THE BIG BAMG

      One minute it was a man-made wonder of the world: Neptune’s Shadow, the second largest oil rig in the world. Its lights glowed in the black fog of the North Sea, like an alien space ship. Towers craned out in all directions, metal arms trying to grab a piece of the night, while the pistons and pumps worked ceaselessly, dragging up the liquor from the belly of the world.

      The next minute, it was a raging mountain of fire that lit up the whole of the night, a beacon visible as far away as Denmark. The noise of the blast shook birds from their nests in Northern Scotland. The source of billions of pounds for the British Government erupted with more rage than Mount Vesuvius.

      In the morning it blew up again a million times, flashing across TV screens in digital reconstructions and vivid newspaper reports, each one exaggerating the size of the explosion a little more, and on the Internet, where people discussed why and how it had happened – and what the Prime Minister was going to do about it.

      And it exploded over and over again in the mind of the one person who had survived actually being there

      – Jimmy Coates.

      01 SLIPSTREAM

      First it was a light on the dashboard, then a clunk in the engine. Jimmy had been expecting this for the last three hours. I could ditch the plane in the water, he thought. At that moment he was somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and a part of his brain was already working out the best angle for the Falcon 20 to hit the waves. He could even feel the muscles in his shoulders warming, preparing for the longest swim of his life.

      He gritted his teeth and stared straight ahead out of the cockpit. He knew ditching wasn’t an option. He had to reach Europe. Then came the answer.

      The plane rocked slightly. A roar drowned out the sound of the Falcon’s engines. Jimmy peered upwards, squinting at the brightness of the sky. There it was – the shadow of a commercial jet looming above him.

      “Time to catch a ride,” Jimmy whispered under his breath. He glanced one more time at the fuel gauges. They were deep in the red zone. He powered the Falcon higher, his fingers gliding over the plane’s controls. Blood covered his palms – black, coagulated blood that left sticky marks on every switch and button. But they were healing already. He could feel it. The pain was far away, buried by his senses. He stared at his hands, but saw past the shredded streaks of red and black skin to the dull grey layer underneath.

      Next to the Airbus A490, Jimmy’s Falcon was like a fly around the back end of a hippopotamus. Jimmy was stunned at the enormousness of the plane. He guessed it must have been nearly a hundred metres long, with an even larger wingspan. Its deep rumble vibrated in Jimmy’s chest.

      Sooner than he eXpected, Jimmy was flying just a few metres beneath it. Please work, Jimmy begged, searching inside himself. He knew it was the force inside him that had put this plan into action. Jimmy could never have dreamed up anything so outrageous without it.

      He let the world fall into a blur, focusing all his energy on a point deep inside, somewhere between his stomach and the base of his spine. His inner power was coming. It had to be. It was destined to take over.

      Then came the familiar buzz. His muscles flooded with energy. His neck fizzed and his brain throbbed. Jimmy was full of hatred and eXhilaration simultaneously. This would save him, but there was a tiny voice inside that knew this power would also eventually destroy him.

      Jimmy jerked on the sidestick controller and the nose of his plane hurtled towards the airbus. Just as he thought he was going to burn to death in a mid-air collision, the Falcon was lifted back and upwards, wafted away on a cushion of air – the slipstream from the airbus engine.

      At that moment, Jimmy cut the power to the Falcon’s engines. The dull whine disappeared and Jimmy was deafened by the thundering of the airbus and the roar of the air blasting past. Violent turbulence rocked him in his seat. He gripped the flightstick more tightly, desperate to control the shifting of the plane’s weight. He was surfing on air.

      “Hey, look at this, Pritchie,” said the airbus pilot, sitting forward in his seat. A fragment of lettuce fell from his sandwich. His co-pilot had his cap down over his eyes and didn’t bother to move.

      “What is it?” His voice was gruff.

      “Message,” replied the pilot, taking another bite of his sandwich. “En-route controller. Something about a ghost on the radar.”

      “Ghost?” Pritchie reluctantly heaved himself into an upright position and set his cap back on his head. “That’s, like, two blips where there should be one, no?”

      “Well, it’s not some dude in a white sheet, is it?”

      They both peered at the data link system. Then they checked their panel displays, both suddenly very alert.

      “Found anything?” asked the pilot. Pritchie shook his head.

      “Hey, what’s this?” he said. “Another message.”

      Together they studied the communications system again. The pilot shrugged.

      “Huh,” he started. “Funny. Must have been a glitch.”

      “A glitch?”

      “Well, we’ve found nothing and now they’re saying things are back to normal.”

      “Guess that’s why they call them ghosts.”

      They looked at each other for a second, each trying to work out if the other was going to make a big deal out of this or just get on with the flight. Eventually Pritchie broke into a smile.

      “Let’s hope it wasn’t a flock of birds heading for an engine,” he said with a rough laugh, reclining in his seat and putting his cap back over his eyes.

      “No worries,” the pilot snorted. “I don’t smell any roast chicken.”

      Jimmy was riding the slipstream expertly. The slightest twitch of his muscles made tiny adjustments in the balance of the plane. Gradually he manoeuvred down and to the centre, where the airflow was strongest. If he was going to get away with this, he knew he needed to stay as close as possible to the airbus so the air-traffic control radar system would read the two planes as a single entity.

      Now all he had to do was stay there until they reached Europe. Then he’d have to work out a way to land. He just hoped he wasn’t too late.

      02 WILLIAM LEE

      “Shall we get started then?” Miss Bennett announced brightly.

      Eva Doren felt like a schoolgirl. But unlike most thirteen-year-olds, she wasn’t at school. She was at an operations room deep under the streets of Central London, in the bunkers of NJ7, the most technologically advanced and well-funded Secret Service organisation in the world.

      She didn’t think there were many girls who came to work every day at a place like this: three breeze block walls, bare grey except for the multicoloured horizontal stripes of the electrical circuitry, and a fourth, newly installed glass partition which allowed extra light in from the corridor.