The Ultimate Escape Read online

And then they were sent into veeyar.

  As Matt Hunter was hooking himself up in the simulator room and waiting for his back seater to show up, Megan O’Malley approached him when the others were out of earshot.

  “I want to talk to you after class,” she said.

  Matt nodded. “Sure. About what?” he asked.

  But Megan moved away from him without acknowledging his question.

  That’s odd, he thought.

  But Matt soon forgot about the mysterious exchange as he got back to the work at hand. Mark showed up finally, but he’d forgotten something in the briefing room and had to run back for it.

  Matt’s mind was spinning with all the things he had to remember, and he was glad that he and his teammates were “assisted” by user-friendly software that helped them with carrier takeoffs and dive-bombing runs.

  In the simulator today, the Net Force Explorers were part of Lieutenant Clarence “Wade” McClusky’s flight of Dauntless dive bombers, which launched from the deck of the USS Yorktown at 0925 hours—almost nine-thirty in the morning— on June 4, 1942, the second day of the Battle of Midway.

  They were sent off to seek and destroy the Japanese carrier fleet, which was commanded by Admiral Nagumo from the bridge of the Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi.

  Matt watched expectantly as the digital clock on the wall of the simulator room counted down… 004, 003, 002, 001…

  And suddenly Matt and Mark were in the cockpit of a weathered navy-blue Dauntless, loaded with a single thousand-pound bomb. They were on the swaying deck of the USS Yorktown in the middle of the South Pacific ocean on a clear, blue morning.

  All around them, the dive bombers were lined up on the flattop’s steel deck, waiting for their turn at the catapult.

  “Here we go again,” Mark said from his seat directly behind Matt. Both of their hearts were racing with excitement as they prepared to launch. With the cockpit open, the noise was deafening as dozens of fighters and bombers gunned their engines in preparation for takeoff.

  Matt sniffed the air, and discovered it was rich with the scent of a wide ocean, tempered with the tang of diesel and oil fumes from the plane and the ship. Again, he was impressed with the details of the Institute’s simulations.

  A sailor signaled for them to move forward, and Matt carefully steered the airplane over the catapult rail.

  A moment later, he was thrown back in his seat by the forces of gravity and inertia as the Dauntless was hurled from the tossing deck and into the bright blue sky.

  “Go back!” Mark Gridley said. “I think I left my stomach on the boat. …”

  Matt was too involved with trying to fly the aircraft to come up with a clever retort. If he stopped what he was doing long enough to be clever, he, Mark, and the Dauntless would be floating in the Pacific Ocean below them.

  A few moments later, Megan and Andy’s plane moved onto their wing, and David Gray appeared from above, the sunlight flashing off the glass panes of his cockpit. When the squadron was formed up, the aircraft headed toward the last known position of the Japanese fleet.

  Thanks to time-compression, the Net Force Explorers spotted their target less than ten minutes later.

  Matt recalled Dr. Lanier’s history lecture. In the real battle, Wade McClusky’s bombers had flown nearly to the limit of their range—about 150 miles—before they found the Japanese carriers. Finding the fleet that day was more dumb luck than strategic planning, but the lucky break turned the tide of the war in America’s favor.

  Matt also recalled that in the real Battle of Midway, the Japanese pilots were caught with their pants down. Their airplanes were all over the carrier decks, in the middle of being refueled and rearmed, when the Americans found them. And all that unprotected gasoline and all those unsecured explosives helped McClusky’s squadron inflict real damage on the Japanese carrier fleet.

  Suddenly, the simulated voice of Lieutenant Wade McClusky crackled in their headphones, ordering the dive bombers to attack the three carriers far below.

  Matt banked his Dauntless and moved in for the kill, just five seconds behind Megan O’Malley’s aircraft.

  A bombing run in a 1940’s-style dive bomber was a difficult proposition, and Matt’s attack was strictly by the book. He lined his aircraft behind Megan’s, and prepared to follow his wingperson down to the deck.

  Matt retarded the stick so that the nose of his aircraft lifted slightly, until it was above the horizon. Then he reached down and gripped the special handle between his legs, a diamond-shaped stick that deployed his dive brakes.

  With the flaps down, the airplane executed a half roll, and nosed down into a seventy-degree dive. To Matt the plunge looked to be straight down, but if he checked the horizon every few seconds, he managed to stay oriented as to what was up and what was down.

  Matt had a little more than thirty seconds to line up the yellow deck of the Japanese carrier he was aiming for in the crosshairs of his telescopic sight.

  “Zeroes!” Mark said from behind Matt. “Right on our tail.”

  Matt didn’t dare take his eyes off the target. “Keep them at arm’s length,” he told his tail gunner.

  A moment later, he heard Mark Gridley’s machine-gun fire, and felt the whole Dauntless shudder from the recoil. Then he heard his tail gunner whoop.

  “I got one!” Mark said in triumph. Matt risked a sidelong glance, and saw the Zero spin toward the blue water.

  “Good shooting,” he said.

  When Matt looked through his sight again, he discovered that he’d let the Dauntless drift. He moved the airplane back onto the target.

  Meanwhile, the gunners on the carrier Akagi began to spray antiaircraft fire into the sky. Though their aim wasn’t particularly accurate, a lot of lead was coming at the bombers.

  Too much for Megan O’Malley.

  As Matt watched, the wing of her navy-blue Dauntless sheared off when it was struck by antiaircraft fire. As her aircraft was going in, Megan tried to alert the others about her plight. But her cries of “Mayday” were cut off as she and Andy were dragged from the cockpit and back to reality.

  The Dauntless spun into the waves, narrowly missing the crowded wooden deck of the Japanese carrier.

  Matt was so low now that he could see sailors running about on the AkagVs deck, and planes attempting to take off. He sneaked a quick glance at his altimeter. He was only 2,400 feet from the surface of the pacific, and the carrier was almost filling his telescope sight.

  “Just another minute,” he whispered to himself.

  Suddenly, a Japanese Zero flashed past him, machine guns blazing. Matt felt his airplane shudder; then he heard Mark howl. The cry of his tail gunner was cut off suddenly.

  “Mark?” Matt said. “Are you okay?”

  But there was no reply from his backseater. And Matt had run out of time to worry about his friend. At exactly 1,500 feet, Matt grasped the handle on the bomb-release “pickle” with his right hand and pulled.

  As the thousand-pound bomb dropped from the Dauntless’s belly, Matt retracted the dive flaps and flashed over the deck of the Japanese ship.

  Virtual sailors pointed at his airplane, and at the bomb plunging out of the sky right at them, and scattered.

  As Matt tugged back on his stick, he felt the pull of gravity again. Then a bright yellow ball of fire exploded behind him, lighting up his control panel even in the harsh daylight.

  Matt turned around in his cockpit in time to see the AkagU Admiral Nagumo’s flagship at the Battle of Midway, become a brilliant fireball that shattered the deck and tossed airplanes into the sea.

  “Allll rightee!” Matt shouted, his backseater’s fate forgotten in the rush of victory.

  Suddenly, a familiar voice crackled in his headphones.

  “Great shooting, man!” David Gray said from his Wildcat.

  But in the seconds following the carrier’s destruction, Matt had made a fatal mistake. Instead of jinking away from the explosion, dodging fighters and antiaircraft
fire, Matt flew in an almost straight line, at an altitude of only about 1500 feet above the surface of the ocean.

  He was practically inviting the Japanese Zeroes to attack him, so Matt shouldn’t have been surprised when a couple of them accepted his invitation.

  It was David Gray who warned Matt of an impending attack, just barely in time.

  “You’ve got trouble coming,” David said. “At your ten o’clock.”

  Matt twisted in his cockpit in time to see two yellow Zeroes streaking toward him. He knew he couldn’t outrun them in the Dauntless, and he knew that Mark was out of commission. Without a tail gunner to fight back, Matt had only one option. He began to wiggle his plane back and forth in an attempt to dodge the bullets coming his way.

  There wasn’t much more he could do. The damage had already been done when he’d made the first mistake.

  David Gray plunged out of the sky in a valiant attempt to rescue Matt, but his maneuver put him directly into the path of a hail of antiaircraft fire from the Akagi’s sister carrier, the Soryu.

  The Wildcat disintegrated, its pieces striking the water and its shattered propeller skipping across the waves like a demented Frisbee.

  Matt lifted the nose of his Dauntless into the sky, trying to gain some altitude. And the two Zeroes on his tail stayed with him. Matt knew it was only a matter of time now.

  He heard bullets strike his Dauntless, and one of the dive flaps on his wing broke free, forcing him to fight the controls in order to stay in the air.

  Virtual smoke began to pour out from under his engine cowling, and Matt knew he was a goner.

  Suddenly, another aircraft flashed over Matt’s head, so close to his canopy that he actually ducked. Matt twisted around and stared at the stranger.

  His eyes widened in disbelief, and Matt gasped in astonishment when he saw another Wildcat fighter plane, this one painted orange from wing to tail and sporting black tiger stripes down its sides.

  The Wildcat’s wing-mounted machine guns blazed and one of the Zeroes exploded in a ball of fire and curling black smoke.

  The second Japanese plane swooped low to duck under the Wildcat attack—too low, as it turned out. The Zero struck the wave tops and shattered into pieces that bounced across the Pacific.

  Then a voice crackled in Matt’s headphones. A familiar voice. A voice that Matt Hunter would recognize anywhere.

  The voice of Julio Cortez.

  Matt snapped back to reality abruptly. He blinked, not immediately aware he was back in real time.

  Then Matt got his bearings. He turned and shouted at Dr. Lanier and the technicians.

  4 ‘Freeze the program! Freeze it NOW!” he said. He’d pushed the button in his cockpit, but after his last experience with this problem, he was no longer sure that it was enough.

  Matt was so agitated that he would have leaped out of his chair if he hadn’t been belted in and hooked up to the computer. The Net Force Explorers hanging around the simulator room turned and stared at him in alarm.

  Even Andy Moore, who was in the middle of accusing Megan of incompetence for getting them both killed, stopped talking when he heard the urgent tone in Matt Hunter’s voice.

  Meanwhile, behind the glass of the main frame’s control booth, Dr. Lanier and another technician went into action, their commands filling the air in the attempt to snatch and preserve the program in the computer’s vast data banks.

  “What is it, Matt?” Mark Gridley said, rushing to the older boy’s side. “What’s wrong?”

  Mart’s eyes were wild as he turned to his friend.

  “It’s Julio!” he said. “He’s inside the simulator—I saw him again!”

  Fifteen minutes later, the Net Force Explorers were assembled in the ready room for their post-flight debriefing. Mark, Megan, Andy, and David were sitting in a cluster, separated a bit from Matt Hunter, who looked like he’d been through hell.

  The debriefing should have started ten minutes ago, but Dr. Lanier was nowhere to be seen. Megan assumed that the professor was trying to determine what, if anything, was wrong with the Battle of Midway simulator program or the computer itself.

  Across the aisle, Matt sat in one of the chairs, rubbing his eyes, while the others stole peeks at him from a safe distance. Mark Gridley approached and offered Matt a plastic bulb of ice-cold lemonade, which he gratefully accepted.

  Mark met Matt’s eyes. “You talked to him?” he asked.

  Matt nodded. “Later,” was all he would say.

  Finally, Dr. Lanier entered the ready room, a computer technician in tow. He stepped up to the podium and apologized for being late.

  “It looks as though we have a situation,” Dr. Lanier said with obvious frustration.

  “What exactly do you mean, sir?” Mark Gridley asked.

  “I mean that we’ve discovered another Rift,” the professor said. “This time it’s in the Midway simulator.”

  “But that’s impossible!” Mark said. “You said yourself that Rifts are rare. How is it possible that two of them should turn up in the programs we used?”

  Professor Lanier raised his eyebrow. “How indeed?” he asked suspiciously.

  “You don’t think we had anything to do with this?” Matt Hunter said.

  “I’m not accusing anyone of anything,” Professor Lanier said. “But I will say that the matter is under investigation, and I will say one more thing.”

  He paused, letting the tension hang in the air.

  “Someone accessed the Red Baron program on Sunday night,” the professor said. “The hacker was clever. He or she used my password to gain access, and covered his tracks … we couldn’t trace the call.”

  Dr. Lanier gazed out at them.

  “I don’t know if this is sabotage or some kind of sick practical joke, but until I find out, all simulations are suspended while we run a complete systems check.”

  There were moans and groans in the ready room, but Dr. Lanier ignored them.

  4 ‘That means Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday classes are cancelled. But unless you hear differently, everyone is to report back here for classes on Monday.”

  The professor scanned the faces in the room one more time, and Matt and Mark were sure he was looking at them accusingly.

  “That is all,” he said, dismissing them.

  Mark Gridley nodded. So did Megan O’Malley.

  Well y I’ve made some progress, at least. They’re not looking at me like Vm crazy anymore, Matt thought. Now they’re discussing the possibility that Julio was in there with me. I guess that’s a start.

  ”What did Julio say to you?” Mark Gridley asked. “Tell us again.”

  Matt swallowed hard, then closed his eyes, trying to envision every detail of the harrowing scene in his mind.

  “Well,” Matt began, “I had the two Zeroes on my tail… and I had taken some hits already. My Dauntless was smoking, and Mark was gone. I knew that I was going down. It was just a matter of time.” Matt took a deep breath and sat forward in his chair.

  “Then suddenly, out of the blue came an orange Wildcat with black stripes,” Matt recalled. “The pilot of the orange plane shot one Zero down, and the other one crashed into the Pacific trying to dodge his wingman’s exploding airplane.”

  “But what did Julio sayT’ Mark repeated.

  “I was fighting the controls, trying to stay aloft,” Matt continued. “I heard Julio’s voice over my headphones … I recognized it immediately. Julio asked me what day it was, and how much time had passed since the last time I saw him in veeyar. He said he was having trouble with his sense of time.”

  “That’s understandable,” Andy said. “If he’s being held prisoner, they might be doing all kinds of things to him: sleep deprivation, torture, keeping him isolated, messing with his day-night cycles, or who knows what else.”

  Matt nodded. “I told him four days had passed, then I asked him how he got there.”

  “He slid his aircraft next to mine, right on my wing like he always did. And
then he pulled the canopy back….”

  Matt paused. “I could see him, just as plainly as I can see you,” he said. “Then Julio looked over his shoulder, like something was chasing him. I shouted to him, and I used his call sign to get his attention … ‘Jefe, ‘ I called. Talk to me!’

  “He looked right at me then, and there was more sadness and pain on his face than I’d ever seen before. He spoke again, begged me to do something to save his family—to do it now, before it was too late.

  “Then he said we weren’t alone … that something was forcing him back.”

  “Something?” Megan asked. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Matt confessed. “Julio looked over his shoulder at that moment. Then his eyes widened, like he saw something catching up with us.”

  Matt paused again. “I think there was a shadow that passed over us, but I can’t be sure. Then, I guess my Dauntless stalled or blew up or something, because the next thing I knew, I was back in the real world.”

  After a moment of silence, Megan rose and tossed her brown hair over her shoulder. She looked down at Matt, who was still slouched in his seat.

  “I have some information that will help you prove your point, information that it took me a lot of digging to get. But first, before the details get fuzzy, let’s go over this again,” she said. “From the top …”

  An hour later, Matt had gone through the events in the simulator time after time, but the Net Force Explorers were still no closer to figuring out what had happened than when they first arrived at the Net Force Explorers’ Lounge.

  But at least they now had a few theories.

  “You know, Matt, I really think you were shot down,” Andy Moore said.

  David Gray rolled his dark eyes. “Not again, man,” he muttered.

  “Hear me out!” Andy said. “Right at the end, when Julio looked over his shoulder. I think he might have seen something coming.”

  “Like what?” Mark said.

  “Like the thing he thought was chasing him,” Andy said. “You admitted that you might have seen a shadow, right?”

  Matt nodded.

  “Well, I think you saw the shadow of the thing that was coming after Julio,” Andy said.