Skyfire

by Maloney, Mack;

  A UA Army officer emerged from the chopper and quickly sought out the militia commander. Hunter had just finished helping load a burn victim onto the Chinook when he joined the two men.

  “This is not an isolated attack,” the officer was telling the militia commander. “You’ve got to get your men organized and set up a perimeter around the village, or what’s left of it.”

  Hunter quickly introduced himself. “Are you saying there was another attack like this somewhere?” he asked the man.

  The UA officer removed his helmet and wiped his forehead of grime and perspiration.

  “There’s been as many as twenty-five attacks,” he said grimly. “All along this edge of the Cape. Provincetown. Truro. Wellfleet. North Eastham. All hit, some of them worse than this, if you can believe it. We’ve also got calls that Chatham and Harwich to the south got it, too. It’s a full-scale assault. They’re pulling hit-and-runs on the bigger towns. But there are a lot of reports of these people—whoever the hell they are—roaming the countryside, killing, raping, looting. And they seem to be moving to the south. That’s why you’ve got to get a defense organized here.”

  But Hunter did not hear the man’s last sentence.

  He was too busy running. Through the smoldering village, past the bodies, up and over the bridge, and to his Corvette.

  All the while his insides were turning inside out. He had made a terrible assumption—that the attack on Nauset Harbor had been a single, isolated action. Now that he knew it hadn’t been, visions of his worst fears were flashing before his eyes.

  Within seconds of reaching his car, he was screaming back down the turnpike, roaring at full speed back toward his farm on Nauset Heights.

  Randy Montserrat was dying.

  Blood was flowing so freely from the cuts on his wrists and ankles that it had soaked the pile of leaves and pine needles below his feet.

  It took much effort for him to raise his head and look over at his wife, Tanya, who was tied to a pine tree about ten feet away from him. The small pool of blood around her feet was also growing. Tears welled up in his eyes as he saw that she was no longer moving.

  He let out a muffled scream and once again tried in vain to snap the ropes that were holding him to his tree. But it was no use: the armed men who had so barbarically beat and slashed him and Tanya had lashed them to the trees with binds too strong to break. Now Randy, robust for his age of sixty-two, felt the last of his strength leaving him.

  He was sure his spirit and soul would soon follow.

  Death would bring one respite: He would not have to endure the memory of the nightmare he and Tanya had suffered in the past two hours. The men had come to their isolated beach cottage just as the sun was setting. Without warning they burst in on him, beat both of them, and then proceeded to ransack the house.

  After finding little of value—both Randy and Tanya were artists and thus had very little in the way of material goods—the men dragged them out of the house and torched it. Then they marched them up into these woods and tied them to the trees, slashing their wrists and ankles as their final dastardly act.

  The men left soon afterward, laughing and growling, almost like they’d become intoxicated by their acts. Through it all, only one of the men spoke. He was a huge bear of a man who was wearing a long black cape in addition to his black uniform.

  He had barked to Randy and Tanya in a thick un-American accent that, instead of being killed right away, they were being left to bleed to death in the woods. The reason was the men wanted to “leave a gift” for the animals. Randy had gotten the implication right away. There were a half dozen types of animals in the Cape woods—foxes, badgers, even a few wild dogs—that would be attracted to the area by the smell of blood. Undoubtedly, soon after that, the animals would devour them.

  Randy let out another howl, this one in hope that both he and his beloved wife would die soon, before the animals came.

  He knew only a miracle could save them now.

  It was a loud, rumbling noise that brought Randy out of unconsciousness.

  Through bleary, blood-soaked eyes, he saw an angel.

  “Can you speak?” the man asked him.

  Randy looked down at his bleeding hands and realized for the first time that they were no longer bound. Nor were his feet. Instead, he was leaning against the tree, the crumbling bark and pine sap sticking to his blood-soaked body.

  “We were … we were attacked,” he managed to mumble, before falling to his knees in exhaustion.

  The loss of blood was obviously making him hallucinate, he thought. Either that or he was already dead. Just a minute before, he felt that he was seconds from death in the deserted woods. Now, just a few feet away from him, there was a white sports car, its headlights shining, its engine rumbling, and this man who had cut the ropes from the tree.

  “Who are you?” Randy asked the man, who was now kneeling over him.

  “That’s not important” was the reply.

  “My wife …?”

  “She’s still alive,” the man said.

  Randy looked to his left and saw Tanya, lying close by, dirty and bruised but obviously breathing.

  The man moved quickly to bandage Randy’s wounds, all the time working by the light of the sports car’s headlamps.

  “You’re going to be OK,” the man told him. “You both lost some blood, but the cuts weren’t deep. Whoever did this to you wanted you to bleed slowly.”

  “But how could you possibly have found us?” Randy asked, consciously feeling some of his strength return. “You certainly didn’t hear me screaming, did you?”

  “That’s not important, either,” Hunter replied.

  He had no ready answer. He had been tearing along the turnpike when his extraordinary intuition began flashing with great intensity. He had learned long before never to question this powerful sixth sense of his, no matter how critical the situation might be. So, even at the moment when his one and only thought was to get back to Nauset Heights as quickly as possible, he nevertheless followed the impulse that was telling him to go slow along the deserted roadway, to look for something wrong. Driving from side to side in order to shine his powerful headlights into the woods, he found the couple just a minute later, about fifty feet off the edge of the road.

  Now bandaged and revived, he loaded the two into his car and screeched out of the woods. He turned south, back to the town, but as luck would have it, a militia troop truck was making its way toward him.

  A quick flick of his lights stopped the driver, and soon Randy and Tanya were turned over to the militiamen for transport back to the town.

  Before being loaded into the truck, Randy grasped Hunter’s hand, and with a firm grip and deathly sincerity said: “Someday, I’ll will pay you back for saving our lives.”

  Hunter did not reply. He simply got back into his car and roared away.

  They were gone.

  He searched the farmhouse three times, the barn and other buildings twice. He even ran through the fields, and up to the cliff, and down to the west beach. But he found nothing. Dominique and Yaz were gone.

  There were no outward signs of a struggle, but Yaz’s rifle had been left behind. There was no blood anywhere, nor did the footprints in the sandy clay of his front yard look too unusual. Yet the raiders had been there; they had left a calling card. A black steel, three-foot axe had been embedded into the house’s front door.

  It was two hours before Hunter stopped searching and half collapsed onto the steps of his front porch. He held his head in his hands and came as close to tears as he had in a long time.

  His precious, beautiful Dominique was gone …

  Had he chosen not to go to the village, would he have prevented this? Had he chosen not to help the children or stay with the militiamen, or help load the wounded onto the Chinook, would he have arrived back to the farm in time?

  If he hadn’t had listened to his accursed sixth sense and found the couple in the woods, would he have saved Domi
nique and Yaz?

  It was the last question that burned inside him—burned a torrid flame that ignited something deep within his soul, something that he thought had been finally laid to rest.

  The world had not changed just because he had “retired” to the farm. If anything, it had become more insane. How many times had he fooled himself into thinking that with time, things would evolve and civilization would return? If anything, things were deteriorating—and fast.

  He had simply chosen to hide away from the evils of the world. But now the demons had found him. They had tracked him down and had invaded his homestead—the last island of sanity left on earth. They had taken away the only woman he had ever loved, to meet God-knows-what fate.

  And all because his damned sixth sense had prevented him from returning in time.

  One hour later, as the full moon reached its zenith, the ground around Nauset Heights began to shake.

  The small field animals that lived under the barn and the cats who lived in its hayloft all scampered for safety, so great was the rumbling.

  Within seconds, the entire top of the cliff was enveloped in a cloud of hot-burning smoke. The convulsions of the earth intensified as an ear-splitting scream shot out from the cliff and traveled down the hill and into the salt marshes below.

  In a second, the scream turned into a high-pitched roar, so loud that many of the windows in the farmhouse shattered from the vibration. Then there was flame, and more smoke, and the roar got louder and louder until finally it could get no more terrifying.

  At that instant, the small, rotting wooden structure in the middle of the hayfield burst apart in fury as the gleaming, powerful shape of the AV-8B Harrier jumpjet exploded upward.

  It rose about a hundred feet above the farm, lingered in a hover for several moments, and then, in a great burst of angry jet flame and exhaust, rocketed away to the south.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Two days later

  THE COMMANDER OF THE Long Island Self-Defense Forces lowered his NightScope binoculars and checked his watch.

  It was 2345 hours—fifteen minutes to midnight, and then six long hours to dawn. What would happen between now and sunrise was anybody’s guess. But as the commander looked down the line of his troops—most of them were working furiously to reinforce the tree-and-rubble barricade that stretched for nearly a half mile along the beach—he couldn’t help but wonder how many of them would be alive to see the sun come up.

  And then he wondered, too, if this was to be his last day.

  They were coming—everyone had convinced themselves of that one single fact. The mysterious coastal raiders, fresh from ravaging the New England coastline, were now likely to carry their campaign southward and hit Long Island. And it was here, at Montauk Point, the very northeastern tip of the island, that they would probably come ashore first.

  Not since the beginnings of the Circle War several years back had the commander seen so much apprehension—some would call it panic—affecting the population of the American East Coast as had the news of the coastal raiders. He would have thought that after more than five years of postwar instability, the American citizen would be able to handle any new threat. But if the events over the past forty-eight hours were any proof, it appeared that just the reverse was true.

  He knew it was a case of knowledge not conquering fear, and for the most part the burgeoning born-again media of the country was to blame.

  If anything, the citizens of the East Coast were better informed now than at any time since the Big War. Many local television stations were back to broadcasting regularly, and dozens of AM and FM radio stations had gone back on the air just in the past year alone. There were even a few dozen newspapers circulating in the Northeast, with many more farther south and out west.

  All of this should have served the public good: Knowledge was power, they used to say. An informed public was a courageous one.

  However, this latest threat brought with it a reputation for unmatched brutality, and the media had been playing that gruesome angle nonstop ever since Cape Cod was attacked. Certainly there were some indisputable facts: the raiders raped and killed almost indiscriminately, they could somehow mysteriously appear and then disappear apparently at will and they sometimes took young women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six.

  But from these kernels of truth, the wildest, most panic-stricken rumors had sprung up. Tales of impossible butchery, grossly inflated death counts, and outright cannibalism (sometimes while the victim was alive) abounded, fanned to flame by the various customer-hungry media machines.

  The result was that rumors were being reported as facts and facts as rumors. What was worse, it seemed as if every news broadcaster was striving to one-up the next by applying a new, more frightening twist to the story: The raiders were actually Special Forces troops being directed by the fanatical Soviet-based Red Star clique; the raiders were bloodthirsty leftovers from the recent United American campaign against the fascist white supremacist armies of the American Southwest; the raiders were radioactive mutants from the North Pole; the raiders were UFO aliens.

  Just how alarming these stories were had been proved earlier this day when a crowd of five hundred or more Long Islanders, fleeing the inevitable arrival of the raiders, attempted to cross a drawbridge down near Islip. For some reason, the drawbridge operator chose to raise his span and stop the flow. Seventy-eight people died in the ensuing stampede. The bridge operator shot himself through the head soon afterward.

  Reports of similar tragedies had been coming in ever since. Hundreds of thousands of people from New England down to the Carolinas were fleeing inland, to the mountains, to the cities, to the forests—anywhere, just as long as it was away from the coast.

  As this day—day four of the threat—grew longer, the news, as well as the rumors, only got worse. Since noontime, there had been a number of reports that oil refineries and fuel storage dumps were being blown up all across the country. Now again, a new twist was being added: the raiders weren’t just moving down the East Coast, they were everywhere.

  The problem was, these reports were true.

  More than twenty oil refineries and fuel dumps east of the Mississippi had been attacked during the day. The vast majority of these attacks, most of which involved long-range remotely operated high explosive missiles, were successful, so much so that even the most battle-hardened veterans had to admit concern.

  The coordination alone of such an enemy campaign was frightening. But so were the insidious reasons behind it. As soon as news of the fuel attacks spread, authorities immediately restricted the use of gasoline and aviation fuel for all but emergency reasons. This action in turn created more panic, as people tried to horde whatever gas supplies were left. By 6 PM eastern time, the country was caught in the grip of a major fuel crisis.

  The lack of fuel also restricted the timeliness of the response to the raiders from the central government in Washington. Knowing it was wise to conserve whatever fuel supplies they had—just in case the country was filled with fifth columnists—the United American Army was forced to march many of its troops to the coast. This would take time and careful planning as to just where these soldiers should take up positions.

  The same was true for air support. Although a dozen squadrons of UA fighter jets had been moved to bases on the East Coast, the threat to the fuel supply dictated that only the minimum of patrol craft be sent out to look for the elusive enemy.

  In the meantime, the United American army brass were urging the local militias to mount their own defenses, and this is what the Long Island Self-Defense Force was doing on the beach at Montauk on this warm night.

  They were three hundred and fifty strong, by far the best-organized, best-armed force to meet the raiders so far. But still an atmosphere of nervousness was thick in the air. Most of the LISDF militiamen were volunteers, well trained, but more used to chasing local robber gangs and highwaymen than dealing with a barbaric, seagoing army that apparentl
y could appear and vanish on a whim.

  Plus, many of them had never killed anyone before.

  The militia commander checked his watch again, and then called his first lieutenant up.

  “Have the men check their ammunition and then count off,” he told the young officer. “It’ll give them something to do and keep their minds on the job.”

  The lieutenant saluted smartly and then half ran through the beach sand back down to the beginning of the now-completed barricade. Within a minute, the commander could hear the count start up: “One … two … three …”

  Then, steeling himself against the darkness and the gloomy crash of the waves, the officer raised his infrared binoculars to his eyes and once again peered out to sea.

  The attack came twenty minutes later.

  It was the Commander who saw them first and—damn it!—it did appear as if they had just materialized on the beach.

  “They’re here,” the Commander shouted out, immediately knowing it was not the proper warning to give. He screamed: “Check ammunition loads!” as partial remedy, adding: “Fire on my command and not before!” Then he turned his attention back to the small but growing force of men approaching the barricade from the left.

  The invaders, at least two hundred of them now, were clearly walking right out of the surf. Yet impossibly, there were no landing craft in sight of the beach, nor any larger mother ships farther out to sea.

  But to his credit, the Commander knew that it was not up to him to figure out the raiders’ disappearing act. Nor did he intend to make a courageous and therefore suicidal last stand on the beach at Montauk. His orders were simple: inflict as much damage as possible on the invaders while minimizing casualties to the militia. The commander felt the first part of the order was straightforward enough; the rest however was left open for interpretation.

  In reality, the commander intended on getting two or three volleys from his men and then, if the enemy kept coming in overwhelming numbers, he planned to withdraw to secondary positions about a quarter mile away. Another two or three volleys and then another withdrawal. He would fall back like this all night if he had to—all the way to Southhampton if necessary.