Devon Ford - The Fall

Although trusted, and only sometimes afforded a chaperone which he suspected was more of a bodyguard, Grant had the run of the place. He wore no uniform, and was exquisitely tailored at the expense of his new masters. It seemed to him that his lack of uniform in any military setting was a uniform in itself, and he found that even senior ranks were wary of his presence.

In the six years since he had been declared officially dead by his country after punching out from the cockpit of his F-22 Raptor, he had experienced a great many new things. The irony of it kicked him square in the gut. Despite his years of training and being at the controls of a cutting-edge weapon of destruction, he’d still ended up being shot down by a goat-herder using a shoulder-mounted weapon. A weapon that his own country had provided a generation before. After that, he had been beaten and imprisoned, but never once used as propaganda material despite being trained to expect the kind of internet home video that every citizen fears seeing a loved one appear on. Nobody cut off his head, nobody informed the United States government of his capture, and they had simply given up looking for him. Not that Grant had any family left back home to scour the internet for videos of his demise by beheading.

It took almost a year, during which time he had been questioned but otherwise mostly ignored, but he had found himself being transported long distances by car, boat, and aircraft until he found himself on a small island being treated by Chinese medical staff as though he were in some expensive rehab clinic for the wealthy and secretive one percenters. He tried to run, and they simply let him. He soon found that the island was small, so small that he ran from one side to the other fearing pursuit, and that there were no means by which he could transport himself off. With ocean on all sides as far as he could see, he walked back to the clinic and accepted the treatment on offer, along with a refreshing, cold beer.

His loyalty had been stretched, and apparently hadn’t been that firm to begin with, because he willingly accepted the offer to become a Chinese citizen and join the Ministry of State Security as an advisor to the People’s Army. He was treated like a general everywhere he went, and now he was officially advising the officers overseeing the air operations of the next phase of their plan. He had no need to give orders, as he found the Chinese beyond reproach when it came to the efficiency of their military operations. He was there to simply advise if the commanders needed their own home-grown American to ask what their opposition was thinking and doing.

In his heart, he knew he had been turned. He knew that the psychological pressure and careful treatment had led to him feeling aggrieved with the country of his birth and who he served, but if he was honest, he liked his new life. Fighter pilots by their very nature are showboats, and he never lacked for respect or admiration. And he certainly never lacked for attractive women around him, even if he was sure they were now paid to keep him company.

Knowing all this, he was still okay with it. Happy, in fact.

Hearing the commands given and feeling the familiar vibrations as the cargo lifts began their slow grind to bring aircraft to the flight deck, he listened to the orders given and heard the command to launch the H-9s.

That made him smile, despite the purpose of the order. The H-9 had been developed in secret, and Grant had even played some small part in the final design tweaks. It was a cutting edge, lightweight, long-range stealth bomber which the rest of the world hadn’t yet seen. It was small enough to take off and land from a carrier, carried an intense payload, and flew so high that the bombs would fall on their targets without the targets ever even knowing about it. The munitions were a next-generation hybrid of drone technology and old-school bomb drops. The pilot, and in Grant’s obvious view no machine could ever replace a real person at the controls of a plane, could fly so high as to never be at risk of attack and drop his payload somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of the target. The system was ingenious, and, he was told, actually inspired by a cult sci-fi film made in America.

The payload consisted of a single dart-like bomb no bigger than a football. That was guided by the co-pilot by drone feed on a screen to the desired target, and then the pilot would release the rest of the bombs. They only had to make one pass high overhead, drop their targeting ordnance, then effectively toss everything else out of the window because the bombs then flew themselves directly onto the target to the desired spread pattern, and would either delay detonation for maximum penetration or could airburst and deploy over the head of anywhere. He knew, as did the senior officers onboard and the pilots themselves, that each plane carried only two guidance systems and two pieces of ordnance each on their first bombing run. He also knew that what they carried similarly hadn’t been seen by the rest of the world before.

Their vastly improved range meant that they could fly undetected for almost the range of any Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM, and fly home again, meaning that the carrier was even now still in international waters. The US military were obviously aware that a Chinese carrier group were heading for their waters, but the nominal warning had been given that they were heading around the southern part of the continent to eventually visit the Chinese-built port in Cuba. No doubt the strength of the escort they would receive would be a huge show of strength, but that was never going to happen. Their eastern seaboard operations were another matter, and Grant suspected that he knew more about them than even the captain of the carrier he was on.

“I’m going up,” he told his aides in Mandarin, a language he had surprisingly taken to with ease, and followed the young sailor assigned to them as a guide. They climbed the ladders to the glass circle of the flight control deck, high above the tarmac below, and watched in awe as the sleek birds rose from the depths. Preflight checks were quick, far quicker than he had experienced in his own flying career, and he even smiled as, one by one, the four H-9s took off from the ski ramp beside the prow of the ship and dropped slightly before powering away almost vertically to reach the thin air on the edge of space.

“Sir! Major!” Johnson’s voice said over the squad radio, full of uncharacteristic panic.

“On my way,” Taylor answered, nodding to his captain and senior sergeant to follow him as he set off for the president’s suite at a run. Bursting through the ornate double doors, Taylor saw Johnson fighting to control the president on the thick rug as the other soldier lay unconscious and bleeding next to a heavy bust of a man who had held the same office in the past. The president himself was raging, fighting against Johnson’s grip like a wounded bull, and all the time shouting abuse and curses at them.

“SIR!” barked Taylor, trying and failing to gain the attention of the man. Johnson was no small man, nor was he unaccustomed to fighting, but the intensity in the struggles of the President made him sweat and suck in breath just to hold him down.

“You sons of bitches,” he bawled, his words contorted by the plush pile of the rug his face was pushed into. “You fucking traitors. You’ve destroyed our country!”

This made Taylor stop. They had hardly destroyed their country, hell they had barely destroyed anything but a handful of buildings at worst, but the tears in the eyes of the man told him that this was something worse.

“Sir,” Anderson said behind him, his voice so deathly hollow and subdued that Taylor dreaded turning around to look at him. He did, and followed the outstretched finger of his second-in-command to the TV screen and the unbelievable picture it showed.