A Grey Moon Over China by A. Thomas Day Read Free Book Online Page A

Thunder Island.”
    “Three seconds, Colonel.”
    I tripped my ranging laser and got ready. The world went dark. I ripped my goggles off and strained to see. Stretching away in front of me was a glowing runway, socked in under a layer of grey smoke, eerily quiet. On the surface were a few darker irregularities I was to remove, but one of the heaters up on the left was still lit. Cole was screaming about it.
    “Chan! Cut that thing off! Override it! What the hell’s the problem down there? Paulson!” Chan’s backup MI priest. “Take over—get thatChink bitch out of there. And where the hell’s the Jap? Why isn’t she clearing that smoke?”
    Elliot’s voice: “Because you didn’t tell her to, you son of a bitch!”
    Up the runway, heater number six finally blinked out.
    “Come
on
, Tanaka,” said Polaski. “Your heaters!”
    “Two minutes,” said Bella. Tanaka’s two barrels erupted into sun-bright shafts of light straight down the centerline, smoke rushing in to follow them.
    “Four degrees up!” Cole screamed at her. “Four degrees! And swing it! Somebody do something about that piece-of-crap imbecile down there—”
    Elliot cut him off.
    “Chan, get me off-line! Come on, give me this thing. We ain’t getting this done till we put a sock in this asshole’s mouth.” Elliot’s ranging laser flicked on, still aimed up the runway in its locked position.
    Chan shouldn’t have let him have control of the digger. Its barrel released from its locked position, then swung across the runway, across Tanaka’s heater beams and up toward Cole’s antenna. Then the digger itself flashed into life.
    Wherever he was, Cole saw it.
    “Jesus Christ! Paulson, get control of that thing! Take—”
    The antenna flashed with a brief flame as Elliot sliced through it with the digger, silencing Cole. Paulson must have taken control back at that moment, however, because the digger’s beam jerked to a stop and started swinging back toward its old position up-range.
    It was still on.
    I was halfway to my feet and screaming when the live beam from Elliot’s digger, now slaved blindly to Paulson in keeping with Cole’s final order, swept through the first crew on our left. More screams, and the digger swept down the whole left side of the runway dragging a wall of flame behind it, finally merging with the double lance of Tanaka’s huge heaters on the centerline. The digger flashed out and a horrified silence settled over the island. Whimpering came from the headsets.
    “Sir?”
    The question took a while to sink in.
    “Major Cole?” It was Tanaka.
    Chan screamed.
    “Oh my god! Tanaka! Ellen! Kill your heater, now!”
    Elliot was already racing toward Tanaka’s heater, which was still blazing down the runway long after it should have been off. At the start of the operation, Cole had backhanded her with his order to leave the heater on until he told her to stop, and now he couldn’t. She stood next to it in confusion,staring instead at the lethal wall of flame down the left side of the runway caused by Elliot’s digger. Elliot leapt onto Tanaka’s machine and groped for the controls, then finally tore out the breakers. The twin shafts flashed out. We spun around to look down the dark island.
    Suspended above the runway was a swirling layer of smoke, drifting in quiet eddies. Floating above it was the moon—huge, round and full, the color of lead through the overcast, lifting into view.
    And then, slowly and gracefully, into the grey circle of the moon came a giant silhouette—the breathtakingly huge, powerful shape of an aircraft, gliding silently through the top of the smoke layer, its nose rising majestically as it began its flare for the landing. The nose lifted higher, then higher, then gasps came through our headsets as the nose rolled higher still, exposing a glowing, jagged edge where Tanaka’s heater had melted the great plane in two.
    The front end of the aircraft rolled slowly onto its back, settling