by Mack Maloney
He was dead, of course. Shrapnel from the missile hit had punctured his chest and he had bled to death probably somewhere over the middle of Baltimore. The plane, with its famous sophisticated computer-controlled flight systems, had completed the mission Jones had programmed it to, then flew him to this remote base. The spookiness of it all made Hunter shudder. Suddenly, he was very cold.
He pulled the general out and lowered the body to the ground with the help of the parachute straps. He took one long last look. Here was a truly gallant man; hero in Viet Nam, leader of the Thunderbirds, the soldier, who probably more than any other, turned the tide in the Battle for Western Europe. An officer who respected his men as pilots and as human beings, who felt that to fight for a just cause was the ultimate human experience. Now to have that life end here, on a wind-swept and desolate airstrip in the middle of the mountains seemed not at all appropriate. The man should be written up in history books. If there were any history books. He should have been accorded a full military funeral—a horse-drawn caisson, a flag on his casket, a 21-gun salute. But it was not to be.
Hunter felt like a huge part of his life had just been cut out, destroyed, vanished. Gone. For the first time in a long time, he felt utterly alone. Not at all like the solitude of his mountain retreat of a few years back. This was the emptiness one felt upon losing a member of his family. The frank realization that a person you knew, spent part of your life with and loved, was gone. Forever.
He knew he would never be the same again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE a shovel to dig a proper grave for Jones. He felt lost. And stranded. He had very little fuel left in the ’16.
It was getting late and a light snow began to fall. He covered the general’s body with the parachute and hoisted it back up onto the wing of the F-111 to keep it from any hungry animals. Hunter knew he would be spending the night at the airstrip and that he had to find shelter and damned quick. The airport’s hangar seemed the likely place.
He tried to force the office door open, but it was nailed shut from the inside. The windows were bricked over—again from the inside. He hadn’t expected it to be so difficult. Finally, taking a wrench from the F-111, he began to work on the lock that tightly held the building’s large sliding doors.
He had no idea why Jones had programmed the F-111 to fly to this place. It looked to be an old remote strip, possibly used by the Vermont Air National Guard, or maybe an airborne forest fire fighting unit. It was in the damndest place. The area, while technically within the territory of the Northeast Economic Zone, had been vacated long before, its residents among the first to flee to Canada when the New Order came down. It was on the side of a mountain that was surrounded by larger mountains, each covered with snow, despite the month being late April. It was utterly desolate; there probably wasn’t a human around for 50 or even 100 miles in any direction. Yet, judging by the tire marks and fuel stains on the runway, it was apparent that the airstrip had been used frequently in the last few months.
He finally managed to bust open the lock and move the doors of the hangar. It was dark by this time, and his flashlight was in his Personal Survival Kit, back in the F-16. He got inside and, after wheeling the big doors closed, wandered around, looking for a light switch that he knew would probably never work. He finally found a bank of them, and started flipping. Nothing happened … until the 15th switch. Suddenly, there was a crackle of electricity and two dozen high powered arc lamps hanging from the ceiling burst into life.
Strangely, he had assumed all along that the hangar would be empty, but he was never so wrong in his life. His jaw nearly fell to his chest as he looked around the building. “Holy Christ!” was all he could say. Over and over. “Jesus H. Christ, I don’t believe it …”
It was Jones’s last card to play and it came up the ace of spades. The hangar was filled—literally to the rafter—with enough bombs, guns, missiles, fuel and spare parts to outfit a small air force.
It was all packed away in stacks of wooden crates marked in stencil with signs like “Dangerous—Explosives” and “Napalm—Handle With Care.” He saw at least 50 M61 cannons, just like the one he carried in his F-16, plus miles of ammunition belts hanging from the main beam across the ceiling. Hundreds, maybe a couple of thousand bombs—clusters to big blockbusters, frags to anti-personnel—were neatly stacked, in pyramids against one wall. There were probably a couple of hundred air-to-air missiles—Sidewinders mostly—each individually wrapped in a separate protective shroud, and carrying a tag for arming instructions.
At the rear of the building, there were hundreds of barrels of JP-8, the jet fuel that was the lifeblood of a pilot. He checked to make sure it wasn’t contaminated—a touch to his tongue told him it wasn’t. Neither were the barrels of lubricating oil stacked neatly beside the jet fuel.
He was glad he didn’t smoke. One match in the wrong place in this building and the resulting explosion would make Mount St. Helen’s look like a pesky landslide.
In another part of the hangar he found a treasure of spare parts—from extra tires to crucial nuts and bolts—all appropriately marked. Hanging on the wall near the parts was a clipboard holding receipts for all the merchandise. Each form held Jones’s typically scrawled initials at the bottom and each form carried the name of the same company: “The Wright Patterson Used Aircraft Company, Parts and Ordnance Division.” So Roy From Troy’s employers had diversified. Big planes weren’t enough for them; they had to start moving the small stuff. Well, he thought, it was probably easier these days to sell an anti-personnel bomb than a B-58 Hustler. Somehow, Jones had bought all the stuff, little-by-little, as the receipts told it, and established a healthy reserve. He had beaten their system after all. If it ever came to war—real war—with the ’Aks, or the pirates or anybody, Jones had guaranteed that he would be sitting on top of enough material to make it very difficult to defeat him. Or, very hard to be victorious. Hunter realized that Jones would have made a perfect air guerrilla—a Robin Hood of the skies.
On examining the parts, he found that although they were manufactured for use on many different aircraft, they all had one thing in common: They could be used on an F-16. One of the beauties of the plane was that nearly 75-percent of its parts were used on other jet aircraft. From that point on he knew that while he might have the last remaining F-16 in the world, he would never have to worry about spare parts for it. That was, if he could always get back to this place. He quickly began to appreciate the desolation of the airstrip.
He pored over the stuff for the next two hours, but finally he nearly collapsed of exhaustion. He shut off the lights—which were powered by a silver cadmium battery—and using a Sidewinder shroud as a blanket, lay on a crate of napalm bombs and immediately went to sleep.
The deadly material proved to be an apt resting place for his dreams to emerge from. In them, he replayed the action of the battles the strange day before. Fighting them over and over. And through it all, there was Jones, baseball hat in place, cigar firmly in teeth, laughing, joking, flying as usual.
He awoke in the middle of the night, a single moonbeam shining through the only crack in the hangar’s ceiling. Outside the wind was howling loud enough to be a blizzard. It sounded like a bad night on top of another mountain. It seemed like centuries ago that he lived on top of the mountain in New Hampshire. He was so sure back then that something was coming that he had spent whole months, doing nothing, waiting for it. It had come. Now, it was gone. Over. Complete. It was the general’s last hurrah. He was glad he was part of it. But now, what was left for him to do? All they had fought for—one of the last places on the continent or even on earth that a man could be relatively free—was gone. Eaten up by the gluttons.
He fell back into an uneasy sleep.
He woke up a second time—an instant, a minute, an hour, maybe two hours—after he had drifted off. The wind was still howling and the old building was rattling. Maybe it was time to climb up on top of anoth
er mountain and wait it out again, he thought. Perhaps this mountain. He could hunt for food and make clothes out of the Sidewinder shrouds. He could read all the technical manuals in the place and drink napalm juice for breakfast. He could wait for the world to get fucked up to the max once more, then get shaken out. Live up here and wait and watch the world go by. Maybe that’s what was in the cards dealt when he followed Jones here. Led by a ghost, what more symbolism could a man want?
But this time, he was sure, he’d be waiting a lot longer than two years before he came down from the summit. That is, if he ever came down. At that point, he didn’t care. Screw it. Let the world rot. It wasn’t worth it. Everything was gone. Everyone—the general, ZAP, Dominique—gone. He was gone. And no one cared. So why should he?
He decided. He would stay and live on the mountain. Live there forever, if he had to. He was retiring. He couldn’t care less, he told himself, if he never got into an airplane again. This was his home now. He closed his eyes. Again, he thought of the general. Again, he fell off into a fitful sleep.
He woke a third time, and the first thing he was conscious of was the folded piece of cloth stuffed into his back pocket. It was the flag, Saul Wackerman’s flag. He reached down and touched it …Suddenly he was hit with an intense light. Not from the outside but from within him. Everything instantly became very clear. His muddled thoughts of living—hiding out was more like it—on top of the mountain were washed away. Now, only one thought was in his head:
Give up? No fucking way.
There were many reasons. The general’s death could not go without some small measure of revenge. Some small reminder that you might be able to kill a man’s body, but it’s hard to kill a man’s soul or his spirit. And, he—Hawk Hunter, the greatest fighter pilot ever—could not just hang up the wings and hide. That just wouldn’t be the answer this time.
Now it was time to fight. Work and fight and fight some more. If he was the last person on the continent who still believed in what was once called the American Way, then screw ’em all, because he’d go down in flames defending it. Anywhere. Anytime. Anyplace. He’d do it for the guys who died in Western Europe. He’d do it for the guys at Otis. For Dominique, wherever she was. For Saul Wackerman. For Jones
Inside, he felt a part of Major Hawker Hunter die and another part be born. He closed his eyes and dreamed he saw an immense “W” written across the sky. It was miles long and wide and as solid-looking as a cloud. He didn’t know what it meant, but he was sure the answer would come to him soon. For the third time that night, he fell back to sleep.
It was a different man who awoke the next morning …
The dawn was cold and clear. He found a shovel and buried the general in an unmarked grave. That done, he drained the F-111’s fuel tanks into his own then attached two full external tanks filled with fuel from the hangar to his wings.
He still had two Sidewinders left, and he attached two more from the hidden arms cache. His cannon was nearly empty when he landed. Now he filled it once more. He attached an anti-runway ordnance dispenser to the ’16’s belly and filled it to capacity with hundreds of deadly little globe-like bombs.
Using the F-16 like a tow truck, he pulled the F-111 to the cliff at the edge of the runway and nudged it. The plane pitched forward and tumbled off the mountain into the deep valley below, exploding on impact. No one would see the wreckage until late spring—if at all. Anyone curious to take a second look would have to surmise the plane crashed and that would be the end of it. Thus, the last chapter of the general’s life would die with him. Only Hunter would know what really happened.
Two hours later he was airborne again. He circled the mountainside base, watching. Waiting.
“… 3 … 2 … 1 … Now!”
Right on schedule, sixteen delayed reaction fuses ignited and exploded right down the center of the runway. Eight more bombs went off on the tree line next to the runway causing eight big oaks to crash down onto the strip. He had set the charges so they would destroy and cover the landing strip, but leave the hangar unscathed. He didn’t want any curious flyboys or pirates landing at the base and stumbling over the technological treasure. Even a helicopter would have a hard time putting down on the cratered and blocked runway. As one last bit of insurance, he had hung a sign he’d found outside the hangar door. “Danger—Radioactivity” it read. In this day and age, people tended to take that kind of sign seriously.
Less than an hour later he was flying high over the recently occupied base once known as Jonesville….
CHAPTER TWELVE
USING THE F-16’S ULTRA-SENSITIVE High Resolution Radar, he was able to project a detailed, three-dimensional map showing the activity of the base on his cockpit video screen. It was like looking down an invisible scope extended 50,000 feet to the ground. He could “see” the Mid-Aks had taken full possession of the place. The hundred of helicopters that had carried out the assault on the base the day before were foolishly lined up in neat rows along the cratered runways. A few warships were close by offshore. Several buildings were still burning. He could even discern the Mid-Ak flag flying over the place.
He made a gruesome discovery in a cranberry bog next to the base. Bodies, hundreds of them, were scattered throughout the marsh. These had to be civilians, the former residents of Jonesville. The ’Aks had caught them and slaughtered them. But he could also see the executions were still going on. The radar showed figures, some moving, some standing in lines at the edge of the marsh. Trucks filled with more people waited nearby. The ’Aks were systematically killing anyone they could find who was remotely connected to the former Zone Armed Forces.
He wasn’t surprised. Disgusted maybe, but not surprised. It was the Mid-Ak way of doing things. Kill whatever stands in the way. The barbaric policy served two purposes: it eliminated bothersome mouths to feed and it served as a fear factor which demoralized any civilian who came in contact with them. It’s easier to bring someone under your heel if they are convinced that it is useless for them to fight back.
Hunter intended to change that …
He made two more passes, taking note of the half dozen anti-aircraft sites the ’Aks had already begun work on. These didn’t bother him and he was pleased to see no sign of any workable radar systems installed. He peeled off and was soon out over the ocean. One last check of his weapons revealed everything was in perfect working order. Turning, he positioned the F-16 between the sun and the occupied base nearly eight miles below. It would be one, long, screaming dive. They would never know what hit them …
Two officers were overseeing the Mid-Ak firing squad. The execution, going on since early that morning, had become dull and routine. Using helicopters equipped with heat-sensitive tracking devices, coordinating with mobile units on the ground, their troops had been rounding up citizens since early the night before. The civilians would be captured, held for transport to the marsh, then lined up, 20 to 30 at a time, before the firing squad. Only the young girls would be spared. They were transported directly to the base commander, who would pass them out as rewards to his best officers. The firing squad officers knew if they completed this job quickly and cleanly, they too would be in line to get a fuckable young girl.
One officer was wiping his brow in the unusually warm, winter morning, when he heard the strange noise above him. Like a whistle, getting louder, fiercer by the instant. He looked at his comrade, who had heard the noise too. Instinctively, they both turned in the direction of the sound, and found themselves shielding their eyes against the sun. It was getting louder and closer, an awesome noise, that was beginning to panic the hundred or so people in the bog—civilian prisoners and executioners alike.
Next thing they knew, the F-16 was right in front of them. It had arrived so quickly, they never had time to move. One officer could see the face of the man flying the jet. Even with a helmet on and an oxygen mask attached, the ’Ak could discern hate in the pilot’s eyes. In the instant before death that seems to last an eternity, t
he Mid-Ak officer thought it was strange to see such an oddly painted jet fighter swooping down on him. It was red, white and blue and looked like it had a bird painted on its underbelly. A bird of death. One second later, a M61 cannon round had taken off his head.
His companion was bewildered. He could clearly see his comrade’s severed spinal column, brain stem and neck muscles as the corpse stood upright for a terrifying instant before tumbling back over. The man’s head, still wearing the standard issue Mid-Ak helmet, was bouncing away like a child’s toy. A moment later, the other officer felt something wet on his chest. The mysterious plane had already passed over and was streaking toward the base, barely 20 feet off the ground. The man looked down and discovered that he no longer had a stomach—it had been blown away by an invisible, seemingly painless entry of a cannon shell. He saw red, coughed up bloody vomit and died.
The Mid-Aks in the firing squad were frozen in place. The civilians, some of whom were lined up ready to be shot, needed no further prodding. They were splashing every which way through the bogs, intent on getting as much distance between them and their would-be executioners as possible. These people were no strangers to Hunter, Jones or the other pilots of ZAP. And they would never forget who it was who had saved them—the familiar Thunder F-16 had returned, just in the nick of time.
“It was Hunter who saved us,” they would say when re-telling the story over and over for years to come. “The Wingman saved our lives.”
The base’s control tower was filled with Mid-Ak officers, enjoying a mid-morning meal of liquor, food and young girls. The confident conquerors had turned the tower into their private club. They had no sophisticated jet fighters to handle, so why the need for a working control center? The helicopters just landed themselves, no need to coordinate them. From the tower, the officers could keep an eye on the base below and celebrate their victory at the same time. Not even the fact that their main base down in Baltimore had been incinerated the day before could dim the party atmosphere.