[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (71 page)

A moment too soon and the pod would not have begun to disintegrate yet, leaving its shielding in place to absorb the heat of the blow. A moment too late and the virus would have already been too dispersed, flowing on the wind in ways the computer tracking systems on board the missile could not have predicted.

But John had been very precise about the altitude they had to hit the pods, and Martin had listened. With this prescient knowledge of his enemy’s behavior, Martin had designed the missile to meet the virus pod at the exact point it needed to, creating a massive storm of fire in the sky over Kashmir, and saving almost two hundred thousand people in the rural farms below from certain death.

* * *

On the ground, the first of the people of Kashmir to wake in the predawn darkness looked to the sky and shook once more with fear. Seeing the fiery ring above them, the farmers and shepherds out with their flocks amongst the cold dew assumed that one side or the other was up to no good once more. They had long since stopped caring which side it was that was firing, as long as they survived. The only thing they cared about now was how the other side might retaliate.

For those in the military, this new fire in the sky was something unknown, as it was for the insurgents still running into the mountains to escape the wrath of an incensed Pakistani government. Knowing all the horrors they had each wrought on the region, the sight of this new, unknown weapon was disturbing.

As reports of the explosions started to run around the region, all of these groups wondered and worried about what new way their enemies might have found to attack them. But two the Agents that still hid among them knew precisely what was happening.

“They know about the viral pods.” thought Jean-Paul Merard, standing in a briefing room on the Allied Force Military Base near Kabul, Afghanistan. Over the last few hours, his world had changed completely, as it had for all the Agents. There could no longer be any doubt that John Hunt had betrayed them, and Jean-Paul fumed at the thought.

But his desire to find the traitor was, for the meantime, secondary to what Agent Jean-Paul Merard should do right now. It would be foolish to think that Agent Hunt had not also revealed the identities of his colleagues. Therefore he should assume that his cover was blown and that he needed to get off the base, and soon. His immediate instinct was to reach out to the Council and get their opinion on his next steps, but that was no longer possible, and he realized that for the first time since his personality had been implanted into this machine he was now free to make decisions of his own. Now that the satellites were dead, the Council was all but moot.

He needed to act, and he needed to decide what to do without input from the others. Looking into the night sky he knew that he could serve multiple goals with one plan. Get off the base, hurt the military force he had been sent to infiltrate, and find out what was taking out those viral pods as they attempted to deliver the final stanza in the satellites’ requiem.

Turning, he started to make his way across huge base. He wasn’t going to wait for the world to come for him, he was going to take the fight to them, he thought, as he rounded the corner and the fenced-off Rafale Fighter hangar opened up in front of him. Six of the powerful beasts sat there, prepped and ready to go. There was lots of activity on the base, which had been on high alert since the attack on Peshawar had begun. The small, nimble fighters were on standby, fueled and loaded. Their standard armament was mostly air-to-ground, but they also carried four sidewinder air-to-air missiles. Flashing his pilot’s ID, he walked past the doubled guard, and into the quad.

The six fighters were deadly, capable of wiping a field clean of a hundred men in a matter of seconds. Like the American F-22 and European Typhoon, they mounted Gatling guns in their forward wings that could tear through steel with devastating ease. Unlike the F-22, they were not stealth capable, but were still much harder to pinpoint than any previous generation of fighter in the sky.

Jean-Paul reviewed the mission log for the next patrol. He was a copilot for now, supposedly learning the ropes from a more capable pilot. He chuckled bitterly, like they could teach
him
anything. He was not assigned to the next patrol, but he turned and headed to the pilot’s locker room anyway, to talk to the next pilot and copilot team as they prepped for their patrol mission.

“Michel, Etienne, ca va?” he shouted, as he glanced briefly around the room to make sure no other pilots were showering or getting changed. With pilots on long shifts, he knew it was unlikely any of them would be in the locker room unless they had to be, and he soon confirmed they were alone. Stepping back to the locker room door, he flicked the latch and returned to the aisle where Michel and Etienne were putting on their flight suits.

The two men looked up as Jean-Paul approached, smiling before continuing to pull on the bulky, one-piece suits. Stepping between them, he reached out with his left hand and grasped the neck of Michel, while simultaneously bringing up his right leg and whipping his booted foot out into the jugular of Etienne. He registered the feeling of the man’s neck snapping through the sole of his boot, and turned his gaze to Michel, who was scrabbling pointlessly at the hand around his neck.

As his instantly dead copilot slumped to the ground, Michel stared wide-eyed at the man he had known as Jean-Paul Merard, struggling at the hand pinning him against his locker.

“I want the takeoff clearance code, Michel.” said Jean-Paul.

Michel glanced from Jean-Paul’s steady eyes to the body of his friend and copilot on the floor. “What the fuck are you doing, Jean-Paul? I will have you court-martialed for this.” He wrenched at Jean-Paul’s hand once more and called out to his colleague with mounting anger and concern, “Etienne? Etienne, are you all right?”

The other man did not move, and Michel became enraged. Ignoring the extraordinary strength of the hand pinning him against his locker, the pilot’s left hand grabbed Jean-Paul’s shirt and his right fist barreled into Jean-Paul’s face, colliding with it with all the force the burly pilot could muster. But the Agent’s head did not give an inch, and Michel’s fist splintered and cracked against the immovable skull of his assailant, the bones shattering as if he had slammed them into a brick wall. The pilot screamed as the incredible pain tore up his arm, forcing his whole body to spasm.

Michel’s face wrinkled in agony, tears streaked down his face, and Jean-Paul smiled, “Michel, please, let’s not make this more painful than it already is.” He reached out with his free hand and wrapped it gently around Michel’s broken fist. Applying the slightest pressure to the shattered ball of flesh and bone, he saw Michel tense and convulse with the pain, his eyes rolling back into his head as the fractured joints ground together.

Jean-Paul saw that if he applied any more pressure the man would pass out, but that wouldn’t be acceptable. When a pilot was given his flight assignment, he was given a unique, mission specific, six-digit code to call in to air traffic control before take off. Together with the flight plan given to the tower by fighter command, they must have this code to take off, or the tower was under strict orders to shoot them down. There were no exceptions in a hostile war zone like Afghanistan. The base had numerous SAM sites and anti-air cannons ranged around the base and they would shred anything that didn’t have a preapproved code.

Jean-Paul reduced the pressure on Michel’s fist a little and watched the pilot suck a breath in through strained lips, a small sob escaping his mouth as he despaired.

“Michel, if you don’t give me the code, I’ll just have to do this to the mission control sergeant instead. Either way I’m getting that code. Do you want to be responsible for another man going through this as well?”

Michel wept. A moment ago he had been chatting about his next home-leave. He was scheduled to return to France in two months. It was not that he was not prepared to die for his country, but not like this. Not at the hands of one of his own men. Rage came over him again, “You motherfucker, Merard, we don’t have enough troubles here already? Fuck you, kill me, I’m not helping you …” but his rant was cut off as the Agent began to squeeze once more.

The man bucked under the pain, tensing and wrenching at the hand holding his neck as his broken fist was squeezed, but to no avail. Jean-Paul desisted again and smiled, “Michel, please, death is the least of your worries. Death is going to be the gift I am going to give you when you tell me the code. No, no, Michel, you have to
earn
death. If you want to say something brave it should go something like this.” Michel stared at the mad man and was horrified to hear an exact copy of his own voice come out of Jean-Paul’s mouth, “Torture me all you want, Jean-Paul, I will never tell you the code.”

The Agent mimicked Michel’s strained face as he mocked him, then laughed coldly, “Michel, I am not here because I want some irrelevant plane. I am here for reasons you cannot imagine. And I am going to get what I want. Even if I have to kill everyone on this base.” At the last words, Jean-Paul’s face turned vicious, his next words coming in a venomous whisper as his civil veneer cracked to show the monster beneath, “So why don’t you give me the fucking code, you pathetic little cockroach, or I won’t just kill you; after I am done here I will go and find your wife and children in Nantes, and I promise you that once I find them I will brutally skull fuck all three of them. Do you understand?”

The pressure returned to Michel’s hand and he tried to scream, but the noise was stifled as the Agent’s other hand tightened around his throat. Despair flooded into Michel’s mind as he started to black out. His remaining good hand grabbed desperately at the zip pocket on the arm of his flight suit. Jean-Paul looked at it and released the man’s crushed fist, reaching up and opening the pocket and withdrawing a small printed slip, six digits neatly printed at its center.

“Michel, Michel, tut tut. You are supposed to destroy this as soon as you have memorized it.” Without ceremony, he then twisted his left wrist violently and snapped the pilot’s neck, killing him instantly. But he did not let go of the man just yet. After slipping the sheet of paper into his own pocket, he opened the pilot’s tall locker and jammed the man’s limp body into it. It was a squeeze, and he felt a few more of the dead pilot’s bones break as he thrust his body in there. But soon he was closing and locking the tall thin door and turning to the other dead man lying on the floor.

“Away we go, Etienne.” Jean-Paul said, hefting the still warm body of the copilot up and opening the dead man’s locker. Unceremoniously, Etienne was wedged into his proxy coffin as well.

* * *

It had been a strange four months for Dassault Rafale pilot trainee Serge Latral. Not long ago he had been a happy, hopeful inductee in the French Armee de l’Air, on track to join the prestigious Rafale Attack Group. He had worked hard. He and his young wife had sacrificed a lot. But a few months into his training he had met an attractive, well-dressed executive in a bar, exactly his type, and the beautiful man had attempted to seduce Serge. Tempted after three years of monogamy, the drink had broken through to his vigorously suppressed bisexual urges. The next morning had been one of regret and worry. The beautiful man was nowhere to be found, and Serge had snuck from the anonymous hotel room.

All had seemed well, but it was not long before another, older man approached him from the Direction du Renseignement Militaire, the secretive French military intelligence service. He carried photos of the fateful night and threatened to release them to Serge’s wife and his military superiors, ending the man’s hopes of moving forward in the career he had dreamed of for so long. It was not that the French military was biased against homosexuality; long before such ridiculous policies as ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ the French military had taken up the stance of France’s population as a whole: your private life should be just that. But having a given proclivity revealed once you were already a powerful person was very different to having a reputation hanging over you when you were trying to break into those higher ranks, and such a revelation would have damned Serge in the service as much as it would have in his home.

But the French spy had not been there to crush Serge’s ambitions. He was there at the bequest of a certain French foreign minister to enlist young Serge for an important job. He was needed to shadow another recruit in the Dassault Rafale training program … that is, if he wanted to stay in the program at all.

Having agreed to do what they were asking, Serge now found himself stationed in Afghanistan with Jean-Paul. It had seemed innocent enough at first; a relatively innocuous, if distasteful task that he had completed with ease. But now all hell was breaking loose around them and Jean-Paul Merard was nowhere to be found. So Serge had gone searching for the other pilot on the large Allied base.

During his infrequent communications with his agency handler, he had been told again and again that a time may come when the other man, Jean-Paul, might try to leave the base, and that this would happen in tandem with some notable world events. He had not been told more than that in any of his cryptic briefing sessions, but if ever something had qualified as ‘notable world events’, it was the last two days.

He searched the base frantically, checking guard logs at each of the three main gates. His ward was not in the officer’s mess, or in their barracks. At last he headed to the briefing room where they had advanced tactical classes each day with the senior pilots. But as he walked over to the low prefabricated building he passed the fighter hangar.

Wait, was that, holy shit, that was Jean-Paul now, in a flight suit, heading to one of the planes. They weren’t scheduled to go up, and they certainly weren’t scheduled to go up without a pilot. Sergio broke into a run, heading to the guard post. Flashing his pilot’s ID just as Jean-Paul had, he called out to the other trainee.

“Jean-Paul, qu’est-ce qui se passe?” Jean-Paul did not turn around at first, but as the other trainee approached him, he stopped and turned to him.