[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (72 page)

The quad was wide open and flood lit at all times. It was surrounded by guards, and the airfield’s tower was just next to it, between the hangar and the nearby runway. While theoretically Jean-Paul could easily handle the base guards with his onboard weaponry, his short-range lasers and sonic punch would be useless against whatever was taking out the virus pods above. The base’s air defenses, meanwhile, were an active matrix, meaning that if the tower didn’t actively stop them, they would shoot any foreign object out of the sky. Which all meant that he needed the powerful jet fighter to take down whatever was up there, and he couldn’t take off if the tower had any reason not to allow him safe passage. So in the middle of the wide-open quad, he turned to his fellow trainee and smiled like an old friend.

“Shh, Serge, not so loud.” Jean-Paul whispered, reaching out and taking the other man’s hand as he ran up. Serge looked at him, confused, and was about to speak when Jean-Paul carried on, “Thank God you are here.” said Jean-Paul conspiratorially, “Michel and Etienne are drunk, they didn’t know they were scheduled for a patrol. They begged me to take their flight so they don’t get grounded. Now that you are here you can join me, come on, get suited up. It’s just a standard patrol route.”

This wasn’t right. This was a long way from right. Something in Serge told him that this, right now, was the reason that he had been assigned to watch the other cadet. It was happening. But the same instinct also told him that he needed to tread very carefully. He had three choices. Shout out for the guard to come over, go with his fellow recruit and attempt to discreetly alert the guard that something was wrong, or say that he didn’t want to go, and hope that Jean-Paul let him go quietly.

Jean-Paul did not let go of Serge’s arm while the other man considered his options. He stood there waiting, a smile on his face like he was trying to get Serge to do something as innocent as go for a beer.

“I don’t know, Jean-Paul. Maybe I should talk to Michel, make sure he is OK with me going along too?” Serge said, fighting to keep the quiver out of his voice, but Jean-Paul was taking something out of his pocket. Serge looked down. It was the slip the captains were given by fighter command with the clearance code. There were only two ways Jean-Paul could have gotten it from Michel: either he was telling the truth and Michel really did want Jean-Paul to take the patrol duty, or … Serge set the thought aside, to think along those lines was just paranoid.

But in truth, either conclusion brought Serge to the same response. He had to stay with Jean-Paul and try to alert someone when he had a chance.

And so, reluctantly, Serge nodded to the other junior officer, and eventually responded with a weak smile. Jean-Paul’s smile broadened in reply, “Great, my friend, great. Come on, let’s get you suited up quickly and get aboard.” Not letting go of Serge’s arm, Jean-Paul set off toward the locker room once more, and the twenty-three-year-old felt himself propelled along by the powerful grip of his erstwhile friend.

Once in the locker room, they came across two other pilots suiting up. Jean-Paul cursed his luck with inner shouts of frustration, but externally remained beatific. He would have to actually take Serge with him. One more complication, but not an insurmountable one, by any means. Another pest to be dealt with once he was away from this place.

* * *

The black sky seemed to shudder with the fourth explosion as the B-2 tracked down its targets one by one. It had been thirty minutes since Jack and Martin had fired off the first missile and they had enjoyed a quick run of successful hits since then. Having banked after the first strike, they were now on the same course as their targets, heading east over Kashmir and northern Pakistan. As the fourth fireball ballooned upward, Jack veered slightly to avoid the worst turbulence, but the plane still bucked as the explosion-induced vortex warped the atmosphere.

Jack turned to Martin briefly. The other man was staring mutely at the massive plume of flame with a mix of reticence, professional pride, and childlike awe. Jack smiled with him but was disturbed by a sudden beeping from his console. Paging through the screens, he came to the radar and located the source of the alarm. Multiple bogies inbound from astern.

“Martin, I have multiple contacts at vector four-niner converging on our position at Mach 1.” said Jack in a worried tone, “Pull up the radar analysis screen and read off the diagnostics to me.”

“Radar Analysis Screen … got it.” said Martin, as calmly as he could manage. He selected the view and scrolled through the information on screen, assessing what they were facing.

“I make it six bogies, converging on our position in a v-formation. They’re coming up from the southwest so it looks like they were scrambled out of Peshawar.”

“That must be the Pakistan air force coming to check us out.” said Jack. He glanced at the mapping screen and checked his readouts, his face creasing into a frown as he checked their position.

“Shit.” Jack said, “They’re only 300 clicks out, at that speed they’ll be on us before we reach the border.” He shook his head, “how did they scramble a response so quickly?”

“Well, we knew they were going to come looking.” said Martin, as calmly as he could manage.

“Yeah,” replied Jack, “but I guess I had hoped that Shahim’s rampage down there would have delayed them more … or even grounded them permanently.”

Martin nodded, but then replied, in as hopeful a tone as he could muster, “We were either going to have to face these guys or our own fighters scrambling from our bases in Afghanistan. Surely these guys don’t have anything too serious to throw at us?”

Jack barked a sarcastic laugh at the air, then shook his head.

“They didn’t have too much a while back, maybe,” he said, “but that was before we sold them thirty-six more F-16s a few years ago. I have no doubt that is what they have sent to check us out.”

Martin stared at Jack aghast, but the other man merely nodded. Then they both turned back to their respective screens.

“Just F16s, then.” said Martin quietly.

* * *

“Command Central, this is squadron leader Pelishar One. What do you have for us?” The voice of the lead F-16’s pilot came in clear over the radio in the command bunker.

It had been hell on the base for the last two nights, and god knows what new horror these latest aberrations foretold. Luckily for General Abashell, he had not been here for the worst of it, but he was here now, and the legendary commander had been directing the battered base’s defenses since his arrival a few hours earlier.

After bringing the base back under some modicum of military lockdown, he had faced a slew of preposterous rumors about the seemingly superhuman nature of their attackers. That had culminated in reports that his own daughter had been killed on the base, something he had quashed with a stern call to her real commander back in Islamabad, a quick word directly with her just to be sure, and then a diatribe on what he would do to the next person who brought him a report that include the word ‘superhuman.’

After events had seemed to be somewhat under his control, reports of an even greater wave of launches had started to come in. They had heard of the missile launches in the upper atmosphere around the globe, and god knows he knew of the earlier launches from the very base he now commanded. As he had feared, the Russian military machine was reportedly now mobilizing in response, and the Kremlin was calling for full access to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Then, of course, there were rumors that all the missile launches were somehow linked.

But General Abashell had even more pressing concerns. Three hours earlier, as news flooded the world’s television and radio networks about the explosions in space, they had started to pick up some sort of debris falling into the upper atmosphere over Eastern Pakistan and sweeping west in a long arch. It had been hard to tell how big the objects were, but there was a string of them coming down in a line stretching as far as their radar could see.

Then, without warning, one of them had detonated, forcing them to dismiss the theory that this was merely debris from some rogue satellite’s demise. The explosion had been so high and so bright that people from over sixty miles away had reported it. A massive circle of flame in the night sky blossoming inward and upward in a great plume. He had not seen it himself, as Peshawar was hundreds of miles to the south of the line of falling objects. But radar and surface-to-air missile installations along the Chinese and Indian borders had sent back images of the detonation.

Maybe it was some weapon he did not know of, some leftover munitions from the attacks over Singapore, Hawaii, and Florida. Either way it was clearly something that demanded immediate investigation. That had been half an hour ago, but he had responded as quickly as the base’s depleted capabilities would allow.

Scanning the command bunker, he quietly cursed the absent air force colonel that was supposed to be his liaison. He had dispatched the exhausted man to personally oversee the launch of six of the base’s remaining F-16s. Many had apparently been damaged by the insurgents’ attack, yet another example of the supposedly superhuman efforts of the vermin attackers, or the equally phenomenal failure of his own people.

His chest surged in anger, but he wrestled his frustration under control as his aide de camp looked askew at him. There was no point in shouting any more than he already had, so instead he mastered his mood and said quietly to the efficient major by his side, “Go and find that bloody air force colonel, Major Duranda, and get him back here. I am tired of doing his job for him.”

The major nodded his head and left without ceremony, making for the guarded doors of the command bunker as the general turned back to the panel of computer screens in front of him. At least his birds were in the air and en route. Soon he would have more information. Hearing a bad report was better than not having a report at all. Information was everything, and he needed to know what the hell was going on up there.

An operator at one of the consoles spoke up, “We’re receiving reports of a fourth explosion, sir, same as the first three.”

“Same altitude?” asked the general.

“Yes, sir, forty-nine and a half thousand feet.” said the operator with brisk efficiency.

Good, thought the general as he regarded the operator in question, at least somebody knows their job. So, same altitude as before, then there is a pattern. General Abashell liked patterns. He liked predictability. In his opinion, everything was predictable if you had all the relevant information to hand. So, he thought, let’s look for the next logical step in that pattern.

“Get me a line on the next object and an anticipated point where it will hit the same altitude.”

The operator did not respond for a moment, and the general felt his ire rising once more in the second before the man reeled off his response.

“I already have estimated coordinates for the next explosion, sir, and a bearing for the squadron to intercept.”

Hmm, thought the general, his next order anticipated. Not bad. He glanced at the nameplate on the top of the operator’s console and made a mental note.

“Sergeant Gupta, inform the squadron commander to come to that heading and altitude, and give him an estimated time to detonation. Let’s get some eyes on one of these explosions.” said the general, and the operator acknowledged quickly, already reaching for the comms key in anticipation of the command.

* * *

“Acknowledged, Command Central.” said the squadron leader a moment later, then, flicking a switch to go to tight beamed plane-to-plane comms, he passed on his orders to his pilots.

“Pelishar Wing, this is Pelishar One, come to nine-zero-niner, on my mark. Line up on the parallel, vertical recon formation, 2K splits from 40,000ft. I have the point.”

The other pilots acknowledged briefly and efficiently, and the squadron leader initiated the maneuver. With cool precision the planes broke formation and started to spread out. They were entering a vertical search pattern with the lowest plane at 40,000 feet and the next two thousand feet above him and so on, up to fifty-two thousand.

As the planes climbed and spread out onto their new search grid, the command bunker operator updated them on the latest information. The squadron had actually seen the last explosion as a yellow-orange spark on the horizon, and now they were starting to get intermittent blips from the next pod as they closed on it. If it followed the same pattern as the others, they should be in visual range when the next explosion occurred. It was still night, but the sky was starting to be permeated with the first deep blue hues of dawn. Soon the line of the horizon would resolve itself against the brightening sky and the stars would bleach and fade behind the coming day.

Maybe the new day would bring some clarity to the strange tori of fire punctuating the sky over their violence stricken country.

Fifteen more minutes passed as they closed on their objective, then suddenly the top four planes in the formation reported seeing a blue band streaking through the sky. At that precise moment, a second radar blip registered briefly on their radar screens, too small to be visible to Central Command. There was something else out there, but a moment later it was gone again, leaving only the faint blue band ahead of them.

The squadron leader had heard about this. They had received reports from Afghanistan of the radar ghosts formed by America’s advanced stealth fighters and bombers, and the squadron commander’s curiosity grew as he considered what they might be about to find.

* * *

General Abashell nodded as the operator gave him the reports of a fresh radar signature being patched from the fighter’s radar arrays, and reached up to stroke his chin. Only the Americans had planes equipped with proven stealth technology, though the Europeans and Chinese each claimed some level of it themselves.

“Get me the liaison to the Allied forces, I want to speak with him immediately.” said the general to the air, expecting an automatic response from his aide de camp. But none came and he remembered that he had dispatched the man to look for the errant air force colonel.