Tomorrow War

by Maloney, Mack;

  The Blues still hadn’t figured it out.

  Hunter’s engine finally reached its proper RPMs, and everything else on his crowded but simple control panel was still green. He spoke to the tower and received his final clearance for takeoff. Another day of combat was about to begin.

  He was in the process of popping his brakes when he saw an odd hunched-over figure in a long trench coat and a battle helmet stumbling toward him.

  It was Y.

  Hunter killed his engine and allowed the OSS agent to approach. He knew Y was going through a bad time. He’d heard about the travails he and the rest of the searchers on the rescue mission had gone through, including how Y had taken to alcohol suddenly at the beginning of the trip, and now, just couldn’t seem to shake it.

  Hunter had yet to have any kind of lengthy talk with Y since the OSS man arrived in the Red camp. They had exchanged a few words the night before, but Y quickly retired to his tent, where he’d spent most of the night drinking other people’s rum rations.

  Hunter felt terrible about this. Y was his friend—both here and Back There. To see him in such bad shape was like a punch in the stomach. Hunter could empathize with him, though—Crabb and Zoltan had briefed him on how Y’s problems only increased when he lost Emma, the brief love of his life. Crabb and Zoltan had assured him that Emma was one of the world’s great beauties and a very sweet girl to boot, and there was no doubt Y was taking it very hard.

  Beautiful? Sweet? But gone?

  Yes, Hunter had felt that type of pain before.

  Now as Y approached, he was waving his hands, indicating that Hunter should shut down his engine and that he wanted to talk. The fact that the engine was already shut down and Y didn’t know it, spoke volumes about just how bad his condition was getting.

  “We have to talk,” Y said, finally arriving at the airplane and leaning against its side. He looked up at Hunter, and the Wingman winced. Y was a mess. His eyes were horribly bloodshot, his face was tired and drawn. He was pale and looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, even though just the opposite was true.

  “What do you need?” Hunter asked him. “Just name it.”

  “I have to … ask you something,” Y said.

  “Shoot,” Hunter said, encouraging him.

  “You know now the details of how we got here,” Y began. “How we wound up stealing an aircraft carrier, one that needed tugboats to move it. Then we reached the place in Vietnam where you left the airplane in the cave and there was a major battle going on there. Then we found out you took a train, threw a lot of weapons on it, and drove it straight through the badlands of Asia.”

  Yaz paused a moment.

  “Those things, and a lot of other little things,” he went on, “I don’t know … When they were happening, I felt very, very strange. Like they all seemed familiar to me—like I had either done them myself or someone else had done them and told me about it. Or, maybe like, I had read about them in some books somewhere—except they were happening to me or people that I knew. What do you make of all that?”

  Hunter just stared back at his friend. He’d been fully briefed by Zoltan, Crabb, and the Jones boys on what they’d gone through trying to find him after the super-bombing. And like Y, those events did seem to have an eerily familiar ring to him. Even the Jones boys looked familiar to him the first time he set eyes on them, as did Kurjan, the Red Force intelligence man.

  But why?

  All he could theorize was that these things had in some way happened to him Back There. This was a fascinating if unsettling theory. Not only were there many parallel universes, but events in each might be similar, but not exact. Like Y, Hunter had suffered from a weird sense of déjà vu since arriving in this strange world. It was Zoltan who told him a year ago—back in Iceland during the war against Germany—that it was best he didn’t think about such things too deeply. This was advice Hunter had found hard to take at first, but successful for his mental well-being in the long run.

  He now told Y the same thing.

  “You know I’m not from here,” he said to the OSS man. “I just got to believe that back where I did come from, I did some of these things, and now, here, I’m reliving these adventures in just a slightly distorted way. Parallel events. Parallel lives. That seems to be the way it is.”

  Y thought about this for a moment, then his eyes brightened.

  “So what you’re saying, then, is that maybe, if I was to somehow get to where you originally came from, there is a chance that maybe …”

  His voice trailed off.

  “Maybe what?” Hunter asked.

  “That maybe, Emma is there, too?” Y finally blurted out. “That maybe I can find her again?”

  The words hit Hunter like bullets to the brain. If someone lost their love in one world, could they simply go to another world and “find” her again? Hunter felt his chest tighten, his hands balled into fists. He didn’t want to address this topic; he didn’t even want to think about it, because either way, in his case, the reply was too painful.

  So he just shook his head.

  “I don’t know, Yaz,” he said finally. “I just don’t know.”

  With that, Hunter reached down to start his engine again. But Y started banging once more on the side of the airplane.

  “Just one more thing, then,” he asked, back to slurring his words. “How did you know to come here? What happened after you dropped the bomb? I have to know. That’s why they sent me after you in the first place.”

  Again Y’s words hit him like a string of bullets in the gut. Why did Hunter come here to far-off Afghanistan instead of turning for home after the superbomber survived the titanic blast?

  There was no way he could explain it to anyone because he didn’t quite understand it himself.

  He decided to tell Y only the basics.

  “A ghost told me to come here,” he said truthfully. “And I think the rest should be … well, classified, until we get to another place that’s more secure.”

  Y just shrugged. He was already wondering where his next drink was coming from—though the Reds had been very generous in doling out extra rum rations to him.

  “A ghost, really?” he mumbled. “Now that’s interesting.”

  Y thought a moment while Hunter inched his hand down to the engine start button again.

  “Ah, just one more thing,” Y said. “One last question, I promise.”

  Hunter nodded patiently.

  “This ghost,” Y began. “Was his name ‘Vogel’ by any chance? A real bitter guy? Used to fly with the AirCats?”

  Hunter just shook his head. “His name was certainly not ‘Vogel,’” he replied, again truthfully.

  Y just shrugged again, and seemed to accept this answer at face value.

  “Well,” he said, “did he mention if he knew another ghost named Vogel? I mean, we communed with that guy—he’s the one who led us to the god-awful place in Vietnam.”

  Hunter just shook his head and finally did start his engine.

  “No, he didn’t mention anyone named Vogel,” he told Y, yelling over the noise. “And besides, from what I understand, ghosts get really pissed off if you ask them if they know other ghosts. Apparently they are very touchy about the fact that just because they are spirits, people assume they know every other spirit.”

  Y just shrugged again and smiled drunkenly.

  “Oh, OK,” he said, stumbling away. “Just thought I’d ask.”

  Hunter finally took off.

  Once airborne, he gave the engines full throttle and was soon soaring high above the Red lines. The formerly magnificent city of Kabul Downs loomed on the horizon.

  He wasn’t up more than one minute when he saw the swarm of Blue planes rising into the early morning air. The noise the SuperSpad jet made was unique. Almost a whistling sound, but perversely sweet. In the key of C, Hunter believed.

  The two aerial armies met head-on over the bloody bridge, which separated the lines below. As always, the Blue plane
s tore through the slower Red formation. This was their first tactic every day. No firing, just flying as fast as they could through the Red formation, strictly as an intimidating tactic.

  Only after the Blues went through the Red formation did they turn back, slow down, and attack in earnest. The Red Force scattered as planned, and when possible, paired off and went after single Blue Force SuperSpads. In the first thirty seconds, three Blues went down. This told Hunter it would be a good day in the sky.

  He did not stick with the Red formation. He preferred to do his own thing. He dove into the thickest concentration of Blues—they tended to stick together if they had losses early on—and simply began twisting and turning and looping and diving, lining up the scattering Blues, firing one shot into the right spot on their fuselage, killing the plane and moving on.

  He wove his way through the crowded skies, routinely downing the Blues’ airplanes. Even though he’d been doing this for three weeks, flying the same airplane and scoring the same spectacular hits, the Blues never ran when they saw him coming. Not that they didn’t want to. Obviously, it went against their orders to do so.

  This had gotten Hunter to thinking …

  Even while he was emptying the skies of the Blues’ SuperSpads he was able to watch the land battle as it commenced in the trenches below him. The Blues’ ground forces seemed to stick to as strict a timetable as their air corps. Every day just as the sun peaked over the mountains to the east, the Blues would launch an attack on the Red lines all around the city. The Red Forces would beat them back, and then a day of attrition and artillery duels would begin.

  Hunter found this very odd. The Blue Forces were good fighters—they had ingrained in them the same legacy of bravery and toughness as the Reds, indeed they could be fierce fighters when their backs were against the wall. But they seemed too … regimented.

  Why?

  These were the thoughts on Hunter’s mind this morning as he downed seven Blue Forces’ SuperSpads with seven single bursts from his huge nose cannon.

  Looking over his shoulder now, he could see dogfights beginning to take shape in the skies all around the city—all four sectors were lighting up at once. It was yet another replay of every day of battle since he’d come here. Regimented. Like the Blues were following the same script, day after day.

  This morning he vowed to find out why this was so.

  He downed another pair of Blue planes, watched their pilots hit the chutes and float down behind Red lines. It was now ten minutes into the dawn patrol and the skies were getting filled with airplanes and tracer streaks.

  Hunter took a quick appraisal of the ongoing air battle, and decided that his Red Force comrades were making a good showing for themselves and could spare his absence for a while.

  This in mind, he pushed the biplane’s stick forward and increased power to his engine.

  Then he pointed the nose of the airplane right toward the heart of Kabul Downs.

  CHAPTER 34

  Above Kabul Downs

  HUNTER’S THEORY WAS A simple one really.

  Unlike the Reds, the Blue Forces were so highly regimented because they were being controlled by a very strict central command, an entity that insisted on pulling all the strings in every aspect, of every day in this odd war.

  The commanders in the field could not take the initiative ever—indeed, judging from what Hunter had seen, the Blue Force commanders had squandered countless opportunities that might have inflicted grave losses on the Reds, simply because some bozo at the other end of the phone wouldn’t give them the go-ahead to do so.

  This type of strict central control was not a new concept to Hunter, though it was rather out of place in this world where, more than his last place, people really tended to do their own thing, especially when it came to the military.

  Back There, in his first combat against the old Soviet Empire, the American strategy was based almost entirely on the Russians’ adherence to a “no-initiative” type of warfare. No attacks unless assiduously planned. No moving beyond a certain point on the map, even if the enemy was on the run. It even got to the point where Russian pilots had to ask permission to fire on an enemy airplane while in the midst of a dogfight.

  It was a stupid way to run a war, worrying about staying in control and not moving onto victory. That’s how the Soviet forces fought in Hunter’s version of World War Three. And that’s how they lost—on the battlefield anyway.

  He smelled the same type of thing going on here. It really did seem like the Blues could not make a move until a certain time had clicked off the clock or a certain general somewhere—buried beneath the city in a very hardened bunker, no doubt—gave the word while ordering his lunch for the day.

  Finding that invisible bunker was now foremost on Hunter’s mind. The question was where to look?

  If there was a central command station somewhere in the city, he knew that knocking it out would probably send chaos through the Blues’ command structure.

  But where would that central point be? Kabul Downs was a huge city full of skyscrapers and castles and many large block-size buildings that somehow captured an architecture halfway between Middle English and Southwest Asian. This meant lots of towers, minarets, and buildings with lots of windows that were thickly structured.

  In other words, such a place could be anywhere.

  But Hunter was not a babe in the woods when it came to these things. If he couldn’t spot the central command station from the air, he would simply allow the Blues to tell him where it was.

  So when he reached the inner city limits, he put the biplane into a steep dive, pulling up only when he reached a perilous 250 feet in altitude.

  As soon as he leveled off, he realized he was right above a rear area for the Blues. It was a canteen and there were several hundred soldiers hastily eating before being rushed to the front. They were as surprised to see him as he was to see them.

  He didn’t want to kill anyone if he didn’t have to—especially when they were eating. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t shake them up a bit.

  So he looped around and intentionally put more gas into his engine than necessary. This created a backfiring effect that began to dull his own hearing. Then he notched down to about one hundred feet and went screaming over the mess area.

  As one, the soldiers all threw up their food and went facedown on the ground. One pass and the place was a mess—literally!

  “Bon appétit, boys!” Hunter called over his shoulder as he screamed for altitude again.

  He was soon over a truck park—the Blues moved everything to the front by truck. This was a place where they kept their constant flow of supply vehicles. This was a legitimate target.

  Hunter cocked his gun and set a reading for twenty shells. He flipped over, pulled back on his gas again, and went down to treetop level. The anal-retentive Blues had all their trucks parked in a neat, little row. One incendiary cannon shell perfectly placed in a fuel tank and wham! goodbye truck.

  This happened twenty times. Actually, there were twenty-three trucks, but the resulting explosions were enough to wreck the other three. Hunter made it all happen in just two passes. A minimum of effort, and a maximum result.

  He liked it that way.

  He crawled back up to five hundred feet and continued on toward the center of the city. The biggest buildings were looming right ahead of him now, and he could see people in the street were turning his way. He laid on the gas again, making his plane as loud as possible, and zoomed right down the main drag of Kabul Downs, a street called Queen’s Drive.

  Well, this was not an everyday occurrence—a Red fighter plane roaring over the main street of the embattled capital. It was obvious even from five hundred feet that those below didn’t quite know what to do.

  Hunter just started weaving through the twists and turns of the canyon of buildings, following Queen’s Drive for the most part but sometimes diverting off to a side street—only to scare the bejeezus out of someone walking ther
e.

  He was flying so loudly, he began hearing fire alarms going off all over the city below. This gave him a laugh.

  Hunter continued his noisy run. A few soldiers on the ground took potshots at him with their rifles, but never to any harm. Oddly, he saw no antiaircraft weapons within the heart of Kabul Downs. This was interesting in that the city was actually very vulnerable to a strategic bombing attack—if only the Red Forces had some substantially sized aircraft to carry out such a campaign.

  He finally reached the end of Queen’s Drive, which terminated in a roundabout that in turn flowed into a short avenue leading up to the Ministers Hall. This was the seat of the blue blood’s government, a queer-looking building whose architecture looked like a cross between Westminster Abbey and “1,001 Arabian Nights.”

  It was here that he encountered his first serious antiaircraft fire.

  It started coming up about a half mile from the Ministers Hall. Three long strands of 70-mm antiaircraft artillery (AAA) shells, lighting up the early-morning sky.

  Of course, Hunter knew the AAA fire was coming even before the gunners had pressed their triggers. He was already weaving and dipping before the first shell even left its barrel. The fire was directed at him from a gun emplacement on a hill about one hundred yards away from the ministry building. That, and a few guards on the ground who were firing their combat weapons at him, were the only opposing fire he drew. It was interesting that the Blues did not protect their seat of government better.

  It also told Hunter that this was not where the central command station was located.

  He flew on.

  The next main street was called King’s Walk. Before the war began, it boasted salons and fancy restaurants. It was now the location of the blue bloods rear-area hospitals. Hunter flew past this part of the city as quickly as he could.