Silence hung in the plane for a moment as all five men caught their breath and thanked their gods. Above them, beyond the behemoth mass of the Eldridge’s hull, the aerial battle still raged, but, for now, their attentions were focussed on something closer at hand.
It was Raine who broke the silence with an adrenaline-fuelled whoop of relief.
“Let’s do that again!”
58:
Eldridge
Having cast the Black Cat adrift upon the storm-tossed ocean, Benjamin King followed Raine and Langley up the access ladder bolted to the side of the Eldridge. The metal rungs were slippery and his cold, wet hands numb as he scrambled up behind them, Bill and Godfrey bringing up the rear.
They paused for a second as Langley reached the top of the ladder and swung onto the main deck. King glanced behind him at the ocean. Despite being lit by the flashes of fire from the battle raging overhead and the lightning streaking through the clouds, the Black Cat had almost completely vanished into the darkness of night. Raine had explained that they couldn’t tether it to the Eldridge as the waves would crash her into the much larger vessel. They would just have to swim for her once the mission was completed.
But Benjamin King had no intention of getting off this ship.
Not in any conventional way at least.
In fact, if things worked out as he planned, he would make it so that he never set foot upon her in the first place.
“Benny, come on!” Raine hissed down to him. He too was now on the main deck, leaning back over to break into his reverie.
“Move it, King,” Bill spat angrily from beneath.
King pushed himself into motion, scrambled the rest of the way up the ladder and allowed Raine and Langley to help him over the safety barrier and onto the deck.
“You okay?” Raine asked worriedly. Langley, no longer the grandfatherly old U.N. Ambassador but a highly trained Special Forces soldier, knelt before them, scanning the eerily featureless deck of the ship. The only thing that broke the barren metal landscape was the command superstructure in the middle. There, King knew, was where the running of the ship was handled. The bridge, he assumed, was at the top, with other critical sections on the decks beneath, right down to the one upon which he now stood. Below him though, he knew, except for a single control room at the rear, the hull was little more than a hollow tube. A particle accelerator built into the heart of a U.S. Navy warship!
“I’m fine,” he answered Raine’s question.
Bill scrambled stealthily onto the deck. “I told you we should have left him on the plane,” he hissed angrily at Langley, indicating King. “He’s gonna get us all killed.”
Langley glanced at him. “As I recall, he managed to survive, and escape from, you,” he replied. “He’ll be fine.”
As Godfrey joined them on the deck, they spread out, creeping along the barrier towards the superstructure.
“Stay close to me,” Raine whispered to King.
But Benjamin King had no intention of doing so.
Admiral Donald S. Harriman sat on the bridge of the enormous aircraft carrier, listening to the reports coming in from the aerial battle and forcing himself not to display any of the astonishment he felt.
In almost thirty years of service, Harriman had never witnessed such astonishing events. Indeed, he felt certain that the aerial battle raging above was to be the first of a war between China and the United States. A war into which the rest of the world would inevitably be drawn.
And yet the situation was all very peculiar.
As a commander of a Carrier Strike Group, Harriman had of course been kept apprised of the deteriorating relations with China over the last days. But instead of being ordered to patrol the coast off China, or to return to the West Coast of the States as he might have expected, he had been ordered to play bodyguard to an experimental ship which he knew nothing about. A ship for which, without any of the usual political deliberation that he would expect, he had been ordered to fire upon and destroy any and all intruders into their designated area to protect. He couldn’t believe that such orders could be sanctioned, yet the President had personally spoken to him via a live satellite feed.
None of it made any sense.
A sudden flurry of activity dragged Harriman out of his thoughts.
“Admiral, sir,” a voice snapped from one of the bridge consoles. “I have a new radar contact. Two planes, coming in fast from the north. They’re incredibly low over the water, sir, only about two meters above—” The radar operator cut himself off. “I’ve lost them sir!”
“What do you mean ‘you lost them’?” Harriman demanded, rising to his feet and coming up behind the young sailor.
“They just hit the water, sir…” The young man turned and looked at him, face pale. “They’re gone.”
The two MR-18 Ushakovs ploughed beneath the surge of the Pacific.
The impact was shockingly hard and Nadia Yashina struggled not to cry out as her X-shaped restraints dug into her breast. In the seat in front of her, her pilot worked the controls which switched the dart-shaped vessel’s jet engines from their conventional configuration to water-jets. The intense heat instantly vaporised the water, working to both cool the engines while using the jettisoned steam to propel it through the water.
Named for Boris Ushakov who had headed the engineering project of a ‘flying-submarine’ during World War Two, the MR-18 was the final realisation of that dream, seventy years in the making. It was also one of the few modern day triumphs for Russia to have finalised a working craft while the U.S. still struggled to get their own design off the drawing board.
This was their first operational test.
Streams of air bubbles flew up over the sharp nose of the submerged aircraft and rather than the thunderous roar of jet engines that had deafened her moments ago, she was now submerged in the womb-like silence beneath the stormy seas.
She looked ahead, through the thick glass of the cockpit and the dark swirling waters of the Pacific towards her destination. Her redemption. Her salvation.
She had told Nathan Raine no lie when she had told him about the night the soldiers had come to her home, killed her family, raped and tortured her. The scars adorning her body were genuine. The attack had been all too real. All too frightening.
She had, however, omitted her shame.
Her father was a traitor.
She was the daughter of a traitor.
The punishment was justified. The scars served as a reminder of the shame her father had brought upon her family.
During her tenure at Moscow University, her genius level IQ came to the attention of those in power. She had been recruited into a top-secret program, designed to breed a new generation of what were described to her as ‘warrior-scientists’. The face of war had changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Brute force and nuclear deterrents weren’t going to keep the Motherland safe in the ‘Digital-Age’.