Now that this brief period of levity had passed, a profound sadness settled over Tessa’s features.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
She sighed. “Not really. I despise having to kill. It’s a horrible thing to have to live with, even if I had no choice. But I’ll shake it off. Now isn’t the time.”
I understood. The carnage I had just witnessed was likely to leave permanent scars on my psyche, and was hard to get out of my head. And I hadn’t killed anyone.
I had long wondered if Tessa had ever been forced to take lives, but I had never brought it up. She had served with the Deltas, after all, a special forces branch famous for its counter-terrorism and hostage rescue operations, so it wouldn’t be crazy to imagine that she had.
What was certain was that she had just killed Chen—along with six others. I would have liked to let her talk it out, be there for her, but she was right, now was not the time.
“Do you think Lu will honor his word and not kill us?” I asked. “I did obtain his word under duress.”
“I’m not sure Lu’s intentions matter. Because I can’t imagine his superiors letting us live. So we need to stall. Stay alert. Wait for an opening. I don’t need much of one to work with. I’ve never felt more at the top of my game than I did at the warehouse. I had it under control, but I hit a freak ditch hidden by some weeds.”
“I saw on Lu’s monitor,” I told her.
“Good. So you know I got a bit unlucky. The bottom line is that I’m more skilled than I showed. Hopefully enough to get us out of this.”
I shook my head in awe. She had taken out Chen and six of China’s elite special forces single-handedly, and was only captured because of bad luck. If I hadn’t believed in her skills before, I sure did now.
“We just need to escape long enough to get a message to Brad,” she continued. “Given what’s at stake, he’ll get the resources of the entire US military to work on our extraction.”
“Okay. I’ll stay alert and ready. Take my cues from you.”
“Good. And something else. You need to come up with a plausible story about ET. The Chinese will never believe you were bluffing. Not after everything that’s happened. So use the rest of this flight to come up with a convincing plot that explains the aliens’ motivations. I’ll stop talking so you can figure it out. Our lives might depend on how compelling a story you can manage.”
I swallowed hard. Talk about pressure. Plotting a novel with this many complex moving parts could often take weeks. Months even. And that was when I didn’t have to pretend I had compelling evidence that it was true, because my readers all knew it was fiction.
But now I had to convince the shrewd, skeptical members of the Chinese Politburo that I wasn’t making it up. And instead of months, I had hours.
Talk about your deadlines. I never thought of the word dead in deadline as being literal before, but this time it was.
I moved a few feet away from Tessa on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes, trying to ignore my gunshot thigh, my cuffed ankles, and just where it was that I was headed.
After twenty minutes of straining, however, I wasn’t getting anywhere.
Why were there so many UFOs in our skies? Were aliens here, or were these craft automated? Why not either formally introduce themselves, or avoid being spotted entirely? Why this middle ground?
Where were they from? What was their endgame? And could I find a solution that might also account for some of the sightings and lore that had been springing up for generations?
I was still racking my brain ten minutes later when Tessa issued a bone-chilling gasp, startling me to full attention. My eyes shot open, and I found her staring out of the window directly in front of us and pointing.
I gasped even louder than she had, and my eyes almost bulged out of my head. A craft was flying with us, about fifty yards off our wing, surrounded by bright, glowing light. Not just flying. Showing off. It was shaped like a tic-tac, and was whitish in color, identical to the descriptions given after the Nimitz encounter.
For the first time in my life, I was seeing an actual UFO. Seeing one had long been a dream of mine, but given the suspect timing involved, this felt a lot more like a nightmare.
The craft had no wings, or blades, and made no sound, yet it flew alongside our private jet with effortless ease. Every five seconds or so it would dance around, change directions, or bounce erratically like a pinball just to leave no doubt as to its capabilities.
Yet I really couldn’t focus in on its precise appearance. It had an otherworldly shimmer about it that seemed to distort any light that tried to hit it. Which made sense. The issued Navy patents described aircraft that could project a sort of vacuum field around themselves, such that no air or water or anything else actually touched them—or could touch them. Perhaps this effect distorted light as well.
The Gulfstream began shaking violently, causing my heart to pound and my breath to stick in my throat. “Holy shit!” I blurted out, not caring about being quiet any longer.
I took Tessa in my arms to somehow shield her from whatever was coming, as the shaking continued to increase in intensity.
The outer walls of the jet began to groan, and seemed to be bulging out, as if powerful electromagnets had surrounded the aircraft and were pulling it apart. Yet other than being shaken like a Frappuccino, I didn’t feel any force acting upon me.
It was then that the fuselage issued one final, terrifying groan, and blew apart at the seams. What had been the body of a jet moments before had become shrapnel exploding outward on all sides and disappearing into the night.