Skyfire

by Maloney, Mack;

  “We just have to assume they have spies everywhere,” Jones told him. “Any major activity at this base, or the smaller ones we’ve set up down the coast, would tip them that we know they’re coming soon. So everything, everywhere is under a blackout.”

  “Plus we’ve got the Football City Rangers out on perimeter patrol,” Fitz added. “If there is anyone out there, they’ll take them out, quickly and quietly.”

  They reached the hangar and slipped inside. The place was illuminated only by dim red-tinted bulbs, ones that cast no shadows.

  Hunter instantly took note of the dozen A-10’s stored inside the aircraft barn. The squat but powerful Thunderbolts were painted in the light gray-and-blue camouflage scheme more appropriate in the overcast skies of Europe than sun-drenched Florida.

  Beyond the line of A-10’s there was a row of A-4 Skyhawks, the well-respected, tough little fighter bomber of the Vietnam era. Farther down the line were a half dozen A-7 Strikefighters, another rugged attack aircraft of Navy origin. There were also three F-4 Phantoms sitting in the rear of the hangar.

  “We’ve been able to muster three squadrons in all,” Jones told Hunter. “Fifty-four aircraft, total. Most are scattered down the coast. These airplanes here will be responsible for our northern flank up here in the Jacksonville area.”

  Walking beyond the line of attack planes, Hunter noticed more than a dozen large stacks covered in black canvas tarp.

  “Here’s a good example of what we’ll be dropping on our friends,” Fitz said.

  He removed the first tarp to reveal a neatly stacked pile of Mk-20 Rockeye cluster bombs.

  Hunter felt an involuntary shiver run through him; he knew what a cluster bomb could do. When a cluster bomb—known as a CBU—exploded it sent out dozens of flaming pieces of high-speed shrapnel in every direction.

  “The whole idea will be to hit these guys as soon as they come ashore,” Jones explained. “Now from what we know about them, the Norsemen tend to stay together in clumps as they move toward their target. Drop one of these in the middle of one of their gangs and you’ll shred the whole lot of them.”

  “And we’ve rigged up a system in which each airplane, whether its a Bolt, an A-7, or an A-4 can carry twelve CBU’s apiece,” Fitz added.

  They moved to the next stack. Fitz removed its covering to reveal several dozen M116 AZ firebombs.

  “Obviously napalm is tailor-made for this operation,” Jones explained.

  Hunter nodded grimly. The M116 was the granddaddy of all napalm bombs. It was 137 inches long and about 18 inches in diameter. Inside it contained no less than 110 gallons of the deadly gelatin gasoline. On impact, the fiery Jell-O would splash over three hundred feet or more, sticking to and burning anything it touched, from wood to metal to skin.

  “We’ll put these on the F-4’s,” Fitz said. “They’re the best platform for the job.”

  Once uncovered, Hunter saw the third stack was made up of a grab-bag of weapons, including everything from AGM-65 Mavericks to Mk-82 general-purpose bombs.

  “We’ll hit them with this stuff once everything else is gone,” Jones explained. “That is, if we need to …”

  Farther down toward the end of the hangar, a crew of gun mechanics were preparing ammunition belts for the attack planes. The A-7 Strikefighters were fitted with M61 20mm cannon, as were the F-4’s and the A-4’s. It was the A-10 that carried the biggest gun in town, though. The ’Bolts lugged around the enormous GAU-8/A GE Gatling gun, by far the largest weapon of its type ever installed in an airplane of its type. It was the ammunition for this monster that the gun crews were preparing.

  “We’re loading them up with HE and incendiary mix shells,” Fitz explained, picking up one of the GAU gun shells and handing it to Hunter. The cannon round was more than eleven inches long and weighed a hefty two pounds. Each A-10 would carry 1,350 of these rounds into the battle, each one fitted with an M505A3 impact fuse. The punch supplied by these rounds was more suited to ripping open tanks and armored vehicles. On the human body, they would be simply devastating.

  Hunter shook his head soberly.

  “It’s going to be a wholesale slaughter,” Fitz said, almost to himself. “God, I thought we’d be beyond all this by now.”

  Jones nodded grimly. “I know these are horrible weapons,” he said. “Especially against such an undisciplined opponent. But, let’s face it, we can’t get sentimental at this point. These guys have to be stopped—cold.”

  Hunter suddenly flashed on a mental image of Dominique’s lovely face and felt a familiar pang of dogged rage thump in his chest.

  “My thoughts exactly,” he replied quickly.

  The three men then left the hangar, and Hunter was shown to his overnight quarters. With the crunch of activity aboard the New Jersey—especially the twenty-four hour period that he and Wolf did nothing but listen in on the Norsemen’s pre-attack radio broadcasts—he hadn’t slept a wink in the past three days. Though that was not unusual for him—he could stay up for many days on end once his adrenaline got pumping—Hunter knew that he had to get sleep eventually so he’d be on top of things once the bullets started flying.

  But although the small overnight room located in the base’s sick bay featured a comfortable bunk and a large fan to ward off the Florida heat, he couldn’t go to sleep.

  His head was filled with too many thoughts of the past few days. From the attack on Cape Cod, to the action off Montauk, to the battle on Slaughter Beach, to his contact with the USS New Jersey. All of it seemed so compressed in time and space it was almost like a dream.

  Then he closed his eyes and once again saw the face of Dominique. With that pleasant antidote to soothe him, he quickly dropped off into a restful slumber.

  It would be his last for a long time to come.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Aboard the Great Ship

  DOMINIQUE WAS STILL GROGGY when the handmaidens awakened her.

  Her throat was parched, her vision slightly blurry, and there was a low ringing in her ears—all side effects, she knew, of ingesting a large quantity of the myx. But there was also a pleasantly warm sensation still lingering between her upper thighs as well as around her nipples, and when she closed her eyes, it felt like her whole body was tingling with the last strains of excitement.

  Grudgingly, she concluded that a hangover caused by the Norsemen’s hallucinogenic liquor was not the worst thing to wake up to.

  Although the female attendants could barely speak English, they made it quite plain that they intended on bathing and dressing Dominique very quickly. She was led to the already-filled tub in the room next to her palatial cabin, washed, dried, and anointed with perfumes, all in a matter of five minutes. Dressing in a functional, all-white jumpsuit took only another minute, as did the lacing up of what could only be described as designer combat boots.

  Within fifteen minutes of waking, Dominique was standing in the Great Ship’s control room, watching as Verden and his son Thorgils completed their morning prayer ritual.

  “She is here,” Thorgils whispered to his father, as the old man finished his meditation with a low, moaning wail.

  The old man creased his wrinkled face and looked Dominique up and down.

  “Do you remember last night?” he asked her, his voice deep and solemn beneath the thick Norwegian accent.

  She simply nodded, the very thought of the strange, autoerotic episode sending another wave of pleasure throughout her sensory system.

  Verden’s eyes twinkled slightly, but then he lowered them and became deadly serious. “That was in preparation for the work you must do for me this day.”

  At that moment, Dominique noticed that a submarine had surfaced and was waiting near the bow of the Great Ship.

  The sub wasn’t anything like the kind the Norsemen used to carry their troops to battle. It was smaller, sleeker, and painted in shiny black with wild red designs that led up to the frighteningly realistic Migardsom monster head on its bow.

&n
bsp; “You must go with Thorgils, and quickly,” Verden told her, first pointing to his son and then to the nearby sub. “We are planning the biggest attack of this war and you must be present, or all may be lost …”

  Dominique slowly shook her head.

  “I do not understand,” she said in a voice not much more than a whisper.

  Verden looked up at her, all moisture gone now from his tired eyes.

  “As my Valkyrie, you must observe my men in battle,” he told her somberly. “You must see what I cannot. You must hear the sounds that will not reach my ears.

  “You must tell me who will live and who will die.”

  Once again, Dominique shook her head. But before she could speak again, Verden held up his hand.

  “I have spoken,” he said with deep finality. It was important to him that Dominique leave the ship before Elizabeth realized it, for he was certain the witch would want to claim his beautiful Valkyrie for her own. “Go now with my son,” he continued. “He will explain any questions you might have. That boat you see is the fastest one we have, but you must leave immediately so that you will be there when the battle commences.”

  With that, Verden made a sweep with his hand, and then closed his eyes and began to weep softly. Dominique was then gently nudged by two of Thorgils’s personal bodyguards and led to the bow of the Great Ship. Within a few minutes, she was riding one of the accursed see-through life rafts over to the waiting sub, Thorgils and his two grim-faced bodyguards sharing the short, stomach-churning trip with her.

  Climbing down inside the conning tower, Dominique quickly realized that this submarine was nothing like the Norse tubs she’d been in before.

  “We must go at full speed all day to reach the battle area in time,” Thorgils told the commander of the boat once they had reached the control room.

  The sub’s master quickly consulted a sophisticated TV radar read-out screen attached to the control-room wall. He lingered at it long enough for Dominique to determine that the sub was about two hundred miles off the coast of Florida. The man then checked the control room’s clock which read 0700 hours.

  “We should be on station with an hour to spare,” the captain told Thorgils.

  “I pray that we are,” Thorgils replied. Then he turned back to Dominique and, taking her by the arm, led her away from the control room.

  “Come with me,” he told her roughly.

  As they walked down the long corridor, Dominique could hear the sub’s engines crack to life. Within seconds, she felt the familiar sensation of submerging and moving beneath the surface of the water. But unlike the other Viking subs she’d been on, this one seemed to move through the water like ice on glass. She correctly attributed this to the sub’s sleek design, a shape more reminiscent of prewar vessels than the lumbering, monstrous Norse Krig Bats.

  Everything inside the sub appeared to be high tech, from the steering and navigation equipment to the lighting and vent systems. There was no reek of body odor on this boat. Even the crew members she saw looked high-tech. No scruffy beards or dirty uniforms for these men. Each one was smartly dressed in a neat black uniform, complete with heavy boots and a red beret.

  Thorgils led her to the door of a small cabin at the end of the passageway and dismissing his bodyguards with a curt salute, he not too gently pushed her inside.

  The room was luxurious compared to the cabins she’d been kept in aboard the larger Norse subs. This room featured a bed, a small galley, and a locker full of unmarked can goods.

  “We have much to do,” Thorgils told Dominique once they entered the room. “You must be prepared to carry out the wishes of my father.”

  Dominique sat on the edge of the bed, now showing none of the pleasing aftereffects of the myx. She felt tired, and caught herself trembling slightly. It was the uncertainty of what lay ahead that was causing the tremors. Although her experience aboard the Great Ship had been bizarre, at least she had felt a certain sense of security there. Now she was riding a warship right into what Verden claimed would be the biggest action so far by the Norsemen against the United Americans. And just what her role in the upcoming battle was supposed to be, she didn’t have a clue.

  Thorgils produced a well-worn notebook from his uniform pocket and opened it to page one.

  “These are the instructions for a Valkyrie,” he told her gruffly, obviously not relishing the task of explaining it all to her. “You must learn them, memorize them, before we reach the battle zone….”

  Dominique closed her eyes and tried to will her body to stop shaking. To suddenly let herself cave in to the strange events of the past week would be tantamount to giving up completely. She knew she had to regain some strength, no matter how she did it. Somehow she had to use the situation to her advantage.

  She opened her eyes and for the first time noticed that there was a flask of myx hanging from the back of the cabin door. Suddenly her body was revived, her mind flashing with options.

  “Go ahead,” she told Thorgils, undoing the top few buttons of her tight-fitting jumpsuit. “If the Verden wishes it, then I am suddenly very anxious to learn …”

  Part Three

  Chapter Forty-two

  Aboard the USS New Jersey

  WOLF STARED INTO THE large green eye of the SLNQ-55 surface radar and, for a moment, couldn’t believe his eyes.

  Just seconds before, the screen had been blank, the only indications bouncing back to the sophisticated radar set being a handful of small weather systems creeping up the North Carolina coast and the occasional flight of seabirds.

  But now the long-range radar screen had come alive with blips.

  Wolf checked his watch and then made an entry into his ship’s log: “Enemy has shown himself at 1630 hours.” He shook his head in amazement. Hunter had predicted that the Norsemen would begin surfacing right at this time.

  The masked man made a quick check of his present position—fifteen miles off the coast of Fernandina Beach, Florida, and cruising due south—and then punched a brightly red-lit button next to the radar console.

  Within seconds, the battleship’s insides were ringing with the sound of an ear-piecing klaxon, calling the crew to their battle stations.

  Wolf turned his attention back to the radar screen, and as one of his junior officers read from the long list of directions left by Hunter, he fiddled with the SLNQ’s various buttons and knobs, finally refining the screen’s contrast and focus to peak levels.

  “Enter this into the log,” he told another officer. “Five groups of subs evident on surface radar at 1645. Position is forty miles south-southwest of our location. Enemy surfacing in packs of three apiece.”

  The junior officer wrote as fast as he could.

  “Three more enemy groups evident now,” Wolf continued, never taking his eyes from the screen. “All enemy ships are heading due west. Time is 1646 …”

  Wolf’s gunnery master rumbled into the room, called there by the battle station alert.

  “Your orders, sir?” the officer, a Scotsman, asked from beneath a snap salute.

  “Prepare all guns,” Wolf told him after a moment of thought. “High-impact HE shells, long trajectory powder for the sixteen-inchers. Standard draw for the five-inchers.”

  The Scotsman snapped another salute and was gone to be replaced by the ship’s defensive systems officer.

  “Program all surface defensive systems to automatic, with a slave command to manual,” Wolf told this man, reading from another set of instructions Hunter had left behind. “Switch on all auxiliary generators for the Phalanx guns and make sure that the magazine is sealed tight.”

  This officer also quickly saluted and left. Next in line was the ship’s intelligence officer, a former Norwegian lieutenant commander named Bjordson, the same man who captained the ship’s undercover fishing boat.

  Wolf quickly motioned Bjordson to the radar screen.

  “There they are,” he said, pointing to the staticky white clusters of blips that were now cove
ring the lower left-hand corner of the large screen. “They are coming up in packs.”

  “Surfacing in full battle formations,” Bjordson said, nodding. He had seen the tactic used many times before by the Soviet Navy, yet never on this grand a scale. “They will attack within the hour …”

  “We should radio the Americans,” Wolf said, pushing a button and summoning the control room’s communications officer.

  “Transmit the last two pages of the log to the American AWAC’s,” Wolf said quickly as soon as the radio officer arrived. “Top code. Double scramble, reply will be the pass phrase of the hour.”

  Another button was pushed and the ship’s meteorologist appeared.

  “What is the exact time of sunset on the Florida coast?” Wolf asked.

  The man didn’t miss a beat. “Eighteen hundred hours, fourteen minutes, sir.”

  Bjordson checked his watch. “Assuming that the attack plan is to hit the beaches simultaneously, that will give them about an hour to disembark all their troops,” he said.

  “That’s the time window we have to hit them,” Wolf said, nodding grimly. “Once it gets dark, the job will be harder by five times …”

  “Ten …” Bjordson replied.

  Wolf turned to the navigation officer who was but five feet to his right.

  “How long until we reach our station?” Wolf wanted to know.

  “Twenty-three minutes,” the officer responded instantly.

  Wolf looked back at the SNLQ and pushed a full bank of buttons. The screen suddenly expanded its view, utilizing a grid map that included most of the eastern shore of North Florida. The cluster of enemy subs heading toward that coast was now reduced to a single white dot.

  Wolf checked with the officer in charge of reading the SNLQ’s directions and then entered a barrage of numbers into the radar’s keyboard. Soon enough he had conjured up another white blip, this one blinking every second and indicating the battleship’s approximate position twenty-three minutes from then.