“I keep having this dream,” the young girl suddenly confessed as she added another dark blue wash to the canvas. “I don’t know what it is, or where it is. But I thought it was best to paint it.”
“That seems like a good idea,” the NS man replied nervously. “It looks fine so far.”
The young girl began to say something else, but quickly stopped herself. She sighed instead, her shoulders slumping appreciably. Then she brushed back her long brown hair with one unintentionally suggestive movement.
The NS man was really tense now. This was not a comfortable situation for him. He’d participated in many raping sprees during the blitzkrieg of America, claiming girls such as her among his victims. Now to be head of the unit protecting such a delectable item was ironic, to say the least.
“Will there be anything else, Miss?” he finally managed to blurt out.
She simply stared at her painting for a moment, working some of the dark paint to form one of many trees on the side of the mountain form.
Then she turned and looked back at him.
“Is it true the priest escaped?” she asked him point-blank.
The NS man could only nod. “Yes, Miss, I’m afraid he did,” he replied. “He and two other dangerous criminals.”
“Do you think he’ll ever come back here?” she asked, demurely dipping her brush into a small puddle of white paint.
“I would doubt that, Miss,” the sergeant answered confidently. “If he did, he would be captured and shot immediately.”
She gave a slight, sad shrug. “But then he would just raise himself from the dead,” she said, her voice an offhand whisper. “Wouldn’t he?”
Now the NS man stiffened completely.
“I really don’t know,” he finally replied.
Chapter Thirty
HE WAS A GHOST.
He felt like the sun’s rays could go right through him. He felt like he cast no shadow. If he were to look in a mirror, he wondered if he’d see any reflection.
Probably not.
He’d accomplished what every great military commander had sought to do at least once in their careers: he’d become invisible. He’d gone on the offensive against overwhelming odds on many fronts, day or night, for nearly a year and had won every engagement simply because he’d mastered this science of transparency. It really wasn’t that difficult—and this was not surprising. All great things were essentially simple. So too the secret to being invisible. It actually turned on one simple rule: make sure the enemy is not looking for you.
And how best to do that?
Make them think that you are dead.
But there were definitely drawbacks to being invisible. Much had to be given up. Much had to be surrendered. All of it with little chance of being recovered. He didn’t look any different. There was the sturdy, slender frame. The powerful shoulders. The lightning quick hands. The steel blue eyes. The handsome face. The hair too long.
Yet he was different. And he knew why. The problem with being a spirit was that you were always in danger of being empty—inside as well as out. You tried to feel it, but sometimes there was nothing deep anymore. As a phantom, nothing real remained of his life. No home. No roots. No friends. No loves. No real future. If anything, he become just a name now. Someone spoken about between breaths, or between beers, if at all.
Yes, the sentence he’d given himself was the worst kind of self-inflicted wound. The Native Americans knew it best.
How does a man feel when he’s lost his soul?
He feels like a ghost.
The mountain looked out over miles of rolling flatlands of what was once upstate New York.
This territory was all but deserted now. No civilian in his right mind would live in such an absolutely lawless region when Free Canada, with its liberty, its laws, its high regard for human life, was barely a hundred miles to the north. It was much simpler to just walk across the border and leave all the fear and oppression behind.
Yet it was here that The Wingman had chosen to stay. Why? It had fit his needs. He’d found jet fuel here. He’d hidden stores of ammunition here. Trusted allies were stationed nearby. It was an unlikely hiding place, yet a good location from which to project the beginnings of the intricately far-reaching plan he conjured up over the last dozen months.
It was also a good place to think.
He’d lost count of the number of times he’d flown down near Football City, keeping the jump jet low and evading the Fourth Reich’s rinky-dink radar nets, landing and hiding whenever he got too close and resuming his mission on foot.
It was on his last mission to the Fourth Reich capital, when under the new disguise as a Death Skull, he’d got wind that his three friends, General Jones, Major Frost and Mike Fitzgerald were still alive, but due to be executed.
His rescue of the trio resulted—and it too fit neatly into his plan. If the situation hadn’t been so desperate, he might have enjoyed the astonishment of his friends longer when they first saw him. It was so obvious that all three had believed he was dead. After all that was the impression he’d been working hard to preserve for nearly the past year.
As it turned out though, their reunion was painfully brief and utterly silent. He’d arranged for three separate helicopters piloted by Free Canadian volunteers and expertly disguised as Fourth Reich aircraft to swoop down and immediately take each of his friends away to three very different locations. Each one thus began their own very secret yet very crucial mission as explained to them by the crew members of their individual rescue choppers.
Meanwhile, he had stayed on the ground. Hidden in his Death Skull robes, he was able to gather more information on the UA officer compound within the prison before returning to the Harrier which he’d hidden on the east side of the Mississippi.
Oddly enough, if everything went well, he would not see Jones or Frost or Fitzie until the last stage of his grand plan. He’d mused more than once about what this longer reunion would be like. His three friends bugging him for details on how he was able to pull off the daring rescue. Meanwhile he held off divulging any more information until he’d secured promises of the many rounds of drinks due him in return for saving their necks.
It would be just like the old days, he thought.
But he always caught himself laughing at this last notion.
The old days. They seemed like a million years ago.
As a ghost, he’d been many other things over the past few months besides a Death Skull. It was easy for a spirit to step into many disguises. He’d posed as a slave, working in a granite quarry in old Indiana, carving out huge pieces of stone. He’d walked the dusty roads of the American Midwest in the rags of a sputnik, working for food and spreading rumors of his own death. He’d donned the garb of a lowly NS sub-private and had driven a garbage truck back and forth through dozens of cities and towns located on both banks of the southern Mississippi. He’d constructed a raft of driftwood and had sailed up and down the Big Muddy.
He had done all this for one reason: To spy.
And what had he found?
That in many ways the Fourth Reich was no ordinary enemy. That they were not the usual gang of criminals and thieves elevated to a higher status simply by possession of military equipment and control over thousands of soldiers who would use it.
No, the Fourth Reich was more than that. It was in fact a movement. A state of mind. Not some Johnny-Come-Lately post-World War III crackpot brigade. The beliefs espoused by the Fourth Reich had been ingrained in world history for decades. It was an unholy religion, one that preached that a single race of people was somehow superior to another, not simply because of skin color or ethnic origins, but because of their beliefs. This was the worst kind of arrogance, and it produced the worst kind of enemy, one that apparently could not die. World War II had been fought to put an end to it. But despite the sacrifices, it did not kill it completely. Many battles big and small had been fought since, yet it was still here. How would it be possible to kill it n
ow in a wildly anarchic world, when five years of war and one hundred million dead back in the Forties couldn’t do it?
It was a problem for the ages.
Yet in years past, Hunter would have attacked this menace head-on. Full steam ahead. All-out. No questions asked. This was because he’d believed back then that he had one key advantage over his enemy. He believed that he was in the right. That he was fighting for Truth, for Freedom, for the universal Good. The right side of people, of nature, of the Universe.
But, yes, he’d changed.
The sometimes barely visible, yet seemingly unextinguishable, flame of optimism which had burned in his heart for all his life was now out cold. It was dead. Snuffed by his realization that, in the end, there was no even struggle between Good and Evil as he had always believed. It was never a fair fight. Evil was always prevalent. Sure, the forces of Good could deflect it every once and a while, and give the appearance of triumph. But it was simply an illusion of victory. Evil always returned. Why? He didn’t know. But he had come to the conclusion that the Universe had been set up this way.
So why fight this time? Why become a ghost? What was the point? What was the sense in battling time and time again when the enemy always reappeared? He and his comrades in arms had fought hard to reunite America again and won more than a handful of times. But still nothing had changed. America was still not free. The people were still enslaved. Why? Again, the only possible explanation to his mind was that it was meant to be that way.
So it was all these gloomy thoughts that had brought him to this place, to look out over the grand landscape, to dream about what it looked like before the world flipped upside down.
The place afforded such a view that he imagined it to be an ideal location for a vision.
Sometimes he became filled with rage. Sometimes he would shake his fist at the sun and wish that a bolt from Heaven would hit him. Damn! He needed a big bright fucking bolt of lightning to hit him on the head and reveal something—anything—to him.
But always, in almost the same moment, he felt foolish for thinking the thought. Miracles, like Truth and Love, could not be manufactured.
Or could they?
He ran his hands over his tired face and then back through his long hair.
He’d lost so much over the years. Friends, now dead or missing. His country, divided up between those who in the end were simply jealous of it all.
The one true comfort of his life; his friend, his lover, his soul mate, Dominique. Probably gone …
But he knew he had to fight. He’d know it for months. But what he didn’t know was why. Until just lately. What motivation could he summon up this time? There was really only one left and it was not the most admirable of human traits.
But it would have to do. It was appropriate in its way.
So this time, he would not make war for Truth, or for Freedom, on for the preservation of America’s heritage.
No, this time he would do it for the most base of reasons.
This time, he’d do it purely for revenge.
His plan was actually a plan within a plan.
It was based on several indisputable facts that he’d discovered during his time as a ghost. One was, when confronted with a threat, the Fourth Reich always reacted the same way: with something he could only label as “aggressive caution.”
They unwittingly proved it time and time again. Despite their overwhelming strength in men and armor, they weren’t really military men. They didn’t have the slightest idea as to the difference between strategy and tactics. When posed with a threat, they rarely counterattacked. Instead they simply bolstered their defenses and hoped whatever happened wouldn’t occur again.
A prime example was the so-called “Noninterference Decree.” He’d learned of the unusual semi-secret Fourth Reich field order while ransacking a small NS outpost in Louisiana. Simply put, the Noninterference Decree forbade Fourth Reich officers from ordering their troops to fire on Free Canadian cargo aircraft, even though they might encounter them in Fourth Reich airspace. The reason behind the order was to prevent an incident—mistakenly shooting down an off-course FC airplane filled with nonmilitary goods, for instance—which might provoke a war with the large democratic neighbor to the north.
On closer examination, the rule was pure insanity on a military level. It allowed Free Canadian cargo planes to routinely violate Fourth Reich skies on intelligence gathering missions, guerrilla supply drops and so on. From a military commander’s point of view, this should be an intolerable situation. But the Fourth Reich was not made up of military commanders. They were not warriors. They were occupiers. And when they became afraid to provoke an action they could not handle, they’d simply legislate the problem away.
But on the other hand, they were so arrogant that they believed anything positive that happened to them was simply the result of destiny. They believed good fortune was their fate, and any evidence presented to them under this wrapping they took as gospel, no matter how foolish or unlikely it seemed. Just like a follower of the zodiac who cannot believe the stars could be wrong becomes a slave to their alignments, so too the Fourth Reich found their paths laid in superstitions and rituals. Their never ending stage managing of “official state ceremonies” was a good example of their misguided self-fulfilling prophesies. In stirring up all the pomp and circumstance, they hoped to find some end result. More knowledgeable conquerors of the past knew that just the opposite was true.
It was with these typical Fourth Reich blunders and many more that Hunter had so carefully constructed his plan within a plan.
Chapter Thirty-one
Off the coast of Mar del Plata, Argentina
THE TRIO OF TECHNICIANS inside Argentinian Imperial Air Corps Radar Post Number 6 didn’t notice the blip on their radar screens at first because all three were fast asleep.
Their dereliction of duty was partially understandable. It was two in the morning, and their fourteen-hour shift was drawing to a close. Few airplanes flew at night anymore. And if they did, it was only under escort and with permission from whatever governments were in power along their air route. Not to do so might result in either a confrontation with jet interceptors or a nasty meeting with a barrage of surface-to-air missiles.
So the Argentinian Imperial Air Corps technicians had no reason to expect to see anything on their radar scopes, never mind an airplane as large as a Hercules C-130. But when the warning buzzers suddenly came alive and the rows of trip wire red light indicators began flashing, the cacophony of noise was enough to instantly knock all three techs out of their insubordinate slumbers. A rush of sleepy button pushing and triangulation ensued, and gradually the three men determined that a big Herc had wandered into their airspace.
But there was more: by calculating its gradually sloping flight path, the techs realized that the airplane had not only violated Imperial Argentina’s airspace, but that it was in serious trouble.
Calls went out to the local interceptor base as well as the nearest pair of SAM sites. But it was already too late. The C-130—its unmistakable radar profile well known to the Argie radar men—was losing altitude very quickly. They watched with a mixture of astonishment and horror as the blip fell off their radar screens less than a minute after it had lit up the fort.
By another round of quick calculations, they determined the airplane had crashed about a mile offshore from the small fishing village of Tia Tipuncio into a coastal area called Mar del Plata. It was an area pockmarked with hazardous reefs and jetties.
They passed this information on to the local militia commander and continued to monitor the situation by radio for the next half hour. But gradually it became apparent that their role in the unfolding drama was over. The plane was down and that was it.
Less than an hour later, all three were back asleep again.
It was dawn before the 25-man Imperial Argentinian militia unit reached the wreckage of the HC-130.
The commander of the unit had secured five
fishing boats from Tia Tipuncio, but with the tides running in, his men found it tough going just to travel the mile and a quarter out to the wrecked and burning airplane.
They finally made landfall on a small jetty close to where the plane had come to its end. From here they could see up close how the big cargo craft’s wings were practically twisted off and that its fuselage was almost neatly severed in two. Several small fires were still raging toward the rear of the airplane and the stink of aviation fuel filled the early morning sea air.
Leaving five men to stay with the boats, the militia commander set out over the eighth of a mile of seaweed covered rocks with nineteen men, intent on inspecting the wreck and determining the fate of its crew.
The airplane was painted all black and had no insignia, but this was not unusual. Few airplanes flying the wild, pirate filled South American skies these days wore their colors proudly. Still fewer went about unarmed. Yet this airplane was definitely not a gunship. It appeared to carry no weapons, offensive or defensive. Instead, its ripped wings and cracked fuselage bore the evidence of many extra fuel tanks having been carried in lieu of armament. From this, the militia commander could only draw one supposition. The Hercules had been on a very long flight, perhaps one that originated from North America.
After much slipping and sliding, the militiamen finally reached the wreck. The airplane’s nose was facedown on the jetty and torrents of seawater were rushing through the cracked cockpit windows. It was apparent immediately that any crew members stationed on the flight deck—either alive or dead—had been swept away by the raging sea long ago.
Instructing his men to be wary of the same fate, they carefully inspected what was left of the airplane, inside and out. But there was little to be found at first. There were no bodies and the commander’s initial suspicion proved correct. The airplane was carrying little else but fuel. Several large inflatable rubber bladders had been stuffed inside the cargo compartment, two of which still contained full loads of fuel.
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