Zero Hour, Part 2 of 4 by Will Hill

Author:Will Hill [Will Hill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

Matt Browning’s first thought upon entering the Mina II was disappointment that it had no windows.

He had walked up the ramp and into the belly of the supersonic plane with butterflies swirling in his stomach. Part of it was the pressure he put on himself to do well at whatever was asked of him, a weight he had been carrying on his shoulders his whole life. This mission was no different, even though his role was only that of observer. Another part, far greater than his almost constant nervousness and need to please, was excitement. Matt had never been on a plane, nor left the country of his birth; family holidays in the Browning household had been week-long trips to Blackpool and Skegness. Now he was going all the way to America, and would be doing so in a plane that aviation enthusiasts would have gladly given one of their kidneys for the chance to look at, never mind fly in.

He had been accompanied into the Mina II’s hold by two members of the Science Division and a Security Operator. These men were the plane’s permanent crew, who oversaw her smooth running and protected her from prying eyes wherever she went in the world. As the pilot throttled up the huge engines, and the plane began to gather speed along the Loop’s long runway, Matt had gripped the arms of his seat and looked over at his travelling companions; veterans of supersonic travel, all three were already fast asleep.

As the wide, angular jet climbed steeply into the sky and accelerated west, Matt’s disappointment had been mollified by a pair of wide high-definition screens that lowered from the ceiling. One allowed the Mina II’s occupants to watch a vast selection of live satellite television channels. The second, brilliantly, was a continuous feed from a camera positioned in the plane’s belly, pointing directly downwards. By the time the screens lowered and hummed into life, they were already high over the Irish Sea and still accelerating; the screen showed a wide expanse of grey-blue water, punctuated by the white lines of rolling waves.

Now, as they neared their destination, the screen was showing a landscape that was as alien to Matt as the surface of the moon. Desert stretched out in every direction, an impossibly wide vista of orange and red studded with the occasional oasis of washed-out green. Roads and trails tracked through the barren landscape, straight lines of grey and twisting loops and whirls of pale brown, and every now and then Matt’s eyes were drawn to tiny clusters of white and grey, desert settlements of such isolation that he could not imagine any rational human choosing to live in them.

As the Mina II began to descend, its headlong blast across the Atlantic and the majority of the North American continent almost complete, her pilot banked her south, dipping the angular port wing to almost ninety degrees. The camera swung upwards and, in the distance, for a fleeting second, Matt saw an incongruous huddle of vast, gleaming buildings surrounded by wide urban sprawl.

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