A few minutes before the C.I.A. got word of the plane hijacking, Mason had been in his room going over the footage of the hearing.
He’d been examining it for a few hours everyday since he got them, and he’d found some evidence he considered pretty damning.
It was small and frankly, pretty out there… but he was 70 percent certain Neuman was the head popper or related to them in some way.
Hundreds of rewinds and replays on specific sections revealed and confirmed the undisputable fact that everyone who had the misfortune of getting their noggins blown up entered the young congresswoman’s line of sight right before they bit the dust.
The three most damning pieces of evidence he had for this was the first death (that of the chairman), that of Vogelbaum, and his own.
More than one camera recorded her looking directly at them and himself before… well, splat.
Instead of following the all consuming desire to confide in Mallory or Rayner, he chose to make his case ironclad first. For that, he needed to work on his findings and bolster his theory.
That’s what he’d been working on when Rayner’s call came through.
Long story short, she had a mission for him. A group of terrorists had hijacked a plane. F-16s had been scrambled but she wanted him to get there first.
A rescue of the passengers went without saying, as that would bolster their chances at keeping Vought out of the military. She stressed a speedy arrival but asked him to exercise patience when he arrived.
Rather than go into the plane half-cocked, he’d relay the situation “on the grounds” to them and they’d advise on how to proceed. Instead of arguing, he agreed and got dressed.
If this had been a simple hideout filled with bad guys, he would have asked “why all this caution?” Because, as young a supe he may be, the past few days had enlightened him on where he stood on the hierarchy… power-wise.
To put it mildly, over ninety percent of supes were chumps when it came to actual combat. Compounding the training he'd undergone from childhood and his extra abilities on top made any comparison between him and them unfair.
That wasn’t the case with this hijacking though. Innocents were involved. If he messed up and got even one of them killed…
He was still nowhere close to getting his hands on supe appropriate clothing, or at least, clothing he liked. So he had to do with the ones provided by the agency.
Thankfully, these were a step up from what he wore during the tests. Not in terms of quality, but design. If this was going to be his debut, then this proto-suit would suffice.
The mask covered his head completely, the protective lenses in the eye sockets providing windows to the outside world. Going down, the neck of the dark blue shirt met with the base of the mask and removed any hint of skin around his neck.
The shirt itself hugged his torso, abdomen and biceps like plaster on a wall, the sleeves on the arms stopping just below his elbow and going no further.
Muscular bare forearms remained exposed but the hands attached to them were protected by high quality gloves of the same material. A pair of slightly loose pants of a lighter shade were secured to his waist by a tac belt.
A duo of pads protected his knees and the bottom of the pants vanished into a pair of boots that completed the ensemble. One last look in the mirror satisfied his inner fashionista and confirmed that everything was in its right place.
With time being of the essence, he shortened the time spent before the mirror and grabbed his phone, activating the comm device in his ear simultaneously.
“Hello? Rayner? I’m ready.”
“Good. Sending the coordinates now. Remember, do not engage.”
“Affirmative.”
He turned the phone sideways when the coordinates came through so he could get a proper look at the distance he was to fly. The higher estimate of 4000 miles made him utter a silent curse.
“That’s over an hour of flight. Are you up for it?” Rayner’s voice came through the earpiece, reminding him he wasn’t alone. As for her question, she seemed to be using the speeds he’d shown in the past as reference.
He barely even tried back then, however actions spoke louder than words, so he left her comment at that. He pressed the comm device and answered her.
“I’m guessing you want me there as soon as possible.”
“That goes without saying.”
“Consider it done. Mason out.”
If he was going to be doing this full-time, he needed a better codename. Or was it call-sign? Whatever the correct term, so long as it wasn’t what the news and the public had dubbed him, all would be fine.
He tucked the phone into a special case on the tac belt and tapped into his powers to levitate off the ground. There were no flames accompanying this, just an invisible force puppeting his body according to his wishes.
After taking time to properly go over the effects of his powers, he concluded that there had to be some kind of field or influence constantly at work within him.
When Stormfront blasted him with lightning after she tossed his car, he felt no pain or paralysis. He chalked that up to superhuman durability, even though the electricity coursed through his body and interacted with his chi.
In the lake where he found out he didn’t need to breathe, water didn’t rush into his nose or mouth even when opened them wide.
And after his brain got torn to pieces at the hearing, he didn’t die like he was supposed to.
That one was most telling and made him come up with this theory of an invisible field permeating his body and ensuring his survival and normal function no matter his internal or external conditions.
When his brain got blasted to smithereens, this… field, assembled all the pieces and put them in their right places, presumably supplying them with blood and nutrients while they healed.
According to Mallory, he wasn’t breathing and neither did he have a heartbeat. This little bit made his theory seem less and less like one.In the lake, this same field kept the water out of his body. Back on the open stretch of grass outside Sage Grove, it allowed him to keep moving despite the paralysing amount of electricity his nerves were subjected to.
It sounded ridiculous, but he saw no reason not to try and seize control of this field—if it even existed. He even wanted to recreate the scene with Stormfront with high amounts of electricity but that turned out to be unnecessary.
A few seconds of focus was enough for the power to respond to his wishes. He just clenched his butt and did it, like every other supe with their powers, gaining a different form of flight that was quieter and less eye-catching just like that.
Of course, it was nowhere near as fast as moving with the flame jets, but this method alone freed up his hands and the focus he used for steering and control whenever he used the flames.
And so, dragging himself out of the safe house and into the air by simply willing it, he flew upward till he reached where the air was thinnest and turned to face the direction he was supposed to go.
He retrieved the phone hovering in place and confirmed things again. It would be a monumental mess and disappointment if he wasted all that time going the wrong way.
When the phone went back in its case, the flight began in earnest.
The two methods of propulsion meshed together with seamless precision, the former controlling his posture and the flames concentrating into a single powerful jet beneath his boots.
A boom and a bright flash rent the air in his wake and he was off, the sudden drastic change in velocity generating intense protests from the environment.
Rayner assumed Mach 3 was the fastest he could go. She was wrong.
Even he didn’t know the true limit. But he knew for certain he didn’t have to reach this aforementioned peak in order to arrive in less than an hour.
He just needed to double or even triple the amount and intensity of flames he outputted, something he had more than enough confidence to achieve.
4000 miles was by no means a small distance, but he would be damned if he let that number intimidate him.
Bit by bit, he cranked the valve on the flames higher and higher. He’d amp the flames, then compress them. Amp, then compress—he repeated this over and over, and the results spoke for themselves.
He sliced through the compounding wind with ever increasing ferocity, the suit holding up despite the intense resistance. At this rate, the plane would enter his sight within thirty minutes or less.
‘Let’s make that twenty.’ He smirked and poured more chi into the jets.
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Heels clacking in the pristine and empty hallways of the Vought tower’s topmost floor, Madelyn Stillwell led Homelander and Maeve towards the meeting room of The Seven with brisk steps.
“Seven minutes ago, Transoceanic Flight number 37 from Paris to Chicago was hijacked mid-air.”
She sounded quite excited, something the two heroes picked up on. Their reactions to it however were wildly different. Maeve fought the urge to roll her eyes and shake her head while Homelander indulged his maternal figure/secret lover.
“Seven minutes ago?” He asked, catching his reflection in her glasses when she looked over.
“Yeah.” Stillwell answered his question, slightly out of breath. “A source from NORAD tipped us off.”
Maeve wanted to get this over with. “How many hijackers?”
Stillwell kept walking. “Looks like three.”
“Did they scramble F-16s?”
“Yep. As we speak.” Madelyn spun around when they arrived at the wide open doors, smiling from ear to ear. “But you can get there quicker.”
A quick order from her cleared out the room. The three stood before the series of monitors they used for team briefings and similar stuff and the scope of the situation became apparent.
The heroes finally understood the reason for Madelyn’s urgency and excitement.
“Middle of the Atlantic.” Homelander crossed his arms behind him, cape swaying as he came to a stop.
“Yep.”
“No man’s land.”
“You can’t operate on foreign soil, but a plane hijacked over international waters… No one will complain.”
Glasses off and hands resting on her hips, the middle aged woman gazed up at Homelander. She gave him an adoring look and spoke in a slightly out of breath way, experience from the decades she’d spent “taking care of him” coming into play.
“If you bring those passengers back alive, not one congressman will have the balls to vote against our bill.”
Disgusted beyond words but numbed after being around it for so long, Maeve simply kept her arms crossed and turned her gaze elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Homelander offered a simple “Mm” and nodded, wishing he could skip all this nonsense and go straight to their alone time so Madelyn could call him a good boy again.
On the other hand, he’d been telling her he could do more. It wouldn’t look good on him if he refused to do this simple thing after proclaiming his competence. Besides, how hard could killing a few jihadists be?He was the Homelander.
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Thanks to his ability to perceive fast moving objects, Mason didn’t have to worry about shooting past the much slower passenger plane.
He caught sight of it below him and canceled the jets immediately, controlling the momentum carrying him forward like a bullet with his innate means of flight. Arms pressed against his sides, he dove down from the cloud layer.
The plane rapidly enlarged in his sight and it took him yanking his whole body back to slow down and grasp its tail instead of tearing a massive hole the size of his body through it.
With his momentum completely arrested, he half crawled, half flew along the plane’s dorsal side all the way to the where the cockpit was located.
When he arrived and pressed himself flat against the cold metal, he tried to inch closer in order to peek through the glass. That’s when he remembered Rayner’s orders.
She didn’t forget about him either. After all, they had his location and that of the plane. When the two overlapped, they drew the right conclusions.
“Mason. Come in.”
He pressed his hand against his ear, hoping his words and not rushing winds would be carried over. “Yeah. I’m here.”
“We see you. What’s the situation?”
“I’m trying to get a look at the cockpit.”
“Don’t do that. One of them is likely in there.”
“Oh.”
Damn. If he had done that. The hijackers might’ve taken drastic measures. Like kill everyone or kill the pilots, which would also kill everyone. A “fuck” or “shit” had never been more appropriate.
‘Nice going man.’
“Wait. How many are there?” He came back to his senses and deployed the one that let him pick up on heat.
“Three. But there may be more.”
The feedback he received from the cockpit was strange. Planes like this had two pilots according to his knowledge, but since this one had been hijacked, his senses were supposed to pick up three heat signatures. Not two.
If one of them was a hijacker, then…
“One of the pilots is dead.”
“How sure are you?”
“There are only two people in the cockpit.”
“Shit.”
“Rayner. What am I doing here? Do I go in?”
“....”
“Haaah… fuck. Listen to me Mason. No matter what happens, that plane cannot crash. You hear me?”
‘That’s why I flew all the way here.’
“Got it. Do I go in or not?”
A loud sigh came over the line. “Use the passenger cabin side door. There’s some risk, but it’s not loud enough to alert the guy in the front.”
“The guys in the back—”
“Oh that will alert them. That’s why you need to be fast.”
“Speed is of the essence. Got it.”
Mason let go of the handhold and flew over to the side of the plane, deftly avoiding the line of small windows.
“And Mason?”
“Yeah?” He held the door handle and paused.
“If it comes down to it, do not hesitate.”
He’d had this talk with himself long before he arrived. So his answer came swiftly. “Yes ma’am.”
His grip on the handle strengthened and he twisted. The door sunk in, retracted, and then swung open, creating an opening for the highly pressurized air to rush out.
Occupying the open gap with his body as papers and small bags bounced off and rushed past, his foresight was rewarded when a whole person hit him and almost caused him to lose his grip.