‘—Vulture Six, this is Base. Nice work. Scuttle the Chinese boat and use the aerosub to fly your men and the prize back to Diego Garcia. We’ll be waiting for you. Mr Caldwell’s jet is already on the tarmac. He wants to see those photos.’
A minute later—as Jack continued to watch the extraordinary scene via satellite—something even more extraordinary happened.
A vehicle of a kind he had never seen before rose out of the water beside the Chinese patrol boat.
It looked like a cross between a plane and a submarine.
Seen from above, it had the shape a stingray, with rounded swept-back wings and a long tail. Only unlike a stingray, its tail had small wings on it. Every edge looked rounded, to allow for easy movement through both air and water.
It had two jet engines mounted on its tail, but also a propeller blade built within the tail structure. Judging from the shadow, it also had a high dorsal periscope.
‘Goddamn…’ Jack gasped. ‘I heard DARPA was trying to build one of these but I didn’t know they actually succeeded.’
‘What?’ Wally asked. ‘What is it?’
‘Some people call it a flying submarine, others call it a submersible aircraft. Or, as these guys just put it, an aerosub,’ Jack said. ‘Either way, it’s a hell of a vehicle: half-seaplane, half-submarine. A plane that can land on water and then submerge and travel under the surface.
‘Military planners have wished for these for a long time. The Soviets tried for decades to build one, but they could never find a material that was light enough to fly yet strong enough to withstand the pressure of the ocean’s depths.
‘But DARPA must’ve figured it out. These guys must have flown their aerosub from Diego Garcia to the Chinese splashdown site, landed it and submerged, and then they just waited for the moon lander to splash down and the Chinese recovery vehicle to turn up. Then they launched their mid-ocean ambush and killed them.’
The American kill team boarded the aerosub, all eight of them.
As the American leader stepped off the Wuhan-II, he tossed a few devices back onto it and a second later, the Chinese patrol boat was rocked by several explosions. Then it sank. Seen from space, it disappeared into a ring of frothing bubbles, never to be seen again.
Abrahamson turned to Jack. ‘Mr Caldwell? Are they talking about Garrett Caldwell, patriarch and leader of the Caldwell Group? One of the richest men in the world?’
‘Yep,’ Jack said. ‘The Caldwell Group is a collection of wealthy American families and businessmen I’ve battled before. Just as their royal European rivals have links to the Catholic Church, the Caldwells have ties with Freemasonry. They’re very well versed in the mysteries of the ancient world.’
‘Looks like America doesn’t want China to get this stuff from the Moon,’ Abrahamson said.
‘You can say that again,’ Jack said. ‘They just used a SEAL team and a super-secret air-capable submarine to take out a Chinese commando team and sink a Chinese naval vessel in order to steal a secret Chinese moon lander. This is big.’