Sky Ghost

by Maloney, Mack;

It took him less than a minute to reach the runway. Now, without breaking stride, he ran over to a line of Pogo fighters, selected one, and climbed up the access ladder.

  There was no one around the plane. No flight personnel or ground crew. It didn’t matter to him. He opened the cockpit on the vertical fighter himself and climbed in. The dials and switches inside looked like everything else in this strange world: props from a bad sci-fi movie. Again, this did not deter him. He began pushing buttons and throwing switches and in seconds, the big tail-sitter aircraft began to come alive.

  He was now aware of people around the bottom of the aircraft, pointing up at him. One man had a rifle and was aiming at him, but another was pulling it away from the would-be shooter. Hunter hit a few more buttons—oil pressure checks, electrical system readouts—and then pushed the start lever and the huge double propellers at the top of the strange aircraft burst to life.

  This served to scatter most of the people buzzing around below him. The cloud of thick black exhaust drove away the rest. The Pogo was shaking so much, Hunter’s teeth were chattering. He scanned the rest of the flight instruments, and somehow knew immediately what each one was supposed to do.

  Another check of the oil pressure, another check of the electrical readouts. Everything was green. He flipped a switch that read, WEAPONS LOAD. It blinked back on with a message that said: Full.

  Hunter then strapped himself in, leaned back in the seat, and reached for the throttle bar.

  And then, at that moment, it hit him…

  He spoke the words out loud:

  “What the hell am I doing?”

  He didn’t know. Just as he was compelled to get up and run out of the hypnosis session and climb into this peculiar airplane, now he was compelled to launch the damn thing and go somewhere to do something.

  But what?

  He just didn’t know.

  And could he actually fly this thing? Could he fly at all? Was he a pilot?

  Again, he just didn’t know.

  But something was telling him to go. Now…

  So he kind of shrugged and took a deep breath and realized at that moment that he wasn’t even wearing a crash helmet or an oxygen mask. But he hit the launch lever anyway.

  The big airplane shuddered once, twice. And then, in an amazing burst of power and speed, the Pogo jumped off the runway and went straight up into the cloudless morning sky.

  While it was not an unusual occurrence for the base’s attack warning signals to go off at Otis Field, it had been quite a while since they had done so.

  The vast air base had been attacked a dozen times in this latest phase of the war, the last time being 18 months ago. In that incident, two missile-firing U-boats surfaced about 20 miles out and launched a half dozen concussion rockets at the base’s main runway, cratering it badly.

  But no defensive measures were taken then or after any other attack on the base for one simple reason: the U-boats were usually long gone before any aircraft crews could get scrambled and any aircraft could launch. The standard procedure then for an attack on the base was for everyone to get to a shelter or a slit trench and stay hunkered down until the attack was over.

  That’s what most of the personnel at the base were doing now. The shelters were filled and the slit trenches were too. However, the sixth floor of the red administration building still held several people. The elderly officers had retreated to the basement shelter along with the stenographer.

  But Agents X, Y, and Z were still on hand, as was a very concerned Captain Zoltan, who was now in their secret room with them. He was looking out the huge unshuttered window to the ocean beyond. His body was shaking. Bad vibes were everywhere.

  “What if a German missile hits this building?” he asked the shadowy agents. “We’ll all be killed.”

  Agent X just stared back at him. “You’re supposed to be one who sees the future,” he replied snidely. “Do you see this happening?”

  Zoltan wiped his brow and nervously tried to push down the creases in his uniform jacket. “No, I guess I don’t,” he replied finally.

  “OK, good,” Agent Z said to him. “Then what’s to worry?”

  But Zoltan was worried, though he really wasn’t sure why.

  “That man, Hunter” he started to say. “He is someone you must not lose track of.”

  Agent Y was standing at the big window looking up at the Pogo’s contrail as it disappeared into the deep blue sky.

  “Well, that might be a problem,” he said wryly.

  The base’s attack sirens were now wailing louder than ever. They’d been triggered by a rather outdated system of sonar buoys laid into the seabed about 50 miles off the coast, devices specially designed to detect U-boats. If one was tripped, a warning would go up and down the entire coastline. The sirens were annoying though, so X picked up a phone and called to the base’s security office—he wanted the alarms turned off. But of course, no one was in the SO’s office to answer the phone.

  Agent Z turned back to Zoltan.

  “What is it about this man that concerns you so?” he asked the hypnotist.

  “He’s just a very strange one,” Zoltan replied, lighting a cigarette.

  “They’re all strange,” Z said nonchalantly.

  “But not like him,” Zoltan said. “He’s either the best actor in the world or…”

  “Or what?” Z asked. “Or he’s telling the truth? You don’t really want to go down on record as believing that, do you?”

  Zoltan began to reply, but this time thought better of it.

  Instead he just crushed out his cigarette and nervously lit another.

  Hunter was at 10,000 feet and laughing hysterically.

  Yet he didn’t know why.

  He was spinning through the air, maxed out on the weird airplane’s double-prop engine, laughing and yelping and screaming. He was uncontrollably happy. Either that, or his brain was slowly being starved for oxygen and he was suffering from some kind of narcosis.

  Either way, it was euphoric.

  The airplane drove like a truck. But he really didn’t care. He was doing something here that he hadn’t done in a very long time.

  He was flying.

  He let the g-forces flow through him as the plane climbed higher. The further he got from the ground, the better he felt. This was a battle with gravity, he realized, and for the moment at least, he was winning. And it felt so good, he never wanted to come down.

  So he continued to climb—15,000 feet, 20,000, 25,000, 30,000. He was ecstatic! 35,000 feet, 40,000. He could start to see the dark edge of the stratosphere above him. He believed he could see the stars, the planets. 45,000 feet, 50,000! Damn, he’d done this before. Exactly this! He let out another whoop. He didn’t know who he was or where he was, but he knew this is what he’d been born to do, no matter where he’d come from.

  He began doing loops. Crazy eights. One-point star-bursts. He felt that at one time he might have been part of a group of airplanes and pilots who performed these things, but only the stunts and his ability to do them remained, and so he did them with great vigor. An upside-down crossover. A controlled stall. Four-point turns. Eight-point turns. These maneuvers, he didn’t even know what they were called, yet he was performing them with incredible precision. And all the while laughing uncontrollably.

  But then his body began buzzing again—and this time, it was definitely a different vibe.

  He was up here to do something, his brain was telling him. That same something that had compelled him to take off in the first place. But what was it?

  He put the airplane into a steep dive. Again, the g-forces felt good on his face. He had a panel that read WEAPONS STATUS. But he had no idea what kind of guns the airplane was packing.

  However, somewhere in the back of his brain, way in the back part of his skull, it seemed he had a file on this airplane and on its guts. When the Pogo was first built, it was intended to be fitted with two machine guns. But in this place, that all happened years ag
o. The airplane looked the same, more or less, but what about the weapons? There really was only one way to find out.

  He reached over and pulled the weapons lever. There was a bright flash! He was sure the nose of the airplane was about to blow off. There was a huge flame, a huge puff of smoke. And a cloud of sparks.

  He quickly disengaged the lever and took a deep breath. Wow!

  There must have been…wait a minute, was it possible? He pulled the lever again. In amongst the smoke and fire and sparks he detected six telltale streaks. Six machine guns on an airplane? That seemed way too many!

  He did a third burst—and sure enough. There were six long fiery streaks. Jessuzz, he thought. What a frigging punch!

  He pushed the throttle ahead and the little airplane leapt through the air again. It was oddly shaped, but quick and powerful. He put the Pogo into a spin. And felt the laughter start to gurgle up inside him again. Heavy as it was, the thing handled perfectly!

  The plane was strange, but in a great way. It was outlandish, but cool at the same time—though he wasn’t sure exactly why he felt both opinions so deeply. Had he flown a similarly outlandish plane before—back wherever he’d come from?

  He didn’t know.

  But suddenly a piece of the puzzle fell into place. Suddenly he realized that he knew something more about himself: He was a fighter pilot. He could feel it. In fact, he might have been more than just an ordinary fighter pilot.

  Something was telling him he might have once been the best fighter pilot in the whole world.

  But once again, he had to drag himself back to the matter at hand. Why was he up here?

  His body vibed again—and he was compelled to look down. And right below him, outlined in black against the deep blue Atlantic, were two submarines. Each was just surfacing. Each had a giant Iron Cross painted on its conning tower.

  Their decks were sporting two missile launchers apiece. Crewmen in dark green uniforms were scurrying about these launchers. It was obvious they were getting ready to fire the weapons.

  And at that moment, Hunter knew the answer to the question as to why he was here.

  From way back deep in his mind, way back in his skull, he heard a familiar voice say: Time to get to work.

  The pair of German submarines that had just broken the surface were U-boats #153 and #419.

  Both were Raeder Class vessels, meaning they were the biggest—and oldest—of the German underwater fleet.

  They boasted crews of 311 and 356 respectively. They ran on cogenerating gas turbine reaction power, which made them efficient and gave them superior range. Their weapons may have seemed unusual for a submarine. They carried no torpedoes, no antiship weapons at all. The subs barely had periscopes. These weren’t attack submarines. Rather they were missile-firing boats, known to all as “Zoomers.”

  What they could do under the right conditions was launch sea-to-surface missiles, the biggest of which was called the Dogglebanger-13.

  The DG-13 carried a warhead the size of a small car. It contained nearly five tons of high explosives. It was partially guided by a set of coordinates preset into its nose cone. But with a DG-13, pinpoint accuracy was not a major concern. With its blockbuster-type weapons load, the missile could lay waste to a five-square-mile area. Getting the missile to impact anywhere in the neighborhood of a 2500-foot radius did just fine.

  Yes, the DG-13 was a powerful weapon, and the Raeder-class submarines were ideal as a launching platform—but this particular mission was an ironic one for the two subs. It was both their last mission of the war and also their most futile.

  Simply put, the German Navy was almost nonexistent. It was close to dead broke. Out of money, out of sailors, out of vessels. The number of German ships that could even make the trip across the Atlantic could be counted on one hand these days, and U-153 and U-419 were two of them.

  This attack was also ironic in that the DG-13 warheads being used were the biggest of the war—6.5 ton mammoths developed a year ago by German naval warfare scientists but found to be too costly to go into mass production. So Germany’s largest warhead would be used in its last attack on the American mainland. It was a last-gasp mission if there ever was one; a desperate attempt at one last dribble of propaganda before Germany finally fell.

  As their commanders back in Lyons had told the U-boat captains: “Make some noise. Then come home.”

  It was the nature of the DG-13 missile that it was wild on take off, wild during its initial flight, wild when its gyropilot took over, and wild all the way down to the target. It was not a tactical weapon—it was much too imprecise for that. Or a strategic weapon either. It was a terror weapon, the last in a long line the Germans had produced over the last half century. Designed simply to kill innocents and inflict pain and suffering. The military equivalent of a bomb in a baby carriage.

  The subs had six missiles between them, and thus six targets: Two for downtown Boston. One for downtown Providence. One for downtown Hartford. One for downtown Bridgeport. And the sixth one, a very long lob into Manhattan itself. The two subs were 42 miles off shore. The DG-13 had a range of 110 miles. All they really had to do was point the missiles in the right direction and fire away. If they came down anywhere within a downtown area, casualties would be high, especially at this time of day. The last missile was set to come down in Times Square itself. German intelligence—what was left of it—had informed the Reich High Command that an American victory party had already started in the square. It would be a perfect place then to aim the very last DG-13.

  The subs also had one more thing going for them in this final attack: the element of surprise. U-boats firing missiles at the East Coast was nothing new. But there had not been such an attack in almost two years. The commanders of both submarines considered this very good luck.

  The deck crews on both subs prepared their first missile and then stood by. Nearly forty tons of high explosives raining down on five Americans cities. That would, the sub captains knew, “make some noise.”

  Then they could finally all go home.

  Or so they thought.

  The crewmen of the subs never heard him coming.

  This was odd because the Pogo was not a quiet airplane. Its engines were huge and noisy and smoky. It would never be accused of being a stealth either.

  But whether the deck crews of U-153 and U-419 were distracted by their mission or thoughts of going home, no one would ever know. The fact is, when the Pogo swooped down upon them, its SE/X whistle screaming, its engine in full growl, the deck hands looked up only at the very last moment. Then they simply froze and saw their end before them.

  So the first pass came out of nowhere. The awesome six-gun barrage from the Pogo blew a hole deep in the forward water compartment of U-153. Half the deck crew were killed instantly. A fire in the electrical room directly below the deck roared to life. This explosion blew several more crewmen into the water. One of them was Hans Lans. He was U-153’s second-duty cook and first-duty missile aimer.

  Lans found himself forty feet away from his sub, burned extensively on his arms and legs and watching in horror as the American aircraft pulled up and out of its murderous dive, disappearing into the thick morning cumulus clouds which had moved in above. Slipping into shock, Hans had a notion to swim back to his sub, burning and smoking as it was. But the screech of the airplane returned and Hans knew getting back to U-153 would soon be impossible.

  He watched as the airplane came in level this time, unleashing its powerful barrage on the conning tower of U-419. There was much smoke, much fire, and when it all blew away, Hans could see right through the conning tower of the sub, the bullet holes were so big. Then two quick explosions erupted below decks even before the attacking airplane had pulled up and out of its run.

  Lans had to duck underwater to avoid being hit by a huge chunk of flaming metal that whooshed by his head a second later. When he resurfaced, the conning tower of U-419 was gone. All that was left was a smoking hole in the middle of th
e deck. The sub tipped over, the hole quickly filled with water, and down it went.

  That lost his idea of swimming to his companion ship. And now the airplane was coming back again. It was diving on U-153 even as the crewmen remaining on top were desperately trying to get back into the sub. But the sub was diving—and water was pouring in the access holes and the airplane was firing madly again. It was all of a submariner’s worst nightmares rolled into one. Lans saw his vessel sinking and heard his comrades dying horribly not 40 feet away.

  But then, just as U-153 began to go under, a strange thing happened. Whether it was an electrical short circuit or a stupid piece of heroism on the part of one of his fellow sailors, one of the DG-13s launched off the deck. The huge clumsy weapon staggered off its launcher, stirring up a storm of water and spray. But somehow it made it to the prescribed height of 50 feet, where its secondary motor kicked in and off it went.

  Lans felt a sudden and insane surge of pride—or was it revenge?

  At least one missile got off, he thought, all feeling in his badly injured arms and legs gone now.

  But then he saw the airplane turn over once again and make one long strafing pass over the remains of U-153, killing it for sure. Then with a spin of its wings and a burst of power from its engine, the Pogo took off after the DG-13 missile.

  As Lans sank below the waves for the last time, only one thing was on his mind: could the crazy American pilot catch up with the missile before the missile blew apart an entire city?

  It was a question the answer to which Submariner First Class Hans Lans would never know.

  The truth was, catching the German terror missile was not the problem.

  It left a contrail so thick and smoky, it could have been seen at night in bad weather by a blind man.

  Stopping the missile once he caught up with it was Hunter’s dilemma. He already had two strikes against him. The Pogo’s six guns were powerful, but the amount of ammunition that the plane could actually haul into the air was limited. Translation: he was out of ammo.

  Even worse, the Pogo’s big engine sucked fuel like a toilet sucked water. Whenever he hit the throttle, it was like a flush, and he could watch his fuel needle drop correspondingly. In fact, he was now on the reserve tank, even though he’d been airborne for barely 10 minutes.