Return of Sky Ghost

by Maloney, Mack;

  When they finally backed off sixty seconds later, the big sub was burning in hundreds of places, stem to stern. So sudden was the attack, and so awesome in its sheer power, not a shot was fired in return from any of the many guns aboard the hapless warship. Soon the entire upper deck of the sub was consumed in flames.

  The pair of gunships moved on to their next victim: a battle cruiser which served as Wakisaki’s floating command station while he was in South America. The gun crews on this vessel did send up some defensive fire. But their aim was so shaky, due to simple fright no doubt, that they missed both planes by a wide margin.

  As with the troop-carrying sub, the gunships rained a storm of fire and lead down on the cruiser, and soon it was burning ferociously too. The planes moved on to the next target—another big sub, this one an aircraft carrier. They mimicked their earlier attacks, tearing up the top deck of the sub while successfully wending their way through weak streams of AA fire. This ship caught fire very quickly, its pathetic defenses soon disappearing altogether.

  By now, the rest of the anchored fleet had finally sprung into action. There were fourteen other ships in harbor at the moment. None of them dared to return fire or flee to the open ocean. Instead, they simply dived—whether their crews were on deck or not. They began going down quickly, creating ripples of small tidal waves as their oxygen displacement systems expelled great amounts of air while sucking in seawater for ballast. The ships disappeared so quickly, the pair of giant gunships were able to set only one more on fire before they had no more targets to shoot at.

  General Wakisaki watched all this from his hiding place beneath the ceremony platform, shaking with fright along with 300 or so of his best officers. The city of New Lima was burning behind him; the prize of his navy was burning in front. His troops were scattered and hiding their heads in the sand like ostriches. Wakisaki was quite nearly in tears. How could his world have turned so upside down so quickly?

  Perhaps I didn’t pray hard enough this morning, he thought.

  The bombing of New Lima and the fleet offshore had come so suddenly, the city’s air raid sirens had not even sounded.

  But the attack was not unexpected. Rumors that a mysterious air force had been seen operating way up in the mountains had been circulating in New Lima for weeks—though they never reached General Wakisaki’s ears.

  Just who this mysterious air force was—and who was flying the Deathwings—was simply not known.

  But the fortunes of the Japanese seemed to suddenly reverse when the tenth pair of bombers appeared over the city. Nearly one-third of downtown was aflame by now and these two airplanes seemed bent on adding to the conflagration. But they were both flying so low and so slow, it seemed impossible for them to stay in the air while they dumped thousands of pounds of firebombs down on the city below.

  And as it turned out, one of the bombers was indeed flying too low.

  It had just discharged all of its weapons when its pilots began a sharp pull out to the right. But the big plane was now over the center of the new city and trying to negotiate its way through a virtual forest of skyscrapers. Suddenly its left wing clipped one spire. The force of the collision cut a quarter of the wing off, taking two engines with it. The impact caused the pilot to yank the big airplane to the right, where it hit another tall building, taking off about one-quarter of its right wing. The plane was in grave trouble now. It roared over the southern part of the city emitting huge quantities of smoke and flames. Those on the beach hiding beneath the platform saw this, and suddenly a huge roar gurgled out of them. Their new city was burning, five ships in the harbor were in the process of sinking, and yet the sight of one airplane in trouble gave them occasion to cheer.

  Now the officers were crawling out from their hiding places and watching the big plane struggle to stay airborne. Its pilots did a good job of keeping the huge bomber trim and steady as it passed over the city and headed toward the thickest part of the jungle, to the south.

  But it was obvious to all those watching that the airplane was too severely damaged to stay aloft much longer. Indeed, about a minute after the twin collisions, and thirty seconds after it passed out of sight, it dipped down and crashed into a thick canopy of trees about ten miles south of the city limits. A cloud of smoke—but not too much flame—was seen rising over the forest. Another cheer went up from the Japanese officers on the beach.

  Even General Wakisaki was letting out a guttural cheer. Then he turned to the man next to him, who just happened to be the officer in charge of security for the city, and shouted an order directly into his ear.

  “Go, hurry to the crash site,” Wakisaki told the man. “And bring back any survivors to me!”

  As it turned out, there was a large contingent of Japanese troops already near the crash site.

  They were a combat engineering group located in another suburb of New Lima called Cucucha. This put them only four miles from where the huge bomber went down. The unit, 300 men strong, was equipped with heavy-duty earth-moving supertanks, mobile weapons that had huge shovels and blades on their front ends and towed assemblies for moving dirt on their backs. They would be ideal for making their way through the dense undergrowth and get to the crash site.

  The phones started ringing at the engineering unit’s HQ not a minute after the big plane went down. The engineers needn’t have been told there’d been a crash. The burning airplane had gone right over their base camp and shaken it from top to bottom before finally plowing in.

  But now the phones were ringing and the messages were coming directly from High General Wakisaki himself. The engineering unit was being told to get themselves to the crash site immediately. They were to bring back any survivors to Wakisaki personally, plus any pieces of wreckage which would help identify where the mysterious bomber had come from in the first place.

  Knowing that the price of failure was death, the engineering unit’s commander managed to muster 200 of his troops in a matter of minutes. Within a quarter hour of getting the first call, twenty tanks of the unit were moving up the road toward the crash site, 200 heavily armed soldiers hanging from them.

  After just ten minutes, this column was able to get within one mile of the crashed bomber, which was in a small ravine on the edge of the Simpacoo Hills. They could clearly see the smoke from the roadway. The column’s commanders laid out their maps and saw what was ahead of them. About 150 feet of thick jungle was right off the roadway. Then there was a bare field which ran up to a wide but shallow river. Then more jungle, then the crash site itself.

  The task facing the engineers wasn’t so daunting then. They would plow through the first strip of jungle, quickly reach the field, and make short work of crossing the river. After that, only several hundred more feet of jungle needed to be covered before reaching the aircraft itself. Confident in the ability of their men and their machines, the commanders radioed back to High General Wakisaki’s headquarters and reported they would be at the crash site within twenty minutes.

  Sending that overly optimistic report was their first mistake.

  The first pair of tanks crashed into the thick undergrowth, their bulldozer blades cutting and slashing trees, rocks and thick vines alike. Behind them, another pair of tanks flattened the destroyed fauna into a makeshift roadway. Behind them, the majority of the column followed, two tanks remaining on the road in reserve.

  The lead tanks reached the open field in just five minutes. From here they could see the shallow river and the thicker forest beyond. A large column of smoke was rising right above the next line of trees. The first tanks went into high speed, the troops draped all over their exteriors, holding on for dear life.

  It was these troops who first heard the strange noise coming from high above them.

  It was not a typical jet-engine whine. This sound was deeper, almost echoing. A definite chop-chop-chop! Times eight.

  They saw it a few moments later, coming out of the north. It looked like a prehistoric monster. It was almost as
big as the bombers which had just set many parts of New Lima ablaze. But it had no wings. Instead, it had many spinning rotors—eight of them. And it was gangly. It was all wires and wheels and engines and noise. There was a huge bubble of glass on its front which gave it an insect look. Yet its eight legs and rotors made it more resemble a flying octopus, which was close to its official name: Octocopter. It was loud, and scary, and it was coming down right on top of them.

  The tank drivers saw it and out of sheer panic stomped on their brakes and brought their huge vehicles to a screeching halt. This served to throw many of the hitching soldiers to the ground, their weapons and helmets flying. The strange air beast descended on the field and went into a hover. Several dozen portholes opened all over the aircraft’s convoluted body, and just as many gun muzzles appeared. The Japanese soldiers looked up, and many of them saw their last sight: thick smoke and flame coming from those muzzles.

  The noise from the guns was almost loud enough to drown out the roar of the aircraft’s eight rotors. The first two tanks were destroyed in a matter of seconds, so intense was the Octo’s high-caliber barrage. The second pair of tanks, and all those behind them, had just arrived in the open field—a big mistake, as they soon realized.

  Some of their soldiers, getting over the shock of the bizarre aircraft’s sudden appearance, began firing back. But this was also a foolish gesture. It simply turned the attention of the people in the weird aircraft toward them and now these soldiers were being perforated just like their colleagues in the lead two tanks.

  By this time the rest of the Japanese column had gone into hard reverse and backed up into the jungle, hoping the dense undergrowth would offer them some protection from the weird flying death machine. And it did. The jungle was so thick, and the engineering tanks so well camouflaged, that they blended right in, almost disappearing from view.

  The strange machine stayed hovering, though—as if it was waiting for something.

  About thirty seconds later, another scream came from the sky. This was from a very strange plane—and compared to the Octocopter, a small one. It had a long slender fuselage that appeared to have been cut off right behind the cockpit. It had an oddly crooked pair of swept-back wings. It had a very strange set of tails and a very powerful engine.

  It was also loaded with bombs. The wings and fuselage were so laden with huge, teardrop-shaped weapons, the weird little plane’s wings were actually drooping a bit.

  This new airplane seemed to have come from nowhere as well. It went right over the pair of burning tanks and dropped two teardrop-shaped bombs into the thick jungle beyond. Instantly there were two huge explosions, followed by two balls of orange fire and smoke. The swift little fighter had to veer off dramatically in order not to get caught in these fiery mushrooms. It did so, but just barely.

  The fighter climbed now, flipped over, and came back down at twice its escape speed. It roared over the jungle again, letting loose two more firebombs. Its engine screaming, the airplane twisted away again as another pair of gigantic fireballs erupted from the thick forest. Above the roar of this jet, the racket of the eight rotors of the Octocopter, and the four fiery explosions, a new sound could be heard: the screams of the Japanese soldiers being incinerated by the firebombs.

  The little fighter twisted over and was coming back again. Meanwhile the Octocopter had moved off and was now hovering above the spot where the huge bomber had crashed. Rope ladders were cascading from the bottom of the weird aircraft, and soldiers were being lowered on them. Within seconds, these ladders were being raised again, each one bearing a rescue soldier and a survivor from the crash.

  The fighter kept sweeping over the jungle, plastering firebombs on the hapless tanks leading all the way back to the road itself. Many of the Japanese soldiers that had somehow escaped the conflagration had scattered into the thick jungle, getting tangled up in the many vines and roots that twisted in a nightmarish patchwork along the jungle floor. The heat was so intense by this time that the leaves were actually melting off the trees, in some cases dripping a burning, rubberlike substance onto the panicking soldiers.

  All thoughts of reaching the wrecked bomber were long gone now.

  Those few soldiers who did survive saw the Octocopter raise up a total of thirty-two people from the crash site, along with six bodies. The little fighter, its wings expended of firebombs, was still strafing the jungle where the column of burning tanks now lay. Only after the Octocopter began pulling away from the crash site did the little plane go into a steep climb and take up a position above and to the rear of the strange eight-rotor craft.

  Together they moved off to the north, leaving behind barely twelve survivors of the column of 200 men and twenty tanks.

  In all, the one-sided battle had lasted just ten minutes.

  In the basement of the main military government building in New Lima was a small hospital used for officers of the Nipponese Occupying Armed Forces.

  There was only one patient being treated here at the moment, though; while nearly two dozen army and navy officers lay dying in the waiting room, no less than seventeen surgeons were praying over High General Wakisaki.

  The general had been hurt in the attack on Callao Beach. Not by enemy action per se—the reviewing stand under which he and many others fled at first sight of the bombers had collapsed, giving the general a slight cut on his nose.

  The wound required not even half a dozen stitches, but still the top doctors in New Lima were working on closing the cut, and trying their best to reassure the general that no scar would remain, or if one did, it would look rather “manly.”

  But Wakisaki wasn’t really listening to them at the moment. Laid out on the operating table, lights and masked faces staring down at him, he was simply too busy crying.

  The tears had been flowing for almost an hour now. They’d started soon after the mysterious bombers had left New Lima ablaze, and had continued unabated through the general’s evacuation to the basement hospital.

  The very unmanly waterworks had little to do with the general’s nose wound, though it did sting anytime his salty tears found their way into the cut. No, the majority of tears were the result of shame—his shame—and from his hurt feelings.

  He just couldn’t understand what had happened. Why would anyone want to bomb New Lima? Or his troops? Or his ships offshore? What was the point of it?

  For his army and navy to be attacked was an affront to his own personal honor, and no blade could go deeper into Wakisaki than a disgrace of his good name. That’s why what happened to the general this day became a scar that would last much longer than the cut on his nose. This day, he knew, would live on inside him and haunt him right to the core.

  Such a compulsive obsession was a result of his psychological makeup. Unbeknownst to anyone, Wakisaki actually regarded his occupation of South America not so much as a conquest, but as a thing of beauty. Like a pearl vase or a sculpture, he’d shaped it, he’d executed it, he’d dreamed of its every detail. And for the first six months, this thing of beauty had grown, had been nurtured by him. Had taken on an extra beauty. In his hands, he’d crafted no less than a new kind of culture. He had projected the Asian way of life to another continent, half a world away. They might as well have been on another planet!

  And now, this thing had been ruined, had been fouled.

  Why?

  This was why there were tears rolling down his cheeks and sometimes getting into his nose wound. His perfect record had been besmirched. His pure white soul was now stained. His heart was now ringed with filth.

  But the real question ran even deeper than why. The real question was who. Who could have done this?

  And just as these words were on his lips, there was a knock at the treatment room door. A very shaky officer in a very sweaty uniform stepped in. He was not a military officer, rather he was the police chief for New Lima, a sacrificial lamb if there ever was one. In his trembling right hand was the report on the action from the bomber crash si
te; in his left hand, a small pistol with one bullet in it.

  The police chief handed the report to the high general, who was eating him alive with his teary eyes. Then, calmly, the police chief raised the pistol to his own head and pulled the trigger. There was a crack, a splash of cranial matter hit the far wall, and the man slumped to the floor, bleeding profusely. The seventeen doctors ignored him, of course. They were too busy tending to the last stitch on Wakisaki’s wounded nose.

  The report was stark in its details. Twenty tanks and 189 men had been lost to enemy action in attempting to reach the bomber crash site. All survivors of the bomber had been rescued; even the bodies of those killed in the crash had been carried away. The wreckage had by now burned away to nothing, destroyed by time-delayed magnesium bombs left behind by the mysterious rescuers.

  Wakisaki felt his spirits plummet even further. What a difference a day makes! Now there was no wreckage to be recovered, no survivors to torture. No way to find out where they all came from.

  He let out another gush of tears, and thought he saw a few of the doctors laugh at this girlish display. But two words in the report were beginning to burn their way into Wakisaki’s brain. Enemy action.

  Yes, Wakisaki realized, forcing back the tears. He suddenly had an enemy on his hands. But who were they? Certainly not the Colombians, or the Brazilians. Neither of those troublesome states would dare attack New Lima. Nor did they have anywhere near the military technology Wakisaki and thousands of others had seen during the bombing raid. Huge bombers, huge gunships, small swift fighters, strange hovering aircraft bristling with guns. Wakisaki knew aircraft, and he knew that no one on this continent flew the kind of airplanes he’d just seen.