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.