Return of Sky Ghost

by Maloney, Mack;

  Wakisaki sipped the last few drops of a grape sake bottle and stared out on the water as the thick alcohol did its work on him. The hulks for the four burned-out warships were still in evidence—the cutting crews would begin work on them today. Other ships were coming and going in the artificial harbor, plying the filthy water, bringing troops and supplies in and taking raw materials and foodstuffs out for shipment back to Japan. Everything looked as it should.

  You see? a small voice in Wakisaki’s head began saying. This is the way it was supposed to be. Everything is right again.

  He picked up his radiophone and called down to his staff room. They were to muster the 1029th Battle Squadron immediately and prepare them for air strikes at Ganganez’s request. Then he ordered a huge celebration planned for downtown New Lima within two days’ time.

  He requested that the following message be sent to the Night Brigade: Destroy enemy base and aircraft. Bring all top enemy officers to New Lima for torture and public execution. Congratulations on a job well done.

  Wakisaki hung up the phone and sipped the last few drops of sake from yet another nearly depleted bottle.

  The sun was just coming up, and the water before him was beginning to sparkle black. Below him New Lima was coming to life too. Tanks rolling through the streets, airplanes flying overhead, port docks getting busier by the second. Wakisaki felt an odd feeling on his lips and cheeks. It startled him, it came so quickly.

  He looked at his reflection in the balcony glass door and saw a brightened face staring back at him.

  That was when he finally cracked.

  He just couldn’t help it. He was smiling again.

  Nine

  At the bottom of Xwo Mountain

  XAXMAX LOVED HIS NEW sunglasses.

  They were a great invention, he thought. With them, he could shield his eyes from the burning sun and yet still see. He imagined they would be extremely helpful while hunting for monkeys in the high trees of the forest. They might also help in catching fish.

  He loved his new hat, too. It was blue with a wide brim and it fit over his matted hair nicely. Again, he was sure that it would help him during the hot days and maybe even the cool nights. After all, what spirits he possessed were in his head, and it was up to him to keep them comfortable.

  The huge mechanical war machine he was sitting in didn’t impress him that much, though. He’d seen greater things atop of Xwo mountain. Sure this vehicle, with all its guns and smoke and fire and lights and bells and noises and things, was interesting—but could it fly?

  He didn’t think so.

  Could it drop bombs? Or fire guns from the clouds?

  No …

  It was big and mighty, yes, but Xaxmax had seen mightier things.

  He’d drawn a map of the easiest way to get up Xwo, to where the airplanes landed and launched from. There were 700 men in Ganganez’s army and most of them would be going up the mountain with him. The path had to be wide enough for them to walk three abreast but not so wide as to attract attention. The path should also be shaded, Ganganez said, so the men didn’t lose their energy too soon. But it shouldn’t be completely covered, so the men would be able to see where they were going.

  As the climb would take at least six hours, Xaxmax knew it was best to bring them up on the southeastern side, so the sun would be on them during the late morning, when it was most important.

  So Xaxmax was drawing a map of a trail he knew would fit the bill perfectly. He’d taken it several times to the top of Xwo himself recently. In fact, he knew just about every step of it by now.

  He’d spent the night in the back of the command vehicle, watching Ganganez and his officers plan the ascent up the mountain and the battle which they believed would take place once they arrived. He heard them talk about what weapons they would bring and how they would talk back to those few soldiers they would leave behind, here, in Xaxmax’s deserted village, with their extra equipment.

  He heard them brag about bringing in their own airplanes to help in the battle—small ones, from what Xaxmax could determine, which was funny because he had never really seen an airplane of any kind until a few weeks ago. Now, suddenly, he was an expert!

  He watched the soldiers eat their morning meal—all red bloody meat, from what Xaxmax could tell. They drank a premission liquid which Xaxmax thought smelled of spirits.

  He watched as the soldiers applied green paint to their faces and hands, for reasons Xaxmax could not understand. They took great care and time looking over their weapons, too. Cleaning them, loading them, and praying to them—or at least that’s what it looked like to Xaxmax.

  Finally, the soldiers were ready to go. They lined up in formation, ten deep, seventy across, and listened as Ganganez went over their plan. Climb up the mountain, reach the top, attack the air base, destroy the airplanes, capture as many officers and pilots as possible, and kill the rest.

  With Xaxmax leading the way, the column should reach the summit in plenty of time to win the battle while there was still plenty of sunlight.

  It seemed simple enough to Xaxmax.

  The column started out at midmorning.

  The soldiers were quiet as they began the climb up the trail. The animals were quiet, the wind too, as the hundreds of boots commenced the trudge upwards.

  Xaxmax was in the lead, Colonel Ganganez and his personal bodyguards right behind him. Ganganez carried just a pistol and a sword; his bodyguards carried heavy bulletproof armor shields, not for themselves, but to protect their leader with, should it come to that.

  The trail was thick with fauna the first hour of marching. The column, which had started out with much enthusiasm, began almost imperceptibly to slow down thirty minutes into the hike. Ganganez didn’t realize it, his men didn’t either. But Xaxmax could tell. It was very obvious to him.

  The second hour brought more heat from the sun and more silence from the jungle around them. The column stopped once for a water break and again, just twenty minutes later, to allow those at the rear to catch up. This took ten minutes, and while those at the front of the column waited restlessly, they drank more water, depleting their rations needlessly.

  Xaxmax, on the other hand, was enjoying the march, his new hat, and his new sunglasses. Moreover, he was enjoying the warmth and the scenery and the cosmic amusement of no animals growling, no birds singing, and no wind blowing.

  The delay was prolonged when two of the men at mid column collapsed from the heat Ganganez angrily sent them back down the mountain, taking their water and weapons from them and casting them adrift on the winding, confusing mountain trail. Xaxmax doubted they would reach the bottom of the hill alive, but that didn’t seem to be a concern to Ganganez.

  The column began again. They were now approaching the end of the tree line, maybe 4,000 feet up the side of the mountain, and entering a stretch of brush, thick bushes, and vines. Xaxmax stepped lightly over and around these obstacles, but the soldiers, marching three across, had a harder time of it. The column slowed even further.

  Another half hour passed. The sun became brutal. The air absolutely still. Suddenly, there came much shouting from the rear of the column. Ganganez called his men to a halt once again and watched in growing irritation as a runner from the back of the column approached.

  “Twenty men are missing, sir,” the man told the colonel.

  “Missing?” Ganganez asked, more confused than anything. “Well, just wait for them to catch up.”

  But the man was shaking his head no.

  “They are gone, sir,” he was saying. “One minute they were there. The next—vamoose! We went back to where we last saw them. We found their guns at the trail’s edge. Their boots too. But the men themselves are gone.”

  Ganganez just stared back at the man. He was talking crazy. If his men had fallen off a cliff, or if they’d deserted or given up the hike, surely they wouldn’t have left their boots behind. Or their guns.

  “Take a count,” Ganganez ordered his lieutenants.
“Quickly!”

  But taking a count of a 700-man column was not a thing that could be done quickly. The men began sounding off, but it was time-consuming. The column was so stretched out by now, it took runners several minutes to move up to Ganganez’s position with updates on the counting process. But when the final tally reached him, things were more confusing then ever. Now forty-three men were missing. All of them from the end of the column, all of them inexplicably leaving their boots and weapons behind.

  Ganganez was now more confused than ever. He ordered all his men to prepare arms, then made a call back to the base camp in the village, to see if the forty-three missing men had been spotted below.

  But there was no reply.

  That’s when Ganganez pulled Xaxmax down off a rock and held him tightly around the throat.

  “What is happening here, bird-head?” he asked him in the ancient Intez language.

  Xaxmax had his answer already prepared.

  “Your men will meet us at the top of the mountain,” he said.

  He pried himself loose and began running up the trail again, beckoning Ganganez to follow him.

  “Come on,” he called back to the Brigade commander. “You’ll see….”

  It was the men at the rear of the Night Brigade’s column who were the most nervous.

  Several times in the past thirty minutes they had turned around and found dozens of their colleagues suddenly gone. Vanished, without a trace. When they went back for them, cutting their way through the dense brush, all they found were their boots and their guns. No footprints. No bloodstains. No last cries. They were just gone, as if swept away by ghosts.

  Now these men—they were part of the Night Brigade’s explosives squads—were suddenly on the tail of the column. They were so frightened, some were actually wetting themselves.

  One man, a sergeant named Aswalo, was trying to keep his courage up by chanting under his breath. To the sun god, the moon god, the earth god, the water god. To any god who might hear him, he chanted and sweated and gulped, while wiping the fluid from his nose and eyes. He was trying his best to keep up with the main column, but felt himself being slowed down, and losing sight of the man in front of him for long periods of time.

  The vegetation was so thick, his eyes were suffering from green-out, a condition that made him see just about everything in shades of green only. Even his skin looked green to him now. Or maybe that’s what happened when a man lost his courage for good, he thought.

  He was almost running now, trying like hell to keep up with the man in front of him, but slipping and sliding on the liquid pathway and falling further and further behind. He should never have slaughtered that family of innocents back in Bolivia several months ago, he cursed. He should never have blown up that church in Chile with so many women and children inside it. He should never have killed his own father in a dispute over two pesos. And he should never have …

  Aswalo was sweating so much now his boots were hard to keep on. In that frightening moment, he became convinced this was the way his missing colleagues had lost their boots!

  Aswalo looked down at his jungle shoes and saw they were coming undone. A new streak of terror went through him. He knew he would have to stop and retie them—but this meant he would fall further behind the column. But not to do so would be even more foolish. If he walked very far in the squishy untied boots, he knew from experience he would develop sores and blisters which would make it impossible for him to walk at all.

  He quickly stopped, laid down his rifle, and hastily began to restring his boots.

  When he looked up again, he found himself staring into the eyes of one of his colleagues.

  It was Sergeant Pedro Petro, one of the company’s cooks and a friend of Aswalo. But in the microsecond that Aswalo recognized his old chum, he also knew something was very, very wrong. Pedro’s eyes were staring at him unblinkingly and his head was cocked in such a way as to look very unnatural. A moment later, Aswalo knew why: It was Pedro’s severed head he was looking at.

  It was tied through the ears with hemp twine and looped around the neck of the man who was standing over him, watching him tie his boots. This man was wearing Pedro’s severed head like a ghoulish necklace, even though Aswalo had spoken with Pedro not five minutes before he’d disappeared.

  Aswalo tried to cry out, but even then he knew it was useless. This person standing over him, he was a native—just like the one who was leading them up this mountain of hell. But his face was painted with bloody red liquid. And his eyes were fierce and burning. He had a double-barrel machine gun in one hand and a huge machete in the other. And he was looking down at Aswalo like a hunter looks down on a calf before slaughter.

  In his last seconds on earth, Aswalo saw another strange thing. It was a gallery of faces staring out at him from the bush. Same blood-painted faces, with the heads of his friends hanging around their necks. Same fierce look in their eyes.

  We should never have come here, Aswalo thought as the machete came down on his neck. We should have all just stayed home….

  There was real trouble now, Ganganez could taste it in the air. The men at the rear of his column were running toward the safety of the middle, thus bunching the majority of his force in a small clearing about halfway up the side of the mountain. Despite his efforts, both yelling into his radio and at the top of his lungs, Ganganez could not calm his men down. Something awful was happening at the rear of the column. Unseen, unheard, but terrifying enough to make his highly trained soldiers panic.

  Ganganez looked up ahead of him, at the trail as it left the small clearing, and saw the native guide Xaxmax standing on a tree stump, waving at him. The native was tipping his hat and laughing, too. Ganganez raised his pistol and fired twice at the man—obviously he’d led them into this trap. But the bullets missed the grinning native by a mile.

  Ganganez directed his men to shoot at the gap-toothed man too, and they did. But somehow the man was able to dance his way out of the line of fire. Now more soldiers were firing at him, but the native continued his dance and managed to dodge the fusillade being directed at him.

  By this time the column of panicky soldiers was flowing into the clearing, accordionlike, dangerously bunching up in clumps of ten or more. Ganganez turned his attention away from the native and back to his men. He began screaming at them again, ordering them to go back down the trail so they all wouldn’t be so woefully exposed. But no one was listening to him. And no one was going back down that trail either. That was very evident now.

  The gunfire aimed at the native, the sounds of the panicky 600-plus men pouring into the clearing, and the sound of Ganganez’s own voice drowned out another, deeper, more ominous sound riding on the wind.

  It was the groan of sixteen jet engines, flying very high, but coming down very, very fast.

  The gunship arrived overhead at precisely 1100 hours.

  It had been airborne for ninety minutes, circling very high above Xwo mountain, tracking the progress of the ascent of the Night Brigade via its long-range monitoring array.

  The timing of this aerial operation had to be exact for several reasons. It would have been a mistake to attack the Night Brigade while they were still in the village below. Thousands of years of heritage were represented by the Intez settlement and it simply could not be destroyed. Besides, an attack on the ground would have given the Brigade a means of escape.

  But up here, halfway up the mountain, they had nowhere to go.

  Taking out fifty of the Argentine soldiers at the rear of the column had been a ritualistic exercise more than anything else. It was the Intez way to instill fear into their enemies before destroying them. Lopping off the column’s tail had certainly filled that bill.

  It had also served to drive the rest of the column into the open area known as Axaz, or “flat place, halfway up.”

  This was the only place on the mountain trail in which the gunship would have a clear shot at the column. It was here that the airplane—and
its forty-four high-powered guns—would do their bloody work.

  The pilots of the aircraft got a message from the control hut on top of Xwo at 1110 hours. The native chief, Xaxmax, was clear of the enemy column. The Axaz plain was now a free-fire zone. The controllers were giving total fire control over to the big airplane’s pilots. They in turn radioed back to their small army of gunners in the hold of the aerial giant: Load weapons and get ready for action.

  The airplane itself was rather frightening just to look at. It was nearly 300 feet long, with an enormous wingspan. Sixteen engines adorned its wings. All of them jets, all of them spewing thick, gray exhaust and emitting a scream that sounded like a thousand people crying at once.

  There were more than 600 soldiers caught on the Axaz Plain. They saw the airplane, saw its muzzles, saw that they were, in effect, trapped before its gun sights.

  The engines screamed as the airplane dipped down closer to them. Many men simply stood frozen and looked at it.

  The fusillade came two seconds later. Thirty-eight triple-barreled machine guns, two small howitzers, and four 20-mm cannons all fired at once. Some of the soldiers pitifully turned their rifles toward the flying monster, but that was immensely futile. The stream of gunfire hit the field like a wave on a beach. In ten seconds, half of the soldiers simply ceased to exist.

  The airplane pulled up, its size so immense it seemed impossible for it to fly, and came back around again. Those soldiers not already killed or horribly wounded were still frozen in place. Or at least most of them were. One man had just a little bit more of his wits about him. It was Colonel Ganganez. He’d somehow escaped the initial barrage and was watching the airplane come around again.

  A fleeting notion went through his mind. In this moment of tragedy, he should be with his troops, he thought.

  But he quickly dismissed that notion.