Skyfire

by Maloney, Mack;

The woman raised her hand as indication that the men should be still.

  “I will not argue philosophy with you now,” she said, her voice becoming strangely calm. “What we must talk about is how this action will affect our plans.”

  “It shouldn’t affect them at all, my lady,” the boldest of the six men told her. “We’ll make sure your orders are transmitted to the appropriate people and that the troops continue their actions just as you prescribed. The American skraelings will not be prepared for them every time they strike. In the meantime, we will pursue our own agenda.”

  “But now they know how we—and the troopships—all travel,” the woman told him angrily.

  “This is regrettably true, my lady,” the man pressed on. “But tracking and finding us or the troopships will still be very difficult for them. Even before the Big War, submarines proved very elusive. The superpowers spent much time and money trying to discover better ways to track submerged warships, and—”

  “Do you pretend to lecture me on military history?” the woman interrupted.

  “No … not at all, my lady,” the man quickly answered. “I was just reviewing the facts of the past …”

  “Forget the past,” she told him harshly. “We must plan for the future. We must keep our schedule or risk the consequences.”

  “We are dedicated to just that, my lady,” one of the men concluded nervously.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  THE SMALL, GERMAN-BUILT CL-91 “Mini-Drone” RPV skimmed over the tops of the waves forty-four miles off the coast of Cape Cod, its remotely controlled flight systems performing flawlessly despite the turbulent air directly above the rough seas.

  The RPV had been in the air almost three hours now and was quickly reaching the end of its fuel reserves. Sensing this, the drone’s minicomputer flight control system began transmitting a series of short electromagnetic bursts. Thirty seconds later, these homing signals acquired their mark. Instantly processing the return signal, the RPV deftly dropped its left wing and turned to a more northeasterly course. Within another minute, it had locked on to its “home base.”

  Ten miles away, a seemingly innocuous fishing boat was undergoing a startling transformation. With speed and agility that comes only from many hours of practice, three members of its four-man crew hauled a section of fishing net up to a point twenty feet above the deck. Attaching one side to the fully extended deck crane and the other to a special set of clasps along the boat’s main boom, the crew had, in effect, quickly constructed what was known in RPV lingo as a “vertical retrieval barrier.”

  Overseeing the operation from the bridge was the boat’s captain. Once the net was up and secured, he turned the seventy-five foot boat into the wind and then settled down in front of fourteen-inch CRT display. After flipping three switches, he waited as the ghostly video image of his own vessel—shot by the camera mounted on the nose of the RPV now just six miles away—slowly appeared on the TV screen.

  Now begins the hard part, he thought.

  Jockeying a small lever that was linked to the RPV’s guidance computer below decks, the captain gingerly lined up the outline of his boat with the middle of the TV screen. The video image flickered occasionally for the next minute as the captain steered the small airplane toward the fishing-net retrieval barrier erected by the crew.

  So far, so good.

  Another minute went by and then the RPV reached the crucial “five-mile away” point. Instantly, the RPV’s on-board flight system shut down the craft’s engine, knocking its flight path slightly off kilter. More juggling of the joystick by the captain brought the RPV back to level.

  All of the small aircraft’s critically sensitive video systems “locked down” at two miles out, the last step before the retrieval attempt. The TV image quickly faded from the captain’s screen as the RPV’s video camera clicked off, but by this time, he didn’t need the electronic visual aid. Looking out the bridge window, he had no trouble picking up the shape of the green-and-brown RPV as it streaked right toward him.

  Ten seconds later, the RPV flew right into the center of the raised net. With a whistle of relief, the captain yelled down to his crew to secure the aircraft and lower the net as quickly as possible.

  Within forty-five seconds, they had done so. The whole operation had lasted less than 10 minutes.

  A half hour later, the crew was gathered around the captain’s monitor, sharing a pot of coffee.

  The captain inserted the RPV’s videotape cassette into his playback machine and pushed the appropriate buttons. A color bar appeared on the screen, and the officer quickly adjusted the videotape to the proper hue and tint. Then, after another few moments of knob twisting, he hit the machine’s Play button.

  The first few seconds of the videotape featured nothing more than footage of the ocean rushing beneath the RPV as it headed for the Cape Cod coastline. Still, this sequence indicated that the RPV’s cameras had clicked on at the proper time and that they had done so in sharp focus.

  “Looks like it could be a good take,” the captain said in a tone slightly more upbeat than his usual somberness. “Image is clear. The color’s good. Zoom facility working OK.”

  “Here comes the coastline now,” one of the crewmen said.

  At that point, the men put down their coffee cups and drew their chairs up closer to the TV. Two of them began to take notes, while a third operated a stopwatch.

  The tape showed the RPV streaking over the coastline at precisely noon, exactly the time dictated by its preprogrammed flight sequence. As soon as it reached the beach, it climbed slightly to clear a long cliff that ran parallel to the shoreline, a place the captain knew was called Nauset Heights. Reaching its prescribed height, the RPV then flew over an abandoned farmhouse and several recently cut hayfields before turning north, toward the small seaport of Nauset itself.

  Any doubt that the destruction of the village had been anything but complete was dispelled by the videotape. Few houses in the small town were left intact, and many continued to smolder, now more than two days after the attack. The men watching the TV had seen the pattern before.

  “They did their jobs well this time, the bastards,” the captain said, his voice thick with contempt.

  The RPV went into a wide circle over the village at this point, providing various angles to the ruins of the small Cape Cod seaport.

  “Looks like they used mostly rockets and automatic weapons,” the captain said, studying the tape with a well-trained eye. “Not so much evidence of napalm or even flamethrowers this time.”

  “Time at one minute and thirty right now,” the man working the stopwatch said. “The wide-angle sweep should commence at any moment.”

  A few seconds later, the image on the screen flickered slightly, indicating that the RPV’s on-board computer had ordered it to break from its circling pattern over the village and climb for a wider view.

  Now, as the angle widened, the crewmen were able to see that two paths of destruction led out from the outskirts of the village, one to the north and one to the south.

  “No doubt they landed two roaming parties,” the captain commented. “Thirty to forty men each, burning and killing as they went. You can see where one unit swept north and the other tried to go south.”

  “Coming up on the impact site in five seconds, sir,” the stopwatch operator said.

  Now the captain leaned forward with the rest of the men. The next sequence would be the most important part of the tape.

  The image flickered again as the RPV went into a preprogrammed descent and turned slightly northwest of the village.

  “There it is, sir!” one of the crewman said excitedly. “God, it looks like a direct hit …”

  The captain put his hand to his chin and watched the next ten seconds of the poststrike reconnaissance videotape very closely. The blackened, smoking trail of destruction caused by the raiding party heading south came to an abrupt halt at the edge of an enormous crater. Where once a high sand dune stood, now the
re was nothing but a monstrous chasm. The massive hole—it was more than one hundred yards across and at least fifty feet deep—was still smoking, too, the sand at its bottom and along its rim black and scorched. There was also evidence of many seared bones and skulls.

  “It was a direct hit …” the captain said with a tone of satisfaction. “And it appears to have wiped out that entire raiding party.”

  He quickly hit the freeze-frame button on the playback machine and then slowly advanced the tape in order to get a better look at the crater.

  “Twenty-four miles away and we can still hit them that hard,” he whispered, almost to himself.

  They watched the replay of the crater sequence several more times before the captain finally relaxed. Leaning back in his chair, the captain’s face creased in the new lines of an unlikely smile.

  “Yes, my friends,” he said in a reverent, hushed tone, “They are finally beginning to feel our sting.”

  A short time later, the fishing boat was underway again.

  Steering their vessel due east, out into the open Atlantic, they sailed for four hours through increasingly rough seas and in and out of several squalls.

  By dusk, they were within ten miles of their destination, and with the coming of night, the sea had settled down to an eerie calm. The captain reduced his speed to one half and allowed the comforting dusk to engulf the fishing boat.

  Their home was coming into view now, but in the fading light, the crewmen could just barely see the outline of the warship’s massive guns.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  YAZ WOKE UP TO the sounds of a raven crying.

  His entire body ached so much, even opening his eyelids was a major discomfort. Then, after he was finally able to blink a few times, he found his vision to be blurry. More blinking cleared it up to the point that he could see his surroundings. But this turned out to be the most painful part of all.

  He was inside a tiny room—though “glorified closet” would be a better description. The place was so small, his rusting, squeaky bunkbed just barely fit. All four walls plus the ceiling and the floor were painted in sickly dull gray, the only deviation being the red-paint drawing of a bird just above the room’s only door.

  A half-filled glass of water was on the floor next to the bunk, as was a piece of crusty bread. Yaz’s clothes—the army fatigues he was wearing the night he was captured—were rolled in a ball and wedged between his bunk and the wall. What he was wearing at the moment was a cross between a hospital gown and a very cheesy bathrobe.

  His stomach ached worst of all—he was sure he hadn’t eaten in at least three days, maybe more. Yet, the piece of stale bread looked anything but inviting. He was sick to his stomach not so much from hunger but from the stench of the cabin itself. It smelled like the dirtiest locker room in the world.

  Despite being unconscious for most of the past forty-eight hours, it wasn’t hard for Yaz to recall just how he had gotten into this predicament. The raiders invaded Nauset Heights less than an hour after Hunter had left to investigate the explosions down in the village. The invaders had come so quickly and in such large numbers—more than forty strong—that Yaz never had a chance to fend them off.

  As it was, he considered himself lucky to be alive.

  The raiders looked as if they had just walked Dungeons & Dragons horror movie—grizzled, heavily scarred faces, many of them carrying battle-axes that were smeared with dried blood. They had surrounded the farmhouse before he even knew it, and by a series of crude hand gestures, had communicated to him that they would burn down the house if he and Dominique didn’t surrender.

  At the time, Yaz still wanted to fight, thinking he could hold them off with his M-16 on the chance that Hunter would return just in time to save the day. But Dominique told him no. If they were going to die, she said, she could not bear to see the farmhouse go up at the same time.

  So they gave up.

  Their captors were immediately struck by Dominique’s beauty and this, Yaz told himself over and over, was the real reason he was still alive. From the looks of the men in the raiding party, killing and raping went with the job. Yet, their leader, a man who had only one arm and one ear, instantly recognized that Dominique was much too beautiful to be ravaged then and there. Instead, she was gently bound and gagged and then thrown over the shoulder of the raiding party’s strongest member. Yaz, on the other hand, was trussed up with long strands of twine and forced to tramp along like a dog on a leash.

  They had descended Nauset Cliff down to the beach and were picked up by a small motorboat that had been commandeered by other raiders. Meanwhile, they could hear the battle back in the village going full blast. In fact, Yaz had not only heard the tremendous explosion on the side of the sand dune, he had felt the shock wave of it as well, even though he had been a good two miles away at the time.

  From the motorboat they were transferred to a kind of transparent rubber raft, one that for all the world looked invisible when riding atop the water at night. In a second, Yaz knew that the see-through raft was the reason the raiders had been able to give the illusion that they could materialize right out of the surf.

  But the biggest surprise was to come.

  When Yaz first saw the submarine he thought he was going to faint. Being a former US Navy submariner himself, he was very familiar with submersibles. But never in his dreams did he think he would ever see a sub as gigantic as the one the raiders brought them to.

  His astonishment didn’t last long, however. As soon as they were brought down into the sub’s control room, Yaz was struck by its total lack of sophistication. Judging from the absence of even the most rudimentary safety and backup systems, he was beginning to wonder how the boat could stay afloat, never mind travel under the water.

  At that point, the man who appeared to be in charge of the sub gave Dominique the onceover. Then, with a jerk of his thumb, he ordered his men to take her away, which they did with as much poise as they could muster.

  Yaz, in turn, was thrown into a cramped and clammy compartment that held about fifty terrified civilians, all of them women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six, and many of them from the village of Nauset.

  The way things were going, he began to believe that he would be kept inside this crowded room forever. Yet his stay there was surprisingly brief. After only two hours—during which he had traded stories with the women—two guards came for him. He was brought to a man who apparently served as the boat’s doctor (though he was as crude and scarred as his comrades), was given a mug of liquid and told to drink. The barrel of the physician’s machine gun convinced Yaz that he was indeed thirsty, and drink he did.

  He was unconscious ten seconds later.

  He reckoned by the growth of his beard that he’d been out for more than two days. Now, with his headache receding, his nose adjusting to the stench, and his stomach starting to grumble, the piece of stale bread was beginning to look pretty good.

  He was about to reach for it—just to determine how inedible it really was—when the door of the cabin suddenly flew open and six armed men barged in. Without a word they dragged him from the bed and marched him through a series of passageways that eventually led to the sub’s control room.

  Along the route, Yaz couldn’t help but notice that the lightbulbs illuminating the corridors were getting dimmer by the moment. He was also vaguely aware that the sub was listing to one side. And while the sound of the vessel’s power plant operation was roaring unimpeded in the background, the sub itself was moving very, very slowly.

  They reached the crowded control room to find that the place was in state of pandemonium. Everyone was jabbering at everyone else and speaking so fast in their indecipherable language that all Yaz could make out was an occasional ya! and na! here and there.

  The man he assumed was the captain of the ship was at the center of the confusion. One moment he appeared as if he were in deep discussion with one or two others; the next he was slapping some underling across t
he face. All the while he was eating a leg of lamb and washing down the huge greasy bites with some kind of sticky red fluid from a tarnished chalicelike cup.

  Yaz’s guards shoved several of the control-room men out of the way, and with a burst of chatter, made Yaz’s presence known to the captain. The man turned and looked Yaz right in the eyes. Yaz simply stared back. The only thing he could say for the man was that his face was less broken, less scarred, and less weathered than the others. His hair was also somewhat shorter, and his beard was fairly combed and trimmed.

  He also spoke some English.

  “I hear you know submarines,” he said to Yaz in a deep, thick accent.

  “Who says?” Yaz replied.

  “Your woman tells us this,” the man stated matter-of-factly. “She says you are a genius in this regard.”

  Yaz shook his head. There was a slight chance that this man did not smell as bad as the others.

  “She is not ‘my woman,’ ” he said, wanting to get the record straight right away. “But she is a very close friend to a very good friend of mine. If any harm comes to her, I will kill the man responsible.”

  Yaz had unconsciously tensed his shoulders as he said all this, part of him suspecting that he was about to be dispatched by a battle-axe from behind at any second.

  But the captain simply waved away his threat. “If she is not your woman, then you shouldn’t be so concerned about her,” he said, rather nonchalantly.

  Yaz was stumped for a counterreply. It was obvious the captain had other things on his mind.

  “Now I ask you …” the man said, tearing a gristle-packed piece of meat from the greasy bone, “Do you know submarines?”

  “I’ve done some time in them,” Yaz replied simply.

  “Just riding, or working them?”

  Yaz shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

  The captain looked around at the gang of smelly, bearded men that had formed a circle around the conversation.

  “The difference is your life,” he said, his yumping-yippedy tone turning dead serious. “And possibly the life of your friend’s woman.