Return of Sky Ghost

by Maloney, Mack;

  He was sure his whole secret mission was the first step in that kind of plan. In fact, maybe it was the only step …

  At exactly thirty seconds to go, Hunter came out of a cloud bank at 80,000 feet. Once again it was just him, the moon, and the stars.

  The mission screen began blinking green at ten seconds out, red at five seconds out, and then it finally went all white.

  Slowly, the animation began to form. It was a map, outlining the lower half of the South American continent. A little cartoon version of his airplane appeared and began moving South. He was being told to proceed to a coordinate shown on the map’s grid as Tango Point Charlie, a location just off the coast of southern Argentina. From there, he was to head in an easterly direction for nearly 500 miles. At that point he would intercept a homing beacon which would lead him to an airport. Here he would land and go AFI—await further instructions.

  At first the directions off the coordinate seemed simplistic. Basically the MVP was telling him to get down to the tail of South America and take a left. Then fly for a few hundred miles. But what exactly was out there?

  Hunter pushed the grid map extension and got his answer right away. Two oddly shaped islands riding amidst the high waves of the South Atlantic.

  Yes, he had heard of them. They were actually infamous in a way.

  They were called the Falkland Islands.

  Twenty-three

  Nevada

  AGENT Y WAS SITTING in a control room in the heart of the Area 52 command center.

  Before him was a bank of six TV screens. His ever-present MVP was plugged into the console beneath these screens and connected to an interface which tied into the room’s gigantic Main/AC computer. The thinking machine was whirring away, blinking and burping as usual. On the six TV screens there was a small clock in the right-hand corner counting down to 0100 hours mountain time.

  This was a big night for Y, a big night for this audacious plan which had Hawk Hunter flying somewhere down at the bottom of the planet, thousands of soldiers sitting on the border of Brazil, thousands more getting ready to jump off for the Panama Canal—and Y sitting here alone in a TV control room.

  This was Phase 3 of the Big Plan; in Y’s own language, the Gathering of the Associates, possibly the strangest part of all.

  At that moment, there were six OSS “hit squads” scattered across the country. Each one was waiting for the small clock in the corner of their MVPs to click down to 0100 hours. Each group was equipped with an insta-camera which would feed live visuals to the control room monitors arrayed in front of Y.

  Y didn’t smoke cigarettes, but if he did, he would have lit one up now. Trying to pull all these strings—while the Main/AC was pulling his—was a nonstop juggle. The multilevel diversion plan, Hunter’s suicide mission, this mysterious Bomb.

  It was strange, though, because in all this, it was the odd disappearance of his estranged colleagues, Agents X and Z, that kept coming back to him. In some ways it made everything that much stranger.

  Where were they? Alive or dead? Free or imprisoned? On the inside or on the out? The fact that the agents were missing was the best-kept secret on a planet overloaded with top secrets and intrigue. Could they have been kidnapped by Japanese agents? Y doubted it. His colleagues were not so foolish as to leave themselves exposed to a snatch. Were they dead? Assassinated maybe? By an enemy hit squad? Y doubted that too. The cosmos just didn’t feel like X and Z were gone.

  So where the hell were they? At this, the most critical time in the country’s history since the last critical time in the war with Germany, two of the most valuable spies around had decided to go underground. It was all so very odd …

  Y checked the time again. It was the last minute of the countdown. He really didn’t have time to worry about X and Z’s whereabouts now. He had more important things to do.

  The clock finally ticked down the last few seconds, then instantly the six TV screens came to life.

  Y immediately activated his microphone and was talking to Squad A. They were located in a section of northeastern Pennsylvania known as the Endless Mountains. They were in front of a nondescript, pleasant-looking house.

  “OK, go,” Y told them.

  Two agents got out of their car, one carrying the insta-cam with him. Whatever was to happen next, Y would see it in real time.

  The agents approached the front door and hesitated a moment before knocking. There was a noise in the background. A high-pitched whining. Electrical. Possibly a power tool of some kind.

  They rang the doorbell and a pleasant-looking Asian woman answered the door. Two young girls were in the background watching TV. The agents identified themselves. The woman looked over their ID cards.

  “We’d like to speak with your husband,” one of the agents told the woman as politely as possible. She showed them in, they passed through the living room where the two young girls politely said hello. They proceeded down a set of stairs to the basement where a workshop was located. The husband, wearing a protective mask, was leaning over a large power saw, cutting a length of very thin material, half plastic, half wood. Before him was a large, incomplete—well, something. Y could not tell what it was from the camera’s angle.

  The two agents walked forward and finally the wife got the man’s attention. The power saw stopped. The object he was working on came into better view. It was an airplane—a small one, but one that looked to be jet-powered and highly advanced in its stunning design.

  The man lifted his protective mask; he was slightly startled, slightly confused. The agents showed their IDs. The man read them and relaxed somewhat.

  Finally one agent spoke.

  “Is your name Ben Wa?” he asked.

  At nearly the exact moment, Squad B was approaching the door to a teachers’ residence on the campus of J. Kathryn College, outside of Chicago.

  The pair of agents, camera running, went through the main door, up two flights of stairs and stopped at Room 1333. They knocked twice. The door eventually opened, but very slowly.

  Watching TV monitor 2, Y got an unexpected eyeful. The dormlike room was filled with young coeds, all in various states of undress. Some were awake and engaged in animated conversation; others appeared to be napping. Four were playing cards in one corner. Another pair were kissing and fondling one another nearby. One side of the room had been turned into a photography area with a large white backdrop, low-intensity lights, and an expensive portrait camera set on a tripod. Here, a group of semi-naked beauties were taking pictures of each other.

  In the midst of this harem sat one man. He was in his mid twenties, fashionably if comfortably dressed, with tousled hair and a professorial beard. This is a teacher’s residence; he is the teacher.

  He is also the man the two agents have come to see.

  The agents make their way over to the man, show their ID cards, and ask him a single question:

  “Are you J.T. Toomey?”

  On TV monitor 3, very nearly the same sequence was playing out.

  A pair of OSS agents were walking toward a bar located in the northernmost city of New England, a place called Loring, Maine.

  The weather was so cold the vapor was fogging the lens of the insta-camera, even in the few seconds it took for the agents to cross the street and go into the saloon. The place was loud and rowdy, but warm. A pool game was going on in one corner. Many dancing girls were in evidence. Many patrons were carrying firearms. From Y’s point of view, it looked like the Old West, except it was really the cold Northeast.

  The agents threaded their way through the crowd, finally coming to a table where a man sat counting out huge stacks of money.

  Beside him were two enormous female bodyguards, armed with shotguns, hand-cannon pistols, and dressed entirely in black leather.

  The man looked up at the OSS agents, and like the previous two subjects, greeted them with a facial expression that was a mixture of surprise and bemusement.

  “Trouble with your bill, gentlemen?”
he asked with a thick Canadian accent.

  The agents ignored the jibe and got right to business.

  “Mr. Frost, we presume?”

  Oddly enough, the fourth TV monitor was broadcasting from a place that Y had just left.

  It was in a squad car parked outside the Visiting Players entrance to the huge Dallas football stadium.

  As always, there was a crowd of fans and general street partiers passing by, even though it was fairly late in the evening.

  The agents left their car, going quickly through the merry crowd and gaining access to the Visiting Players door via a door-unlocking tool carried by all OSS operatives.

  They walked down a long tile corridor and finally found themselves looking at the door to the visiting team’s locker room. The temporary sign on the door read: NEW JERSEY GIANTS. NO ADMITTANCE.

  The agents went in without knocking and were confronted by what appeared to Y to be an entire professional football team, all suited up, just seconds away from running out onto the field. There were about fifty people in all. Some stared blankly into the insta-camera lens. Most ignored it entirely.

  The agents approached the man who was obviously in charge of the team. He was surrounded by five other coaches. They had their names sewn into their workout shirts: Matus. Palma. Cerbasi. Vittelo. Delusso. McCaffery.

  The agents showed their ID badges to everyone, then came face to face with the man in the middle.

  “Coach Geraci?” one asked. “May we have a word with you please?”

  Hit Team Five was slightly late in finding their subjects.

  The contact point was in the isolated foothills near Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the ride out had been a long, dusty, dirty affair for the OSS men. When the agents finally did arrive, they were certain they were at the wrong place.

  It was not a bar or a suburban house or a college harem or a football team locker room. It was a monastery—out in the middle of nowhere.

  The agents checked back with Y that they were indeed at the right location, and he confirmed that they were. They got out of the vehicle, went through the main gate, and quickly spotted a room in the courtyard from which a faint light was coming.

  They knocked on the door and were greeted by a nun, young, fresh-faced, but heavily garbed in a white habit.

  The agents had a few words with her, apologizing for the late hour. She led them into the main dining room. Here a small group of monks was just beginning a late meal. They all looked up—again a look of bafflement on their faces.

  Oddly, the monks were wearing name tags: Brother Miller. Brother Snyder. Brother Higgens. Brother Maas.

  The agents walked over to the monk sitting at the end of the table. They flashed their ID cards.

  But the monk spoke before they could. “I am Brother Jim Cook,” he said. “May I help you with something?”

  Y had been privy to a confidential information message concerning the subject of Hit Team 6.

  For whatever reason, the Main/AC was expecting the sixth person to be the hardest to track down, the hardest to contact, and possibly the hardest to convince of what his country expected him to do.

  Finding him did turn out to be a bitch. It took all of forty-eight hours, which was forty-seven hours and fifty-five seconds longer than it took to locate all of the other contacts combined. The sixth man was finally tracked down to a small military outpost in the wilds of the Florida Keys. It was a reserve naval station, a place that was always on the cusp of deactivation. It held a complement of exactly sixteen men.

  The station had a seaplane—a small, two-engine recon thing—and the man the OSS men had to track down was its pilot.

  They found him in the operations hut, writing a report and drinking a huge cup of mud-black coffee.

  The agents walked in and took stock of their subject. Back at the Area 52 command hut, Y was doing the same.

  The man was in his mid thirties, with slightly graying hair. His face was red, his nose redder. He was, as they would say, a fireplug of a man. But, in his defense, there was an air of slight sophistication about his face.

  He was rugged, tough, and obviously very strong. Yet he smiled broadly when the agents appeared. There was no look of confusion or befuddlement here. This man knew something.

  As Y watched, the agents introduced themselves, pulling out their ID cards and then showing them to the subject.

  But the man barely read their names.

  “How strange is this?” he asked, a slight brogue in his voice. “I dreamed this would happen and now it is.”

  “Sir?” one agents replied.

  “You’re OSS, I know,” the man continued. “And your computer selected me as one of a bunch of people for a secret project. Right?”

  The agents were startled, so much so, one looked directly into the insta-camera and shrugged. Y was fairly astonished too. How could the strange little man possibly know this, unless he was telling the truth and actually did dream it?

  He stood up and began packing his bag—that’s how ready he was to go.

  Finally Y just sent the agents a voice message. “He’s so willing, looks like you will have no problems at all.”

  The agents on the other end agreed. Then one turned to the man and said, “For the record sir? Your name is …”

  The subject smiled again and then looked directly into the camera.

  “Mike Fitzgerald,” he replied.

  Twenty-four

  HUNTER ARRIVED AT HIS first coordinate less than twenty minutes after receiving his orders.

  His grid map indicated he was over a point in Argentina called Punta Norte. It was a coastal city, thick with cargo ships and tankers bringing in supplies for the Occupation Forces. Someday soon, he imagined, it would feel the sting of an American firebombing.

  It was now 0530 hours, and way off in the distance Hunter could see the beginnings of the new dawn.

  He punched his present location into the in-flight system and waited while the MVP agreed with his selection. Then he made a long turn to the east, set his throttles to supercruise, and felt the Stiletto accelerate smoothly through the clean air.

  The ocean horizon stretched out before him now, and he detected no less than six storms within his visual range. To his right, where the reaches of Antarctica could be found, a large white blizzard was in full blow. To his left, whipping off the coast of Uruguay, a tropical storm was beginning to stir. But the largest disturbance of all was right in front of him. It was an enormous tempest, black and gray clouds twirling in a counterclockwise motion, like a slow-motion tornado, tearing off the Argentine coast and heading east, out to sea.

  Hunter checked his coordinates with the MVP and they came back as OK. He wondered, briefly, what the Z-3/15’s characteristics would be in bad weather. The plane was built to carve through clean high air with the greatest of ease. How would its needle shape, short wings, and enormous fuel tanks take to the bad atmospherics? He decided to find out.

  He reduced speed to barely Mach 1 and took a long, deep breath of oxygen. The storm clouds were topping 55,000 feet—he held at about 53,000 and dove in.

  There was a little buffeting, and his needle nose began oscillating slightly. But Hunter simply pushed the throttles ahead a notch and everything smoothed out. He took another deep breath of Big O in celebration. This airplane was simply amazing …

  Suddenly, everything began shaking again.

  Hunter immediately checked the aircraft’s instrumentation. The cockpit of the Z-3/15 was an elegant array of buttons, push pads, and switches. At the moment, all of them were lit and normal. This proved one thing: It wasn’t the airplane that was shaking. It was him.

  He checked the MVP. Maybe this vibe was a prelude to some kind of wacky message coming in from the mother-hen Main/AC?

  But no. The MVP was clear.

  Whatever was making him shake was local. He scanned the skies above and to the sides—maybe there were some unfriendly fighters lurking in this soup? If any enemy aircraft wer
e close by and he had to fight them, he would at least see what the Stiletto could do in a shoot-out. But both his radar screens were clear: the one installed in the aircraft and the more efficient and accurate one located between his temple lobes.

  So why the shakes? he wondered.

  Purely on instinct, he began to dive. Through the thick clouds, through the swirling winds, through the rain itself. The needle-nose airplane was down from 55-angels to barely a mile high in less than twenty seconds.

  That’s when he saw them.

  Warships. A small fleet of them. Right below him. Two destroyers and two cruisers, escorting six cargo ships. There was no guessing here; these cargo humpers were troop carriers. Leading the fleet was an aircraft carrier. Not one of the mammoth subs that Japan had recently used in its conquests, or a megacarrier of the type the U.S. Navy favored. This was medium-sized for this world, and thus, odd in its own way. But still it could carry at least 200 aircraft.

  Just who these ships belonged to seemed very apparent. All of them were flying the huge red ball flag of the Japanese Occupation forces. No wonder his entire body was vibrating.

  But worst of all was the direction of these enemy warships.

  Like the storm, they were heading east.

  Right toward the Falklands.

  There were two working airports on the Falkland Islands.

  One was at Stanley, the capital. It had a 6,500-foot runway, capable of handling small fighters and cargo airplanes. Neither made any regular trips there however.

  The larger airport was actually a somnambulant RAF base located at McReady Bay on the northwestern tip of East Falkland.

  This base boasted no less than seven runways, two of them 20,000-foot giants capable of handling just about any plane flying, save the latest supermonsters. McReady had been built in 1983 during the war with Germany to interdict German supply routes coming around Cape Horn. When the war switched phases and all action left the area, the base was all but mothballed. The maritime and defensive airplanes were moved out, and now the base supported a single C-330 Hercules S&R plane, a few prop observation planes, and an ancient Beater.