The Grail

CHAPTER 4

The largest weapon system ever made by man, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, the USS Washington, lay beached, bow inland, on the north shore of the island. Moai statues gazed down on the ship, which dwarfed even the largest of them, weighing over two hundred tons.

The statues appeared to be the only thing not involved in the bustle of activity taking place on board the carrier and all over the island. Small pools of black were spread out on various places aboard the ship — nanomachines, each one built at the molecular level — working on the carrier, putting it back together, in many cases making improvements over the original man-made design.

The Easter Island guardian was using nanotechnology to transform both the machines and people it had captured. Nanotechnology was molecular manufacturing. With it, the guardian could break down machinery at the smallest level and reconstitute it. It had also developed a nanovirus that could get inside the brains and bodies of humans and control them.

Along the airfield in the center of the island, men and women slaved at their tasks. Their movements were smoother now, almost natural as the current version of the nanovirus designed by the guardian computer shunted their conscious will into blind obedience to the orders broadcast by the alien machine.

The guardian used the humans to perfect the nanovirus. Those who did not serve the experiment well were buried, to prevent disease from hurting the ranks of the slaves.

Deep under Rapa Karu volcano, Kelly Reynolds was still pressed up against the side of the guardian. The ten-foot-high golden pyramid was now the center of all activity on the island, along with propagating the opaque shield that guarded the island from the humans and their weapons on the outside.

Kelly was thirty pounds lighter than she had been when she’d arrived on Easter Island. Even the relative stasis invoked on her body by the guardian was not enough to keep the body from breaking down, consuming itself to stay alive. The guardian was hardly aware of her presence anymore. She had served her purpose and she might serve a purpose in the future, but right now the guardian had many higher priorities.

Although the guardian was hardly aware of Kelly Reynolds, the opposite was not true. Kelly had managed to divest her body of the nanovirus by slipping a command into the guardian that went unnoticed by the higher echelons of control. Kelly could still tune in to much of what was going on with the guardian, but the flow of information and commands that her mind tapped into was like trying to take a drink from a rushing mountain stream, so much went by her that she had no clue about or could not reach. She had managed to get a single message out to Area 51, but beyond that, she had accomplished little, other than try to keep track of what the guardian was doing.

One thing was clear from what she had picked up on — the rebuilding of the Washington, the adaptation of the attack submarine Springfield, and the spread of the nanovirus among the captured humans — the guardian was preparing for all-out war. It would take time for it to have its forces ready, but war was coming. She knew that those outside the shield could not see what was going on, cloaked by the alien technology.

She could also pick up some of the messages the guardian was sending out, contacting other Guides, contacting The Mission, talking to the Airlia trapped on Mars, coordinating their efforts. All with one goal in mind.

All-out war was coming. And at the end, the guardian planned only to have its chosen slaves alive.

The Chinese air force lieutenant had never seen a similar radar signature. It was smaller than a commercial airliner, and the way it moved about sharply indicated it might very well be a helicopter. If it was, it was a very large one.

He grabbed the mike to broadcast on the emergency band in Chinese. “Unidentified aircraft entering Chinese airspace, identify yourself. Over.”

He counted silently to three, correct procedure, then keyed the mike once more. “Unidentified aircraft, you must turn back immediately or you will be shot down. This is your only warning.”

The lieutenant watched the screen for three more seconds before dialing the number for the local Air Force base.

Two SU-27 fighters scrambled in response to the call, afterburners blazing. With the recent events at Qian-Ling and the fragmenting of the world’s countries into Isolationist and Progressive camps, the Chinese military, particularly those stationed in the predominantly western Muslim section, had been on a high degree of alert.

Lead pilot Major Fukang Jimsar’s name represented the ethnic mix of the people in that part of China. A mixture of Chinese and Mongolian, he should not have been assigned to the Kashi air base. It was standing policy in the Chinese military to send personnel to assignments outside of their home area, thus ensuring it would be more likely that they would be willing to fire on rioters and keep the civil peace. Because Jimsar was one of the few pilots trained by the Russians in the SU-27, there had been little choice.

As soon as he was clear of the runway and had some altitude, Jimsar kicked in the afterburner, accelerating his fighter to Mach 2. He checked his radar to make sure his wingman, Captain Hanxia, was right behind him, then followed instructions as the lieutenant vectored them toward the bogey infiltrating Chinese airspace from the west, out of Afghani airspace. Jimsar knew that meant it could be coming from anywhere, as the anarchy in that neighboring country left it wide open for overflights.

The bogey flew along the northern foothills of the Himalayas as the two fighters closed the gap. The lieutenant reported the intruder making a course adjustment to the north, over the Tarim Basin while also dropping in altitude, apparently trying to escape the detection of radar. But by now, Jimsar’s own radar had picked up the strange image from his higher altitude. The intruder was fifty miles straight ahead.

Standing orders dictated that the pilots aim their air-to-air missiles at any intruder and, once they received a lock-on signal from the radar homing device, to fire.

There was to be no reconsidering those orders, no initiative displayed, no hesitation. The Chinese military believed in one thing above all else — obedience.

When the Chinese bought the Su-27 Flanker aircraft from the Russians in 1992, they’d also purchased 144 AA-10 air-to-air missiles to arm the craft with. Jimsar knew that renaming the missiles R27 didn’t change the country of origin for the weapons. Of course, he had never uttered that thought aloud. The Chinese government was desperately afraid of the corrupting influence of foreigners, yet it didn’t draw the line at buying their weapons.

At twenty-five miles, Jimsar received lock-on confirmation that the on-board radar had acquired the target. Still out of visual range, he and his wingman armed their missiles.

Twenty miles and still closing, Jimsar flipped open the small red cover over the fire button. He thought briefly of the Russians downing KAL Flight 700 and the American navy ship shooting down the Iranian airliner. He knew if he did not fire there was a good chance he would be shot down on approach back to Kashi airfield by his own anti-aircraft batteries. His only other option was to try to fly to freedom, but he had a limited amount of fuel on board — not enough to reach a decent airfield to land the plane, and without the prize of the plane he doubted he would be granted asylum in any of the countries within reach. Also, if he fled, he had been told in no uncertain terms that his family would be sent to prison for the rest of their lives.

Jimsar pressed down, and a missile leapt from beneath each wing. Seeing that, his wingman followed suit and four missiles raced forward at four times the speed of sound toward the target.

Jimsar watched the action play out on his display.

“We have multiple hits,” he announced, watching the trail of his two missiles abruptly disappear. This was followed by the second two at a slightly further location, which was strange, but Jimsar didn’t report that.

“Confirm wreckage location,” the lieutenant ordered.

In the time it had taken the missiles to fly twenty miles, the jets had flown ten. The short conversation at Mach 2 closed the gap another five miles. The Flankers dipped down and slowed until they were cruising at a relatively slow five hundred miles an hour, less than eight hundred feet above the desert floor.

Jimsar loved flying close to the ground, the terrain flashing by, emphasizing the speed and power of the jet. His eyes were glued forward. A tall sand dune over a hundred feet high rapidly approached.

For a second, Jimsar froze in shock as the strangest thing he’d ever seen rose from behind the sand dune. At his speed all he had was a glimpse, then he was by, but there was no doubt of the form — a dragon, open mouth pointing directly at them!

“Break and circle!” Jimsar ordered. There was no response from Hanxia.

“Break and circle.” Jimsar already had the Flanker in a steep left-hand turn.

“Roger, breaking and circling right,” Hanxia replied in a shaky voice.

As his hands worked the controls, Jimsar replayed the image in his mind. “It was metal,” he said out loud. He forced himself to snap back to reality. “Captain!” Jimsar ordered. “We’re going to circle back. Do you understand? Over.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s a machine,” Jimsar said as he leveled off, heading back toward the dragon. He checked his display. Nothing. The dragon had to be using the sand dune to mask its radar signature. “Keep your eyes open,” he warned Hanxia as the dune came into view five miles ahead and below.

“Sir, I think—” There was a loud burst of static, a scream inside of the static, then silence.

Jimsar’s action was instinctive. He rolled the Flanker hard right, dropped altitude, punched in afterburners, and pointed the nose almost straight up. His back slammed into the seat from both the acceleration and vertical attitude.

His head twisted and turned as he searched the sky from this unique perspective. He saw the dragon racing up, no visible means of propulsion, three miles away and closing both horizontally and vertically.

Jimsar pushed the stick over, going from a climb to a twisting dive that put him head-on with the dragon, now less than five seconds away. He pressed the trigger for the 30mm cannon and felt the plane shudder as it spewed eight-inch-long bullets. Every fifth round was a tracer and his hand twitched on the stick, bringing the fiery rope of bullets right into the chest of the dragon as it raced toward him.

A line of light leapt from the dragon’s mouth, and came back at Jimsar’s plane as fast as his bullets were going the other way. He released the trigger and rolled left into a steep dive, narrowly avoiding the beam.

He kept his afterburners on and used the descent to add to his speed before leveling off at one thousand feet and almost seventeen thousand miles an hour in speed. He headed directly for the airfield at Kashi, the battle over.

Not only did Jimsar accept he was overmatched, his fuel gauges were dangerously low because of the limited fuel he had been given.