Lord Mantil sensed rather than heard the alarm from his battered systems denoting missile lock on him, and broke right as hard as he dared, banking away from the returning Jean-Paul. His plane was no longer capable of much, but his sudden movement was fast enough to throw off the lock before the pilot could fire, and he followed his new course as his mind continued to look for tactical opportunities to defeat the powerful Rafale.
Lightning One followed the battered Pelishar Four as it banked outward, leaving Lightning Two and Balbuzard One to continue their burn upward toward Jean-Paul. But the other plane was now coming back down to face them, its agile design and inhuman pilot bringing with him four streaking missiles hot on his tail. Jean-Paul brought his plane on a downward arc to pass between the remaining two planes, and as he did so, Lord Mantil cursed the simple but ingenious maneuver. It was exactly what he would have done with a plane capable of such a sharp turn, and he and the other pilots watched as the seconds unfolded and the maneuver’s game changing results became apparent.
Jean-Paul’s Rafale rocketed between the two jets and his jet signature vanished in their combined jet stream. The missiles on his tail lost lock and searched for another heat signature, finding the other planes in an instant. The two men had only a moment to pull apart from each other as blind fate chose one of them and the four missiles reassigned their trajectories to meet him.
The Typhoon erupted in a blaze of fury as four simultaneous explosions tore it to shreds. Wings flying apart as the fuselage disintegrated in white-hot flame.
But as Jean-Paul then pulled up, he followed the precise trajectory Lord Mantil’s own computer would have chosen for him, and the double agent was waiting for him. Jean-Paul saw the broken jet an instant before the other pilot’s course fell across his own and registered the threat in a flash. Machine reactions taking control, he rolled his plane but Lord Mantil was already firing, emptying the last of his Gatling gun’s belts into the flicking silhouette of Jean-Paul.
The bullets clawed along the Rafale’s left engine and wing, and the plane’s advanced computer systems instantly shut down the torn left thruster, cutting off its fuel supply before it killed the entire plane. Lord Mantil was allowed a second of pleasure at the hit before another radar lock found him, and this time Lightning One’s pilot was immediate in her response. She fired two of her latest generation, fighter-killing missiles at close range and every tactical option Lord Mantil saw told him he was doomed. Without hesitation, Lord Mantil literally ripped his own seat out of his plane and catapulted himself clear in the fraction of a second before the missiles flew up his jet stream, fucking his plane’s engine with two hundred pounds of explosive fury.
He was just clear when the missiles struck, and he felt more than saw the explosion as it drove him outward. His tactical options gone, his part in this contest over, Lord Mantil began his long hard fall to Earth with a tinge of regret. He had enjoyed piloting the jet, and he had enjoyed firing on Agent Jean-Paul Merard. He hoped it would not be the last chance he had to bring his vengeance to bear on the man, or the rest of his remaining colleagues for that matter.
For his part, Jean-Paul was far from done. The desperate maneuver by the mysterious F-16 had significantly reduced his Rafale’s power, and the damage to his left wing would affect his maneuverability severely as well, but he was still in the fight. Lightning One was climbing to take the height advantage from him, but worse than that he could not see Balbuzard One on his radar at all anymore.
Shit, he thought. All the advanced fighters in his squadron had some of the ingredients of a fully stealth fighter. Nothing like the F-22, B-2, or the F-35, but if they got on the right vector, they were very hard to find. Clearly his French cousin intended to give him the run around. Very well. In mimicry of the maneuver Lord Mantil had made earlier that morning, Jean-Paul rolled his plane, his acute eyes scanning above and below him as his view rotated. There. A quarter mile behind him, and fifty feet below.
Balbuzard One barely registered the turn as Jean-Paul started his loop, such was his confidence in his own shroud at this angle of approach. He was still programming his missiles with his intended attack vector when Lightning One’s voice came over the radio.
“Balbuzard One, Balbuzard One, above you!”
The other French pilot glanced up in a reflexive jerk to see Jean-Paul’s plane had vanished from his field of view. An instant later, the rogue jet was barreling down on him from above, guns blazing as he ripped the other plane apart. Jean-Paul had pulled a fifteen-G inverted loop to bring him up and over the jet pursuing him, coming down on the other fighter like the sword of god.
Like Pelishar’s commander not two hours earlier, Captain Sarah Hutcheson’s emotions swam as the last of her small squadron was rent asunder by the bullets. The plane did not so much explode as get decapitated, and there was no report from its pilot as it began to fall to Earth, its battered nose a mockery of its slick, graceful, former glory.
But Sarah was no amateur. She had seen what this other pilot could do and she had seen the damage the fragmented F-16 had done to it before she had finally killed it. She could take him, but she would not rely on old tactics. They clearly would not work against a pilot this daring and capable.
Breaking off the pursuit, she started to race for home, hoping that the rogue Rafale would continue on whatever mad mission had caused it to turn rabid in the first place, but knowing she could outrun him even if he chose to pursue. Sure enough, the other plane did not come after her, and she noted with satisfaction its smooth turn as it started to climb again to pursue some other goal. Maybe a defection? Who knew? She only knew it had killed two of her command and she was going to exact her retribution.
Lord Mantil, his parachute just opened, was beginning an almost serene drop to Earth when he saw her breaking off the engagement. “You can take him!” he screamed at the howling air as she flew off toward the horizon. “He’s damaged, and you have a superior plane. Goddamn it he’s trying to kill the very people you are here to protect!”
But his shouts of frustration echoed pointlessly across the sky, and Jean-Paul raced onward, without concern. The dogfight had delayed the French Agent, and while the five planes had ravaged each other, Jack and Martin had flown by unheeded, their stealthy plane soaring far ahead to carry on its mission of mercy.
Well, you conspiring bastards, thought Jean-Paul, your mission of mercy be damned.
There was a stirring behind him as Serge Latral started to come to, and with utter contempt for the other pilot and his entire race, Jean-Paul ripped a small piece of metal from the underside of his chair and slung it over his shoulder with massive force. The jagged metal slammed into Serge’s neck just under his chin, semi-decapitating him and pinning his head back against the chair. The man never knew what had hit him. His blood spurted from under his lolling head, spraying the back of the cabin with thick red spurts.
The final beats of the man’s heart sent gobs of it up to splatter the glass dome. Jean-Paul flew onward, a smear of gore behind him to symbolize the death in his wake as he closed in on Martin and Jack.
* * *
Major Jack Toranssen crouched in the rear section of the B-2’s flight deck and tried to reason with the recently awoken pilots that still lay bound there. He understood their anger more than they could know, but his patience was starting to wear thin. He had explained their situation to them as clearly and concisely as he could, but he was moments away from knocking them out again, anything to stop their insistent shouting and bickering.
“Look,” he said, trying to keep his frustration under check, “it boils down to this: you can be angry all you like. You can shout and scream and force me to knock you out again. Or you can accept that something has happened that pisses you off royally, but that a decorated US Air Force major from your own unit is telling you that it is more justified than you can possibly grasp, and is trying to give you a chance to face this awake and conscious, instead of in a dribbling lump on the flight deck floor. Either way, I am afraid I don’t give a shit anymore. I have to get back to the mission, so here is your choice … either shut the fuck up or I will knock you the fuck out.”
They stared at him with a mix of shock, and now somewhat restrained fury, and he saw them resigning themselves to at least being conscious for whatever was about to happen. But the moment was broken by a call from Martin in the cockpit, “Jack, we have a problem. The fighters seem to have torn each other apart again, and once again it looks like there is only one survivor. Only I get the sense that the survivor this time is far from friendly.” They had each seen something they hoped was their friend Lord Mantil rising up into the fray as the Allied fighters approached them, but their hopes had been dashed as the clearly damaged fighter had flung himself headlong into the swarm of hornets and vanished in a haze of missile fire and explosions. Only two planes had left where five had entered, and they had both been moving too fast to be the old and battered F-16.
Jack gave the two groggy and sullen pilots one more stern look, then climbed forward to glance at the radar screen. One of the remaining fighters had vanished into the dawn, but the other was coming in pursuit of the bomber as it continued to fire upon the viral pods dropping down from above. It was not quite supersonic, and maybe it had been damaged in the fight, but it was coming on hard, harder than the F-16 would have been able to fly with its remaining fuel, and it was slowly gaining on them. It would not be more than fifteen minutes till the pilot was in visual range.
Miles astern of them Jean-Paul calculated the coming kill. The minutes ticked by slowly and he decided on the tactics for his attack and started to think about how best to escape after he had killed his prey. He would take the jet north as far as his remaining fuel would take him, he decided, and then eject as close to the border with China as possible. After that he would try to regroup with Agents Lam and Kovalenko so they could assess their remaining strategic options.
The time of attack approached, his machine mind informed him, and he started to scan for the plane he knew must be out there. After a few minutes, his eyes found it even before the ghost blips started to show up on his radar. From directly behind, even the stealthiest of planes become somewhat visible as the four big jet engines driving the bomber spewed their heat and left their indelible signature on their air behind. His missile systems found the heat source a couple of miles ahead and locked on, giving a literal green light to his fire control.
* * *
Slowly, slowly, Captain Sarah Hutcheson crept up on the rogue jet. She had shut down her radio systems, disabled her active radar, and even put her missile systems on standby, relying on passive radar and line of sight to bring herself up to Jean-Paul in his singular blind spot. She was waiting till the kill was guaranteed. Till the bastard that had slaughtered her friend and their French colleague was dead in her sights. She was only a quarter mile behind him now and she allowed herself a smile.
But her moment of satisfaction was cut short as she then also registered the big bomber off in the distance. She had a moment to contemplate what she was seeing before she saw Jean-Paul’s jet launch his missiles. Shit. She had waited too long. She had allowed the rogue fighter to launch on another hapless victim. Her rage boiled over in her and she went weapons hot in a flash. Engaging her systems at point-blank range and locking on in less than a second. As she fired her missiles, she went to guns and opened up her powerful Gatling gun, bringing her nose across the other plane’s tail and sending everything she had after him.
Jean-Paul heard the lock and missile alarm as one and started his bank before he even registered where it was coming from. But his silent pursuer had been too close and too complete in her attack. The four missiles came in a tight phalanx and followed his hard turn with ease. While the missiles sought the heat of his tail-fire, Sarah’s bullets flew into the space he had occupied only a moment before, followed quickly by Sarah’s plane itself, but the missiles stayed true.
Jean-Paul’s head span round in surprise and shock as the explosives closed in and was granted a moment’s regret at his complacency before the fire ripped through his plane and blasted him outward, charring and flaying his flight suit and synthetic skin as he began the long, hard fall to Earth. The plane’s carcass dropped past him like a metal meteor, a sad echo of the Agents’ arrival on Earth eighteen months beforehand. The fall was going to hurt, probably destroy even his robust body, for unlike Lord Mantil, there was nothing left of the eject mechanism and parachute that he would have had if he’d had the time to eject.
Without tactical options, he set his fate aside and turned in the air to watch as his missiles cruised toward their more distant target. At least he would get to watch these bastards go down, he thought.
Onboard the B-2, Jack, Martin, and the two bound pilots scrambled frantically into the two ejectable pilot seats in their last few moments. Jack was strapped in and clipping Captain Jennifer Falster’s jumpsuit to his own with the reflexive automation his training had imbedded in him, while Martin tried ineffectually to do the same for Captain Billy Kellar. The missile lock alarm had sounded moments before the missiles launch had registered on their screens. There was not enough time, thought Jack, glancing across at Martin and Captain Kellar, and he saw the despair in the other captain’s face as the female pilot in Jack’s lap screamed at them to strap in.
The pilots knew they only had a few seconds. Jack glanced over at his friend and thought he saw the man give the thumbs-up, but later he would curse his uncertainty as he reached for the eject lever, wrapping his spare arm around the female captain in his lap as she rolled her head back onto his shoulder to avoid breaking both their necks when the seat’s booster engaged.