Thunder in the East

by Maloney, Mack;

  Suddenly, a Circle Army guard came up behind him and poked his ribs with the barrel of his AK-47 assault rifle.

  “Get back to work,” the soldier told him gruffly, jabbing him again with the snout of the Soviet-made weapon.

  How the hell did I get here? Yaz asked himself for the umpteenth time. In an instant he replayed the series of rather incredible events that took him from a hospital on the Mediterranean island of Malta to digging in the goddamn “Hole” in the middle of Football City. Shit, the last time he had been in the states, this place was called St. Louis.

  During the first battles of World War III, Yaz was an officer aboard the U.S. nuclear submarine, USS Albany. The boat went down off Ireland, but many of the hands were able to make it to shore. Eventually, he and some of the survivors got organized and went over to Britain after the war cooled down, finding work as technicians. Later on, they moved to Algiers where they were hired by some British RAF officers to help tow an aircraft carrier across the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal in order to thwart an attempt by the infamous world terrorist Viktor to invade the area and revive the World War.

  The valiant adventure succeeded in delaying Viktor’s armies at the Suez chokepoint long enough for the European democratic forces, known as the Modern Knights, to engage and destroy most of the enemy force. In the course of the early fighting, the carrier was sunk and Yaz, blown off its deck in an explosion, was later found by friendly forces and eventually taken to Malta where he spent three months recovering from his wounds.

  Mixed up in all this was an American fighter pilot named Hawk Hunter. He was well-known, both in America and around the globe, as being the best fighter pilot in the post-war world. He had been convinced by the Brits to coordinate air operations off the carrier and he had led the air battle in the canal until taking off in pursuit of Viktor. While recovering in Malta, Yaz heard that Hunter had caught up with the super-terrorist shortly after the battle in the canal and that the terrorist wound up dead. Exactly what happened to Hunter was unclear. Many people in the Med claimed that he too was killed along with Viktor. Others said Hunter had returned to America, where it was rumored that another great war was brewing between the democratic Western Forces and the Soviet-backed Circle Army of the east.

  Those rumors proved correct—much to Yaz’s dismay…

  As soon as he recovered from his wounds, Yaz caught a flight from Malta to the near-abandoned airport at Casablanca. From there, he was given a seat on a free-lance Swedish C-130 gunship that was flying to America to look for work. But the gunship was jumped by MiGs near the coast of Cuba, and crash-landed off the beach at Guantanamo Bay. Captured by the communist Cubans, Yaz spent some time in jail and then was sold as a slave laborer to the Circle Army, who now had a tenuous hold on Football City.

  It was a long, crazy story, unbelievable to him even though he had lived it. Ever since the end of the Big War, Yaz had dreamed of returning to America. Now that he was here, he longed for the hot, smelly days of Algiers …

  Now he was part of a work crew—some 2000 strong—that was digging The Hole. Nearby were the handful of bridges that had all but been destroyed in a massive war between Football City and the Soviet-backed Family Army, out of New Chicago. These spans had suddenly become very important to the Circle troops occupying the city and their engineers were in the process of rebuilding most of them. Some said the Circle wanted the bridges rebuilt in order to reenforce the city against attack from the Western Forces to the west. Others said the Circle needed the bridges intact so as to insure their own escape route out of the city.

  As for “The Hole,” no one had yet explained to the prisoners why they were digging it. In fact, it wasn’t a hole at all. It was more like a cave, with a large wooden door at one end. But it had become more than their home—it was their universe. They worked in The Hole during the day and slept there at night. The Circle guards simply locked them in every sunset and opened it up at sunrise for another full day of endless digging. All the while the cave got bigger. But at quite a cost. Many of the POWs were ill and every night a few would die, exhausted from the 16 hours of hard labor. It all seemed so futile, pointless and useless. What was even odder, Yaz had heard that The Circle was making four other POW groups dig similar holes around the city.

  The Circle soldier shoved him once again, and Yaz had no choice but to resume digging.

  His line of about two hundred slave laborers, chained at the feet, stretched out of the tunnel and up to the huge wooden door. The soldier routinely walked along poking every third or fourth man in the ribs. It was only about nine in the morning, yet Yaz and the others had been at it for three hours already. There had been no breakfast, no water.

  Just then Yaz heard a commotion down the line a way. The guard had grabbed one of the laborers by the scruff of his neck and was questioning him intensely.

  “Where the hell did you get this?” the soldier shouted at the man, poking him in his stomach with the butt of his AK-47.

  “I found it, over there,” the prisoner answered, terrified. “I was just going to use it … to sleep on.”

  The object in contention was a simple, uninflated inner tube.

  Three more guards showed up. “Show me where you found it,” the soldier ordered the man.

  As the rest of the work gang watched, the prisoner was unhooked from his chains and led the guards to a spot off to the side of the huge cavern.

  “In there,” the man said, pointing to a hole in the dirt floor. “There’s a bunch of them.”

  One of the guards jumped into the cavity and soon was passing up dozens of neatly-folded inner tubes.

  The first guard inspected several of the tubes. “Where the hell could these have come from?” he asked.

  “Left over from before the war I guess,” one of his companions answered. “But the captain will go apeshit if he knew these scumheads were using them to sleep on.”

  The last of the tubes were recovered. “Take them all up to the end of the tunnel and burn them,” the first guard said.

  His companions did as told and Yaz went back to his shoveling. Compared to the dirty blanket he now slept on, he thought sleeping on an inflated inner tube would be like heaven …

  Several hours passed, when Yaz felt another poke in his ribs.

  “You … Go up to the entrance way,” the guard told him. “Help the others carry down the chow.”

  “Yah, sir, massah …” Yaz said under his breath as the man unhooked his leg irons. Actually, he was thankful for the opportunity to get away from the monotonous shoveling, even for a short while.

  He slowly made his way past the work gang and up to the front end of The Hole. Ten other laborers were waiting there.

  “Ah, fresh oxygen …” he whispered as he breathed in his first taste of outside air in two weeks. The sun was out but it wasn’t too hot. A quarter mile away was the Mississippi and even its muddy water looked inviting.

  An old Ryder Rent-A-Truck pulled up to the mouth of the tunnel and two men, both of them wearing sunglasses and white coveralls, got out. They were POW trusties, prisoners allowed to perform more than menial tasks.

  “You guys here for the food?” one asked.

  Yaz and the others nodded. They went around to the side of the vehicle, opened its folding door to reveal ten pots filled with steaming soup. The drivers climbed up into the truck.

  But the pots were hot and they needed help.

  “Climb up here and give us a hand,” one of the drivers told Yaz.

  He climbed up into the truck and the three of them grabbed the first steaming pot and painfully lowered it to the ground.

  “This is ridiculous,” one trusty said. “We need a winch.”

  The second and third pots were worse.

  Just then Yaz spotted a crowbar at the back of the truck sitting on top of a pile of cardboard boxes.

  “Here, use this,” he said, walking to retrieve the tool. But as he did so, he noticed that the top of one of the cardboar
d boxes was open. He glanced inside.

  It was filled with neatly-folded inner tubes …

  Suddenly, one of the drivers came up from behind and had his hands around Yaz’s throat.

  “That was a big mistake, mister,” the man said. “You just looked somewhere you shouldn’t have …”

  Yaz was just about gagging from the man’s stranglehold. The driver spun him around, and for the first time, Yaz got a good look at the other trusty without his sunglasses.

  Oddly, the man looked familiar …

  “I … know … you,” Yaz was able to say, his words a gurgle.

  The man stared at him, as if he’d seen Yaz before, too.

  “Let him go,” he told his partner.

  Released from the chokehold, Yaz and the man stared at each other for a moment, trying to figure out where they had seen each other before.

  “You’re a pilot,” Yaz said suddenly, as if the thought had magically appeared in his brain. “Back at Suez … you helped pull me from the water …”

  The man looked at him closely and started shaking his head.

  “Your name …” Yaz continued. “It’s … Elvis.”

  The man shook his head and put his sunglasses back on.

  “You’re nuts, mac,” he said briskly. “Now get your ass in gear and get that goddamn soup out of here.”

  With that the man climbed out of the truck, fiddled around at the back of the truck, then disappeared.

  Using the crowbar, the other driver and Yaz lowered the rest of the pots to the ground.

  The job done, the truck quickly pulled away, the man who Yaz had recognized behind the wheel.

  Yaz shook his head. Maybe he was mistaken, but the driver looked exactly like one of the pilots who had come to the rescue of the survivors of the aircraft carrier that had sunk during the battle of the Suez Canal. Yaz had only seen the man briefly at the time, yet his wavy, jelly-roll haircut and rock star looks were unmistakable.

  He shrugged it off and went to pick up his gang’s soup pot. That’s when he saw that something had been scribbled in the loose dirt next to where the truck had been parked.

  It was a single letter and Yaz had to stare at it for a few moments before its meaning started to sink in. When it did, he immediately knew that he was right in identifying the driver.

  Using the heel of his boot, the man had scratched out a large “W” in the dirt …

  CHAPTER 4

  THE RF-4 PHANTOM RECONNAISSANCE airplane set down to a bumpy landing on Football City’s cratered and only working runway.

  A service crew meandered out to the jet’s parking area, as the free-lance pilot climbed out and retrieved four loads of exposed film from the RF-4’s nose. He carefully placed them alongside another four rolls inside a lead-lined strongbox, then jumped into a waiting jeep, which whisked him to the airport’s control center.

  A major of the Circle Army was waiting for the pilot as the jeep pulled up to the control center.

  “How’d it look out there today?” the officer asked the flyer.

  “If anything, it’s worse than yesterday …” the pilot answered. “Let me develop the still photographs first and I’ll show you.”

  “Hurry it up,” the major told him. “The colonel has to be in the Viceroy’s chamber in exactly one hour.”

  The pilot went into the control center and disappeared into the photo-developing darkroom. Meanwhile, the major climbed the stairs up to his colonel’s office, gulping at the thought that he had to deliver more bad news.

  The free-lance photo-recon plane had just overflown the Western Forces positions that surrounded the city on three sides. In previous flights of this, the only recon airplane available to the Circle troops, its cameras had photographed as many as 10 divisions of enemy troops, apparently preparing for an all-out attack on the city.

  “Almost two hundred thousand troops,” the major grumbled to himself. “How the hell were they able to raise that many men?”

  It was a question that had been nagging him—and everyone else near the top of the Circle command. It seemed that every time the RF-4 came back from a photo recon run, its film contained more and more evidence that the Western Forces were growing stronger by the day.

  “More bad news, I’m afraid,” the major told his superior—a colonel named Muss. “The pilot said the Westerners have increased their troop strength.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Muss said, standing up to consult the map of Missouri which hung on his office wall. “Where the hell are they getting the men?”

  “They’ve got to be hiring mercenaries?” the major offered.

  “Mercenaries, be damned!” Muss shouted. “There isn’t a division of honest mercenaries around these parts that they could recruit, never mind fifty thousand of them.”

  “Free Canadians, maybe,” the major said.

  “Maybe,” Muss replied. “But the Canucks know full well what would happen to them if they intervened in large numbers. They know our Soviet allies would nuke their asses if they came down in a big way.”

  The major shrugged. “That’s if the Russians have any workable ICBMs left,” he said.

  Muss gave the man a cold look. “I’d avoid that kind of talk, Major,” he told him.

  Muss was getting nervous himself though. The Westerners had been steadily backing the Circle into a corner while at the same time building up their strength. Every day it got worse. The problem was, it was up to Muss to tell all this to the Viceroy.

  And he was not a man who liked to receive bad news …

  Viceroy Richard St. Laurant was better known, though not to his face, as “Viceroy Dick.” He was the Commander-in-Chief of the Circle Troops in Football City and, in effect, governor of the city. He was of undetermined European origin, and installed by the Soviets just after the battle at the Platte River. Once again, the Sovs had picked an unusual puppet. The Viceroy was neurotic, quirky, possibly even psychotic. He had a propensity for cocaine, young girls and on-the-spot public executions of friends and foes alike. He carried on with such a regal air that he had been known to ride the streets of Football City wearing a king’s robe and a small gold crown and partake of the city’s still burgeoning night life, followed around by an entourage of teenage girls and tough, South Afrikaner bodyguards.

  Several minutes later the recon pilot came into the room, holding a half dozen still-wet photographs.

  “Quick, let’s see them,” Muss said.

  The pilot laid out the photos on the colonel’s desk. Right away, Muss felt his mouth go dry.

  “These vehicles you see here are elements of an armored division,” the pilot said. “It moved in just overnight. I count forty-five tanks and APCs. About three dozen support trucks, and a lot of ground troops. I figure about seventy-five hundred guys in all.”

  “Damn …” Muss said under his breath.

  “Saw a lot of anti-aircraft capability in place too,” the pilot went on, leafing through the photographs. “Look right here. They’ve moved in some SA-twos and some SA-sixes.”

  “They must have got them in the Badlands,” the major said. “Left over from the Soviet Expeditionary Force.”

  The major was referring to the massive Soviet infiltration that had led up to The Circle War. Over the course of many months, the Russians had placed a wall of surface-to-air missile batteries along the western edge of the Badlands, effectively ending the cross-country airborne convoys which had been the only linking factor between the east and west coasts of the continent.

  “If they got mobile SAM batteries, then they’re really getting serious,” Muss said. “They must know we’ve got all of eighteen airplanes here …”

  “And I figure they’ve got at least ten squadrons in the immediate area,” the RF-4 pilot said. “That’s not counting what the Texas Air Force looks like these days.”

  Muss studied each photo once again. Each one of them was worse than the one before. Encampments of Western Forces infantrymen, Football City troops, Free Can
adians, along with those of the Texas Army. Convoys of fuel and provision trucks. Ammo dumps. Helicopters. Surface-to-surface rockets. And now tanks and APCs …

  “When will the movie film be ready?” Muss asked the pilot as he gathered up the still photos.

  “Give it another hour,” the pilot replied. “But I’ll tell you, it ain’t pretty.”

  “Just get it developed as soon as possible,” Muss barked at him. “And get ready to go up again late this afternoon.”

  With that, Muss quickly put on his uniform jacket and cap and left.

  The major waited until Muss was out of earshot before he asked the next question.

  “Any sign of, you know, an F-16 out there?” the officer asked, nearly choking with anticipation.

  “You mean The Wingman?” the pilot asked.

  The major hastily shook his head. “Do you think he’s out there somewhere?” he asked nervously.

  The recon pilot laughed. “Let me tell you something, Major,” he said. “If he was out there, I wouldn’t be here, talking to you. I’d be scattered on a hillside somewhere, pieces of a Sidewinder sticking out of my ass …”

  A look of relief came over the major. At least they didn’t have Hawk Hunter to worry about. Maybe the rumors that he had died over in the Middle East were true.

  “But while we’re on the subject, can we settle up now?” the pilot asked the major. “You guys owe me for three runs and with those SAMs showing up, it’s going to be dangerous from now on.”

  The officer shook his head. “This afternoon,” he said. “We’ll pay you then.”

  The pilot shrugged, left the office and went back down to the photo darkroom.

  After locking the door behind him, the pilot carefully took the room’s wastebasket and poured a small amount of developing fluid into it. Then he took the four rolls of film he’d retrieved from his cameras that day, put them in the basket, and added another chemical, this one an industrial acid agent. The developing fluid and the acid quickly ignited and, in a smokeless flash, destroyed the never-exposed film.