King felt a sense of dread race down his spine at the same time as a fire of hope was stoked in his heart. “But now they have all the pieces of the mask.”
“They have five times the amount of tachyons,” Raine finished for him. He glanced up at his former mentor. “Will that be enough?”
Langley nodded solemnly. “From what I’ve read, it will be more than enough to maintain a stable wormhole inside the ship. The nano-fibres will carry the effect across the ship. They will have a fully functioning time machine. They will have the ability to travel into the past and alter history to suit themselves. They will have the ability to extinguish lives years before they are born. They will have the ability to conquer Russia before it became a threat, to annex China when they are weakest.”
“I thought that would suit you and your little band of sociopaths,” Raine snarled.
Langley’s eyes were hard. “We aim to protect the world, to maintain the status quo. Do I want America to conquer the entire world? No more so than I wanted Nazi Germany to. No more so than I want Russia to. We’re talking about playing god here. It’s one thing to take a life… of a soldier,” he said. “Even of a civilian. But it is quite another to wipe a life from existence altogether. To squat out the light of a soul before it is born into this world, to remove its memory, its legacy. It’s right to exist, to have existed and to go on existing.”
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
“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.