On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the Moon. It is the greatest and most astounding achievement in all of human history.

In the half-century since that day, however, there have only been five more manned missions to the Moon and, to date, only twelve men—all men, no women—have walked on the lunar surface.

There have, however, been many unmanned missions to the Moon.

The earliest missions by the US and the Soviets—and more recently by China—involved crashing an unmanned spacecraft directly into the Moon. Later missions performed controlled landings and deployed rovers to collect surface samples which were returned to Earth for later analysis.

All were well-documented and could often be followed in real time by amateur astronomers on Earth.

And China was usually very happy for the world to watch its achievements in space. It yearned more than anything to successfully land people on the Moon, for that would prove that it had finally matched the United States of America in such a sophisticated field.

As such, it was most unusual for China to perform a moon landing in secret.

Yet this was exactly what had happened here, Jack saw.

Jack was also intrigued by the mention in the intercept of the Sea of Rains. He knew of this land formation on the Moon because it was where the fourth Apollo mission, Apollo 15, had landed. That mission, interestingly, was the first one to bring a lunar rover with it, so that its astronauts could venture farther than ever before from their lander.

With his intercept, poor Wally had discovered a secret Chinese mission to land a remote vehicle on the surface of the Moon right near an old Apollo landing site and collect data, make measurements and take photos of something there, and then return with that information without anyone knowing.

Discovering this had got Wally kidnapped and, if it hadn’t been for Jack, would have got him killed.

Hours later, Jack peered at one of the monitors in the darkened comms room.

On it was a real-time satellite video image: a top-down black-and-white view of a Chinese naval patrol boat arriving beside a circular object bobbing on the surface of the Indian Ocean, at a standard Chinese landing site a hundred nautical miles east of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

That circular object was the moon lander.

It had just made a successful re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in the Indian Ocean. Upon hitting the water, the lander had deployed an inflatable collar to keep it afloat. It now looked like a round raft.

As Jack, Wally and Abrahamson watched in silence, the Chinese patrol boat, the Wuhan-II, pulled to a halt next to the raft.

Voices over the radio, speaking in Mandarin.

The radio operator translated:

‘—coming alongside the lander now.’

‘—the vehicle’s casing and re-entry heat-shields all appear to be intact.’

There were ten men on the patrol boat. Chinese commandos.

Two of them leaned over the side and extended long hooks to snag the bobbing spacecraft. The lander was brought aboard the boat and placed in a large cube-shaped chamber on its rear deck.