Chapter Fifty-seven
Jacksonville Beach
THE HOT SUN RISING over the shore at Jacksonville baked the thousands of creatures alternately pecking at the corpses of Norsemen and fighting amongst themselves.
In the midst of the gluttony stood the Harrier jumpjet, its landing gear and lower fuselage covered with caked sand.
Next to the jet was a large sled holding a trio of weapons: one five-hundred-pound general-purpose bomb, one cannister of M113 napalm, and a Harpoon antiship missile that contained only a third of the high explosive normally carried in its warhead. Another smaller sled nearby carried a drop tank half filled with aviation fuel and a roll of guide wire and a half dozen pulleys.
Hawk Hunter was working feverishly under the Harrier’s wing, splicing the necessary wires and making the necessary connections which would allow him to attach the weapons and the fuel tank to the jumpjet. A red bandana covered his nose and mouth; a pair of industrial safety glasses covered his eyes.
But nothing could block out the incessant squawking and greedy hissing of the multitude of creatures as they continued their disgusting banquet.
If I get airborne within two hours, I might have a chance, Hunter kept telling himself over and over.
Standing up on the beach wall about fifty feet away was Jones and Fitzgerald. They both knew what Hunter was planning to do. But they had also failed in trying to talk him out of it.
It was useless. Once Hunter had his mind made up to do something, no matter how dangerous, it was pretty near impossible to change it.
Besides, Fitzgerald and Jones had little left in the way of spirit reserves. Their whole world had come crashing down on them less than twelve hours before. Trying to convince their friend that he was about to embark on a suicide mission seemed to be just too much for either one of them to contemplate.
Yet, as they watched their comrade hoist the weapons one by one up under the wing of the jumpjet by way of an ingenious series of wires and pulleys, they knew they had to try one more time to save his life.
Blocking out the rising stench on the beach with kerchiefs of their own, the two men tramped through the ghastly red sand and reached the Harrier just as Hunter was attaching the half-filled fuel tank.
“Save your breath, boys,” he told them, not even looking at the pair.
“This is crazy, Hawker,” Fitz told him nevertheless. “What good does it do anyone if you blow yourself to hell?”
“It’s a mission,” Hunter replied stoically. “Just another mission …”
“It’s an impossible mission,” Jones told him. “Even you won’t stand a chance …”
“It still has to be done—and quick,” Hunter said gloomily as he attached the last of the holding wires to the fuel tank. “And I’m the only one within five hundred miles who still has an aircraft in flying condition.”
Jones and Fitzgerald could only look at each other and shake their heads.
It all started after Hunter appeared at the destroyed naval air station earlier that morning. He said very little to Jones and Fitzgerald upon entering the bomb shelter. Instead, he drained two cups of coffee and then began a wild search of the still-smoldering base, looking for anything left that he might able to strap under the Harrier’s wings.
He located the three disparate weapons in three different damaged buildings, and declining all offers of help from the surviving base personnel, loaded them on a bulky service truck, retrieved the tool sleds, the wire, the pulleys, and the half-filled fuel tank and headed back to his beached airplane.
Now it was almost noontime. He’d been working on the airplane since 7 AM.
“Suppose I order you not to go?” Jones asked him wearily. “Suppose I ground you, here and now?”
Hunter stopped working for a moment and looked directly at Jones.
“Are you going to force me to disobey a direct order?” he asked his Commander in Chief.
Jones was suddenly speechless. Then he simply shook his head and walked away.
Fitzgerald decided to give it one last try.
Walking up under the shade of the wing, he watched Hunter secure the last guide wire under the fuel tank.
“Hawker, you don’t even know what you’re looking for,” he said, the words not really coming out as he planned them.
“Like hell I don’t,” Hunter shot back. “There’s only one way those navy airplanes could have hit us like that. They were launched from an aircraft carrier, a big one.
“Now it’s out there, somewhere—and I’m going to find it.”
“On a pint of fuel and carrying these three crummy weapons?” Fitzgerald replied somewhat angrily. “You know if it’s a big carrier, then it will have SAM’s, Phalanx guns, the works, plus airplanes that will come out to get you before you even spot the damn thing. You won’t stand a chance.”
“Maybe not,” Hunter replied calmly. “But I still have to try. The alternative is that this country will lose control of its own skies. And you know, when that happens, it will really be over.”
“But we’ll still have those damn subs running around with their nukes,” Fitz pleaded. “What about them?”
Hunter turned and looked directly into his friend’s eyes. “I’ll leave that problem to you, Mike,” he said sadly.
With that, Hunter jumped up onto the Harrier’s wing, climbed into the cockpit, and began pushing buttons in preparation for starting the airplane’s unique engine.
As soon as Fitzgerald heard the low whine of the engine’s prestarter, he knew he had only one last opportunity to talk to Hunter, maybe forever.
Running up beside the cockpit, he looked up at his friend and yelled: “What about Dominique?”
Hunter immediately froze, his face turning ashen white. Then he looked down at his friend of many years and said simply: “Good-bye Mike …”
The souped-up Harrier lifted off a minute later.
Kicking up a windstorm of sand and debris, the VTOL jet slowly rose above the hardened sand, the screaming of its engine scattering away any remaining sea gulls.
As Jones and Fitzgerald and a small contingent of Football City Rangers watched from the top of the breakwater, the jet hovered briefly over the beach and then rocketed away out to sea in a flash.
It disappeared over the horizon seconds later.
Chapter Fifty-eight
THE DAY PASSED AND night fell and still Mike Fitzgerald was sitting on the edge of the Jacksonville Beach wall, looking out to sea.
The stench that had permeated the air during the day was long gone now. The rising tide had washed many of the dead bodies away, cleansing the sand as it did so. Now the place was absolutely quiet—eerily so. Not so much like a field of battle, Fitzgerald thought, more like a cemetery.
He had been waiting all day for Hunter to return. But now, as the night grew darker, he knew the chances were decreasing that he would ever see his friend again.
Even by the most optimistic calculations, the Harrier’s fuel would have run out by midafternoon, four and a half hours ago. And as far as Fitzgerald knew, the jumpjet did not carry any air-sea rescue provisions, such as an inflatable life raft or flare guns.
Still, he spent every second scanning the horizon. And just a few minutes after sunset, he spotted a light way off in the distance, coming right for him.
His hopes alternately rose and sank as he watched the light approach. Although it was moving slow enough to be attached to a hovering aircraft, its color was bright white, almost fluorescent in nature.
He knew the Harrier carried no such light.
Still, the light came straight for him, and within another minute, he heard the distinctive sound of its loud engines. It was at that moment Fitzgerald gave up any hope that it was Hunter. These were not jet engines he heard. Rather, they powered a helicopter.
The light was attached to the snout of a LAMPS ocean-recon helo. As Fitzgerald watched, the aircraft turned over the shoreline and slowly moved up and down the beach, its occu
pants obviously observing the now-silent battlefield.
After a few moments, the copter went into a hover close by Fitzgerald, and at one point caught him in its searchlight beam.
A minute later, it landed with a roar on the boardwalk next to the breakwater.
Three men alighted from the chopper. All were dressed very strangely. Two of them were wearing a sort of green, yellow, and red costume that would have looked more at home in a comic book. The third was wearing a long black cape over a black uniform and hat.
As the gaudily uniformed men began inspecting something underneath the chopper, the man in the black cape walked over to Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald knew the people in the chopper were not unfriendly. They would have attempted to shoot him had they been. Now as the lone man walked closer to him in the gathering doom, he saw he was not only wearing a cape but also a black mask over his eyes.
“My name is Wolf,” the man called out to Fitzgerald from about fifteen feet away. “Are you with the United Americans?”
Fitzgerald replied that he was.
“My name is Mike Fitzgerald,” he said, walking over to the man. “I talked over the radio with your intelligence officer aboard the New Jersey just before the battle.”
Wolf immediately recognized Fitzgerald’s name. “You spoke with Commander Bjordson,” he told the Irishman. “He was killed in the closing moments of the battle.”
The two men stood and stared at each other for a long moment. Finally Wolf asked: “Are you the only one who survived the air raids?”
Fitzgerald slowly shook his head. “No, there are some others,” he said soberly.
Wolf let out a long, troubled sigh. “We saw those airplanes on our radar screen,” he said. “We got a warning off to your base …”
Fitzgerald nodded. “Yes, I know,” he said. “And because of that, and two other warnings, we were able to save many of our men. But all our airplanes are gone, as is all of our fuel. They put us out of action inside of five minutes.”
“We tried to locate them after it happened,” Wolf told him, his words deep and clear, despite the thick Scandinavian accent. “We sailed out off the coast all day, looking for anything large enough on our radar screens that might be an aircraft carrier. But we found nothing.”
“You weren’t the only one looking,” Fitzgerald replied.
He quickly told him about Hunter’s last mission. Wolf was silent for several long moments after hearing the news.
“It’s hard to believe that he’s gone, too,” he said finally, wrapping his cape around him. “We only met a few days ago, and then only for less than a day. Yet I felt like I had known him all my life.”
“From what I hear, you and he were very similar,” Fitzgerald replied. “You both had the same calling in life, you might say …”
Wolf just shrugged and nervously tugged at the corners of his mask. “You’ve heard of me then?” he asked.
Fitz just nodded.
“The Wingman and I were alike in many ways, yes,” he said, embarrassed to admit the secret of his notoriety. “Europe is my home and I love it as much as he did America. We are similar in that we wanted to change things for the good in what is inherently an evil world. That’s all. It’s really what all men should strive for. Some people just depend on me to do it for them.”
Fitzgerald turned and looked out to sea. “Well, we always depended on him …” he began sadly. “We always counted on him to come through. And he never failed us. Even when he went up to that farm—‘Skyfire’ was the name, I think—and finally got back with his woman, we had to drag him out and get him involved in all of this madness.”
Fitzgerald had to pause for a moment. Suddenly his words were having a hard time coming out.
“And now, if he is gone,” he went on, “then me and my colleagues are the ones to blame, really. We knew he loved his country more than anything else and we used that to such an advantage that he couldn’t ever shut it out. He could never escape it. He could never put a barrier between us and himself. It may have finally been the death of him.”
At this point, Wolf also looked out on to the empty, darkening sea. Then in a deeply sad tone, he said: “Now you know why I wear a mask …”
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Prologue
THE CLATTERING OF HORSES’ hooves galloping at full charge cracked like thunder against the asphalt of the abandoned highway.
There were twenty horsemen in all. Ten riding at top speed in front of the rumbling tractor trailer truck; ten behind. There were also three battered HumVees in the strange caravan. All of them were at the rear of the column, their gunners firing .50 caliber heavy machine guns wildly at the army of pursuers less than a quarter mile behind.
Captain “Crunch” O’Malley was behind the wheel of the last HumVee in line. More accustomed to piloting his famous F-4X Super Phantom than this four-wheel monster without shock absorbers, O’Malley was doing all he could just to keep the truck steady on the cratered, unlit highway. It was the dead of night and the only illumination was coming from the frightening flare of Katyusha rockets exploding all around them, plus the larger explosions off to O’Malley’s right which told him that the enemy was zeroing in on them with long-range 122-mm artillery.
“Goddamn, are we going to make it?” he yelled up at his gunner.
The gunner—a sergeant in the now defunct Pacific American militia—slapped another belt of ammunition into his big .50 and kept right on firing.
“Not if we don’t reach the bridge damn quick!” he yelled back.
The bridge was a mile ahead of them. The lead men on horseback, remnants from the Pacific American militia’s single cavalry unit, would reach it in a matter of minutes. Could they deploy their explosive charges in enough time for the trailer truck, the HumVees and the rest of the horsemen to cross the span, and then destroy it before their well-equipped, ruthless enemies finally caught up with them?
O’Malley looked in his rearview mirror and knew it would be very, very close.
I wish the old Wingman was still around, he thought. We could sure use him now …
If they were lucky at all, it was because their pursuers were driving armored personnel carriers and light-armored vehicles, making their top speed only slightly less than that of the overloaded trailer truck and the winded, but determined, cavalry horses.
More 122-mm shells came crashing down in front of them as the ragged, harried procession rounded a long bend on what used to be California State Highway 15.
By the flash of these explosions, “Crunch” could see the charge of enemy APCs and LAVs closing in on his tail.
Once again, a desperate thought crossed his mind. What would Hawk do?
Major Hashi Nushi Three was the commander of the hundred-man, fifteen-vehicle mechanized column pursuing the ragged Pacific American soldiers.
He was new to the California theater of action, having come in on the third invasion wave which had landed just two weeks before on the beaches of Ventura. At the time, Nushi had been upset at his commanders. He considered it an insult to be kept in one of the invasion ships for so long before finally being allowed to land and join the conquest. This was especially grating as his grand uncle, Hashi Nushi One, was the Imperial Commander of all the Asian Forces.
By the time his unit hit the beach, much of the fighting on the West Coast of America was over. The much weakened Pacific American Army, depleted by the wars in the eastern part of the country, proved to be little match for the invading armies of the Combined Greater East Asia Divine Warriors’ Association. Indeed, much of the Pacific American Army surrendered lest the overwhelming Asian Forces make good on their promise to destroy one major city along the West Coast and immolate their populations in the process.
It was no idle threat. The Asian Forces had happily provided information to the Pacific American Army on two Fire Bats submarines which were on station in the Gulf of Santa Catalina. Each one carried
a nuclear-tipped, ballistic missile in its launch chamber.
With the fight for California nearly over, Nushi was pleased to get the assignment to hunt down and liquidate the last remaining enemy armed force inside the newly claimed territory.
He knew very little about this ragtag band of soldiers, just that they numbered less than thirty, they were lightly armed, and were relying mostly on horses for transport. They’d been slowly moving eastward since the first days of the Asian Forces’ invasion, committing various acts of sabotage along the way. This included destroying many of the main power stations around Los Angeles, which was now the site of the Asian Forces’ main headquarters for the conquered portion of southwest America. Now it appeared as if the small enemy unit was making a break for the San Bernardino mountains to the east—and the unsettled, yet unconquered lands beyond.
Nushi’s orders were to stop them and he’d been attempting that since early morning. But the enemy soldiers were doing strange things, not the least of which was driving the tractor-trailer truck. The large rig had been slowing them down all day. If they had stuck to the horses and their small combat vehicles they would have been in the mountains hours ago.
Nushi didn’t know what was inside the truck—nor did he care much. He had little respect for the enemy or their stupid antics, therefore they were not worthy of his examination. Nushi just assumed that when he finally caught up with the elusive Americans the mystery of why they would sacrifice time and speed for the truck’s cargo would be revealed.
The enemy was just a half mile ahead now, right around the bend in the highway. Nushi’s LAV was in the lead, its gunner firing nonstop at the fleeing Americans, while his radio man was calling in the big 122-mm artillery rounds from a mobile firebase five miles to the south.
Nushi confidently ordered his second radio man to call back to the main headquarters to tell them that their quarry was in sight and would soon be destroyed.
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