The Black Knight (42 page)

Lopez stared up at the main screen just as the digital read-out alongside the missile icon reached five miles per second and the weapon arced down onto Antarctica in its hypersonic terminal descent.

‘It’s over,’ Jarvis said softly.

*

Ethan gripped Hannah’s hand tightly in his own as he heard the roar of the missile plunging down toward them from the heavens and he flinched, ducked down and closed his eyes as the roar became deafeningly loud and thundered directly overhead.

The snow on the ridge was blasted aside and Ethan thought that his eardrums were going to burst as something rocketed directly overhead their position and barely above the ridge line. Ethan waited for the intense heat of the impact, the unimaginable moment when their bodies would be assaulted by the million-degree heat of a nuclear blast.

Suddenly, the great roar of noise rushed by and faded to the south, and Ethan peered from the corner of his eye in time to see a great wake of wind-blown snow left behind by the wings of a twin-engine aircraft that thumped down on the ice alongside the ridgeline.

Ethan was not an expert on aircraft but he could recognize some of the more classically shaped airframes and the one before him now was a fugitive from the golden age of aviation. The Consolidated PBY Catalina was painted white and looked like a giant dove as it turned on the ice. A veteran of World War II, the amphibious Catalina had a long hull with an equally wide wingspan atop it, two large piston engines set into the high wing either side of an angular glass cockpit with multiple windows. On her rear fuselage, two bulbous Perspex viewing bubbles that had once held cannons glinted in the sunlight. Capable of landing both on the water and on land, the Catalina had been renowned during the war for its reliability, durability and extremely long range.

All at once, Ethan smiled and said a single name.

‘Lopez.’

Ethan could barely speak as he jumped up and saw the Catalina seaplane braking on the snow as it began to turn back toward the ridge line, its pilot swinging the big aircraft around like a pivot on one main wheel as he powered up the starboard engine to help turn the aircraft about.

‘Come on!’ Ethan yelled at Hannah. ‘Our ride’s here!’

Hannah’s weary expression livened as she saw the airplane travelling back toward them and Ethan helped her to her feet, the former FBI agent holding the handle of the blade in her side as together they staggered out onto the ice.

The PBY Catalina taxied across to them and the side door opened up to reveal the rugged features of Arnie Hackett shouting at them above the engine noise as his wife, Yin-Lee, guided the aircraft.

‘You wanna hurry the hell up?!’

Ethan almost carried Hannah the last few steps and Arnie hauled her on board the aircraft as Ethan jumped up into the fuselage and hauled the door shut.

‘What the hell are you doing out here? How did you find us?!’ Ethan asked in amazement.

‘Got a text from a friend!’ Arnie shouted. ‘The smoke from those wrecked skidoos guided us in! Now strap in and shut up!’

Arnie dashed for the cockpit, shouting as he went. ‘Yin, get us the hell out of here!’

The Catalina’s engines roared as the aircraft thundered along the ice, her huge flaps, powerful engines and broad wings providing enormous lift as she rushed along the Antarctic ice and rotated, her nose pointing for the sky. The fuselage shuddered and vibrated as the aircraft thundered along the ice and then suddenly the shaking vanished as the aircraft lifted off and Ethan heard the undercarriage retracting as the aircraft climbed away into the frigid sky.

‘Did we make it?’

Hannah’s voice was weak, and Ethan crouched down alongside her as he squeezed her hand and applied pressure once more to her wound.

‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘you’re gonna be fine now. We made it.’

Ethan heard Arnie’s voice from up in the cockpit bellow back down at him. ‘We’re not done yet, asshole. Brace for impact!’

Ethan looked down at Hannah and managed a smile. ‘Just a formality.’

Hannah almost laughed, but her mirth was choked off with pain and she winced as Ethan held on to her.

Through the windows he saw something, and for a moment he thought that a second sun had appeared high in the western sky. A bright flare of light burst against the evening sky far behind them, and then he detected for the briefest of moments a flash of something rocketing down through the sky.

The sunset behind the Catalina suddenly brightened ten-fold and Ethan squinted away as the missile hit the Nazi base with enough force to bury itself half a mile down into the glacier. He waited for a moment and then opened his eyes in time to see an immense fireball expanding out behind the Catalina, a tremendous mushroom cloud billowing out from the impact site and towering up into the Antarctic sky.

Moments later, the Catalina was hurled forwards through the sky as the shockwave from the ferocious blast slammed into the aircraft.

*

Lopez saw the missile icon strike the Antarctic and vanish without any graphic to determine what had happened, but on another screen a satellite’s visual image of the Antarctic flared with light as data began spilling down screens nearby.

‘Nuclear grade detonation strike!’ Hellerman called as he read the data pouring down the screens. ‘Yield equivalent to five megatons, impact point matches the location of Black Knight’s descent into the ice fields. We’re looking at a major destabilization of the glacier’s northern fields and…’

Vaughn’s hand on Hellerman’s shoulder silenced him. ‘Let’s maybe leave that debrief for a bit, okay?’

Hellerman nodded as he glanced at Lopez and saw her head hanging, hidden behind her long black hair. ‘Sure.’

Lopez could hear them both clearly however, and her voice rang clear in the otherwise silent room.

‘What’s the blast radius?’ she asked.

Hellerman looked at the main screen, where the spy satellite’s sensitive cameras were recording data from the impact site.

‘At least one mile,’ he replied, ‘expanding as we speak but losing power and velocity now.’

Lopez looked up at the screen for a moment as Hellerman, working swiftly, overlaid fresh graphics on the blast zone where Lopez could already see a large cloud of flame and smoke billowing up from the surface and casting a long, dark shadow away from the impact sight across the Antarctic.

‘The blast radius would be non-fatal at anything beyond two miles,’ Hellerman added as he surveyed the data. ‘If they got to the surface and were able to travel away from the site far enough, they could have made it.’

Jarvis shook his head.

‘Ethan would have made contact by now,’ he said. ‘He’d know we were monitoring the situation down there.’

Lopez reached into her pocket and retrieved her cell phone. There were no messages, nothing to suggest that Ethan had tried to contact her, but then of course being so far south it was unlikely he would have any means of reaching her.

She turned to Hellerman.

‘That satellite detects movement, right?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ Hellerman said, ‘but it’s not sensitive enough to detect people. They’d be too small and move too slowly. Even the ski-gliders would be too tiny to…’

‘Look for something larger, doing about a hundred fifty knots.’

Hellerman stared at her. ‘Say what now?’

‘Just do it,’ Lopez insisted.

Hellerman tapped in a series of commands, re-tasking the satellite’s sensors to pick up any object of a defined size travelling at the speed Lopez had suggested in the vicinity of the blast zone.

The computer whirred for a few moments as the satellite’s on board computer reset the optics for the new resolution and tracking request, and moments later a small icon appeared on the screen, travelling south away from the blast zone.

Jarvis walked closer to the screen as the satellite zoomed in under Hellerman’s control, and he shook his head slowly as he recognized the pixellated form of an old World War Two aircraft, an unmistakable shape.

‘That’s a Catalina,’ he said.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Hellerman gasped in delight as he looked at Lopez. ‘How the hell did you get him there in time?’

‘The text message,’ Vaughn said, glancing admiringly at Lopez, ‘when we were sent after LeMay. I can see why Warner relies on you so much.’

Lopez looked at the tiny icon on the screen and then her cell phone rang and she picked it up.

*

The Catalina’s fuselage was humming with the growl of the two piston engines as they labored to lift the aircraft higher into the evening sky. Ethan could see the billowing clouds of their exhaust trailing behind them, just as similar clouds had done from the C-130 Hercules when they had arrived in the Antarctic what seemed like an age before.

The Catalina had climbed high enough that it was able to achieve a data link with
Polar Star
, and from there to satellites. The links were strong enough that Ethan’s cell phone had picked up a signal, and he had seen a dozen or so missed calls from Nicola Lopez.

‘Ethan?’

The sound of her voice in his ear, one that he had not heard for so long, was one of the best things he could ever recall hearing. He sat with his legs out in front of him on the deck of the aircraft, slumped against the seats as he replied.

‘Nicola.’

‘Christ you’re okay! That’s another one you owe me, wise guy!’

Ethan smiled, dragged one hand down his face and realized that it came away wet.

‘Yeah.’

The tone of Lopez’s voice changed.
‘You sure you’re okay? I mean, I just called you after waking up from a coma of six months and all. Don’t get yourself too excited or anything.’

Ethan’s hand still rested on Hannah’s wound, and her hand was still upon his, but there was no longer any strength in her grip. Arnie squatted beside him, the medical pack and dressings he had rushed to Hannah’s side with soaked in blood as he shook his head slowly.

Ethan let Hannah’s hand remain where it was, not wanting to remove it, and looked into her clear green eyes. They stared in silence at the ceiling of the Catalina’s fuselage, empty now of the vibrant spirit that seemed to have soared the very moment the bomb had detonated behind them.

‘We’re coming home,’ Ethan replied, his throat tight, ‘but only one of us is coming back.’

After a long pause Lopez’s reply came back gently across the line.

‘I’m sorry, Ethan. I’ll speak to you when you get here.’

Ethan nodded, rubbed his eyes angrily. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

Ethan cut the line off, and then reluctantly he lifted his hand free of Hannah’s and gently closed her eyes for the last time.

***

L

Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters,

Washington DC

Ethan Warner sat quietly on a seat opposite the DIA’s Patriot’s Wall, a series of hexagonal gold plaques set alongside each other in a shape reminiscent of the continental United States and flanked by the flags of both the agency and the United States of America. The wall honored DIA personnel who had lost their lives while working for the agency around the globe. Ethan knew that the wall was not exhaustive due to exclusion of agents with links to classified missions – nobody knew how many personnel the agency had lost in classified circumstances over the decades.

A new plaque now shone on the wall, emblazoned with Hannah Ford’s name. Ethan stared at it in silence for a long time, and knew that if either he or Lopez had lost their lives in the battle against the enemies of their country their names would not be honored upon the wall. Unlike the CIA, contractors were not included on the DIA’s wall due to the often highly sensitive nature of their work.

He was still sitting there when Doug Jarvis strolled in and took a seat alongside Ethan, the pair of them staring at the same wall.

‘What intel did we get on Majestic Twelve?’ he asked.

Jarvis looked at him for a moment. ‘Let’s forget about them for a moment. How are you doing?’

Ethan sighed and looked into his lap for a moment before he replied.

‘It doesn’t really matter how I’m doing, does it,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘We have a job to do and it costs lives every day. All that matters right now is finishing the job.’

‘You need to take some time,’ Jarvis began, ‘or this whole thing will…’

‘It won’t be for nothing,’ Ethen growled back. ‘Hannah gave her life for this, for what we do, for this cause that we’ve been recruited for. You and I both know that the only reason her name is up on that wall is because she worked for the FBI and had enough history there to warrant it. As it is, the cause of her death has been put down to terrorism.’

‘It was the only way to get her on the wall,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Had we not opted for that, her sacrifice would have gone entirely unnoticed.’

‘Which brings me back to my original question.’

‘Nicola and Michael succeeded in identifying the members of Majestic Twelve in New York City,’ Jarvis informed him. ‘While you were returning from Antarctica our team was able to put names to those faces. We know who Majestic Twelve are, Ethan, every last one of them and we already have one of them in custody, a man named Victor Wilms.’

‘The man behind the missile attack,’ Ethan said. ‘What about Mitchell?’

‘He gave us Wilms, but is now in the wind. I can only assume that he intends to flee and live out his days on some obscure beach far from civilization, or that he intends to continue exacting his revenge on Majestic Twelve.’

Ethan shook his head. ‘He won’t last long on his own. A man like Mitchell always has a game plan of some kind, an escape option.’

‘Perhaps,’ Jarvis conceded, ‘but he’s getting too old for field work. If he’s planning something it’ll be big, something sufficient to allow him to live his life in peace.’

‘The eradication of his enemies,’ Ethan agreed, ‘which now represent Majestic Twelve. He’ll hunt them down as we do, but he won’t stop at arresting them.’

‘No, he’ll kill them one by one,’ Jarvis replied.

‘I’m not going to let Hannah have died just so Mitchell can go on his revenge spree,’ Ethan said, his voice hard and cold. ‘That asshole spent enough time working for the bad guys and knowing it to have expended any sympathy I might have had for him. You should never have worked with him, Doug.’