With little left of his cockpit, Shahim wrestled to keep the hurtling hulk of his F-16 off the ground as he tried to stay low and keep the other pilots guessing as long as possible. The remains of his communications systems were dying or dead, and his comms were barely audible over the titanic scream of the wind about his ears. But his ears picked up bits and pieces through the storm, and the name of the French Agent rang out like an alarm.

Jean-Paul. The name was not unusual in France, but the fact that it was here, and it was the name of a pilot breaking formation to fly up toward Jack and Martin’s B-2 could only mean one thing. Like it had been catapulted from the grave, Shahim’s plane came launching up out of the valley in a blur of smoke. The two Typhoons reacted instinctively, their advanced weapons systems got a lock on him almost instantaneously, and the two pilots stopped shouting at their errant comrade long enough to bark a warning at the foreign plane to disengage.

But Lord Mantil was also locking on as he tried to get as many of his remaining weapons online as possible. The two Typhoons and Jean-Paul’s fellow Rafale also changed course, pulling back on their controls to send their planes arching upward to intersect Shahim’s, all combatants now banking upward to converge on Jean-Paul’s jet stream. Shahim could no longer get his relatively antiquated and thoroughly perforated F-16 to break any speed records, and he could sense the other planes coming at him even as Jean-Paul started to stretch away. He knew he didn’t have much longer. Punching at his semi-responsive control board, he fired all his available missiles in unison, the four explosive lances belching from under his wings and racing ahead with a speed he could not hope to match.

Jean-Paul registered the launch immediately and was surprised. Surely they would not fire on him so soon, he had assumed. But turning his attention back to his pursuers, he did not spare much time to assess which plane had fired on him, or why. Instead, Jean-Paul pulled a hard G-turn and tracked the missiles’ pursuit with the same machine skill Shahim had used to avoid his own destruction at the hands of the Pakistanis.