But the massive airlift plane had carried more than just GBMD shields, and as Major Jack Toranssen looked out over the harbor, his eyes came to rest on a particular ship moored across the bay. As part of the long standing alliance between the US and Great Britain dating back to the Second World War, the two navies shared an uncommonly liberal access to each other’s dockyards. So it was as normal to see a US naval sub in one of the berths at the British naval base in Gibraltar as it was to see a British ship in port here.

As Jack looked at the HMS Dauntless, he noted that it was a strange-looking ship. The ordinariness of its pragmatic bluff bows and grey paint served only to emphasize the two significant differences between it and most any other warship afloat. Firstly there was the huge tower amidships, capped with its unwieldy looking radar dome. The tower housed one of the most advanced tracking systems on earth, capable of sensing and tracking the tiniest of objects over the greatest of distances, and it was the nerve center of the ship. The second thing that made the ship stand out amongst other warships was its apparent lack of onboard armament. There were no great artillery guns on board like on the various ships that crowded the busy harbor, only large grey boxes like cubist sheds. But the strange-looking grey structures that covered the deck were in fact the housing for the vast and deadly array of missile systems that made the new destroyer such a powerful beast.

It could track and intercept incoming missiles and planes at vast distances, guiding and controlling multiple warheads simultaneously in complex vectored intercept patterns to shatter the path of anything unfortunate enough to incur its wrath. It did not even try to be a conventional warship, thus freeing every member of its highly skilled crew to be dedicated to the identification and destruction of anything the HMS Dauntless did not want flying in its airspace. That said, this singularity of purpose left it quite vulnerable to torpedo attack by another ship or by a submarine, which was why it always travelled in complement with at least a small but lethal orca-class attack submarine.

The submarine in question remained carefully hidden in one of the covered sub-docks of the harbor, entering and exiting its berth without ever showing its head above water, just like its larger nuclear cousins it shared the dock with.

Gathering his thoughts back to the moment, Jack nodded to himself, tapping his head as if to reset it on the task at hand. OK, time to go. Tonight he was going to be getting his hands very dirty indeed. And in order to accomplish the seemingly insurmountable task at hand, three men were going to be joining him, among whom was the alien Agent John Hunt.