First, because you’re not paranoid if they really are after you.

And second, because he knew why they’d come for him.

The transmission he’d intercepted the previous day.

The one from the Moon.

Wally raised his bloody head toward one of his captors. ‘Please, mate, let me go! I’m nobody. I won’t tell anyone what I heard, I promise.’

‘Quiet,’ the lead kidnapper said in English. ‘The Sky King himself is coming to interrogate you.’

Sky King? Ferguson frowned. Who or what was that?

He looked out the hangar’s partially-open doors and saw a chain-link perimeter fence enclosing the airfield. A turquoise tropical sea lay beyond it.

Three Chinese Air Force fighter jets sat on the runway, plus the cargo plane that had brought him here.

In the early dawn light, nothing stirred.

Most of this island was artificial. It was one of several military islands that the Chinese had built in the South China Sea, to the vocal anger of neighbouring countries.

And then, without warning, as Wally watched it, the cargo plane exploded.

One second it was there, the next it was a billowing ball of flames.

And then a small man-shaped figure—a figure that seemed to have wings— streaked across the sky, banked quickly and swept right into Wally’s hangar!

The winged figure swooped to a halt and Wally saw that it was a man wearing what appeared to be lightweight carbon-fibre wings on his back. The man quickly jettisoned the wings and raised a pair of Glock-19 machine pistols that blazed away ferociously.

He was wearing a fireman’s helmet.

It was Wally’s old neighbour, Captain Jack West Jr.

First, Jack shot the six Chinese kidnappers, dropping each of them.

Then he blasted open the handcuffs binding Wally’s hands and said, ‘Hey there, Wal. Long time no see. Heard you might be in some trouble.’

‘Jack West!’ Wally exclaimed. ‘I overheard ’em on my scanner. They were on the frigging Moon.’

‘Let’s go, Wal. We gotta get you out of here, now.’

‘Wait, my hard drive.’ Wally raced over to a nearby table where the Chinese kidnappers had placed his 100-terabyte hard drive. He snatched it up. ‘This is what they wanted, much more than me.’

‘Let’s move. We got about thirty seconds before everybody else at this base gets here with a whole lot of guns,’ Jack said.

The two of them hurried outside…

…just as twenty guards from the base’s main building began converging on the hangar in speeding jeeps and trucks.

Running hard, Jack guided Wally over to one of the fighter jets parked on the tarmac. Reaching it, Jack clambered up its ladder and into the cockpit.

‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘Get in here. On my lap.’

‘What are you doing?’ Wally asked as he climbed in. ‘There’s no way you can get this fighter moving before they reach us. It’s also a single seater—’

‘Just get in!’

Wally clambered into the little cockpit, sat on Jack’s lap.

Jack said, ‘We’re flying out of here. Just not the way you think.’