Jimsar pressed down, and a missile leapt from beneath each wing. Seeing that, his wingman followed suit and four missiles raced forward at four times the speed of sound toward the target.
Jimsar watched the action play out on his display.
“We have multiple hits,” he announced, watching the trail of his two missiles abruptly disappear. This was followed by the second two at a slightly further location, which was strange, but Jimsar didn’t report that.
“Confirm wreckage location,” the lieutenant ordered.
In the time it had taken the missiles to fly twenty miles, the jets had flown ten. The short conversation at Mach 2 closed the gap another five miles. The Flankers dipped down and slowed until they were cruising at a relatively slow five hundred miles an hour, less than eight hundred feet above the desert floor.
Jimsar loved flying close to the ground, the terrain flashing by, emphasizing the speed and power of the jet. His eyes were glued forward. A tall sand dune over a hundred feet high rapidly approached.
For a second, Jimsar froze in shock as the strangest thing he’d ever seen rose from behind the sand dune. At his speed all he had was a glimpse, then he was by, but there was no doubt of the form — a dragon, open mouth pointing directly at them!
“Break and circle!” Jimsar ordered. There was no response from Hanxia.
“Break and circle.” Jimsar already had the Flanker in a steep left-hand turn.
“Roger, breaking and circling right,” Hanxia replied in a shaky voice.
As his hands worked the controls, Jimsar replayed the image in his mind. “It was metal,” he said out loud. He forced himself to snap back to reality. “Captain!” Jimsar ordered. “We’re going to circle back. Do you understand? Over.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s a machine,” Jimsar said as he leveled off, heading back toward the dragon. He checked his display. Nothing. The dragon had to be using the sand dune to mask its radar signature. “Keep your eyes open,” he warned Hanxia as the dune came into view five miles ahead and below.
“Sir, I think—” There was a loud burst of static, a scream inside of the static, then silence.
Jimsar’s action was instinctive. He rolled the Flanker hard right, dropped altitude, punched in afterburners, and pointed the nose almost straight up. His back slammed into the seat from both the acceleration and vertical attitude.
His head twisted and turned as he searched the sky from this unique perspective. He saw the dragon racing up, no visible means of propulsion, three miles away and closing both horizontally and vertically.
Jimsar pushed the stick over, going from a climb to a twisting dive that put him head-on with the dragon, now less than five seconds away. He pressed the trigger for the 30mm cannon and felt the plane shudder as it spewed eight-inch-long bullets. Every fifth round was a tracer and his hand twitched on the stick, bringing the fiery rope of bullets right into the chest of the dragon as it raced toward him.
A line of light leapt from the dragon’s mouth, and came back at Jimsar’s plane as fast as his bullets were going the other way. He released the trigger and rolled left into a steep dive, narrowly avoiding the beam.
He kept his afterburners on and used the descent to add to his speed before leveling off at one thousand feet and almost seventeen thousand miles an hour in speed. He headed directly for the airfield at Kashi, the battle over.
Not only did Jimsar accept he was overmatched, his fuel gauges were dangerously low because of the limited fuel he had been given.
CHAPTER 5
Duncan ran her hand along the top of the Ark, feeling the thin wires coiled into the lid. At first she had thought they were artwork, but when she tugged on them, they came out. Three long filaments of metal, ending in what appeared to be a small rose-shaped object about half an inch across, each made of a different material.
She looked at the wires for a short time, something nagging at her, as if she had seen this before. She reached up and took the crown off her head. On each of the three bands of metal that comprised the crown was a small indentation, the inverse of the objects on the end of each line.
She took each lead and placed it against the indent on the band made of the same material. The first two clicked firmly in place. She hesitated on the third, not sure what it would bring forth, but she had an overwhelming urge to move forward. She pushed the last one in place and the lid glowed brightly, enveloping her in a golden light, but that was all.
Duncan lifted the crown and set it on her head.
She gasped as she “saw” the Giza Plateau from a bird’s-eye view, in the midst of a lush, green land, but with no pyramid or Sphinx on its surface. The vision shifted and she saw a Talon spacecraft on the plateau, its long, lean form against the blue sky. The Talon fired a beam down into the rock of the plateau, burning deep into it. Another Talon appeared, the Black Sphinx just below it, held in a golden field propagated from the tip of the craft. The Black Sphinx was lowered into the hole that had been cut. Men and women were now getting off the first craft carrying supplies.
Duncan was overwhelmed, her mind receiving input faster than she could process it. What she was experiencing was more than a vision. She knew things about what she was seeing. It was as if the Ark was giving her information in the form of memories.
She reached up and ripped the crown off her head, then collapsed next to the Ark, her body shutting down to protect itself.
It was the worst defeat the US Navy had suffered since Pearl Harbor. The Nimitz-class carrier USS Washington, the pride of the Pacific fleet, was lost. As was the USS Springfield, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine.
The loss of the carrier and its battle group to the unknown force on Easter Island had effectively gutted Task Force 78’s power, as the surviving ships’—two guided missiles cruisers, three destroyers, two frigates, another LA-class sub, and two supply ships — primary mission was to guard the carrier.
The arrival of the Washington’s sister ship, the USS Stennis, and her battle group, had restored the combat effectiveness of the fleet that now steamed two hundred miles north of Easter Island, with the new title of Task Force 79, under the control of the commander of the Stennis, Captain Robinette.
The orders to sit tight and do nothing didn’t sit well with Robinette, nor the men and women he commanded. When he received a mission asking for a SEAL team to infiltrate Easter Island with the dual mission of reconnaissance and rescue, all he cared was that it had sufficient clearance, and ST-8 was the highest possible. He knew that he should check in with Pacific Fleet Command at Pearl to confirm, but he chose not to, for fear they would countermand the order. Instead, he personally took the tasking to the commander of the SEAL team billeted aboard his ship.
Turcotte had been pacing in the hallway outside the conference room for the past hour after grabbing a quick meal in the base’s cafeteria. Yakov sat on a hard plastic chair just outside the door, a bottle of vodka between his knees. He’d made a big show of getting the bottle from Quinn, but Turcotte noted that the level had dropped less than a half inch in the past hour, barely a wetting of the lips for the Russian.