The X-15 rolled onto its side, shot through the air, banking left in its gigantic turn.
The sudden course-change allowed the AMRAAM missile behind it—ever-closing, ever-ravenous—to reel them in even more. It was only a hundred yards behind the X-15 now, and still closing.
TIME TO TARGET: 1:20 . . . 1:19 . . . 1:18 . . .
'There it is!' Rufus yelled. 'Dead ahead!'
Schofield strained against the G-forces to peer out over Rufus's shoulder, out at the twilight Arabian sky.
And he saw it.
The mere sight of the intercontinental ballistic missile took his breath away.
It was incredible.
The Jericho-2B clone ICBM looked like a spaceship from a science fiction movie—something that was far too big, far too sleek, and moving far too fast to exist on Earth.
The 70-foot-long cylinder shot like a spear through the sky, a white-hot tailflame blazing from its base like a magnesium flare, leaving an impossibly long smoketrail in its wake. The smoketrail extended, snakelike, a God-sized python, over the distant horizon, streaking away toward the missile's source, Yemen.
And the sound it made.
A single, continuous BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
If Schofield's X-15 was ripping the fabric of the sky, then this baby was shredding it to pieces.
The banking X-15 roared round in a giant semi-circle, careering
in toward the moving ICBM, while itself trailed by the dogged AMRAAM.
TIME TO TARGET: 1:00 . . . 0:59 . . . 0:58 . . .
One minute.
And then, like the arms of a flattened Y converging to meet at the stem, the X-15 rocket plane and the Chameleon missile came alongside each other.
But they weren't level yet.
The X-15 was just behind and to the left of the ICBM—parallelling the horizontal column of smoke shooting out of the ICBM's base.
TIME TO TARGET: 0:50 . . . 0:49 . . . 0:48 . . .
But the rocket plane was moving slightly faster than the missile, so it was gradually hauling the ICBM in.
Noise was everywhere. The roar of supersonic speed.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
TIME TO TARGET: 0:40 . . . 0:39 . . . 0:38 . . .
'Get me closer, Rufus!' Schofield called.
Rufus did so—and the nose-cone of the X-15 came alongside the tail of the roaring ICBM.
The CincLock VII unit didn't respond. They still weren't close enough to the missile's CPU.
The X-15 crept forward, edging up the length of the Chameleon missile.
'Closer!'
TIME TO TARGET: 0:33 . . . 0:32 . . . 0:31 . . .
Out through the cockpit canopy, Schofield saw the lights of a city down in the evening darkness below.
The holy city of Mecca.
TIME TO TARGET: 0:28 . . . 0:27 . . . 0:26 . . .
And the X-15 came level with the mid-point of the missile and Schofield's disarm unit beeped:
FIRST PROTOCOL (PROXIMITY): SATISFIED. INITIATE SECOND PROTOCOL.
'I'm gonna get you,' Schofield said to the ICBM.
The reflex response pattern on his unit began its sequence, and Schofield began hitting its touchscreen.
The two rocket-propelled aircraft carved a sonic tear through the sky, travelling side-by-side at astronomical speed.
And then the AMRAAM behind the X-15 made its move.
Rufus saw it on his scopes. 'Come on, Captain . . . !'
'I just. . . have ... to do . . . this first. . .' Schofield grimaced, concentrating on the reflex-response test.
TIME TO TARGET: 0:19 . . . 0:18 . . . 0:17 . . .
The AMRAAM powered forward, closing in on the tailflame of the X-15.
'It's approaching lethal range!' Rufus yelled. Lethal range for an AMRAAM was twenty yards. It didn't have to actually hit you, only explode close to you. 'You've got maybe five seconds!'
'We don't have five seconds!' Schofield shouted, not taking his eyes off the screen, his fingers moving quickly over it.
TIME TO TARGET: 0:16 . . . 0:15 . . . 0:14 . . .
'I can't take evasive action!' Rufus yelled desperately. 'I'll move us out of proximity! Jesus Christ! We can't come this far to lose now! Two seconds!'
Schofield kept hitting the touchscreen.
TIME TO TARGET: 0:13 . . . 0:12 . . .
'One second!'
And the AMRAAM entered lethal range—20 yards from the X-15's tailpipe.
'No!' Rufus yelled. 'Too late—!'
'Not if I can help it? a voice said suddenly in their earpieces.
Then, in a supersonic blur, something black and fast shot sideways across the wake of the X-15—cutting in between the AMRAAM and Schofield's X-15, so that the AMRAAM hit it and not Schofield's plane.
An explosion rocked the sky and Rufus whirled around in his seat to see the front half of another X-15 rocket plane go tumbling through the air, its rear-end vaporised, destroyed by the AMRAAM.
Knight's X-15.
He must have survived the death of his pilot and then stayed on their trail, catching up with them while they'd made their two time-consuming circling manoeuvres. And now he had flown himself into the path of the AMRAAM missile that had been about to take them out!
The shattered front half of Knight's X-15 fell through the sky, nose-first, before abruptly, its canopy jettisoned and a flight seat blasted out from the falling wreckage, a parachute blossoming above it a moment later.
TIME TO TARGET: 0:11 . . . 0:10 . . .
Schofield hardly even noticed the explosion. He was consumed with the reflex pattern on his touchscreen: white, red, white, white, red . . .
TIME TO TARGET: 0:09 . . .
'Whoa, shit! It's going vertical!' Rufus yelled.
With a sickening roll, the Chameleon missile abruptly changed course, banking downward, pointing its nose directly down at Mother Earth.
Rufus manoeuvred his control stick and the X-15 copied the move—and went vertical with the ICBM—and suddenly the two rocketcraft were travelling supersonically, side-by-side, heading straight down!
'Aaaaaaaaahhh!' Rufus yelled.
Schofield's eyes remained fixed to the touchscreen, focused, his fingers moving quickly.
TIME TO TARGET: 0:08 . . .
The X-15 and the ICBM raced toward the Earth like two vertical bullets.
TIME TO TARGET: 0:07 . . .
The lights of Mecca rushed up toward Rufus's eyes.
TIME TO TARGET: 0:06 . . .
Schofield's fingers danced.
And the CincLock disarm unit beeped.
SECOND PROTOCOL (RESPONSE PATTERN): SATISFIED. THIRD PROTOCOL (CODE ENTRY): ACTIVE. PLEASE ENTER AUTHORIZED DISARM CODE.
TIME TO TARGET: 0:05 . . .
Schofield punched in the Universal Disarm Code and the screen beeped again:
THIRD PROTOCOL (CODE ENTRY): SATISFIED. AUTHORIZED DISARM CODE ENTERED.
At which point the crucial line appeared:
MISSILE FLIGHT ABORTED.
What happened next happened in a blur.
High above the minarets of Mecca, the supersonically-travelling Chameleon missile self-destructed in a spectacular explosion. It looked like a gigantic firecracker—a spectacular starburst of sparks spraying out in every direction.
It was moving so amazingly fast, however, that its blasted-apart pieces were just stripped away by the onslaught of uprushing wind. The charred remains of the cloned Jericho-2B would later be found over an area 100 miles in diameter.
Schofield's X-15, on the other hand, suffered a far different fate.
The shock wave from the Chameleon's blast sent it spiralling away from the explosion, completely out of control, rocketing toward the Earth.