Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  With mechanical precision, a heat-seeking missile dropped off its starboard wing, the chemical reaction of its rockets ignited, and it leapt away from the Sukhoi at incredible speed, zeroing in on the Red Arrow’s super-hot engines.

  United Nations Head Quarters,

  New York City, USA

  “Here they come!” someone shouted in the TOC, his voice carrying with it a wave of panic. All eyes now watched the wall board as the blinking digital representations of the NATO and Russian forces swept towards their own collision point.

  Airborne over Europe

  In the air above Denmark, the squadron leader of the NATO planes checked in with his own commander.

  “Roger that. We have a visual of the target.”

  In the lead plane of the Russian forces, the squadron leader’s hands were slick with sweat as the gripped the control stick of the motherland’s newest fighter jet. Ahead of him, he could see the tiny silhouettes of two planes engaged in a dogfight, while beyond them was the swarming black mass of thirty more fighter jets.

  NATO jets.

  Enemy jets.

  His orders were clear. Protect his comrade no matter the cost.

  “All pilots,” he radioed. “Prepare to engage.”

  All across the globe, those in power, those in the know, watched status screens, monitors and live video feeds of the turmoil in the skies above northern Europe.

  The Kremlin,

  Moscow, Russia

  The Russian President’s hands were shaking, despite his outwardly cool demeanour. History would judge him this day. The moment one of his fighter jets obeyed his orders and opened fire on a NATO plane, he would be plunging Russia, and the world, into war. Yet the alternative meant annihilation for his country.

  It wasn’t supposed to have come to this. It should have been a quick snatch and grab operation. There would have been political fallout; diplomatic relations would have soured for a few months, just like those with China, but ultimately the status-quo would have been maintained, only this time with Russia holding all the aces.

  Russia had to control the Moon Mask.

  The White House,

  Washington D.C., USA

  The American President watched the swarm of NATO forces that he had urged, pressured, even threatened, race towards an aerial collision with those of his nation’s age-old enemy.

  Russia must not control the Moon Mask.

  Airborne over Europe

  In the skies above the coast of Denmark, squashed between two forces of advanced warplanes closing at colossal speed, a single Red Arrow flew straight and true, directly towards the heat-seeking missile which raced towards his engines. It had launched only a second ago, yet for Nathan Raine it had felt like an eternity. He hadn’t had chance to ponder his position, to consider the sixty savage beasts waiting to hurl themselves at one another, closing all the time. Nor had he even realised that the fate of the world rested on his shoulders. The politics of nations, the power plays of world leaders, the gesturing of political forces never entered his head. They didn’t matter.

  Raine’s world had focussed down to him, the Russian, and the missile that lay between them.

  In the blink of an eye, moments before the missile struck, Raine yanked the steering yoke, spinning the Red Arrow into a barrel roll. The missile shot past. Raine dived. The missile re-established its lock, swung about. The Russian plane banked and began to climb. Raine pulled back, sweeping the Arrow up towards the underbelly of his more-powerful prey. The missile followed, trailing a streamer of smoke.

  The Russian and NATO planes grew larger all around, the roar of their engines deafening.

  West’s pilot realised Raine’s plan and flipped his own plane expertly to port. The Red Arrow shot up past its cockpit and West realised he must have been hit because he was trailing smoke.

  Raine spun the Red Arrow on its axis, a barrel-roll as he climbed over the Sukhoi’s cockpit then levelled out. The smoke was thick and intense, clogging and all encompassing. The Russian pilot found himself temporarily blind.

  “Why’s the smoke red?” West heard himself ask.

  The Sukhoi dropped slightly as the pilot tried desperately to escape the cloud of bright red smoke which now engulfed them. From the ground, the scene far overhead looked as incredible as it did bizarre as the Red Arrow released its tanks of coloured vapour, usually used to swoon crowds of spectators as they criss-crossed through the sky. But now the Arrow had dumped its load over the canopy of the Sukhoi’s cockpit and the split second it took the Russian plane’s disoriented pilot to realise what was happening was all that was needed.

  The heat-seeking missile pierced the cloud of red smoke and, the Sukhoi having drifted, blinded, into its path, drove itself into the underbelly of the plane!

  Raine screamed loudly, a roar of adrenaline, pain and fear as he threw the Red Arrow away from the blossoming cloud of destruction. It looked as though a nebula was bursting into life above Denmark as the cloud of smoke billowed outwards like a supernova.

  “Target is down, I repeat, target is down!” The NATO squadron leader yelled urgently into his radio.

  The Kremlin,

  Moscow, Russia

  A similar report, relayed from the Russian commander, echoed through the speakers of the Russian president’s office but he was already in motion, grabbing the radio and screaming into it. “Abort! Abort!”

  Airborne over Europe

  The command was echoed through the channels, from presidents, supreme commanders, generals and ultimately to the pilots of both forces.

  Just as sixty-two warplanes converged on the blossoming explosion that marked the position of their target, they veered away at the last possible moment. Their engines boomed as the two opposing forces weaved in and out of one another, so close that the pilots of their respective counterparts could be seen through the cockpit canopies of their fighters. It was a thunderous melee of deadly, terrifying machines designed for the sole purpose of bringing death and destruction to one another, yet not a single bullet was fired.

  Instead, as though they had passed through a storm cloud, all the planes swept out from the tangle of metal that could easily have been the ignition point of a third world war and powered away from one another.

  RNAS Culdrose,

  Cornwall, England

  “What did I tell you,” Gibbs barked at Robertson in the O.C. of RNAS Culdrose, raising his voice to be heard over the collective sounds of relief from the staff that had watched the events closely. “You’ll get your plane back in one piece.”

  “Mayday, mayday,” a voice crackled over the speakers as if on cue. Nathan Raine. “I’m going down, I repeat, I’m going down.”

  Airborne over Europe

  Whatever burning chunk of debris had hit the tail of the Red Arrow had obliterated its engines. Raine banked about shallowly and headed out over the coast. Already he could feel his altitude dropping and his speed dipping. Nevertheless, the plane’s own momentum still had it travelling at close to four hundred miles an hour as it cleared the west coast of Denmark and dropped towards the glistening blue that raced by underneath.

  “I’m bailing out.” He fed his coordinates to the operator at Culdrose, then reached down and pulled the eject lever. A small chemical explosion catapulted the canopy from the top of the plane and Raine barely had time to register the sudden rush of wind that hit him as he and the pilot’s seat were shot out from the dying bulk of the plane and launched into the air. The parachute plumed open instants later and he watched as the sleek Red Arrow slammed into the ocean, crumpling on impact. It bobbed there for a moment, buoyant, before its own weight and its flooded cockpit dragged it under.

  RNAS Culdrose,

  Cornwall, England

  Despite the situation, Benjamin King couldn’t help himself as he stood watching the events in the O.C. at Culdrose. He leaned in between Gibbs and Robertson, remembering the former’s promise to retur
n the ‘borrowed’ plane safe and sound.

  “I told you so,” he smiled smugly.

  43:

  The Destroyer of Worlds

  United Nations Head Quarters,

  New York City, USA

  Alexander Langley slumped into his chair in his office at the United Nations Secretariat Building and rubbed his throbbing temples.

  In the space of only a few days, the world had gone from something loosely resembling order into undisputed chaos. In his mind’s eye, Langley saw the earth as little more than a dry haystack with half a dozen people gathered around holding magnifying glasses over it. At any time, a single spark was going to ignite the whole thing.

  It had been so much easier when he had been a soldier in the field. All he had needed to focus on was the mission, and his team. And that was how he had played this entire Moon Mask crisis, focussing purely on that one aspect of the mission- the retrieval of the mask. Even now, he had just devoted enormous amounts of resources to cordoning off the crash site in Denmark while the NATO forces there searched for the transponder signal from the mask’s case. The case had been designed to withstand a nuclear detonation so he had no concerns about it not having survived, yet he found himself wishing it hadn’t.

  Now I am become death; the destroyer of worlds.

  Oppenheimer’s infamous statement following the detonation of the world’s first artificial nuclear explosion had been plaguing him ever since finding out about the threat that these tachyons posed.

  He was the man selected to find this power and contain it. Protect it. But now, as he stepped back to look at the bigger picture, to look beyond the simple retrieval of the Moon Mask and consider the eventualities involved with its being reassembled, he found himself wondering just who he was protecting it from.

  The United Nations had always shone as mankind’s brightest beacon of international hope, a place where all nations could come together for the betterment, and the protection, of humankind. But now both China and Russia had shown their hands. They had no interest in international security, only in their own goals.

  Sergei’s accusation still echoed in his mind. “Think about it, Alex. How do you think your government even knew about the tachyon radiation? They sent a team to Venezuela to retrieve the mask long before it even came to our attention.”

  How had the Pentagon known about tachyon radiation? How had U.S. doctors diagnosed the German archaeologist, Karen Weingarten, as suffering from tachyon radiation poisoning if it was only theoretical? The Russians had experimented on it, and he presumed so had the Chinese for them to have known to send a team to the Amazon. But following that train of thought likewise led him onto the only logical conclusion: the United States had also been experimenting with tachyons. And if that was true, were their motives equally as selfish as Russia and China’s?

  The shrill ring of the phone on his desk startled him from his dark thoughts. He grasped the receiver. “Yes?”

  The voice of his aide replied. “Mister Ambassador, we just got word that the package has been recovered.” She said the words in such a simple, casual manner, totally oblivious to the danger that the ancient mask posed to the modern world.

  He didn’t know whether he was relieved or not. “Thank you, Kelly,” he said half-heartedly. He went to reset the receiver in its cradle then snatched it back to his ear. “Kelly.” She was still there. “Will you get me the name and contact details of the doctor at John Hopkins who diagnosed Karen Weingarten from the UNESCO Sarisariñama Expedition? Thank you.” Then he hung up the receiver and returned to his dark and troublesome thoughts.

  NATO Air Base Geilenkirchen,

  Germany

  The low afternoon sun glared through the window in the office space Benjamin King had been allocated upon arriving at the NATO base two hours earlier, but he ignored it and his own fatigue as he scrolled through page after page of digitalised documents on the internet. Spread across the desk around him were numerous books which he had managed to commandeer from the base’s library but so far they had revealed nothing about the two missing pieces of the Moon Mask.

  He had been expecting one to be missing. Throughout the Kernewek Diary, there had been no mention about Kha’um recovering the mask originally stolen from the Bouda by Edward Pryce. On his adventures through Chile and then Cornwall, he had been positive that the Bouda mask wouldn’t be with the pieces Kha’um had gathered from his own adventures three hundred years ago. But he had been certain that all the other pieces would be there- the Egyptian mask, the Easter Island mask, and ultimately the final missing piece which King himself had found- the Xibalba mask.

  Tracking down the Bouda mask, he knew, was only a matter of time. Sid and Nadia were currently in an adjoining office trying to piece together the life of Edward Pryce. In all of her writings, Emily Hamilton had described Kha’um’s nemesis as little more than ‘a devil which dogged our trail every step of the way’. But there was more to Pryce than some faceless villain, King knew. He was a man obsessed with reuniting all the pieces of the Moon Mask in the misguided belief that he could use it to travel back in time and right the wrong he felt had been done to him. King already knew that he had been declared insane and locked away in an asylum. Yet all of a sudden he reappeared in Kha’um’s life, not only released from his asylum but suddenly in command of a ship and a crew. And then, after losing his ship to Kha’um, he had miraculously found another. Yet, the records indicated that all his assets had been frozen when he had been declared insane, his family’s wealth, built on the trading of African slaves, absorbed by the government of the time.

  So how was Edward Pryce able to purchase two ships and two crews? How was he able to provide the supplies and provisions for numerous trans-Atlantic hunts in pursuit of Kha’um? Or, more importantly, who was funding him from behind the scenes? And why?

  King knew that if they could answer these questions they would lead to Pryce’s puppet-handlers. And whoever was pulling his strings, he knew, was also the person who possessed the Bouda’s mask.

  But while Sid and Nadia pursued that line of investigation, King had set himself a far more daunting challenge.

  Taking into account the missing piece which they could account for, there was still another ‘gap’ in the completed Moon Mask, a slot for the final piece of the ancient jigsaw to fit into.

  Only this time, King had no idea where to begin.

  There were no clues, no open lines of enquiry. He’d re-read the Kernewek Diary and all the other source material he had accumulated over the years but everything he had so far suggested that the puzzle was complete, that the mask was composed of four parts: the Bouda piece, the Xibalban piece, the Easter Island piece and the Egyptian piece.

  So he had started from scratch, searching the internet for any hits that might reveal the final piece’s location. He searched for any references to magical masks, which came back with so many possibilities that he’d never have enough years of his life left to read them all. He’d scoured the UNESCO database and Nadia had set up a ‘spider’ search program which spread throughout the web, searching museum inventories, private collectors and auction houses. So far, he’d read about masks from Egypt to Mexico, Ancient Babylon to Aboriginal Australia. He’d read myths and legends, folktales and purely farcical stories about the magical masks of Solomon, Rameses and Augustus to Genghis Khan, Henry VIII and George Washington, but none of them fit, either physically or metaphorically, with the Moon Mask.

  After clicking onto yet another whacko website about a magical mask worn by George Washington, King dropped his head down onto the desk and thumped it three times. It did nothing to help the headache which he hadn’t shaken since crashing off the balcony in the Hand of Freedom building and then being knocked out by West in the mine. His eyes felt like they were going to pop, just about every muscle in his body ached from the exertions of the last week and the nail wound in his forearm and hand still hurt like hell despite the pain killers he
’d been prescribed by Culdrose’s medic.

  “Ben?” Sid’s voice suddenly startled him. He looked up at her groggily. The brief excitement of their engagement seemed years ago now. He was running on empty. Sid had tried to get him to catch some shut-eye on the two hour flight from Culdrose but he’d spent the whole time re-reading Emily Hamilton’s narrative about Kha’um’s adventures, hoping for some clue. How had Kha’um found the other pieces of the mask in the first place? If he couldn’t track them down using the universal network that was the internet, how did an illiterate escaped slave find two pieces and almost a third, three hundred years ago? But all that Emily said about the matter was that Kha’um ‘placed the mask upon his head and entered a trance-like state’. When he removed it, severely weakened and disorientated, he claimed to know where the next piece was. But how was that even possible?

  “Hi,” he greeted Sid and Nadia. Officially released from custody, Nadia had been reinstated back onto the team. But despite her cooperation, King could see a distance in her that hadn’t been there before. She was angry. She was hurt. Luckily for the rest of them, most of that anger seemed to be directed at her original accuser: Nathan Raine.

  They’d been told that Raine had been recovered safely and, after a quick once over in the infirmary, he was now being debriefed somewhere on the base. The British were pretty angry about him destroying a Red Arrow, but King suspected he’d rather be facing a pissed off RAF Air Marshall than Nadia Yashina at this precise moment.