Tomorrow War

by Maloney, Mack;

  How ironic, then, that it appeared he was about to be killed in a plane crash near there.

  The Z-16 ran into another explosion, this time off its left wing, knocking the huge airplane and everyone in it to the right.

  After another backbreaking tumble Y found himself pressed up against the middeck observation bubble. The g forces holding him there were so intense, it was all he could do to get a breath in and out. He felt like a gigantic hand had him by the neck and was squishing him harder and harder against the Texiglas window.

  And again, it seemed like time stood still. Y could see what was going on outside, and why the Z-16 recon plane was being thrown all over the sky.

  They were under attack by literally dozens of tiny airplanes, each one sporting a very large cannon in its nose.

  At least, that’s what the situation appeared to be at first.

  What Y actually saw was a bit more complicated.

  The sky was indeed filled with the tiny aircraft, which seemed to move extremely fast and were of biplane design. But in that slice of a moment Y could see that these airplanes were not all exactly alike. There appeared to be two different kinds.

  One group of these tiny planes was powered by jet engines. Even though they were of biplane design—with two wings slightly askew but parallel to each other—there was a small double-reaction engine midfuselage, spewing jet exhaust and streaks of flame from the rear tailpipe.

  These jets were painted in various shades of blue. They seemed to carry cannons on the wings, smaller than the other group of airplanes. To Y’s eye, these odd jet-powered craft looked most like an airplane of almost ninety years before called the Spad.

  The other airplanes were painted red. They were propeller driven and were lugging the huge nose cannons. They mostly resembled another ancient airplane called the Sopwith Camel. There were many more of these airplanes than the jet-powered Spads, and their pilots seemed to be firing with wild abandon.

  And this is where something else became clear to Y. These airplanes weren’t shooting at the Z-16 necessarily. Rather, they appeared to be shooting at each other.

  Y tried to move his head a bit, and sure enough two red airplanes went streaking by the Z-16’s bubble, clearly pouring cannon fire into the smaller, swifter, but mortally wounded jet-powered Spad. An instant later, he saw just the reverse: two jet Spads were ganged up on a lone Sopwith and were viciously pouring fire into it. Y saw the hapless pilot’s head come apart in a thousand bloody pieces after taking a direct hit from the Spad’s guns.

  That settled it in his mind. This swarm of aircraft was not trying to shoot down the Z-16. Rather, the Z-16 had blundered into a battle.

  This seemed like important information to Y—important enough for him to attempt to turn his head and yell out this news to the others aboard the Z-16.

  But at that moment the Z-16 was thrown across the sky a third time, and Y was sent flying again.

  He closed his eyes before impact this time, but this didn’t do anything to lessen the blow of hitting the deactivated Main/AC console, shattering just about all of the critical components inside. He bounced off the Main/AC, past a vaulting Crabb, who was being thrown in the other direction, and landed again against an observation bubble.

  The Z-16 was in serious trouble now. It was losing altitude, and this was bad because it wasn’t flying that high to begin with. Y found himself pressed even tighter than before against an observation bubble, his bloody nose smearing the Texiglas.

  Outside, the swarm of small aircraft battling each other was as fierce as ever. Y had no idea how the Jones boys were keeping the Z-16 airborne—there was so much wreckage, and so many airplanes, in the sky it was a miracle that they hadn’t collided with anything. Yet …

  At this point Y’s ears cleared a bit, enough for him to hear other voices up on the flight deck.

  “Why the fuck weren’t these things picked up on radar?” Seth Jones was screaming at someone.

  “Because they are made of wood mostly!” someone screamed back.

  “Are we supposed to be shooting at these guys?” a pilot in one of the escorting AirCats was calling down to the Z-16.

  “Only if they shoot at you!” Dave Jones was screaming back.

  The Z-16 did another toss, and Y rolled across the floor and back up against the starboard-side observation bubble. From here, he could see that Crabb and Zoltan had stationed themselves at the next bubble down. They had opened the bubble’s access hatch and were sticking two large-caliber twin-barrel machine guns out of this hole.

  They went to their battle stations, Y thought, his cognitive processes now on a downturn as a result of so many whacks to the head. Where the hell is mine?

  Somehow, the Jones boys were able to level off the unwieldy Z-16. Y took a deep breath—it had been less than thirty seconds since he’d been thrown from his bunk by the first aerial explosion. To him, though, it seemed like he’d been bouncing off the walls of the cabin for an hour or so.

  He peered out the bubble again and was simply astonished at the number of airplanes flying all around them, guns and cannons blazing, a blizzard of red bullet streaks going every which way.

  The radios were alive with calls from the escorting Air-Cats:

  “Damn, these guys are so damn close to me!”

  “Shit—if they pull that again, I’m going to shoot up a bunch of these little bastards!”

  “Whoever heard of jet engines in biplanes …!”

  It was strange. Even though these words were going into Y’s ear, they were floating out the other. He was actually staring out at another scene entirely—one that sent a chill streaking through his spine and back again.

  In the midst of this very crowded sky, taken up as it was by the hundreds of buzzing swift fighters, the Z-16, and the AirCats, Y’s mind was seeing something else.

  There were three huge aircraft about a half mile above them. Two were airplanes, but they were of a type he’d never seen before. They were both big and painted black. They both had their wing attached to the top of their fuselage, and each had four big propeller engines. High tail, snout nose, thick body—for some reason the name “Hercules” popped into Y’s addled mind, though he knew of no aircraft by that name, and he had certainly never seen any aircraft like these two before.

  Another strange aircraft was attached to one of the airplanes by a long hose. It was a helicopter, a big one and it seemed to be connected to one of these Hercules airplanes by this long slender tube. Possibly this was a gas line and the airplane was refueling this huge helicopter. But then, in a wink of the eye, one of the Hercules airplanes opened fire on the one connected to the helicopter. A tremendous explosion resulted, destroying the fueling Hercules and sending the helicopter plummeting to the ground in a cloud of flaming debris.

  Y’s brain suddenly locked up. What the hell was he really seeing here? These strange airplanes? The helicopter? It seemed real, and then again it seemed very unreal. In horror, he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and took in a deep breath and opened his eyes again.

  The sky was still filled with the strange, swift, battling biplanes and the AirCat fighters, but nothing else. No big airplanes, no big helicopter. Y felt a cold sweat suddenly soak him through. His mouth dropped open and words started to tumble out.

  “I’ve got to stop drinking,” he heard himself say.

  Suddenly Emma was beside him. She’d retrieved the huge twin-barrel machine gun Zoltan had just given him, which he’d managed to drop during the first jolt to the airplane.

  “Take this!” she commanded him. He obeyed, and somehow knew enough to cock the feed drive and slip both safeties to off. The gun was belt fed, the ammo compartment being a plain black box hanging beneath the stock. It was heavy and cold, and Y had never been within ten feet of one before.

  The Z-16 was still flying somewhat straight, but this did not mean they were out of danger. If anything, the sky was even more crowded than before with the battling blue and red airc
raft. Even worse, either by the jostling caused by the explosions, or possibly a stray bullet or two, the Z-16’s flight computer had suddenly glitched up and wouldn’t release from the LANTRAN terrain-guidance system. The last command the computer had received was to guide the Z-16 along the same direction as the westward-pointing track bed, and that’s what it was doing, a mere five hundred feet above the ground. Nothing the Jones boys could do, short of firing a couple bullets into the flight computer, could get them off that automatic-course track.

  The Jones boys were yelling back and forth at each other and slamming their fists on the LANTRAN console trying to unlock the hard drive, but nothing was working. They could not get control of the airplane back from the faulty computer. This was disastrous because eventually the tracks would come to an end or, even worse, split off into two directions. Then which way would the airplane go? If it lost its track reference, anything could happen, including plowing into the nearest mountain of which there were many in this part of wild Afghanistan.

  In all his time with them, Y had never seen the Jones boys look nervous, ruffled, or anything but cool. At this moment, though, they seemed very nervous, very ruffled, and very, very uncool.

  Y stole a peek forward and could see the unmistakable skyline of Kabul Downs just on the horizon.

  If we have to crash, he thought, tugging Emma closer to him, I hope we go down near the city ….

  The flight deck’s radios were still going full blast.

  “Please repeat order on defensive action?” one of the AirCat pilots was requesting urgently of the Jones boys.

  A second AirCat pilot was more direct: “When can we start shooting at these bastards?”

  Somehow Dave Jones was able to click in his microphone’s send button.

  “One last time,” he shouted, slamming the LANTRAN console again to no effect. “Fire only if you’ve been fired upon!”

  Not a second later, a ball of bright-red flames and smoke went right by Y’s bubble. It took a moment for Y to realize the flaming wreckage was one of the AirCat fighters dropping out of the sky. Frozen by shock and horror, Y saw that two airplanes—one red and one blue—had collided with the huge AirCat, and this mass of metal and wood was now plummeting to the ground.

  In the next second all hell broke loose. The remaining AirCats, believing that their comrades had been attacked, opened fire on both the red and blue airplanes. Suddenly the air was filled with flaming wreckage spiraling down as the more powerful AirCat guns began blowing the strange little biplanes out of the sky.

  This, in turn, caused the two swarms of biplanes to stop attacking each other and begin shooting at the suddenly very vulnerable Z-16 recon plane. The next thing Y knew he was firing his twin-barrel machine gun out the bubble access hatch at a pair of red bijets coming at him full speed from the port side.

  In seconds Y’s nose and throat were filled with the stink of cordite. He was firing wildly for two reasons: first, the double-MG was heavy and its kick was awesome. Second, he was very drunk and in those little slivers of time that seemed to be exaggerated by combat, he wasn’t sure if he was shooting at two red bijets or four.

  But somehow he was hitting targets—or at least he thought he was. The machine gun was blasting away, and there were numerous small explosions going off about fifty yards in front of him, and there were more clouds of broken wood and metal flying all over the sky.

  The strange thing was that the whole air battle had commenced not a minute before. Everything was slowing down dramatically for Y. He continued firing, and things continued blowing up, and the Z-16 continued being flung all over the sky and in the midst of all this, they all passed over the next mountain and found themselves over the valley that led up to the fairy-tale, castlelike city of Kabul Downs.

  One of the AirCat fighters whooshed by the observation bubble, chasing four bijets, three blue and one red. The big plane’s huge cannons were splintering the four bijets into thousands of flaming pieces. Zoltan and Crabb, firing double-MGs from the Z-16’s top observation bubble, bagged two red fighters as they were trying to perforate the recon plane’s flight-deck canopy. This attack caused the Jones boys—who were expert at jumping the Z-16 all over the sky—to bank the huge winged plane to the right, causing Y to be smashed up again against the observation bubble Texiglas. He almost lost the double-MG in the process.

  Now he was looking straight down again, and by chance Y found himself staring at a huge railroad bed—no wonder the Z-16 was all over the sky! There were at least a hundred railway lines jutting all over the huge facility. Y couldn’t imagine what havoc this was playing with the aircraft’s locked-in LANTRAN terrain-tracking system. A quick glance up to the flight deck produced a blur of flashing lights and a cacophony of warning buzzers.

  A moment later, there was a huge explosion up on the flight deck. Y was firing his machine gun at anything that moved, but the flash from the flight deck was enough to blind him for a few moments. The next thing he saw was a pair of missiles rising up from the ground and heading right for the nose of the airplane. Somehow the Jones boys were able to twist the big airplane away from the pair of antiaircraft missiles—but the strain on the already creaky airframe was getting to be too much. The airplane’s skin was now perforated with cannon and bullet holes from the swarm of attacking fighters. The main flight console had blown up due to overloading of the LANTRAN system, and now the cry of metal against metal was telling the tale of impending double-reaction engine failure.

  Y recovered somewhat, grabbed Emma closer to him, and looked down. They were right over the city of Kabul Downs itself. There were many narrow streets below them, and soldiers running through the streets, firing at each other. Y’s drunken eyes told him that this war between the reds and blues was not confined to the air.

  What bad luck was this? he asked himself in the beat of a heart. Busting in on someone else’s war ….

  But then Y saw one more thing that was even more disturbing: Sitting at the edge of the rail yard, not far from the center of Kabul Downs, was a train that was at least three miles long. It contained many, many flat cars, all of them holding at least several wrecked or knocked-out weapons. Machine guns, rocket launchers, triple cannons. This train was a wreck. A total wreck.

  In that next blink of an eye, Y knew that they had actually accomplished the second part of their mission. Below them was undoubtedly the train Hunter and the others had armed and had taken across half of southwest Asia, just to end up here, in Kabul Downs.

  But why?

  Y couldn’t fathom that answer—and in the next second it was gone from his mind completely. Its place was taken over by something more overwhelming.

  The Z-16 was crashing ….

  The Jones boys were fighting with the controls, but there was nothing they could do. Between the equipment fire and the numerous bee stings caused by the bijets, the huge recon plane was fast becoming unflyable. The Jones boys were trying their best to level the plane out. Their only hope was to attempt a survivable crash landing, but weight and gravity were against them on that score.

  Y pulled Emma even closer to him; she was crying. Zoltan and Crabb were holding on with one hand and firing their double-MGs with the other—even now picking off bijets as their own plane was about to auger in.

  And weirdly, Y’s mind was suddenly at peace. If this is where he was to die, then so be it.

  He was surprised how calm he was as the ground raced up to meet him.

  Of course, he was very drunk. And in that one last time sliver he decided this: If one has to go down in an airplane, then being drunk during the experience was the only way to go.

  Wasn’t it?

  The Z-16 went in three seconds later ….

  CHAPTER 28

  Fiji

  SO, IS THIS HEAVEN, or not?

  It was a question that Viktor had been asking for the past twenty-four hours, and now the words themselves were taking on a comical tone.

  If this was Heaven … wou
ld I have to ask the question?

  He leaned his head back and allowed one of the bevy of bare-breasted young girls to pour another stream of sweet pineapple wine down his throat. The “pine-wine” was delicious, nutritious, and to Viktor’s mind, had a slightly opiate effect to it.

  He’d been drinking it almost nonstop for the past day and night, ever since he’d somehow washed up on the pearl-white beach of this paradise on earth.

  He’d also been eating up a storm. Coconut soup, plum cakes, pinkfish, a hundred different types of fruit. Viktor imagined, after downing yet another long gulp of pine-wine, that he could see his previously skeletal frame taking on some bulk, though he was sure this was an illusion. In any case, in the short memory of his life, he’d never been that interested in food or drink, but now, here in Heaven, that had changed.

  He looked around the guest hut, and the candles were now flickering in syncopation with the mellow electronic island music that was wafting in from nowhere. There were at least twenty-four beauties either attending him or lounging around nearby, waiting to serve. Each girl was more beautiful than the next. Each one willing to do anything his heart desired.

  More pine-wine went down his throat, another piece of sweet fruit was placed on his tongue.

  If that wasn’t Heaven, what was?

  The illusion was diluted a bit, though, when Viktor detected Soho’s approach in the air.

  The girls smelled it, too, and they immediately became stiffened and reserved. The stink of body odor arrived about ten seconds before the man himself did. By the time Soho actually stepped into the hut, most of the girls had fled to the far corner and had cuddled up close to a wall full of candles, hoping the heat would dissipate some of the BO.

  Viktor sat up and greeted the smelly guy with a friendly nod. He didn’t dislike him. After all, Soho was the reason he was having such a delightful recovery. From what Viktor had culled from their conversation the day before, just about everything—and everyone—on the island belonged in some way to Soho. He was slightly odd and slightly mysterious. His hospitality didn’t seem forced, but not entirely genuine, either. He had told Viktor yesterday that he considered him his guest and that he could stay here indefinitely. Viktor had to admit that the night before he’d dreamed of staying on the island permanently.