Jack West Jr and the Chinese Splashdown

JACK WEST JR
and the
CHINESE SPLASHDOWN

MATTHEW REILLY

A special Jack West Jr short story

Copyright © Karanadon Entertainment Pty Limited 2020

I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.

– Astronaut Michael Collins, who had to remain in the Command Module circling the Moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on it.

‘The moon landing?’ Mae’s eyes narrowed. ‘It was real, wasn’t it?’

‘Absolutely. And also very necessary,’ Hades added enigmatically. ‘The fourth landing was the important one.’

– From: The Three Secret Cities by Matthew Reilly (Macmillan, Sydney, 2018)

After Jack West Jr found the

SEVEN ANCIENT WONDERS,

rebuilt the Machine with

THE SIX SACRED STONES

and was recognised as one of

THE FIVE GREATEST WARRIORS,

he stepped away from the world for several years.

During that time,

before he won in the Great Games held by

THE FOUR LEGENDARY KINGDOMS

and rediscovered

THE THREE SECRET CITIES,

Jack went on another mission.

A mission that would bring him unwittingly close

to the Trial of the Mountains…

THE ZOMBIE SATELLITE HUNTER

Great Sandy Desert

Northwestern Australia

Sometime in 2006

In the year or so after Jack West Jr found the seven wonders of the ancient world and was living peacefully on his farm in the remote northwest corner of Australia—out past the abandoned desert towns of Simpson’s Crossing and Death Valley—he had exactly one neighbour.

Crazy old Wally Ferguson.

No-one else lived in those parts.

The area was hot, arid and about as far from the world as you could get. Not many people cared to live in such a place.

Well, no-one except for Jack and Wally Ferguson.

Jack had a soft spot for old Wally.

He was one of those ‘Only in Australia’ guys. Pushing sixty, he was gruff and overweight, with a pot belly and hairy shoulders. He was also prone to wearing blue singlets and shorts.

‘He’s also as honest as the day is long,’ Jack told Lily as they drove out to see Wally one day in late 2006. ‘I like him.’

‘He smells funny,’ Lily said. She was nine at the time.

‘Regardless of how he smells, he’s actually a brilliant man. Back when he was younger, Wally was an astronomer at the University of South Australia. But then his wife died and Wally kinda had a nervous breakdown and he was never really the same. So he came out here. He’s the only guy who lives in Simpson’s Crossing anymore. But he still has his telescopes and his radio gear—which he built himself—always pointed up at the sky.’

‘He’s not searching for aliens, is he?’ Lily said. ‘Is Mr Ferguson nuts?’

Jack laughed. ‘No, he’s not nuts and he’s not searching for aliens. What he is searching for—listening for, actually—is very interesting. He’s looking for zombie satellites.’

‘Zombie satellites?’

‘A zombie satellite is an old satellite—launched many years ago, usually by America or the old Soviet Union—that has run out of batteries and turned off. Only it’s still up there, just sweeping around the Earth, dead, but still in orbit. Ergo, zombie.

‘Wally uses his telescopes and radio antennas to find them and he posts his findings on astronomical noticeboards. He’s made a few fantastic finds over the years, including three old American spy satellites that, while officially designated in the 1990s as dead, were still working. They were still emitting encrypted signals long after they shouldn’t have been. He informed the American government and they weren’t very happy about it at all. He got a tax audit the next year which kind of fuelled his paranoid tendencies.’

Jack smiled. ‘I like old Wally. He’s an odd duck, for sure, a bit of a dreamer. But the world’s a better place with him in it, which is why I like to check on him from time to time. Be a good neighbour.’

Of course, Wally had been delighted to see them—‘Jack! Little Lily! Sit down! Lemme get you both a cuppa!’—and they’d stayed with him all afternoon.

‘Say, Lily,’ Wally said at one point, ‘do you like classical music?’

Lily screwed up her nose. ‘You mean, like, Bach and Beethoven?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No, not really. It’s kinda old and stuffy. I prefer pop music.’

Wally looked horrified. ‘Now, love, I reckon you just haven’t heard the right classical music, is all.’

He heaved his big beer gut from his chair and waddled over to a collection of vinyl records on a shelf, picked one and placed it on an old-school turntable.

The music began playing. The famous first notes of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Piano Concerto No.1’.

Baa-bum-bum-bum.

Baa-bum-bum-bum.

…only to suddenly be replaced by a series of boppy synthesised drumbeats.

Jack smiled to himself as he recognised the tune.

It wasn’t exactly what professors at highbrow conservatories of music taught as ‘classical’. But then…

Wally sat down beside Lily and with a grin a mile wide, started enthusiastically tapping his foot and banging his hand on his thigh in time to the music.

‘Isn’t it great?’ he said, raising his voice.

To her credit, Lily listened…

…and she started bobbing her head, too.

Wally was delighted. ‘See! You just haven’t listened to the right classical music. This track, Lily my girl, is called “Hooked on Classics” and it’s a dead-set ripper in the world of classical music. You won’t find a better tune.’

Jack was well aware of the tune.

With its cheerful mix of catchy synth and famous orchestral music, ‘Hooked on Classics’ had been a surprise hit in the early 1980s, climbing into the top ten on popular music charts all over the world alongside the likes of Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Physical’ and Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’.

Of course, music snobs decried it. But like it or not, ‘Hooked on Classics’ had introduced a whole generation of young people to classical music, evidently including Wally Ferguson.

After a time, Lily went to play outside and Jack and Wally chatted about his astronomical observations.

‘I hear more and more Chinese signals,’ Wally reported. ‘China is sending all kinds of satellites up into orbit these days. A lot of them are emitting signals that are seriously encrypted, too.’

‘Good to know,’ Jack said as he got up to leave. ‘Thanks for the tea, Wally. We’ll come by again soon.’

A year later, in December 2007, early one morning, Wally would turn his telescope southward and watch—both curious and alarmed—as hundreds of Chinese paratroopers floated down from the sky in the direction of Jack’s farm.

The radio had said it was an exercise, but Wally wasn’t so sure.

But then, shortly after the paratroopers had landed out that way, Wally saw Jack’s big black plane take off and fly away to the northwest, so he figured Jack was fine.

A few months after that, Jack returned, and for some reason took all his stuff from his farm and moved to another one in the Simpson Desert.

Before he left, he stopped by to see Wally and Wally was grateful for the visit.

Over the next few years, Jack would call him on the phone occasionally, but old Wally was sad to see Jack and his little family go.

He’d enjoyed their visits and nobody else visited him anymore.

NINE YEARS LATER

FIERY CROSS REEF
SOUTH CHINA SEA

EYES ONLY: DESTROY AFTER READING

Chinese Military Airfield

Fiery Cross Reef, South China Sea

2016

(A few days before the Great Games)

An elongated thread of bloody spittle stretched from Wally Ferguson’s chin down to his blue singlet.

He also had two black eyes and a broken nose.

The previous night, he’d been kidnapped from his remote farm in the Australian desert by a team of masked soldiers who’d whisked him away in a plane.

A four-hour trip on the plane had followed, bringing him here.

He didn’t know it, but ‘here’ was a remote hangar at a military base in the South China Sea.

In the nine years since he’d been neighbours with Jack, old Wally had become even quirkier.

He had embraced the Internet and, using his homemade equipment at his farm, he would listen in on space missions launched by the Americans in Florida, the Europeans in French Guiana and, most of all, the Chinese out of the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Hainan Island at the top of the South China Sea.

His reports of these missions, which he posted on online forums like Reddit, were widely regarded as the paranoid ravings of a conspiracy theorist who’d read too many science fiction novels.

Now, as Wally sat in that Chinese military base on Fiery Cross Reef, flanked by the six Chinese special forces soldiers who had crossed into Australian sovereign territory to kidnap him, he shook his head in disgust.

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.’

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.