belly, closely followed by the tiny shape of Horus.
Once the second car was inside and firmly tied down with a crank-harness, the ramp was raised and the plane sped up and hit takeoff speed and slowly, gracefully, lifted off the empty desert highway, leaving the farm— now crawling with Chinese cars and troops—in its wake.
West strode into the cockpit of The Halicarnassus.
“We’re not outta this yet, Boss,” Sky Monster said. “I got incoming bogeys. Four of them. Look like J-9 Interceptors. Chinese MiG variants.”
West charged back into the main cabin, where Zoe was buckling in the kids.
“Zoe,” he said. “To the guns.”
Moments later, he and Zoe were harnessed into The Halicarnassus ’s wing-mounted gun turrets. The plane also had revolving guns on its roof and underbelly that Sky Monster could control from the cockpit.
“They can’t blow us out of the sky, can they?”Sky Monster asked over the intercom.“They’d destroy the Firestone.”
“It’s made of almost solid gold,” West replied. “It’d survive just about anything except a total fuel fire. If I were them, I’d shoot us down and expect to find it in the wreckage.”
“Great. Here they come…”
Four Chinese J-9 Interceptors blasted across the sky in pursuit of The Halicarnassus, screaming low over the desert, unleashing their missiles.
Four small aerial darts zoomed out from their wings, spiraling smoke trails extending out behind them.
“Launch countermeasures!” West called.
“Launching countermeasures!”Sky Monster reported back.
He punched some buttons and immediately, several chaff bombs sprang out from the underbelly of the Hali.
Three of the missiles took the bait, and detonated harmlessly against the fake targets.
West himself nailed the fourth and last one, blowing it to pieces with his cannon.
“Sky Monster! Hit the deck! Rawson’s Canyon! Let’s throw the line and hope Super Betty still works! Go! Go! Go!”
The Halicarnassus banked and dived, swooping for the flat desert floor. Two of the Interceptors took off in pursuit, the other two staying high.
The Halicarnassus came to a rocky canyonland, a wide dry plain flanked by low mesas and hills. It shot into Rawson’s Canyon, a long thin chutelike canyon that ended at a narrow aperture between two mesas. Technically this was all Army land, but no one except Jack West Jr. had set foot out here in years.
The Halicarnassus zoomed low through the canyon, barely a hundred feet off the ground, chased by the two Chinese Interceptors.
The fighters fired their guns.
Jack and Zoe blazed back from their revolving turrets.
Tracers sizzled through the air between the chased and the chasers, the landscape whizzing by in a blur of speed.
Then Zoe got a bead and hammered the left-hand Interceptor with a wave of tracers that entered it square in its intakes. The J-9 shuddered instantly, belching black smoke, before it wobbled in the air and lurched dangerously to the left, popped its ejection seat, and smashed at 500 mph into the canyon wall.
The remaining fighter kept firing, but Sky Monster kept banking within the confines of the narrow canyon and the bullets sizzled past the speeding black plane, nicking its wingtips but hitting nothing of value.
Then The Halicarnassus hit the end of the canyonway and blasted through the narrow exit, just as Jack called: “Sky Monster! Call in Super Betty! Now!”
And—bam!—Sky Monster punched a switch on his console marked:LAUNCH SUP BET.
A hundred feet below and behind him, the solenoid on a large explosive that had sat undisturbed on the desert floor for many months tripped.
The explosive was a large RDX one, based on the principle of the Bouncing Betty land mine. Once triggered, it set off a preliminary blast that launched the main bomb a hundred feet into the air.
Three seconds later, the main charge went off, just like a Bouncing Betty, only much bigger. Plane-sized. And filled with shrapnel.
The Super Betty.
A giant star-shaped blast exploded in the air behind the fleeing Halicarnassus, right in the path of the second speeding Interceptor.
Shards of shrapnel assaulted the fighter jet head-on, smacking against its cockpit canopy, lodging in its reinforced glass, creating a hundred spiderwebs. More shards slammed into the J-9’s air intakes, ripping apart the innards of the plane.
The pilot’s ejection was followed by the fighter’s full-scale explosion. Dead Interceptor.
“I hadn’t checked on Betty for months,” West said. “Glad she still worked.”
the Hali soared up into the sky.
Where the last two Interceptors were waiting.
