At that moment, a Chinese army jeep with a huge 20mm cannon mounted on its back skidded to a halt right in front of their jet.

‘Uh-oh.’ Jack grabbed the jet’s control stick, squeezed the trigger and fired a missile from one of its wings at the jeep.

The jeep blew apart.

Next Jack took aim at the other two fighter jets on the tarmac. Two bursts of gunfire and they were blown to pieces, too.

Then another jeep, also equipped with a 20mm machine gun on its back, stopped to the side of their jet and the gunner manning its cannon opened fire.

A barrage of heavy-calibre rounds strafed their fighter jet, raking its side with bullet holes, shattering its canopy just as Jack yanked on the fighter’s ejection-seat lever and—

— whoosh!—

—the glass canopy was blown clear and like a cork shooting out of a champagne bottle, the ejection seat blasted up into the air above the jet, shooting high into the sky, with Jack and Wally on it.

The ejection seat zoomed upward, reaching the peak of its near-vertical trajectory just as—

—another plane, a black plane, appeared, swooping in low from the east.

It was a sleek Tupolev-144—Jack’s plane, known as the Sky Warrior, and flown by his friend, the incomparable Sky Monster. It came thundering in low over the hangars of the island base and, with a colossal boom, roared over the runway with an elasticised capture-cable and hook dangling from its underbelly.

The Tupolev’s arrival had been perfectly timed.

Just as the ejection seat reached its zenith and was about to start falling again, the hook suspended from the Sky Warrior caught the capture-ring affixed to the top of the seat and Jack and Wally were swept with a stomach-churning lurch away from the base and out over the South China Sea.

Hanging from the capture cable beneath the fleeing Sky Warrior, Jack tapped Wally on the shoulder.

‘You okay, buddy?’ he yelled above the wind.

‘Yep!’ Wally called back. ‘Everybody called me crazy, Jack! They can’t call me that anymore! Not after what I intercepted from the surface of the Moon!’

COCOS (KEELING) ISLANDS
INDIAN OCEAN

A.S.D. Communications Facility

Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Indian Ocean

One day later

In a dark underground room, his face lit by the glow of communications screens, Jack West listened to the transmission that Wally had intercepted the previous day.

This communications facility was located on the Cocos, or Keeling, Islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Through a quirk of history, these islands—like the more controversial Christmas Island nearby—were administered by the Australian government, even though they were a long way from Australia.

Only two of the Cocos Islands are inhabited and this one—coincidentally named West Island—was one of them. It has a crumbling airstrip, a worn-looking town and an underground state-of-the-art listening and direction-finding station run by the elite Australian Signals Directorate featuring, among other things, a Circularly Disposed Dipole Array antenna system.