by Mack Maloney
What he saw would change his life forever…
It was a photograph of Dominique.
Body Rushes. He knew he got more than the average person and for more and different reasons. He'd flown close to the edge of the atmosphere; he'd flown at nearly four times the speed of sound. He'd not only seen battle; he had fought in the largest, most destructive war ever. He'd been around the world several times, had seen its oceans, its peaks, its valleys. He'd known love; he'd known hate. He'd experienced rushes through his body that left him buzzing for hours if not days. But nothing equalled this rush. It exploded in his brain and traveled at the speed of light to each and every one of his nerve endings. There were sparks in his eyes.
Dominique? What the hell was this guy doing with a photo of Dominique? Hunter stared at it in disbelief. Was it really her? The young Bridgette Bardot-look-alike face was there. Her hair had grown out long and now looked lusty and blond. It was definitely the body he'd taken in person and so many times in his dreams. Who wouldn't be haunted by this? There was no question.
It was her.
More sparks in his eyes. He couldn't believe the way she was… posing. The photograph was not a hastily snapped affair. It was in clear, crisply focused full color and almost artistic in the way it was shot. She was leaning forward slightly, her eyes staring directly into the camera. She was heavily made-up.
Her clothes — what there were of them — were stunning. She was dressed in what looked to be a female version of a black tuxedo jacket. She wore no dress. Her black nylon stockinged legs were fully exposed, as was the garter belt that held them up. She wore short, black leather boots.
Her blouse, which looked to be pure silk, was drastically low cut, exposing more of her breasts than not. The clothes managed to look expensive and trashy at the same time. She was wearing several diamond necklaces and what appeared to be a tiara of some sort. Even the chair she sat in had a plush look about it. It was all staged so strangely, yet beautifully. The photo looked like a cross between a pin-up and an expensive portrait sitting.
His eyes were filled with sparks now — real sparks. A loud bang knocked him out of his trance. There was another bang, followed by a louder, more dangerous rush of hissing. Looking out the smashed cockpit window he saw the starboard wing had erupted in flames. The hissing signaled an explosion was imminent. He had no more time to search the body or the cockpit.
His instincts began to take over. He quickly folded the photograph and slipped it into his boot. He wiped off his helmet visor and checked his air supply.
But he took one last look at the pilot's face. Who was he? What was he doing?
Where was he going? And what the hell was he doing with Dominique's photograph? Hunter knew one thing: the dead man could have led him to where Dominique was. But now he was cold and so was the trail. Who the fuck were you, pal? As if to answer him, Hunter watched as by. some trick of rigor mortis, the grin widened into a full-toothed, grotesque smile.
"I have to get out of here," Hunter whispered.
Moments later the wing blew up, violently knocking the fuselage onto its port side. No matter — Hunter was clear of the wreck by this time, having sprinted and ricocheted himself down the cabin and out the door. He made a quick slide of it down to the base of the mountain — mucking up his M-16 in the process.
The airplane exploded in one last, agonizing boom, after which it was totally engulfed in flames.
He passed 65,000 feet and was still climbing. The sky had suddenly turned dark, night was falling. As he approached 70,000 feet — nearly 14 miles high — he could see the faint twinkling of stars above him. Higher and higher he went. The F-16 was soon closing in on 80,000 feet, past the safe ceiling for its make and model.
Yet Hunter still climbed…
He clutched the picture of Dominique. There were too many questions bouncing around his head. So he sought refuge. At 85,000 feet the sky was like night and the stars were bright and in full view. Suddenly he saw a huge band of red light streak across his northern horizon. It was followed by another, then another. It was the Aurora Borealis again. But strangely it displayed just one color. Deep red. The streaks were dazzling, sparking bright crimson leaping across the sky like huge airborne waves. In all his years of flying, he had never witnessed the phenomena as intense as this.
Hunter felt a jolt run the length of his body, bounce off his flight boots and rebound back to his flight helmet. He was transfixed by the brilliant, eerie lights and their strong, hypnotic quality.
He found himself being drawn toward the display. Slowly he leveled off at 90,000 feet. The air was so thin at this height he imagined he could see it travel by him in long curling wisps.
He pointed the jet fighter north, determined to plunge into the bath of red light. Soon the entire airplane was awash in the one color. It was the color of blood. He took his hands off the controls and held them up to his eyes.
Strangely, they looked white while everything else around him appeared red.
His body shook again. The red became more intense. He closed his eyes.
He knew it was an omen. War was coming. A big one. To the east. He could already hear the bombs exploding and big guns being fired. He could see the smoke and the tail fires of missiles as they streaked to their targets.
Highways lined with the weapons of war. He could smell the gunpowder and the cordite and the napalm. He saw huge fires. He heard people screaming — their sounds intertwined into a symphony, playing so hard in his ears they started to ache. The jet was shuddering, its engine shrieking as it streaked into the Northern Lights.
Suddenly a new, entirely different feeling washed over him. His eyes were still jammed shut. Inside, he felt the color turn from red to white. Then, everything started to clear. In an instant he knew how the Russian jets had pulled off their svengali. The answer had been there all along and he laughed when he finally realized the truth. So that was it! He felt a surge of power travel through his body. His fists tightened. His teeth were clenched. He gulped the oxygen from his face mask. The fuckers. They almost had him. They almost psyched him out. But now he was on to it. One mystery down, just several more to go. No more time to contemplate his condition. No more self-pity. No more doubting his resolve. He had to get to work.
He kept his eyes closed just a moment longer, drawing the last jolts of strength from the feeling. The last image he saw before opening his eyes was that of the beautiful Dominique. She was alive. The photo proved it. He knew it now for sure. She was out there. Somewhere. He would find her.
He opened his eyes. The Northern Lights were gone and the night sky was cold and clear. The feeling hadn't entirely vanished, however. In fact, a little bit of it would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Chapter Eight
Hunter returned to the base, shut down the F-16 and ran to the base's recon photo analysis lab. The two technicians who had been laboring over his footage came out to meet him, both anxious and glowing with news.
But before they could say a word, Hunter spoke to them. "Jump jets?" he asked.
"Bingo, sir," the senior tech told him. "Yak-38's. We narrowed it down about two hours ago."
The Yak-38 was an airplane design the Soviets ripped off from the famous British Harrier. By using a multi-direction jet nozzle, the airplane could lift off vertically, then, with the push of a button, its thrust could be redirected backward and the jet could instantly fly like a normal fighter. The Harrier was an amazing airplane; the Yak-38 an effective, if bargain basement version of it.
Now all the pieces were fitting into place. The Russians hadn't really constructed an air base in the arctic valley — they had simply cleared a landing spot, for the jets could land vertically, too. The airplanes had leapfrogged over from Siberia, probably rendezvousing with tanker planes or even preadapted ships at sea for refueling. After all, the Yak-38 was originally designed to operate off Soviet aircraft carriers. When Hunter happened to find their base, it only would take about
an hour or so to get the 50 airplanes lifted off and moving.
But one mystery solved sometimes led to another: Now that he knew how the airplanes got there — and how they got out — he had to find out where they were going…
"Where the hell are they now?"
Seated around the table were the principal officers of PAAC-Oregon. One by one, Twomey, Ben Wa, the Cobras, the Ace Wrecking Company, an officer from the Crazy Eights, Major Frost, and Dozer looked at the still photographs gleaned from the infrared tape of the Yaks.
"This is not your typical Soviet stunt," Hunter was saying. "These guys were pros. It took a lot of planning and execution to jump fifty Goddamned jets across the arctic."
"And to do it in bad weather," Frost said. "And without a peep on the radio."
"Some kind of special unit," Dozer said. "Probably trained just for this mission."
"Damn!" Hunter said, pounding the table. "I would never have guessed the Russians had five of these Yaks left, never mind fifty!"
"We have to find them and take them out," Captain Crunch of the Wreckers said. "Any ideas where they went, Major?"
Hunter was quiet for a moment. "I hate to even say this but…" he began slowly. "My guess is they jumped themselves right over into the Badlands."
"Christ!" Twomey blurted out, expressing the feeling of every officer there.
They were all unquestioningly brave men. But still not one of them wanted anything to do with the Badlands.
"Why do you figure the Badlands, Hawk?" Wa asked.
"Well, based on the maximum operating range of the Yak-38, if they flew light and conserved fuel, they could have made it in one extra jump," Hunter said, pulling out a notebook of calculations. "And these photos show they weren't carrying any ordnance under the wings. They were, however, carrying extra large wing tanks.
"This tells us something else. If they weren't carrying bombs, it could mean they were meeting up with someone who was."
"Goddamn," Dozer said. "Fifty Russian jump jets flying around the continent can cause a lot of misunderstandings to say the least."
"What are they here for, Major?" one of the Cobras asked. "Convoy raiding?"
"Well, it seems like a hell of a lot of trouble to go through just to shoot at airliners," Hunter said.
"Could be part of another disruption campaign," Dozer said. "They sent a bunch of jets over to The Family, too."
"That's true," Hunter said. "But we've got to figure that they sent more jets than pilots that time. Pilots must be in very short supply over there, still. And so are top-shelf airplanes like these Yaks.
Top-shelf to the Russians, anyway."
"You think something bigger is brewing?" Frost asked.
Again, Hunter was silent for a few seconds. He had given it a lot of thought in the past few hours, though he had to admit, some of the answers literally popped into his head from nowhere. He now had theories on most of the recent mysteries, both on the west coast and on the east — all except one.
"Okay, let's look at these one at a time," he began. "First, we have a patrol boat who reports something strange and sends out an SOS. By the time we get there, they're gone. Now, whatever it was, it had to be a ship that attacked them. Yet the Wreckers didn't see anything else floating around out there."
"True," one of the F-4 pilots confirmed.
"Okay," Hunter continued. "Maybe it was a submarine. Maybe it was a bunch of submarines. By the way the patrol boat captain was talking, he might have sailed right into a school of them."
"Or a wolf pack," Dozer interjected.
"Exactly," Hunter said. "They can't blast the patrol boat out of the water because they know we could probably find it and figure it was hit by a torpedo, or a Harpoon-type ship-to-ship missile, or even a deck gun.
"So what do they do? They jam the boat's radio transmission, then they board her and either kidnap ' the crew or throw them overboard."
"We never saw any bodies," a Wrecker said.
"Right, too messy," Hunter agreed. "So maybe those guys were taken alive."
He paused for a moment, then continued. "Now, how about what went down in Vegas? What the hell exploded out there and why would anyone want to blow a mile wide crater in the middle of the desert?
"Well, how about this: We assumed it was done on purpose. Suppose it wasn't.
Suppose it was an accident?"
"Accident?" Twomey asked.
"Sure," Hunter answered. "Why not? Someone moving a whole lot of ammunition.
Something goes wrong. Boom! Everyone is blown into smithereens and the place looks like an A-bomb went off."
The rest of the officers around the table nodded in agreement. It was possible.
"How about what Fitzie's guys have been seeing, Hawk?" Twomey asked. "Lights floating over the Great Lakes?"
"Not floating, really," Hunter said. "More like soaring."
"You mean… like gliding?" Dozer asked.
"I mean exactly that," Hunter said. "They could have been gliders, released somewhere outside the Canadian radar net. Shit, if you launched a glider high enough, with the winds over the Lakes, it could fly for hundreds of miles.
Granted, it would have to be pressurized and winterized and whatever else."
"But it's not impossible," Frost said.
"But what's in these gliders?" Wa wanted to know.
"Could be anything," Hunter continued. "But my guess is troops. At the very least, officers and advisors. Sure, a few years ago we know the Soviets could disguise one of their big planes as being 'East European,' load it up with troops and fly right into the Aerodrome. But they knew then, and they know now, that with our intelligence network, we'd be on those airplanes as soon as they touched down and we'd stay with them the whole way.
"But how do you do it when you don't want anyone to see or hear you? Sneaking in fighters is one thing. And maybe there are weapons and ammo on the subs. A sub you can dock in any number of places around the continent without a soul seeing you. But bringing in troops — raw manpower — on the QT, well, that takes some doing."
"Jesus Christ!" Dozer said, putting the pieces together. "Are you saying they're sneaking a whole Goddamned army into the country!"
Hunter nodded gravely. "They're not doing this just to harass us. They've been doing that kind of Mickey Mouse stuff ever since the armistice. This is big time. Serious stuff."
He paused. "I think what we've feared most is underway and has been underway for some time.
"The Russians are invading America."
"But, wait a minute," Toomey said. "What happened at Way Out, or the guardsmen's post?"
"You mean, 'Horses,' " Hunter asked. "I'm still working on that one. But we do know this much. Two men — the surviving guardsman and St. Louie's recon guy — both saw some kind of intense action, and although they were more than a thousand miles apart, they both remembered one thing: Horses. And I'm personally going to find out what the hell they meant."
Chapter Nine
A week later, Hunter sat in the hold of the Stallion chopper, looking out at the darkened landscape below. They were heading east, over the old states of Idaho and Wyoming, over the South Platte River to where the borders of Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas once met. There was an almost full moon this night. He could see the contour of the land below him change from mountainous to hilly range land to flat open spaces. He checked his watch. 0150 hours. By 0230, the chopper would be on the edge of the Badlands. Then he would be on his own.
He had briefed the rest of the PAAC-Oregon officers on the mysterious convoy and wreck of the 707. The incident fit into his theory. If the Soviets had moved men and materiel into one end or the other of the Badlands, it would just be a matter of getting hold of some convoy jets, hiring on some fighter protection and moving freely anywhere in the midsection of the country. In all likelihood, the convoy he intercepted had strayed somewhat from its course, bringing it slightly west of the Dakotas. Again, not an unusual occurrence in these days of flyi
ng more by the seat of one's pants than by sophisticated navigational gear.
Using the 419.10 miles he'd found on the 707's distance indicator, he did some quick calculations which led to a very interesting discovery. Within the 420-mile radius of the crash site there were four airports — or former military air bases — that could handle 18 big airliners like the ones in the convoy.
Three of these bases were inside the Badlands. Even the hay and the oats made a crazy sort of sense. "Horses," again. Another piece of the puzzle seemed to be falling into place.
But the photo of Dominique was another story. That almost defied explanation.
He told no one about it…
He checked his watch again. 0200 hours. His face was properly blackened as were his clothes. He did a final check of his gear. He was carrying Dozer's smaller Uzi instead of his own, larger M-16. On his back was a satchel filled with HE (high explosive) hand grenades, several signal rockets, a long distance radio transmitter and receiver, a long, bayonet-like pack knife, and a .45 automatic. He also carried two gallons of water and six small bags of food. He knew he'd never eat any of the food — when he was this charged up, food was the farthest thing from his mind. But he took the packets along only as a favor to Mio and Aki.
He turned his attention to the contraption sitting next to him. He'd spent the last week designing and building it, yet he still couldn't come up with a proper name for it. It was kind of a combination ultralight/hang-glider/mini-jet. He had started with a tricycle-type frame and enclosed it with a small, soapbox derby style cockpit. Inside was a seat, a main control steering column, and two mini-control panels. Located directly in back of the seat was an umbrella-like device on which was the vehicle's presently-folded triangular sail. In the rear he had installed a small, intricate jet engine. Two stubby wings projected a foot and a half out from each side of the frame. They were just long enough to hold four small dual-purpose air-launched missiles, two on each wing. The missiles were also filled with HE. A tripod built next to the steering column held a swivel fastener on which he could bolt down the Uzi. A small radio was on board.