filled Raine with a surge of anger which he transmuted into energy and hurled himself up at Gibbs. He slammed a fist into his charred flesh and the soldier wobbled back on his perch. For a moment, Raine thought he was going to topple back but he had no such luck. He launched himself at Raine and threw a punch which connected with his jaw. He almost lost his hold on the banister but swung himself flat against the grating once more.

Another support gave out, this time ripping chunks of metal down, which impacted the catwalk, wrenching yet another support free. It bent beneath Raine, arching sharply down. The climb up was now more exaggerated, more difficult, and he struggled to remain clinging to it.

With Gibbs in an elevated position, Raine knew he wouldn’t get passed him. Instead, clenching his teeth at the pain in his shoulder, he swung under the safety banister, now hanging almost vertically, and began to climb it like a ladder.

Gibbs realised what he was doing. “No!” he screamed at him and thrust himself across the gap. He slammed bodily into Raine and the weakened barrier tore free under the impact. Raine reached out, grasped the catwalk proper and rolled onto it just as the railing tumbled away.

Another support strut broke free and this time the jarring was enough to rip an enormous section of the bending catwalk free. It too tumbled, crashing to the deck.

Raine scrambled up, now slightly above Gibbs’ position. Gibbs threw himself at his legs, attempting to wrench him off the walkway but Raine kicked back, smashing his boot into the raw flesh of the other man’s face. Gibbs staggered, giving Raine the opportunity he needed to clamber onto the next section of the catwalk. The support strut above him still held, the metal walkway, though unstable, was horizontal once more, and Raine pushed up onto his feet and sprinted down it.

“No!” Gibbs screamed at his fleeing form. He hauled himself up and darted after him, the sudden impact ripping another support free, then another and another.

This was it, Raine knew. The entire thing was coming down!

He ran faster, his legs pounding against the metal walkway, Gibbs hot on his heels. Behind them both, the catwalk wrenched and tore and crashed to the deck far below. It shuddered and shook under their every footstep, the rate of destruction increasing as they neared the far bulkhead. The control room lay below them, the twisted ladder only yards away. But then Raine saw the metal bolts affixing the catwalk to the walkway pull free under the stress.

On instinct, he threw himself over the safety barrier and dropped through the cavernous belly of the
Eldridge.
Above him, the catwalk’s final supports gave out and the entire structure dropped, metal debris raining down around him.

He hit the roof of the control room feet first, the impact jarring his spine. He rolled out of it and almost into one of the circular recesses which pitted the roof. The suction of air from the blur of the fan almost dragged him in.

He remembered seeing the fans on the
Eldridge’s
schematics. The enormous computer servers required for the quantum computers, housed in a line to either side of the control room, grew extremely hot when worked, requiring an extensive cooling system.

He pulled himself away from the blur of the spinning blades and rolled to one side as a huge portion of the catwalk smashed into the roof, spitting up sparks and tearing out chunks. He rolled into the foetal position, covering his head as debris rained down around him. Then the ruins of the structure were dragged by its own weight into the depths of the accelerator. The impact was deafening, resounding through the tunnel.

He uncovered his head and looked up, just in time to see Gibbs’ boot come slamming down onto his skull. Caught unawares, he reached up to cushion the impact but the other man’s sole still crunched into his nose and slammed his skull against the metal roof.

He screamed in agony, his vision going blank, his head thundering. Then Gibbs slid his boot down Raine’s face to his throat. He tried to resist but, in his dazed state, his attempt was feeble. Gibbs’ boot pressed into his windpipe, slowly crushing it.

Raine gasped, struggling in vain to suck oxygen into his lungs. He fingers scrabbled at Gibbs’ calve muscle, digging in but Gibbs was beyond pain now, beyond reason.

Raine’s eyes bulged, his face turned purple. Still, the pressure on his throat continued. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, the sounds of destruction around him faded to womb-like silence.

This was the moment of his death, he knew.

The only thing was, he wasn’t ready for it.

Without even contemplating the move, he reached up with his right hand and wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the knife still protruding from his shoulder. He tried to pull it free but his strength faded with every passing moment. He tried again, felt the blade shift, sending knew tendrils of white-hot pain searing into every nerve in his body. He tried to scream but nothing came out.

The burst of pain sent his last reserves of adrenaline flooding through his system and, with a war-cry that sounded terrifying in his head but a pathetic strangled whine in reality, he wrenched the knife free, upturned it, and slammed it into Gibbs’ thigh!

Gibbs howled in pain, stepped off of Raine’s neck and staggered. Raine sucked a minute amount of air in through his bruised windpipe, hacked, rolled forward and wrenched the knife from his opponent’s leg before digging it back in his other limb.

Gibbs dropped to both knees, coming face to face with Raine, his disfigured, horrific visage glaring at him in fury. But his fury was matched only by Raine’s own. Through the blood smeared across his burnt and bruised face, his icy blue eyes shot daggers into Gibbs’ own.

He wrenched the knife free again and jabbed it into the soldier’s belly. “That’s for Sid!” he growled, his throat raw. Gibbs’ eyes went wide, blood spurted from his mouth. He reached forward to wrap his hands around Raine’s throat once more.

Raine ripped the knife free them slammed it into his belly again. “That’s for Rudy!”

Blood ran like a river down the other man’s chin, but still he would not surrender. His hands wrapped around Raine’s neck but he pushed them away, pulled the knife out one last time.

“And this is for me,” he growled. Then he slipped the razor-sharp blade of the knife across Gibbs’ throat, feeling the flesh slice open. A look of shock registered on Gibbs’ face. He brought his hands up to hold the wound, as if he could hold the severed flesh together with nothing else. Then, realising he could not, he looked down at his bloody hands and rolled backwards. His body hit the rooftop and slid into the circular depression that had almost claimed Raine.

There was a whine of motors, a squelch of flesh and then a burst of blood and gore. For a moment, the man’s feet, upside down, thrashed wildly, but then they too were sucked into the propeller-like blades of the fan and were gone.

Raine wheezed in a painful lung-full of air then dropped face first onto the roof of the control room, exhausted.

A booted pair of feet appeared before his eyes. He strained his neck to look up at an ugly brute of a man, levelling at assault rifle at his head. Defeated, Raine lowered his head to the roof.

In halting English, tinged with a Russian accent, the man barked an order at him; “Get up!”

62:

The Power of God

USS Eldridge,

Pacific Ocean

Nadia
tried to hide her shock as she saw Raine stagger into the control room. His face was crusted with blood, his nose was twisted to one side, his hair was singed, his skin red with blisters, and an angry purple bruise was swelling around his throat.

“Sit!” his escort ordered, pushing him into a chair next to King. King for his part, Nadia noticed, barely registered his ‘friend’s’ injuries. After she had established some sort of order in the control room following the destruction wrought by the Chinese jet, King hadn’t said a word. Instead, he glared defiantly at her, a simmering rage which bit into her every time she made eye contact.

“Say please,” Raine quipped, his voice raw and husky.

The Spetsnaz soldier, one of the three under her command, pushed him down hard, bringing the butt of his rifle up to smash his face.

“Enough!” Nadia barked at the man.

Raine smiled at her. “New boyfriend?”

“No,” she snapped, and immediately felt a pang of annoyance for letting the comment bother her. Raine had gotten under her skin, in more ways than one. He had indeed ‘melted’ the Ice Queen and even now she felt her heart race at the memory of their night together.

“If he moves,” she told the soldier, “kill him.”

She slung her pack from over her shoulders and pushed her way to the semi-circular control desk. The lead blast door blocking the next chamber had been raised and she glanced for a second at the completed Moon Mask.

Attaching the
Ushakov
flying submarines to the
Eldridge’s
hull below the waterline, they had gained access to her lower levels from a submerged maintenance hatch which led them into the lower part of the particle accelerator. From there, she and the three Spetsnaz soldiers had made their way up the ladder to the control room just before the Chinese plane had struck.

Now, emergency lights bathed the control room in red. Glass was smashed over the deck, shattered from the screens of the numerous computer monitors. The acrid stench of burned ozone permeated the air, the air-conditioning system evidently off line. The two American technicians had both been killed in the blast. The lead scientist, Doctor Tobias, sat beside King, shaken and bruised. Around her, throughout the length of the particle accelerator, the sound of the ship’s tortured hull groaned. Weakened by the impact, she would not hold up well to the storm raging outside, Nadia knew.

She pulled a laptop out of her pack and proceeded to connect it to the work station’s main computer terminal. She brought up a schematic of the ship and frowned.

“The particle accelerator is still functioning,” she told one of her three soldiers. “But the nano-fibres have been damaged. Reconfigure for Plan B.”

“Plan B?” Tobias scoffed. “If the nano-fibre network has been damaged and you try to activate the process again, you’ll rip the ship apart. Different sections will fall out of phase with one another-”

“The nano-fibres in the mask chamber are still intact,” she replied, annoyed at having to explain something so simple. “We’ll simply disengage all other fibre bundles, lower the lead shield and confine the effect in there. The ship won’t go anywhere,” she admitted, “but the wormhole will still open. All we have to do then is step through it.”

“The wormhole won’t open,” Tobias told her with a sneer. “It doesn’t work. The mask doesn’t emit enough tachyons to reach the energy level required.”

Nadia smiled at him cunningly. “I know,” she replied, patting him condescendingly on the cheek before returning her attention to her laptop.

“Then what the hell are you doing here?” Raine demanded. Nadia glanced up from inputting commands into her laptop and looked at her former lover. Despite his dishevelled appearance, there was no denying his rugged handsomeness. She toyed with the idea of asking him to join her. After all, he couldn’t go back to America now. But she knew that he would never accept the offer.