Return from the Inferno

by Maloney, Mack;

  What a bunch of saps, he thought.

  It was getting dark, and he had to begin searching for a place to sleep. Preferring bugs to rats, he selected a small patch of still green weeds located near the edge of a filthy, rust water run-off stream, and laid out the remains of his parachute as a bedroll.

  Once he was settled, he devoured two survival pack candy bars and one third of a canteen of water. Then he smoked half of his second-to-last cigarette, carefully extinguishing it after exactly six puffs. After another sip of water, he lay back and stared up at the imposing rusting hulk of a gigantic coal crane towering over him.

  Should he or shouldn’t he?

  It was a question he’d been asking himself for the past six days. It would have been easier to decide if he knew exactly where he was. If this place was near the old city of Gary, Indiana, then it would only take a couple more days for him to reach New Chicago and rejoin his unit.

  Go ahead. Do it. You deserve it.

  It had been six long days of walking and eating candy bars. Maybe he deserved a little reward. If only for fighting off the temptation for so long.

  Fuck it. Go ahead. What harm will it do?

  He reached deep into the crotch of his flight suit pants and pulled out a small wax bag. Carefully pulling off the binding rubber bands, he wet the tips of two fingers and slowly dipped them into the bag.

  He could feel the two fingers go pleasantly numb as he withdrew the few tiny drops of the sticky thick substance and studied it for a moment. It was just a little, stolen from the batch he’d given to the Nazis in Bummer Four. But it was more than enough for him. Closing his eyes, he dabbed his fingers on his tongue and then sucked off every last possible residue of the myx. When he opened his eyes ten seconds later, the dark rusting crane overhanging him was gleaming as if it was made of pure gold.

  When Itchy came to two and a half hours later, his pants were sopping wet.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered, just then realizing that he was emerging from an incredible myx-intoxicated state.

  “All those girls,” he breathed. His body was weary as if he’d actually romped with a roomful of costumed nymphettes for two hours. “All those lovely fucking girls….”

  He immediately wrapped up his parachute bedding and prepared for a hasty leave. Just why he was doing this, he wasn’t sure. It was still hours before dawn, and only a fool would walk this countryside at night. But his mind was telling him to get up and get going, and when one was under the influence of myx, they really had no other choice. Or so it seemed.

  Still he couldn’t help but wonder why. What was driving him at this point? Maybe it was his brain telling him that the sooner he got going, the sooner he’d reach New Chicago and the sooner he’d be able to cop some more myx and do the wet dream all over again. This time with some real nubile girls.

  Or could it be that something else was calling him to walk the tracks?

  He was moving west again within minutes. The last of the myx was still coursing its way through his system. He knew this because everything seemed to either be glowing like gold on its own or bright with illumination from nearby objects. He also felt the overwhelming conviction that he was damn near invulnerable. That was typical of most myx encounters.

  If I’m lucky, this might last until noon, he mused.

  His mind began to wander as he continued the rhythmical march of a railroad bed, alternately stepping on a tie, then gravel then another tie and so on. Back when he was still captured, when he’d seen all those W’s written across the sky, the incident had provided him with one clue as to who his captors were.

  He’d never met up against the Wingman while flying with his air pirate gang. If he had, he would have been dust long ago. No, he knew only of the famous Hawk Hunter through the stories told by the older guys in the Cherrybusters. Itchy discounted ninety percent of their tales about the Wingman as being pure bullshit—supposedly he was in a dogfight alone against one hundred Soviet fighters and shot down every single one. Itchy was smart enough to know that the remaining ten percent probably had to be true, and that was a frightening thought.

  How could a fighter pilot be that good?

  But it made no difference now. The Wingman was dead. Everyone was damned sure of that, All those W’s were probably executed by the last of his buddies, running water hoses out the ass-end of their airplanes, just to get the big white spread.

  Those guys could skywrite across the entire country, he thought with a laugh. It still wouldn’t bring their hero back.

  His thoughts drifted back to what he’d do when he finally reached New Chicago. He didn’t have any money and he was sure his squadron commander would not loan him any. But this was not a problem. He would simply go downtown and rob someone, most likely killing the victim in the process. Then if it was enough money, he’d get some more myx, and probably some crack or heroin too. Once he started in on this combination, he knew he would feel a real spree coming on. Rape. Pillage. Mayhem. Maybe a thrill killing, if he was high enough.

  The myx-induced thoughts of all this made him smile so hard he almost hurt his face.

  Those saps should have killed me when they had a chance.

  Suddenly he looked down and he saw his own shadow.

  This was strange. Dawn was still at least two hours away. He blinked once, thinking it may be the myx. But it wasn’t. Staring down at the tracks, he could definitely see his silhouette against the ties and rails.

  He spun around and found himself staring full into the brightest light he’d ever seen.

  It was hovering over him, no more than twenty feet above his head.

  “Jesus!” he cried. “What the …”

  He fell to his knees. The light was so bright. It was burning his corneas. But he could not look away.

  “Please let this be the myx!” he screamed, terrified.

  Then the sound came. It was an explosion of mechanical screaming. So loud, so sudden, he felt his eardrums pop like gunshots in a quick one-two succession.

  Now he went down to all fours, his eyes burning, his ears stinging, his knees weak. The light moved directly over him and when it did, he could feel twin blasts of heat, so intense, they burned his hair. There was smoke too. Smelly, like exhaust, it was thick enough to blacken his teeth.

  I’m dead, he thought. And this is the beginning of Hell.

  Or maybe not.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the airborne light slowly began to move away. With it went the ear-splitting thunder and the waves of smoke and heat.

  Itchy watched, mesmerized, as the light suddenly turned to the east. Then in an explosion of flame and power, it rocketed away, passing over the dark horizon in a matter of seconds.

  Itchy lay prone for the next hour. He was burned on his skin and head. His eyes ached, his ears were bleeding and his body was covered with oily exhaust soot.

  But he was still alive.

  And in that hour, only one question bounced around his mind: Why?

  Chapter Nineteen

  One week later

  FROST PICKED UP THE bottle of champagne and checked the date.

  “Nineteen sixty-six,” he said aloud, fingering the gold leaf raised Dom Perignon label. “A great year … I think.”

  He stared hard at the neck of the bottle. His eyes like lasers inspecting the neatly twisted wire assembly holding the cork in place. Suddenly the wire began to unravel on its own. Then the cork began to move. Slowly, but effortlessly, it raised itself out of the bottle stem, until it finally ejected with a loud pop!

  Frost snatched the near ballistic cork right out of midair and handed it to the lovely, skimpily dressed redhead woman on his left.

  “A souvenir for you, my darling …”

  Never letting her dreamy eyes stray from his, the woman took the damp end of the cork, put it between her lips, and began sucking on it suggestively.

  “It’s so wet,” she purred. “And so hard …”

  Frost shuddered with an ero
tic rush. He turned to the equally delectable woman on his right.

  “Champagne, my dear?”

  This second woman lifted her glass for Frost to fill. She took a sip of the bubbly, giggled a bit, and then rose slightly to whisper something in his ear.

  “I shaved for you today,” she cooed, running her hand up her lovely, milk white thigh. “And not just my legs …”

  Frost felt another tremor of lecherous delight. He poured himself a glass of champagne and turned his attention to the set of large jewel encrusted doors which dominated the far end of the spacious, harem-style room.

  “Who are we expecting today, ladies?” he asked his playmates.

  “Your all-time secret love,” the brunette on his right told him. “The one you’ve been dreaming about having all these years?”

  Now Frost was almost paralyzed with lust. He knew exactly who they were talking about.

  “Really?” he asked in a gasp. “She is really here?”

  “Yes, she is,” the redhead told him, softly laying her hand mere inches away from his upper, inner thigh. “That is what you wanted, right?”

  Frost could only nod his head by now. The hormones were flooding the glands in his body at such a rate, he thought he was going to explode.

  “Call her in,” he finally managed to say.

  The brunette simply snapped her fingers and the two doors burst open. There was a puff of steam or smoke and somewhere in the background, violins began to play.

  Frost saw the visitor’s legs first. They were works of art, delicate slender ankles, perfectly curved thighs.

  His eyes slowly moved up, following the contours of the lovely hourglass of hips, waist and chest. She was wearing a hockey shirt bearing the logo of the Montreal Canadians. It was ripped in strategically erotic places: He could just barely see the nipples of her lovely, small, pert breasts.

  “My God,” he whispered. All of his erogenous zones were pulsating madly, with no little help from the probing hands of his playmates. “Is … is it really her?”

  At that moment the last of the smoke dissipated and he could now clearly see her face.

  It was a vision of haunting beauty. Her long blonde hair was expertly tousled. Big blue eyes, classically structured nose, wide pouting lips, ears that begged to be nibbled.

  Frost could barely catch his breath by this time.

  “Mon Dieu!” he cried, reverting to his second language. “It is you. You are here. You are alive.”

  The woman was suddenly right in front of him, one hand softly touching his trembling cheek, the other directing his fingers to her nearly naked breasts. “Yes, Major,” Dominique said. “I am really here.”

  “Major … Major Frost …”

  Frost bolted up from the bunk like he’d been shot from a cannon.

  The young Scandinavian sailor standing at his bedside caught him and steadied him.

  “Sorry, Major,” he said in slightly tinged English. “I apologize if I startled you …”

  Frost struggled to get his bearings. He was inside a small stateroom. Just a bunk, a sink, a foot locker and a small desk and chair. The walls were painted gray upon gray and a myriad of pipework crisscrossed the ceiling.

  It took a few moments more, but then he realized where he was: on board the battleship, USS New Jersey.

  “Are you okay, Major?” the sailor asked him.

  Frost wiped an embarrassing bit of drool from his mouth.

  “I’m fine,” he said quickly. “Just a dream, that’s all.”

  The sailor handed him a note.

  “It’s from the captain,” he told Frost. “The choppers are warming up right now, sir. You have to be up on the launch deck in ten minutes.”

  Frost took the note and read it quickly. It confirmed the sailor’s verbal report.

  The sailor saluted and left, after which Frost virtually collapsed back down on the bunk and took a deep breath.

  It had happened again: another highly charged erotic dream, caused by the residue of his intentional myx overdose. He was experiencing them almost every night since being transferred to the New Jersey. Each time it took him a few minutes to settle back down.

  He’d been on the battleship for a total of ten days now, having traveled through the escape network, first accompanied by the Football City Special Forces man who’d rescued him from the graveyard, and then by two members of the American underground movement. He’d spent much of that time on board recuperating mentally and physically from his escape ordeal.

  Of late he’d been getting a crash course on the ship’s wide array of offensive and defensive weapons. The enormous battlewagon was currently plying the waters off the east coast of Panama, its sophisticated early warning radars and artificial fog making mechanisms insuring that no enemy eyes could see it.

  But this was no meaningless cruise, as Frost soon found out.

  The battleship was under the command of the masked man known to all simply as Wolf. Frost had known of the mysterious Wolf before coming to the battlewagon. He’d been briefed on Wolf’s brilliant naval action in support of the United American forces during the repelling of the Norse invasion of the Florida coast. The battleship and its massive 16-inch guns had destroyed no less than thirty of the Norse submarine troopships, damaging many, many more.

  But now the New Jersey was serving as a flag ship for a very different kind of mission.

  Despite his clouded mind and deteriorated physical condition, Frost had become aware of one indisputable fact during his first day on the ship. It had come in a personal message to him from Wolf which said, to wit, that despite small numbers, the forces of freedom were very quietly gathering on the periphery of the new, instant Nazi empire. Their intent was to strike a major blow against the occupying Fourth Reich fascists. One which would seriously disrupt, if not halt altogether, their rabid swallowing of America and its captive population.

  But to do this correctly, Wolf had written, would mean a rallying of democracy’s allies like never before. Covert actions had to be carried out. Weapons had to be purchased. Mercenaries had to be hired. And as many imprisoned UA officers had to be made free as humanly possible. This was why the elaborate and dangerous prisoner escape system had been set up. And this was why Frost had been brought to the New Jersey. He was to participate in nothing less than the first attempt to gain back a large piece of the imprisoned American continent from its treacherous Nazi overlords.

  For a freedom loving individual like himself, it was like a dream come true.

  But he also knew that it was an endeavor of monstrous proportions. One that would have been handled by the late Hawk Hunter in past years. Now, it was apparently up to those who survived the initial onslaught of the Fourth Reich to carry the banner against their tyranny and imperialism. And try to do it in the way the late Wingman would have done.

  Wolf frankly communicated to Frost that he would be expecting him to take on some very dangerous missions before the Grand Strike was launched, ones that would be plainly life threatening.

  Frost was more than willing to risk his life for such a cause and he would have told Wolf personally if he’d had the chance.

  But he didn’t. Wolf wasn’t talking to anyone.

  In fact, none of the crew had seen Wolf or talked to him directly for a long time, even though he was aboard the ship.

  Frost wasn’t quite certain why Wolf had maintained this self-imposed isolation. He did know that the mysterious captain had been locked away inside his quarters for at least the last three months. Not seeing anyone, taking his monk’s meals of bread, water and soup through an opening in his cabin door. Still the enigmatically reclusive Wolf had issued a steady stream of messages to his staff, instructing them on even the most minute details of the emerging liberation plan.

  This strange behavior was not lost on anyone aboard. The rumors of what was going on behind Wolf’s sealed door ranged from a near maniacal need to be alone to plot the crucial strategy to a kind of creeping insanity
. The guards posted outside the door reported hearing Wolf banging away on his computer keyboard at times, and indeed the man had sent steering and course change commands directly to the ship’s bridge via his computer.

  Much of the time, though, there was dead silence behind the door, interrupted only by traces of hushed conversations. It was this last report, and the fact that the guards swore the conversations were absolutely one-sided that had given rise to the story, among the highly superstitious, mostly Scandinavian crew that their captain was in fact communing with a ghost.

  Frost didn’t believe in ghosts. At least he didn’t think he did. And he was certainly in no position to question Wolf’s odd behavior. He was an officer and it was his job to carry out his orders, and that was what he was prepared to do.

  One of them, carried down from Wolf himself the night before, involved the trip Frost was due to take that day. He was scheduled to chopper out with a squad of New Jersey commandos to a secret location, one known only to a handful of people in the world.

  Wolf’s message told Frost the trip was necessary for him to see for himself a crucial element in the emerging Big Strike plan. It would also allow the Free Canadian officer to see firsthand the clues in what Wolf described as a “mystery within a mystery.”

  It was with these enigmatic thoughts bouncing off his already myx-bruised thought processors that Frost hastily climbed into the dark blue utilities suit worn by the New Jersey’s newly-established, one-hundred-man commando unit, and checked his 9-mm Berretta pistol’s ammo load.

  At the same time he was trying with all his resolve not to think about why his most lustful myx dreams always seemed to involve the beautiful companion of his long-lost friend, Hawk Hunter.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE TWO WESTLAND LYNX helicopters lifted off from the USS New Jersey and quickly turned west.

  Frost was squeezed in between two massive commandos, both of whom displayed classically chiseled Scandinavian features. Like the seven other troopers inside the cramped passenger bay, the commandos were armed with M60 7.62 AP machine guns, twin bandoleers of the appropriate ammunition and a sling full of hand grenades and flash bombs. Frost felt naked by comparison; his tiny automatic pistol looked puny when compared to the walking arsenal around him.