Authors: Matthew Reilly
‘
Racers. This is your three-minute warning. Would all pit personnel please vacate the start area,
‘ intoned a stern male voice over the public address system.
The starting area for the Italian Run was the Colosseum. Every racer started from the same spot, in the exact centre of the 2000-year-old Roman amphitheatre.
The pole sitter took off first, blasting out of the stadium, followed by the second-placed starter who, sitting on a car-sized conveyor belt, would be cranked out onto the starting grid, ready to go exactly twenty seconds later. Then would come the third car, and the fourth, and so on, all drawn out into the arena on the conveyor belt, a new racer starting every twenty seconds until all 28 had commenced the race.
In the dark stone conveyor-belt tunnel, Jason and the Bug stood a short distance away from their F-3000 - now christened the
Argonaut II
- 12th in line on the belt. Jason’s eyes scanned the preparation chamber.
‘He’s not coming,’ he said.
Sally had a headset phone strapped to her head. ‘He’s not answering his phone either.’
There was no sign of Scott Syracuse. He hadn’t arrived in Italy yesterday, nor had he left any messages for Jason and the team. No ‘Good luck’, no anything.
Having his parents here was one thing, but Jason had hoped Syracuse would come - if only just to give him some professional words of support.
‘
Racers. This is your one-minute warning. Pole sitter to the starting grid, please.
’
‘Jason…’ Sally pressed him towards the
Argonaut II
.
But Jason was still scanning the area for Syracuse.
The simple truth was, he was nervous as hell.
In fact, he’d never felt this nervous before in his life. His stomach was positively churning. He couldn’t believe this:
he was about to race in a pro event
. You could watch pro races on TV every weekend, but until you were in one, you never knew what it was really like.
Then, finally, he turned to face his car - and glimpsed a flash of movement near the tailfin of the
Argonaut II
. For an instant, he could have sworn that he’d seen someone lurking there - someone small - a man he had met before.
Ravi Gupta.
Jason went to investigate, but found no-one near the
Argonaut II
‘s tail. He scanned the tailfin itself but found nothing out of place or out of order.
And then - lo and behold - he saw Gupta, standing a short distance away, over with another driver.
Gupta caught him looking and waved back happily.
Jason eyed him carefully: ‘Sally, do you know that guy? The guy waving at me.’
‘Yeah, of course,’ Sally’s voice became a low growl. ‘He’s Ravi Gupta, and you don’t want to get caught up with him. He’s bad news.’
‘What’s he do?’ Jason remembered the weird questions Gupta had asked him on Friday night: how he was coping with top-level racing; how he was finding the F-3000’s extra power.
Sally said, ‘You don’t know who Ravi Gupta is? Sorry, kiddo, but sometimes I forget you’re still so young. Ravi Gupta is a gambler. A bookmaker. Hell, one of the biggest bookmakers in the racing world. Now, come on Superstar,’ Sally handed him his helmet. ‘You got other things to worry about.’
‘Right,’ Jason took the helmet.
Then he and the Bug climbed into the two-man cockpit, strapped themselves in.
Once they were settled, Jason exhaled. ‘Whew.’
The Bug said something in his earpiece.
‘Yeah, me too,’ Jason replied. ‘Mine’s churning like a tumble dryer.’
With a dramatic mechanical clanking, the giant conveyor belt rumbled to life and the super-sleek Lockheed-Martin of Alessandro Romba, the pole sitter and current world champion, was drawn out into the main arena of the Colosseum…
…and the 60,000-strong VIP crowd packed into the ancient amphi-theatre roared as one.
Romba’s car,
La Bomba
, came to a halt, now pointed like a missile towards the external archway of the Colosseum. The exit to the course proper.
‘
Twenty seconds to race-start
…’ came the voice. ‘
Would the second place-sitter please stand-by
…’
A 20-second digital countdown ticked downwards on a giant scoreboard, beeping with every second…
…the crowd leaned forward…
…beep-beep-beep
…
…Jason watched Romba’s car from the stone tunnel, his heart in his throat.
Sally patted his shoulder. ‘Good luck, kids. I’ll be waiting for you at both pit stops.’
‘Thanks, Sally. Have a good race.’
Beep-beep-beep
…
Then the countdown hit zero and a shrill beep screamed and the lights went green and Alessandro Romba screamed off the starting grid, blasting out of the Colosseum and the Italian Run was underway.
As soon as Romba was out of the stadium, the conveyor belt tunnel erupted with activity.
The great belt immediately rumbled into action once again.
‘
Twenty seconds to next racer
.
Second-placed racer to the grid
…’
The 20-second countdown restarted and the secondplaced car - Fabian’s purple-and-gold Renault - was drawn out of the prep tunnel and into the sunlight and Jason heard the roar of the crowd.
The conveyor-belt-line of racers shunted forward one place, all of them watching tensely as they awaited their turn to move out onto the starting grid and into the glare of the hysterical crowd.
The countdown hit zero and Fabian shot off the mark.
‘
Twenty seconds to next racer
.
Third-placed racer, to the grid
…’
Jason watched each car shunt along the conveyor belt, take its place on the grid, and shoot out of sight - they looked like bullets being loaded into the chamber of a gun and then fired.
His nerves got tighter and tighter with every passing moment. Watching each car go was almost hypnotic - shunt-shunt,
beep-beep
, blast-off; shunt-shunt,
beep-beep
, blast off…
And then, surprising him, the announcer said: ‘
Twenty seconds to next racer
.
Twelfth-placed racer, to the grid
…’
He’d become so preoccupied with the rhythm of each new car moving out onto the grid and blasting off that it surprised him when his turn came round.
And so Jason sat in the
Argonaut II
as it was drawn out of the tunnel and into the dazzling sunlight - where it entered another world.
The crowd packed into the ancient stadium howled and roared, clapped and screamed. They were absolutely
wild
. And these were the VIPs. Jason couldn’t imagine what the ordinary race fans out on the course would be like.
The
Argonaut II
jolted to a halt on the starting grid. Locked and loaded.
The arched exit tunnel leading out of the Colosseum yawned before Jason.
The Bug whispered something.
‘You can say that again, little brother,’ Jason replied. ‘Hang on.’
The digital countdown hit zero, the lights went green and Jason floored it and his Ferrari F-3000 exploded out of the Colosseum and he began his first Grand Slam race.
CHAPTER NINE
Speed.
Supercharged, blinding speed.
Rome whistled past Jason’s cockpit in a hyperfast blur of horizontal streaks - before abruptly he left the city in his wake and shot up the spine of Italy, knifing up the Autostrata, heading towards Florence.
The entire freeway was lined with spectactors three hundred deep.
Ahead of him, he could make out the tailfins of the two cars that had started immediately before him. Twenty seconds wasn’t much of a head-start and they were already duelling.
And then -
bam!
- Jason swung into the first Chute section of the course and suddenly he was right on the tails of the two racers ahead of him. They’d both had to slow at a gateway when neither would give way and suddenly Jason was on their tails - trying to gauge whether or not he could overtake them before the next narrow aperture.
And that was the thing: multiple cars in a Chute was little more than a high-speed game of ‘Chicken’ - a who-dares-wins race to each aperture - all played out at a deadly 700 km/h.
Jason waited for his moment, for his chance to make his move when suddenly -
shoom!
- he was himself overtaken by the car that had started
behind
him, in 13th place.
The car - a member of the Boeing-Ford factory team - had screamed by so close that it actually scratched a chunk of paint off Jason’s right wingtip.
‘Damn it! Never saw him!’ Jason yelled.
‘
Make a note, kiddo. We ain’t in Kansas anymore
,’ Sally’s voice said in his earpiece.
And then suddenly, Jason was out of the Chute section and he beheld Florence ahead of him, its famous terracotta Dome rising above a low cityscape in the centre of a wide hazy valley. Every roof on every hill was covered with spectators.
Jason ripped down the Arno River, swooping under its famous bridges. As he swept under the Ponte Vecchio, Jason went left, around a bridge pylon, while the Boeing-Ford that had got him in the Chute went right, and as they came out on the other side, Jason was in front and the crowd on the bridge cheered.
The race shot northward, through Padua - coming tantalisingly close to the ultimate finish of the race, Venice II - and the monumental crowds there.
Giant hover grandstands, floating above the hills, pivoted in mid-air to watch the cars go by, before turning back around, ready to catch them when they would come through in about two hours’ time, at the business end of the race.
Then it was into Milan - the cars banking round the great Sforza Castle, before heading into the most treacherous part of the race: the vertiginous cliff-edged roads and tunnels of the Alps.
As always happened in the Italian Run, the field bunched up on the tight twisting roads of the Alps - and here the top racers made their moves.
Showing exceptional skill, Xavier climbed two places, to 7th, whipping past Etienne Trouveau of the Renault team and Kamiko Ideki, the notoriously unpredictable Japanese driver for the Yamaha team, known to fans everywhere as ‘Kamikaze’ Ideki.
Back in 12th, Jason also moved up the field, first taking the Australian driver, Brock Peters, before sweeping past his own team-mate for the Lombardi team, Pablo Riviera, in a daring round-the-outside manoeuvre.
Up to 10th…
And then the first crash of the race occurred and it caused a sensation - because it was the 3rd-placed driver, Dwayne Lewicki of the US Air Force team, who’d bowed out. Lewicki had thundered at 450 km/h into the arched entryway of a tunnel as he’d tried to overtake the 2nd-placed Fabian.
Lewicki had tried to duck inside Fabian, but the Frenchman wasn’t going to have any of it, and he’d held his line as he’d entered the tunnel, cutting across the bow of Lewicki’s fighter-jet-shaped car - the razor-sharp blades of Fabian’s nosewing
shearing the left wing of Lewicki’s nosewing clean off
, causing Lewicki to lose control and slam into the archway.
Everyone moved up a place.
Romba was out in front.
Fabian, 2nd.
Xavier, 6th.
Jason, 9th.
In the top ten…
Down through the mountains, sweeping through Milan again, then into the third Chute section of the course between Milan and the French border, before making a tight hairpin at the glorious white-walled city of Nice.
And then the racers hit the coastline.
This was the most spectacular section of the course - with every single kilometre of the Italian coastline teeming with crowds.
One after the other, the lead cars shot down the coastline, shooting through faux-Roman archways that rose up out of the sea a hundred or so metres out from the shoreline. The archways were in a staggered formation - forcing the racers to sweep down the coast in broad S-shaped swoops rather than in a continuous straight line, the whole section - like all the other ‘ocean’ sections of the course - flanked by red demagnetising lights.
As the ocean swept by under his nosewing, Jason saw on his dials that his mags were way down on magnetic power by now, severely worn by the tight traverse through the mountains and the three Chute sections.
But that was normal - they were coming up on the pit section at Fiumicino Airport outside Rome, and everyone would be pitting there.
The
Argonaut II
screamed down the coast at almost full speed, 810 km/h, ever-closing on the hover car in front of it: Car No. 40, the
Vizir
, the second car of the Renault team, driven by Etienne Trouveau.
Jason saw Trouveau’s tailfin, saw it wobble slightly after whipping through an archway, losing the ‘line’ needed to take the next Roman archway properly.
So Jason seized the opportunity, and gunned the
Argonaut II
and - to the delight of the crowd - swept past the
Vizir
in a rare straight-line passing move.
He shot through the next archway - now in 8th position - and flying on adrenalin.
Moments later, he beheld the flashing yellow hoverlights indicating the entrance to the Fiumicino Pits.
He banked left, aiming for the pits, thrilled to be where he was…
…when disaster struck.
Etienne Trouveau, it seemed, hadn’t appreciated Jason’s cheeky passing manoeuvre.
As Jason had banked to enter the pits, the Frenchman had accelerated unexpectedly and in a shockingly rude manoeuvre, cut across Jason’s nose - swiping it with his bladed Renault nosewing, slicing the left-hand wing of Jason’s own nosewing clean off!
Jason watched in apoplectic horror as a piece of his car’s nose fell away and tumbled into the sea like a skimming stone: a few bounces and a splash. At the same time, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Trouveau disappear into the pits to the left -
Then reality struck.
Hard.
810 km/h is not a speed at which you want to lose control.
The
Argonaut II
lost control. First it lurched left - then it pitched dramatically to the right - touching the demag ripple strips, causing the car’s magnetic power levels to plummet - before Jason engaged his compressed-air thrusters to get them off the debilitating strips.