“But?” Hunter asked Fitz warily.
“But other locations along the coast weren’t so lucky,” Fitz said grimly.
Fitzgerald went on to report the disturbing news that other targets along the East Coast had been attacked by the raiders the previous night: the cities of Hampton, Williamsburg, Norfolk, and Portsmouth in Old Virginia; an air base on Cape Hatteras, and the city of Wilmington in North Carolina Free State; Myrtle Beach, Charlestown, and Cape Romain in South Carolina. Nine targets in all. Some were defended by militia and regular UA troops, others were not. Casualties were very high in some remote areas, and in a few places, many hostages were taken. And from all reports, very few of the raiders were killed or captured.
Hunter was so instantly enraged he couldn’t speak for a few moments. The sheer audacity of the Norsemen was overwhelming, their brazenness extreme to the point of folly. No matter that they had been handed a defeat at Montauk and one of their subs was captured. No matter that that had failed miserably in the Milford raid. They still appeared intent on raping the American coastline with these hit-and-run battles, all while the entire country was caught up in a state of media-whipped panic and in the midst of a devastating fuel crisis.
And worst of all, for Hunter, the bastards still had Dominique and one of his best friends.
But the news of the increased attacks also told Hunter something about the enemy.
“The scope of their attacks is getting bigger every time,” he radioed Fitzgerald. “I think it means that they’re gearing up for a major strike, somewhere farther down the coast.”
“Could be,” Fitz replied. “Though that would still leave the question as to how these guys can all get together and act in unison when they claim there’s no central command point.”
“Well, that’s exactly how the old Vikings used to operate,” Hunter told him. “Very little guidance from the top. Back then, the clan elders just used to get their guys pointed in the right direction and then let ’em go.”
“It’s a fascinating way to fight a war, isn’t it?” Fitz came back. “It almost put us heroes at a disadvantage. We can’t cut the head off the snake if the snake has no head.”
“There’s something there,” Hunter radioed back, his voice almost raspy with anger. “We’ve just got to know where to look.”
A burst of static interrupted the transmission for a few seconds.
“Keep me updated, Mike,” Hunter told Fitz after the line had cleared. “I’ll contact you when I know more out here.”
Fitz added a word of luck and then signed off.
Coincidentally, at that moment, Hunter saw the RPV take a turn to the north and then settle into a flight path that would take it right in line with the seemingly innocent-looking fishing boat.
Hunter was expecting the vehicle’s mothership to be something a little more elaborate, but already he could see the crew raising its fishing net and positioning it as retrieval barrier.
Ritually tapping his flight suit’s breast pocket—the place where he kept a small tattered American flag wrapped around photo of Dominique—he felt a surge of adrenaline roar through him. Instantly, he hit his throttles and put the jumpjet into a screeching climb.
Time to get some answers he thought grimly.
Chapter Thirty
ELIZABETH SANDLAKE ROLLED OVER and briefly admired the naked body of the beautiful Spanish woman lying next to her.
The woman’s name was Juanita Juarez and she belonged to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth ran her hand up the lovely dark skin of the woman’s thighs, over her tight stomach and around her full breasts. Her fingers lightly touched the dark beauty’s face and caressed her hair.
What woman would not want to sleep with such a beautiful creature? Elizabeth thought.
She’s the next best thing … Elizabeth found herself thinking.
But in the next moment, she felt all traces of pleasantness wash out of her.
Her head hurt and her stomach was growling. She could feel another brutal hangover coming on. Her own long hair was a jumble of tangles and one touch of her face proved her carefully applied makeup was now smeared and runny.
Looking around in the dim light of the sub’s perfume-drenched cabin, she saw that the place was in an outrageous state of disarray. Beside the bed she shared with the sleeping woman were three empty myx bottles. A fourth had been spilled sometime during the night and had soaked a large part of the cabin floor. Lying right next to this pool of red liquor was the discarded fighter pilot’s flight suit; it too was covered with myx stains.
The pilot’s helmet and a ceremonial male organ modality were also lying nearby.
The night before had been wild—too wild.
The hallucinogenic liquor had flowed more freely than at any other time since she’d been aboard the sleek submarine, known as Fire Bats Nord, or Four Boats—North. Her fragile memory told her that no less than seven women had romped in the bed with her and Juanita the night before, taking turns wearing both the pilot’s suit and the dildo. At the time, it had been pure unadulterated erotic pleasure. Now, with the onslaught of the morning after, Elizabeth was beginning to regret it all.
This can’t go on much longer, she thought as she rolled over and begged her head to stop aching.
Elizabeth was quite insane—but her madness was of a most peculiar nature. True, it was a debilitating, self-destructive psychosis. But she nevertheless willingly gave herself to it. Messianic and nymphomanic, obsessive and schizophrenic, megalomanic and paranoid, Elizabeth had enough loose ends to stock an entire ward of lunatics. But she was not at the mercy of this multilevel complex—she reveled in it.
That was, after all, the best part of the insanity.
She was an educated woman—she held a Ph.D. in the esoteric study of Deep Zone Archeology. But she also had minored in psychology, so she had long ago recognized exactly what was wrong with her and how she had come by the affliction. It was the result her being held in total isolation in deep caves in the Yucatan by the gold-hungry Canal Nazis of the Twisted Cross. It was a simple snap she had felt in her brain that fateful night while locked in the deepest depths of a cavern beneath an ancient Mayan pyramid. After that, her entire life changed.
Now, she wanted nothing less than to rule the world.
Several minutes went by, during which Elizabeth’s headache throbbed to new heights of agony.
She turned once again toward the naked Juanita, who was just coming out of her myx-induced slumber. A warm caress of the Spanish woman’s lovely body eased Elizabeth’s pain a bit, a respite she eagerly prayed would continue.
Despite the perpetual red haze of her days and nights, Elizabeth did not consider her attraction to Juanita to be part of her madness. As it was, the Spanish beauty had come to her at precisely the right time in her life, the moment when her brief reign of power at the Canadian fortress was at its peak. It was no exaggeration to say that Elizabeth had been an actual queen there—her subjects being a volatile mix of escaped supercriminals, Amazonian women fighters, and the hired guns of the Guardians. And although the Americans and Canadians had brought the regime to a quick and bitter end, it was not totally unexpected. Ever prepared, Elizabeth, Juanita, and two bodyguards were miles away from the place five minutes after the first shots were fired.
So it was with fondness and memories that she gazed upon the nude form of Juanita. The woman had been involved in the notorious Knights of the Burning Cross fiasco before finding her way to the secret Canadian fortress. Upon arriving, Elizabeth had quickly laid claim to her, especially after hearing that Juanita had been erotically involved with Hawk Hunter prior to her fleeing the American Southwest for the wilds of Alberta.
This had made a very important connection in Elizabeth’s mind; Hunter was a big part of her distorted world, too. After all, it was he who had bravely rescued her from the Canal Nazis. (As a reward she had offered herself to him in many different ways, but, though tempted, he never took her up on any of them.) Then, when she a
ttempted to assassinate the traitorous ex-vice president of the United States as part of her plan to take over America, it had been Hunter who grabbed her gun and saved her from being shot by security forces.
But it was also Hunter who had led the attack on her fortress, thus ending her brief reign as Queen of the Alberta wilderness. However, even amongst her jumbled brain fibers, she knew she had just about dared Hunter to come. After all, what other reason had she for kidnapping his celebrity girlfriend and imprisoning her in the fortress? And why had she arranged to have Hunter’s precious F-16 XL stolen as well?
There was something about this Wingman—something that despite her madness she couldn’t deny. She knew that he, above others, represented the biggest obstacle in her path to rule America and, eventually, the world. Yet her soul still burned in passionate desire for him. For many nights on end, she and Juanita had lain her bed chamber, deep within the fortress, performing various sex acts on each other while the Spanish beauty regaled her with detailed tales of sex and hypnotism with the famous pilot. These kiss-and-tell sessions had Elizabeth walking around in an orgasmic fog for weeks, intensified as they were by the fact that Hunter’s actual girlfriend was imprisoned close by in the tower of the castle. Perhaps it was for this reason that Elizabeth never revealed herself directly to this Dominique during her captivity at the fortress.
Later on, after she and Juanita escaped and entered into the long, preplanned negotiating sessions with the Norsemen, she had devised the Sapphic Fighter Pilot “substitute” ritual, to the utter delight of the lovely, sex-starved Norse wenches the raiders kept on board the Fire Bats. And even though the distractions were many in the midst of these orgies, Elizabeth still found herself thinking about Hunter during the long, astonishingly carnal nights.
Juanita was fully awake now and Elizabeth was quick to order her to kiss her entire body—slowly, starting at the toes and working her way up in an attempt to drive off the hangover. The Spanish beauty sleepily obliged.
As she felt Juanita’s warm tongue pass up one ankle and down the other, Elizabeth’s mind felt clear enough for her to consider the day ahead.
It would be a particularly busy twenty-four hours. As soon as she was able, she would be briefed by the captain of the submarine on the results of the many raids carried out by the Norse troopships the night before. Then she had to prepare three coded messages that would be bounced off a satellite and beamed to several points around the globe. One would be sent back to Norway. Another would go to Central America.
The third, and most important, would be beamed to a warship sailing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, half a world away.
Then she would be briefed by radio by the captains of the other three Fire Bats, they being her closest conspirators in her wild, all-encompassing scheme.
Only then would she be prepared for the most important event of the day: her trip to the Great Ship, the Stor Skute.
She wriggled with delight as Juanita’s tongue finally reached her pubic area and then began a long slow trip to her heaving breasts. Her hangover was now a thing of the past. Her spirits were boosting to manic heights. If all was successful this day, she thought, especially aboard the Stor Skute, then perhaps when she returned to the sub, she could convince Juanita to climb back into the fighter pilot’s uniform and pick up where they had left off the night before.
Chapter Thirty-one
THE RETRIEVAL OF THE RPV had gone remarkably smoothly for the crew of the fishing boat.
They had erected the net barrier, caught and secured the drone, and gotten underway again, all within fifteen minutes’ time. And best of all, they had completed their critical covert mission without being spotted.
Or so they thought.
The RPV itself returned in good shape; it had sustained no damage despite being so close to the spot where the massive shells had exploded on Slaughter Beach. Its TV nose camera had worked perfectly, sending back live pictures from the Delaware beach which, in turn, were relayed instantaneously to the ordnance-men on the mothership a farther twenty-five miles from the target. With the RVP’s cameras providing the long-distance eye-in-the-sky, coordinates had been instantly calculated and the extremely high-explosive shells deposited exactly on the spot.
Now the fishing-boat captain was straining his vessel’s engines to their breaking point. It was especially important for him to reach the mothership as quickly as possible as it would soon be sailing farther south. It was a journey that the fishing boat would have to make also, and the captain had no intention of going it alone.
It was close to 9 AM when the fishing-boat captain spotted the outline of the massive cloud of mist and steam on the horizon.
He let out a breath of relief and then called down to his three-man crew to stow all their phony fishing gear. There was no further need to keep up their disguise as peaceful, innocent trawlers. Now they could return to their real world, that of sea going warriors.
Inside the half-mile-long, man-made cloud sat the mothership. Generated of nothing more than heated seawater, the “smokescreen” wrapped a protective envelope around the vessel anytime a fog bank was not available to do so. While the screen would not fool any enemy on a clear day such as this, it did serve to hide the precise location of the ship within. And preserving the secret of the mothership was the highest priority.
Once the fishing boat was within ten miles of the cloud of vapor, the captain sent out a message in Morse code via the powerful lantern located on his stern. He smiled again when the message was quickly acknowledged.
“Wine and hot bread are waiting for you” the message had said.
For the captain of the fishing boat, there were no better words in the entire world.
Once again he called down to his crew, telling them that they should prepare to tie up to the mothership. The captain was well aware that his men were now going about their tasks with speed and renewed enthusiasm. They, too, were glad to be home.
With one last check of his instruments, the captain slowed his speed to one-third and turned the boat slightly to the north, lining it up with the mothership’s strobe light blinking invitingly through the man-made mist of gloom.
Thirty seconds later, the fishing boat entered the artificial fog bank. Ten seconds after that, the captain heard the sound of a jet engine …
Hunter couldn’t help but stare at his main TV screen in disbelief.
The signals being provided by the AAS-38 pod slung under the jumpjet’s left wing were creating an image on the screen that was both amazing and baffling. The FLIR device—as in Forward-Looking Infra-Red—used thermal imaging to find targets at night or in bad weather. Heat thrown off by the target was detected and processed into a remarkably sharp TV picture, similar to infra-red NightScope binoculars.
But the picture that was being bounced back to Hunter at this moment seemed so unbelievable that he thought the FLIR system itself was out of whack.
The target that was registering five thousand feet below amongst the murk of the obviously man-made fog screen was an enormous vessel. Guns of all sizes seemed to poke out of every available space from stem to stern and it carried more than a few missile launchers—both SAM’s and ship-to-ship. There were even indications of torpedo tubes both amidships and in the rear. Above it all was jungle of radar and radio antennas that covered the top of the ship’s superstructure. Yet strangely, none of them were activated at the moment.
More mysterious was the fact that while the heat image was more or less uniform above and below the decks of the ship—indicating the vessel was crammed with much sophisticated electronic and communications equipment—there was a large evenly spaced “cool” spot running along the entire deck itself. This indicated to Hunter that the deck was made of nothing more high-tech than wooden planks.
But it was the outline of the entire ship that he found unbelievable. He knew what kind of a ship it was right away—its profile was unmistakable. What astonished him was that he—like many others—had
believed no ship like this was left on the planet.
He had assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that all the US Navy’s massive battleships had been lost long ago.
Suddenly it seemed as if every warning light on Hunter’s cockpit panel came on at once.
One moment he was flying undetected high above the artificial fog bank, in the next his Harrier jumpjet was being “painted” by at least three blazing threat-warning radars. Already, as many as a half-dozen smaller SAM acquisition radars were locking in on him, as were twice as many antiaircraft guns.
Everything his instruments were telling him indicated that within three to five seconds, the air around him would be filled with so many missiles and AA shells that even the best of pilots would not survive.
But he was better than the best.
Within a micro-second of the first warning, Hunter had gone on the offensive. In the snap of a switch he had armed his twin Aden cannon pods, putting hundreds of 30mm cannon shells at the ready. In the flick of a button, he likewise activated his pair of wingtip-mounted Matra 155 twin rocket launchers, as well the single Harpoon antiship missile he carried under his right wing.
As predicted, four heartbeats later, the air was filled with hundreds of deadly AA shells and four screaming SA-2 missiles homing in on the strong radar signal of the Harrier.
All of them missed.
Hunter had already yanked back on the jumpjet’s vertical thrusters, literally bringing the Harrier to a screeching halt. From this position he watched as all of the high-tech flack passed through the airspace where he would have been if he hadn’t slammed on the brakes.
“OK,” he whispered, jamming the thruster controls back into the full-forward flight position as the deadly storm of missiles and shells abruptly stopped. “Now it’s my turn …”
The captain of the fishing boat had to hold his fingers in his ears to block out the roar of the jet engine that had suddenly become so excruciatingly loud.
Looking up through the cloud of mist and steam in no small terror, he searched in vain for the source of the banshee-like engine shriek. But he could see nothing other than the gigantic outline of the battleship and the dirty brown contrails left over from the four automatic, but obviously unsuccessful, SAM launches just seconds before.
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