The sixth plane had been the Z-16 recon plane, which had been left behind at Long Bat for the rescue crew to find.
Only four planes were left of this odd squad now: the two Bantam and the two VTOL planes. The Z-5 Super-Cobra had been left back in Kwai as the signal for the rescue crew to set down there. The Z-16 lay crumpled in Kabul’s central park.
The four surviving airplanes were still on the rogue train. Tied down and covered by tarpaulin, the Blues had taken one look at the strange airplanes’ and simply covered them back up again. They didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with such exotic weaponry, which wasn’t much of a surprise from a military establishment whose idea of high-tech was to place a jet engine inside the frame of a biplane.
So here these four odd, but powerful airplanes sat. Practically forgotten.
Ripe for the taking ….
It had been a long day in the trenches for the Blues defending Kabul Downs.
The artillery duels had been particularly long and drawn out, especially in the late afternoon around the bloody bridge to the south of the city. This was where the sides seemed to clash most often, the hot spot in the twenty-two-mile front, which practically encompassed the embattled, besieged city.
Just as soon as the sun went down, and many of the Blues began withdrawing from their forward positions for the night, the Reds launched a massive artillery barrage all along the front. This was unusual and it sent the blue-blood night commanders into a bit of a panic. They immediately began ordering weary troops out of their billets, away from their hot meals and beds, and back up to the front to face whatever the Reds were planning to do after the artillery barrage let up.
The Blues expected another raid into the city. Each and every successful raid by Red Forces into the heart of Kabul Downs had been presaged by a huge artillery barrage the likes of which was now lighting up the night sky. But this time was different The Reds had never launched a raid on Kabul Downs during the night before.
This was enough to ratchet up the tension several notches behind the blue-blood lines.
Which was exactly the idea.
With flames from the southern front now lighting up the sky, the guards based in the Royal Five railroad yard were put on trucks and rushed forward in case a large Red Army raid was coming.
When this was done, responsibility for guarding the railroad yards was given over to a very unreliable group—the Sally-Buns. Their actual name was the “Salibun,” and they had once ruled parts of Afghanistan with an iron, religious hand. Over the decades, the Buns had been assimilated into the British Empire’s self-defense forces. When the war broke out between the Reds and the Blues, the Buns elected to side with the Blues. As it turned out this was a favor to the Reds.
The Buns were lousy soldiers. They were ill disciplined, poorly trained, and lazy. They were also vicious and spent much of their tenure in Kabul Downs killing each other over squabbles revolving around card games or drunken games of blood sport.
They were a force that was always held in reserve to be used only when the rest of the barrel had been scraped dry. No self-respecting commander in the Blue Forces would let any of them anywhere near the front. That’s why when the rail-yard guards were rushed into duty, the Buns were dispersed throughout the Royal Five and told simply to stay out of trouble.
But even this, they would not be able to do.
The commander of the Buns rail-yard detachment was a man named Ali Bet-Assou.
He’d been drinking heavily when the call came to rush to the rail yard. Now that he was on station, nothing had changed.
He’d brought some snake wine to the rail yard with him. After lazily positioning his men in the most convenient, as opposed to the most strategic, locations, Bet-Assou took up residence in the high tower, which overlooked the rail yard, and opened his first bottle of wine.
Bet-Assou had personally killed 251 people in his adult life. Not soldiers—people. Civilians, women, elders, children. In the old days he’d been paid by the number of fingernails he brought back to his Sally-Bun regional chief. Bet-Assou was known far and wide for the practice of extracting those fingernails before slaying his victim. Oddly enough, he had a bad habit of biting his own nails, many right down to the quick.
By 2100 hours Bet-Assou was drunk and sitting feet up on the controller’s panel in the high tower watching the artillery duels on the southern front about ten miles away. He had no radio with which to talk to his men, and had made no arrangements by which they would check in with him on a regular basis.
It was not unusual, then, when Bet-Assou, taking his eyes off the battle in the distance to scan the rail yard below, saw two of his men stretched out on the ground about one hundred feet away. Arms crossed, feet propped up, they looked not so much asleep, but passed out—a common side effect of the lethal snake wine.
Bet-Assou made a mental note to pull a fingernail out of each man’s right hand the next morning and went back to watching the battle and drinking his wine.
He did this for five minutes and when he looked down again on the rail yard he saw two more of his men also laying down on the job. Both atop a rail car located directly in front of the tower.
Now Bet-Assou was growing furious. He only had ten men in the rail yard and nearly half were out cold from snake wine. He took out his flashlight and directed it down into the yard looking for the other half-dozen men. He found two more—again laid out as if they were napping, again close by the train with the tarp-covered objects.
That was it for Bet-Assou. He grabbed his double-barrel machine gun, checked both clips, and then started down the ladder to the ground below. At least two of his men would have to die for this dereliction of duty. As it was, he barely made it down the long ladder alive, so drunk was he in his descent.
He cocked his rifle back and approached the first two men. He intended on killing one man and wounding the other—but before he could pull the trigger, he noticed something first. There was already a pool of blood around each man’s head.
Bet-Assou didn’t believe it at first. He shined his flash light on the twin pools of blood, and only then did it dawn on him.
He’d wanted to shoot these two for laying down on the job.
But someone had beaten him to it.
On guard now, the thought that these two had been killed by their comrades—for their bottles of snake wine—went through Bet-Assou’s mind. That would not be too unusual. Still, Bet-Assou was getting very wary. The rail yard seemed very quiet all of a sudden. And very dark.
He walked slowly now, reaching the two other men laid out on the ground. Like the first pair, there was a pool of blood around each man’s head. Their throats had been cut.
Bet-Assou could smell no snake wine on their persons. This sent a jolt of panic through him. He began flashing his light, a signal for his men to muster before him. But no one messaged back. Bet-Assou was suddenly very aware of two things: All his men were probably dead—and he was suddenly very alone in the rail yard.
In the next second he heard a sound that would, in fact, drive him straight to Hell.
It began as a baby’s cry—the same he’d heard from some of his victims before dispatching them. This quickly transformed into a mechanical whine that was so loud, Bet-Assou found his eyeballs actually vibrating. This was quickly taken over by an earsplitting roar. This was being made by fire, fire fueled by powerful compounds. Bet-Assou’s ears began to ring so loudly, he fell to his knees and clasped his hands over them. But this did no good. The sound in his head now perfectly mimicked the cries he’d heard from each one of his victims—and the din of 251 people crying in pain all at once was more than one psyche could take. Bet-Assou suddenly found himself on the ground shaking from head to toe.
In the next second, night turned into day. The two railway cars next to him were suddenly enveloped by a great flame. The brightness burned Bet-Assou’ retinas. Then he felt the fire and smelled the smoke and tried to cover his eyes but couldn’t.
/> The next thing he realized, the tarp on top of the nearby train was splitting one thread at a time, with flame and smoke erupting from beneath. Then came one more tremendous explosion and the objects on the railway cars started to move!
Before Bet-Assou’s unbelieving eyes, two airplanes broke free of the tarp, and on legs of smoke and fire, rose up into the sky. Straight up! Right before his eyes.
What demon’s work was this!
Even Bet-Assou knew that airplanes could not fly this way.
He watched in shock as both airplanes climbed to about five hundred feet above his head. Then he saw one come back down, a chain hanging from its belly. Now shadows were moving near him. He saw a pair of ghostly figures take the end of the chain hanging from the impossibly hovering airplane and connect it to another tarp-covered object. This done, the airplane began to lift the object, which Bet-Assou saw once the tarp fell off, was yet another airplane. This one very small, very compact.
In astonishment, he watched this combination—one plane carrying another—slowly fly off to the south. Before he could draw another breath, he saw the second hovering airplane come down, and more shadows at work, and this plane, too, lifted away another aircraft from the railroad car.
Within seconds, everything was quiet again. Suddenly there were no more airplanes. They’d all disappeared. Bet-Assou still had no idea exactly what he’d seen. All he knew was that there had been four airplanes in the rail yard when he and his men went on duty, and now there were none.
He knew his Blue Army superiors would not like that.
Bet-Assou did what he did best. He went around to the dead bodies of his squad members and rifled their corpses for money, ammunition, and flasks of snake wine.
Then he ran. Out of the rail yard, out beyond the city limits, and into the mountains north of the city.
Here he would stay for several hours, drinking what snake wine he could hold. But no amount of liquor could eliminate the awful chorus of screams that was now going around his head, nonstop, no matter how much he tried to get it to cease.
When the sun came up and the screams only got louder, Bet-Assou finally went insane. He pulled out each of his own fingernails, one by one, with nothing but his dirty and cracked teeth.
When the horrible sound still would not go away, he drank his last bottle of wine, put the barrel of his rifle into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
Only then did the screams finally stop.
The pair of VTOL planes, being flown by Hunter and JT, flew as fast as they could back to the Red Army lines.
It was only because the VTOL planes were overpowered, and the Bantam such a lightweight aircraft, that they were able to steal the tiny fighters back from the Blues.
Still, carrying them across enemy territory and going no more than thirty-five knots in nearly full-forward hover, had been a dicey operation, but in the end a successful one.
Once back at Red Base One, they gingerly lowered the Bantam fighters dangling from their fuselages to a crowd of waiting ground personnel below. Typically anxious, JT dropped his airplane a few seconds ahead of time, resulting in a flat tire. But that was the most extensive damage incurred in the bold operation.
After dropping his own Bantam, Hunter brought his VTOL down for a bouncing landing, and was out of the cockpit before the engines had stopped turning.
The rest of the Americans now gathered around the four fighters. The VTOLs were in great shape considering what they’d been through. The Bantams were a bit banged up, had some fuel leaks and a few rough edges here and there, but were definitely flyable.
“It’s strange,” Fitz said, checking out the quartet of new weaponry. “We brought these along because we thought they’d protect us during the bombing run. Who could have foreseen they’d come to our aid now?”
“I could have,” Zoltan interjected. “If someone had just asked me …”
Hunter checked the weaponry on his VTOL plane. It was filled with cannon shells and had two five-hundred-pound bombs hanging from its wings.
“It will have to do,” he said, climbing back into the cockpit.
With that, he powered up his engines again and was soon lifting off, straight up once more into the night.
At an altitude of five hundred feet, he turned the jet’s nose to the south and brought the engines up to horizontal. The hover jet suddenly shot ahead like it was fired out of a cannon.
Less than a minute later, all that those on the ground could see was the dull flare of Hunter’s engine exhaust disappearing over the horizon.
CHAPTER 37
HIS NAME WAS KLAUS Von Baron, though his friends long ago had bestowed on him the very unlikely nickname of “Sluggo.”
For the most part, Von Baron was a proprietor of flesh. He bought and sold people—men for soldiers, girls for sex—like other people traded in cotton, wood, or oil. He was fabulously wealthy, a mover and shaker in a world that had not known more than two consecutive years of peace in nearly 325 years.
But he also fancied himself an adventurer of sorts, and that’s what put him this fateful day on the porch of a prefab chalet overlooking the rather unattractive convergence of the Indus River and the Nawa Canal.
Von Baron was six foot even, with wavy blond hair, a thin, yet muscular-looking frame, and womanly hands, which he kept hidden whenever possible. His nose had been broken—by accident against a door frame—years before. Its flatness gave him an entirely undeserved tough-guy look, which he perversely relished. This chance injury also led to his nickname of Sluggo.
It was with Van Baron’s money, and his verve to make more money, that this rather despicable waterway project he was now gazing down upon from the shade of his temporary veranda had been launched.
This effort, which he had dubbed, cleverly he thought, “Little Big Dig,” sought nothing less than to connect the Indus with the Nawa, and at certain points, widen and deepen both drastically.
The reason for this environmentally putrid idea was to create a huge bay leading into the upper Indus, allowing large ships to reach a point some 150 miles inland from the Arabian Sea. These ships, of course, would be carrying mercenaries. By widening and joining these two waterways—killing or displacing nearly one million people in the process—the mercenaries would cut three days off of a tough march through hilly, thickly covered lower Pakistan. For want of seventy-two extra hours, a significant part of the earth’s face was being transformed without its permission.
For all this, Sluggo Von Baron would later suffer the pains of Hell.
But now, looking down on his massive project, he felt an almost sexual excitement running through him. This was money staring him back in the face. More money than he’d ever imagined—and he’d been born rich. It was a simple plan really: get as many merc ships as possible to travel up his newly opened passage, and charge them an enormous fee, which they wouldn’t mind paying if it meant their men could get to the big fight up north for Kabul Downs fresh and quickly. So far, this had all worked out better than he’d dreamed.
The blue bloods had contracted for twenty divisions of forced mercs—soldiers that would be fighting against their will—as well as four professional divisions to intervene in the Kabul Downs fight. Close to a quarter of a million men would invade Afghanistan from the south, attacking the Red Army at its rear, and finally ending the fight in favor of the royals. Or so the Blues intended.
But what Sluggo knew, and very few others besides him, was that the people who were bringing all these mercenaries to this war, had no intention of stopping once they’d rolled over the Red Army. Even though the blue bloods were paying the bill, secret plans spelled out an operation in which the oncoming “Black Army” would simply keep going after they defeated the Reds, eliminating the Blues, and taking over the strategically important Kabul Downs for themselves. At that point it would be sold—the entire city and whatever was left of the population—to the highest bidder. Sluggo Von Baron would double his already substantial wealth, just
like that.
He’d just completed a briefing for some members of the Black Army high command not thirty minutes before. The secret plans for this double cross were still laid out on the table next to him, flapping gently in the breeze, as he watched the massive dredging operation continue unabated a half mile down the hill from him.
He was almost completely happy at this point. He was certainly moving and shaking—tons of dirt were dredged up every minute, widening and emptying holes left over from the five massive DG-55 bomb blasts that had started this huge project in the first place. But now, as he watched a small fleet of support boats scurrying up and around the artificial bays created by the enormous blasts, he felt something eating at his craw. What could it be? All seemed right with his world. He’d had an excellent briefing with the Black Army advance men. The double-cross plan was simple and ready to be put into effect. So what was bugging him couldn’t be business-related.
Physically, his body felt good, too. He would soon retire to the small town a mile away, partake in some fine food he’d flown in and drink some great brandy. Then it would be on to the well-stocked cathouse, where he would choose from a bevy of young girls who had also been brought along on this adventure for his bodily gratification.
So what was bothering him? He really couldn’t tell. But despite all this evidence that the world was spinning his way, he could not identify the slight twitch of foreboding in the pit of his stomach.
He thought about this for a few minutes until it finally hit him. It was the dream he’d had the night before causing his discomfort. It had been mildly terrifying. He was on this very porch, at this very time of day, drinking this very drink, when suddenly a huge bird had come out of the sky, swooped down, impaled him on its talons, and then flew away to a huge nest where he had been provided as a meal for the bird’s equally huge, equally horrible chicks.
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