Cobalt Black stood alone on a military runway in the Nevada desert, cell phone to his ear.
The high-security base on which he stood and in which he had lived and worked for the last ten years was about forty miles northwest of Las Vegas.
People in the Air Force and other branches of the military called it the Groom Lake Military Testing Complex. Regular people and conspiracy theorists knew it by its old designation: Area 51.
The tarmac beside Black stretched away toward the vast salt lake that surrounded the base. It shimmered in the heat haze. A dozen huge aircraft hangars surrounded Cobalt Black.
‘Your emotions make you weak, sister,’ he said into the phone before hanging up on Cassie.
‘Hello there,’ he said.
The Fury of Russia hovered in the air above him.
‘The brilliant one,’ the Fury said.
Black shrugged. ‘Welcome to Groom Lake. Strategic weapons centre. Nukes, chem, bio. All the good stuff. We need to talk.’
The Fury landed in front of him.
‘Speak.’
‘Two options,’ Black said. ‘One: we join forces and you give me America to rule.’
‘And Option Two?’ the Fury said.
‘I kill you and rule America anyway.’
‘And how exactly would you do that?’ the Fury asked, intrigued.
‘You can withstand a nuclear blast, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘How about ten of them?’
The Fury frowned at that, suddenly concerned. He glanced at all the hangars around him, as if seeing them for the first time.
‘I wanted to do this in a city,’ Black said, lifting up a remote control . . .
. . . as his entire body flickered.
The Fury blinked in surprise as he saw the small silver disc on the ground.
He was a hologram.
The Fury spun as—
—all ten hangars around him blasted apart—
—and the entire base blew up with ten simultaneous nuclear explosions.
The ten white-hot mega-sized blasts completely engulfed the Fury before rising into the stratosphere as a ring of mushroom clouds, clouds that soon became one super-colossal pillar of smoke.
And from a hill ten miles away, Cobalt Black watched it.
He grinned thinly . . .
. . . but a moment later, his smile faded as . . .
. . . the tiny figure of the Fury zoomed up out of the very top of the gargantuan mushroom cloud like a thin red laser beam, shooting into the upper stratosphere, outrunning the rising blast.
‘Damn.’ Cobalt Black scowled.
Then he turned and swept away.