CHAPTER EIGHT.

NEW YORK CITY, USA (SUNDAY).

RACE 4: THE QUEST.

SECTION: OUTBOUND JOURNEY.

The four cars sat on Fifth Avenue, all aimed northward. Alessandro Romba - in his silver-and-black Lockheed

Martin.

Fabian and Etienne Trouveau in their purple-and-gold Renaults.

And Jason - in the Argonaut.

This is what it came down to.

Four contenders.

All within four points of each other.

Romba, Trouveau and Jason had to win Race 4 - and have some other placings go their way - in order to take

the Masters.

Fabian, however - three points clear of his nearest rival - could come 2nd, garnering 8 points, and still take

the overall t.i.tle.

The course for the Quest was a long and arduous one - taking the racers all the way across New York State, right to Niagara Falls on the US-Canadian border. There the racers would collect their trophies from a platform suspended high above the falls and begin the journey back to Manhattan.

Now, while the journey both ways was extraordinarily difficult, it was also astonishingly beautiful, but in an unusual way.

For the main feature of the course was a superlong underground highway known as the Endless Tunnel. Before the invention of hover cars, the US Government had started construction of an underground superhighway designed to go from the Canadian border all the way down to Florida, to be known as Superhighway Two.

But then along came hover cars and the project was abandoned: and only the section through New York State was completed - and even then, only roughly.

What remained was a rough-hewn network of long octagonal tunnels cutting through all sorts of underground environments - old mines, subterranean chasms, rivers and waterfalls. Indeed, the construction of the highway had led to the discovery of the now-famous Twin Caves, the largest underground caverns in the world.

Naturally, the Endless Tunnel was now equipped with many small ion waterfalls that cut the tunnel's width in half. Plus lots of single-file-only bridges over the underground gorges and rivers, and not a few dead-end forks: navigators were provided with a map of the Tunnel and their role in the race was crucial.

Jason sat in his c.o.c.kpit, eyeing the superlong skysc.r.a.per and grandstand-lined canyon of Fifth Avenue stretching away before him.

'Your legs will not fall from under you,' he said aloud. The Bug didn't hear him, asked what he'd said. 'Nothing, little brother. Nothing.'

The crowd murmured - would Alessandro Romba win this race and take the Grand Slam? Or the two Frenchmen? Or perhaps even the young outsider, Jason?

Jason's parents watched from the grandstand nearest to the Start-Finish Line. Sitting with them were Umberto Lombardi, Scott Syracuse, the McDuff clan and Ariel Piper. Henry Chaser was literally on the edge of his seat with excitement.

The starter for the final race of the Masters was always a celebrity, and this year it was the biggest movie star in Hollywood, Rosemary Anderson. To great applause, she pressed the start b.u.t.ton.

Immediately, a loud electronic tone warned everyone that the start lights would ignite in three seconds.

Red light - Yellow light - Green light - Go!

The world blurred.

Super speed. And Jason found himself pushing the Argonaut to new limits.

Skysc.r.a.pers became bridges, then houses, then open highway as the racers shot up Interstate 87, charging northward, with every piece of available land covered with spectators.

Then the landscape quickly became tree-covered hills, bridges and rivers and - all too soon - the Catskill Mountains came into view. And waiting for him at their base, Jason knew, was the entrance to the famed and feared Endless Tunnel.

Romba was in the lead, where he liked to be, while Jason and the two Renaults swapped and jockeyed for 2nd place, overtaking each other regularly - and all the while, the two French drivers flashed their razor-sharp nosewings dangerously close to Jason's flanks.

And then Jason beheld the entrance to the Tunnel. It was a ma.s.sive grey concrete arch, solid as h.e.l.l, with a dark pa.s.sageway behind it that yawned black. The opening was flanked by a sea of cheering spectators.

Shoom!

Jason rushed into the blackness.

Arched concrete pillars whistled by overhead in a dizzying display of hyper-repet.i.tion. Actually, they weren't so much pillars as 'ribs' - the ribs of the octagonal tunnel.

The four cars roared like rockets through the winding pa.s.sageway, banking with the bends, flattening out with the straights.

Romba - Jason - Fabian - Trouveau.

At certain points, ion waterfalls halved the width of the Tunnel, and they had to form up into single file to get past the glittering golden curtains - and sometimes weave left and right when a second or a third ion waterfall appeared directly after the previous one, but on the other side of the underground pa.s.sage.

And then, gloriously, Jason burst out onto a superlong natural bridge that spanned a subterranean gorge. Bottomless black raced by on either side of the fenceless bridge. But before he could gaze in wonder at the spectacular scenery, Jason was plunged into claustrophobic tunnel-territory once again.

Forks began to appear in the tunnel system.

And for a time everyone just followed Alessandro Romba - trusting his navigator's map-reading skills - but then Romba got ahead of the others and suddenly the Bug had to make the Argonaut's navigation calls.

But not for long.

Fabian - keen to stay in 2nd place and thus ensure that he won the Masters - started harrying Jason with the help of Trouveau.

The Argonaut sped round a bend, avoiding an ion waterfall, before - whoosh - it blasted out into an absolutely enormous cavern, the first of the Twin Caves, known as the Small Cave.

Stunning waterfalls blasted out from fissures in the side of the immense cavern, falling 700 feet down a mult.i.tiered rock wall before disappearing into darkness. Temporary underground hoverstands filled with spectators lined the cavern, their chants echoing in the ma.s.sive s.p.a.ce.

A wide bending S-shaped bridge snaked its way across the face of the multi-streamed falls - at some points dipping behind the curtains of rushing water. The hover cars on the bridge were dwarfed by the sheer size of the underground water system.

It was here that the two Renaults tried to finish Jason off for good.

The bending bridge was wide enough for the three of them, but it narrowed to a two-car-wide tunnel at its end.

Ominously, the two Renaults swept up on either side of the Argonaut.

Jason snapped left, then right. Saw Fabian at his left, Trouveau on his right - both of them so close that he could almost touch them.

A Renault sandwich.

'Uh-oh...' Jason said.

The Renaults had him exactly where they wanted him - in a technique they'd used so many times before to nail their rivals. All Fabian had to do now was push Jason onto Trouveau's bladed nosewing.

Fabian started ramming Jason, forcing him right, forcing him towards...

...Trouveau's flashing nosewing.

Jason rammed Fabian back, fighting the push - nervously eyeing the rapidly-approaching tunnel entrance ahead.

Then Trouveau also pulled in close, bringing his fearsome silver nosewing to within centimetres of the Argonaut's.

Jason swung his head left and right. There was nowhere to go. He was being run onto Trouveau's blades and there was nothing he could do about it.

Any second now, they would have him...

Any second...

Fabian gave him a final push. Got him.

CHAPTER NINE.

RACE 4: THE QUEST.

SECTION: THE ENDLESS TUNNEL (OUTBOUND).

But as Fabian made the killing blow, Jason did something totally unexpected.

He slammed on his brakes.

The Argonaut slid backwards in the air and the result of this sudden action was as spectacular as it was surprising.

Fabian - previously pushing hard against the Argonaut - suddenly found himself pushing against nothing at all, so his car lunged forward in the air and before he could do anything about it, Fabian saw his own bladed nosewing shear right through Trouveau's!

Trouveau's eyes bulged as he saw his own nosewing drop away - at which point he lost all control of his vehicle and the Vizir veered to the right, speeding perilously close to the edge of the winding bridge and the deep drop below it, before it smashed with terrible force into the vertical concrete frame of the tunnel entrance at the end of the gigantic cave.

Car hit stone.

At 700 km/h.

In a single instant, the Vizir transformed from hover car to fireball.

The explosion rang out in the cavern - and the crowds in the stands rose in horror. Trouveau and his navigator would ultimately walk away from the crash, dazed and dizzy, saved only by their reinforced c.o.c.kpit and anticrash features. The Vizir, on the other hand, would never race again.

It was left splayed across the right-hand side of the tunnel entrance, blocking half of the way.

As for Jason, he was still rocketing along at speed - his braking manoeuvre had only been brief, so he hadn't lost that much ground on Fabian - and the two of them shot past the wreckage of the Vizir in single file, and disappeared into the two-car-wide tunnel at the end of the Small Cave.