Carter followed him up. He stopped for a moment, glancing over at Cairo. The sights and scents of the city had filled him with an awe that he would never forget. But he knew that he was cursed in this place, hated and reviled, condemned to die. He could never again witness its wonders without risking a bullet in the back.
Carter breathed deeply, dropped into the cockpit and pushed the ladder into its housing. He stared at the controls in front of him, reached out, and flicked on the power. Powering-up whines came from the aircraft’s batteries and Carter touched the control screen, which sprang to life with a display of Russian and subtitled Arabic.
‘Hmm.’
‘You know how to fly this, Carter?’
‘Aye.’
The sirens were getting uncomfortably close. Carter started the engines, which roared into life with the awesome, deafening thunder of quad Saturn/Lyulka A184-F turbofans and the reined-in energies of 200,000 pounds of thrust. Grasping the controls, Carter eased the MiG 8-40 around in a circle to face the long expanse of sand-blown tarmac. The runway stretched into the distance, meeting the horizon through a shimmer of desert heat.
Excitement welled in Carter’s breast - excitement at such awesome and mind-blowing power, mixed with his fear of flying and falling and heights. He also had the terrible certainty that if he fucked up then he would be dog meat, pulped in a battered can, within about thirty seconds flat...
Machine guns rattled from the jeeps.
Bullets zipped over the wings ...
Carter hit the burners. The MiG 8-40 MFI’s engine note rose to a scream and the fighter juddered around the two men. It screeched down the runway, leaving trails of rubber on the dusty tarmac, lifted its nose towards the sky and the orange sun - and soared smoothly up into the heavens ...
Sunlight gleamed along the fighter’s grey flanks.
The wheels lifted neatly into the machine’s underbelly with tiny and precise clicks.
And the MiG 8-40 banked, wings gleaming, and headed towards the south and west.
‘We’re going in the wrong direction.’
‘No, we’re going to pick up the Comanche.’
‘Why?’
‘All our equipment is there. And our explosives. Everything we could need.’
Mongrel frowned. ‘How long will it take?’
‘In this?’ said Carter, gazing out over the rapidly undulating desert. ‘Well, we’re currently cruising at 2,000 kilometres an hour - so a little over ten minutes. Now
that’s
pretty fucking fast.’
The MiG 8-40 MFI was a multi-functional front-line fighter. It was built primarily for air-to-air combat but it also carried payloads both in its belly and on pylons beneath its wings for tactical air-to-air surface strikes. Built by MiG - the Mikoyan & Gurevich aviation, scientific and production complex of the MAPO military-industrial corporation of the Northern Russian Confederacy - the war machine had quad Saturn/Lyulka A184-F engines with turbofans and Needle_injectors capable of upwards of 200,000 pounds of thrust when using afterburners. It had System5 thrust vectoring channels to allow the fighter to make extremely sharp turns. The jet could supercruise at an awesome 2,600 km/h, had a top thrust speed of 3,245 km/h and a flight ceiling of a little over 27,500 metres. The plane was a cranked delta-wing, with triple tail fins, and it had intakes under the nose. It measured twenty-two metres in length and had a wingspan of sixteen metres. It sported Phazotron Plasma TW-35 phased-array fire-control radar, rearward-facing N-018 radar and Global PK18 TSAM control radar. It also carried the latest generation of plasma-cloud stealth systems - known as PCSS-5s - for the simple beauty of undetected infiltration.
After scanning the machine’s systems and struggling through the Russian and Arabic instructions, Carter could see that this machine packed quad 30mm canons, and carried eight R-80 AA-e Aphid air-to-air missiles, and twelve KH-68 AS-13 Kilter tactical air-to-surface missiles, each 4.98 metres long.
Carter grinned to himself sombrely.
Fucker must be worth a few million, he mused.
One could say that airfield security had been lax.
And somebody was going to lose his job, and then his balls.
There was silence for a while, interrupted only by the noise of the engines as they cruised at low altitude. Carter knew that he wasn’t a fighter pilot and despite arming the PCSS-5s he still felt nervous. He didn’t want to engage in air-to-air combat with pilots sporting thousands of hours of training.
‘Mongrel, we need to talk.’
‘So talk.’
‘That wasn’t me back there.’
‘Who was it, the fucking Queen? I didn’t realise she was so fond of shooting dogs with a Browning.’
‘Mongrel, listen to me. There is a demon inside my head. Sometimes I go a little —
insane.
I try to control it, really I do. But sometimes, when I am weak, or I’ve been beaten up or shot - sometimes the demon takes control.’
Mongrel was silent. The engines hissed behind the two men. Below, the desert flowed like golden mercury. Rocks flowed past and the distant landscape lay cratered like the moon.
‘I find that hard to accept.’
Carter took a deep breath. ‘You have heard Natasha -and I - mention the name of Kade? I know you have. It is me name of the demon in my soul, the dark brother I have to carry like a seed. And yes, he is evil, and yes, I wish him dead. But I cannot banish him, Mongrel, I cannot get rid of him without terminating my own fucking existence. And I want to, believe me, I want him to die ... but he lives, inside me, in my brain, and sometimes he breaks free ...’
For decades Carter had carried this secret.
And he realised that he was talking as much to himself as to Mongrel. And now he was exorcising his secret, the words flowed with ease, like fine sand in an hourglass.
Carter realised that there were tears staining his cheeks.
‘Sometimes I do really bad things,’ he whispered. ‘But it is not always me in control. Sometimes I have no say in my actions. Sometimes Kade holds me in his fist -trapped behind the bars of his strength - and there is nothing I can do.’
Mongrel leaned forward and tapped Carter on the shoulder. Carter turned, savagely wiping away his tears. Mongrel smiled at him, his dark eyes glistening.
‘I accept this for now, but later we must talk. When this - this
Kade
is out, he have real attitude problem. I considered putting bullet in him with M24. He real fuck-wit.’
‘Yeah.’ Carter laughed. ‘Fucking tell me about it. I have to listen to his voice 24/7. It drives a man a little mad.’
‘So what the plan now?’
‘I’ll drop you by the Comanche ... shit, you
can
fly it, can’t you?’
‘Ha, I’ll fly anything! Not very well, but I fly it.’
‘Then we’ll rendezvous in Austria. I’ll scout ahead. The fucking speed of this thing, I’ll probably get there before Durell and Jam!’
‘I doubt that. We spend too much time fucking about here.’
‘I knew coming to Egypt was a bad idea. Have you checked the ECube?’
Mongrel fished out the machine. It glowed blue.
‘It’s working. But I fear Nex still have control of systems, despite this new revision of our magical little alloy friend - real piece of shit The Priest gave us here, I am thinking.’
‘Send an ECube blip on the WarChannel. When the shit hits the fan, my disobedience will be as nothing - and the world is at stake here, our whole civilisation at risk. We need Spiral back-up; I doubt we’ll come out of this alive without
some
aid ...’
‘But you are disobeying Spiral’s orders!’
Carter nodded. ‘I will save Natasha - and I will destroy Durell. But I cannot fight a war alone. Let Spiral do what they will do - if they cannot see I fight for the greater good, then fuck them to the darkest reaches of Hell. But I won’t turn down a bit of heavy artillery help, that’s for sure ...’
Mongrel nodded, and started to spin the ECube in his fingers. ‘If Durell
does
have control of channels, when I send this he might know we’re still alive. He might know we’re coming ...’
‘Fuck him,’ said Carter. ‘Send him one as well. And tell him I look forward to our next joyful meeting, because there will be only one fucker leaving the room - and it won’t be him.’
The MiG cruised on, sunlight glimmering along its dull grey hull. The Russian tri-colour was the only bit of colour on its otherwise blank alloy fuselage. Soon the machine dropped, howling from the deep blue skies, and skimmed low across the desert rocks of Gebel al-Galala al-Qibliya - and then on towards the Red Sea Mountains, searching for a place to land ...
■
■ ■
■ ■
>>>>>
■
quakehubQIV initiated
waiting
waiting
waiting
proc zgrade
matter (q) clocks initiated
zones (q-z): checking
■
OPEN 6364786398-QIV {
isort(A, 0); check(A, 0)
genid(A, 1); isort(A, 1)i check(A, 1)
genrand(A, n); isort(A, n); check(A, n)
gensort(A, n); isort(A, n); check(A, n)
genrev(A, n); isort(A, n); check(A, n)
identical integers //q12
genid(A, n); isort(Ai n); check(A, n)
qq)
function isort(A, n, I, j, t) {
for (i = 2, i < = n, i++)
for (j = I, j > 1 88 A [j-1] > A [j];
j--) {
# swap A[j-1] = A[j]
t = A[j-1]; A[j -1] = A[j]; A[j] = t \\\ }
zones cleared;
call fzone sort; 7y879ehwi
x897xx89x897x90
x5x675x45x56576
x876x79-x076x9x7
x6xx454x76x765x
call 76538973454784
call 43876438973492
call 23765723862348
■
quakehub systems online
quakehub foundations linked
quakehub systems operational
01010111ok
101010100k
111010100k
10010101ok
100000100k
00000000ok•
engines complete
please specify targets…
OPEN tactical :GUI
done
■ ■ ■ ■
New York, the United States of America
Darkness flowed majestically over the sleeping city. Lights glittered from a billion different coordinates, a swathe of electronic eyes focusing and keeping the world alive. Cars moved in tracer streamers along the twisting concrete highways, headlights slicing the dark and adding to the great sweep of phosphorescence flowing up and out towards heaven.
The night was peaceful.
Sleeping.
The rumble seemed to shake the whole world. Buildings started to tremble, softly at first, jiggling against their foundations as windows clattered in frames. Several shattered, glass shards and slivers tumbling in long glittering falls to the sidewalks far below. From Queens to Staten Island, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, the Big Apple felt the clenched and threatened fury of the quake’s titanic fist-fuck.
Cars started to rattle against road surfaces, bouncing on protesting suspensions.
Shop windows cascaded onto sidewalks in huge sheets of diced glass.
Alarms started to squeal from a million different tenement blocks and wounded vehicles.
The George Washington Bridge began to shudder, swaying violently.
On the subway, trains ground to a halt as rails were distorted, twisted, wrenched from concrete blocks, their tortured bolts torn.
And then the quake seemed to grow, to expand, to rise swiftly into a sudden fury - as it washed across the whole city in a titanic crush and devastating smash of unleashed energy worse than any single warhead that had ever been directed at the United States ...
Buildings toppled.
Houses disintegrated.
Cars were crushed.
And all to the accompaniment of a constant wail, a high-pitched eternal cacophony, a moaning writhing bleeding symphony-scream of apocalyptic human suffering.
Shanghai, China
In Shanghai Harbour at the head of the Yangtze River, the water trembled gently. Small boats started to bob, the rhythm gentle at first but growing more violent until they jiggled as though they were on wires. Moored ferries started to rock, crunching against wharfs and one another, and on the mainland the streets started to move, some actually erupting as tarmac buckled and thrust upwards in grey-black showers. The new T12 HyperTubeway ground to a halt, and screams echoed as the waters from the Yangtze poured in, picking up trams and spinning them violently down the wide bright underground tunnels, washing people like sticks of debris from the platforms, drowning those who were already trapped and struggling.
The Huxinting tea house, built in 1784 and nestling like a proud jewel, a national symbol of heritage at the centre of Nanshi’s ornamental lake, shifted as dust drifted down from its ancient supports, peppering the still lake waters with tiny flakes of debris. There was a beautifully constructed zigzag bridge, linking to Yu Yuan, that was said to keep evil spirits away ... As it tumbled into the still waters a roar so loud, so devastating that it could dwarf the sound of a nuclear explosion, scythed across Shanghai. The whole area moved and tipped and a devastation, an abomination like nothing the city had ever seen smashed down without mercy through the darkness ...