Return of Sky Ghost

by Maloney, Mack;

  The destruction he and his jet plane were wreaking was happening almost by remote control. See the target, aim at the target, shoot the guns. Simple as that. Flying the plane was simple too, no matter what impossible twist or turn he was performing, it was like second nature to him. It was trying to get the fucking MVP to do something that was draining most of his energy—and that was very frustrating.

  For despite what was happening below, it was still absolutely critical that they get a message to the outside world. That had been Hunter’s real objective in getting his plane working and airborne again. To charge up the MVP and send an SOS. But now the damn thing was charged to the max and still it wouldn’t even burp for him.

  While he was screwing around with it, he’d put the white jet into a long elliptical orbit; this was the most efficient way for him to fire his guns and hit targets. The fact that he was doing it just 300 feet above the ground and a speed approaching Mach 3 gave it all that unreal blurry image. In one second, he would find himself over the beach, firing on the landing craft. The next, he was over McReady, tearing up a few taxiing warplanes. Turning continuously to the left, he was suddenly over the warships, raking the second cruiser with cannon fire. A few seconds later, he was back over the beach again.

  It was a crazy carousel of speed and fire and death and all the while he was banging the goddamn MVP and screaming at it to do something. Anything.

  Finally, after his third pass over McReady, the MVP screen cleared itself and began blinking: Send Message Now.

  It was as if the sun and the moon came out at the same time. Suddenly, there was light before Hunter’s eyes where since he’d come to this haunted place, there had been nothing but darkness. He passed over the second destroyer, pumping a barrage into its foredeck, and kept screaming left. He began punching words into the MVP—a long, yet concise message. He’d been rehearsing it for a long time, so he wasted no time now. The words began spitting onto the MVP screen faster than he could turn the jet.

  He was sending the priority message burst to Agent Y and OSS headquarters simultaneously. He was telling them his current position, the situation, and how dire it all was. It took him just one pass over the beach and another over McReady to complete the message. He was sure anyone receiving it would recognize the circumstances right away and send help—quick.

  But, after he scrambled the message and hit the Send button, the usual screen-blink from green to white did not happen. The screen blinked blue, and then came back as all red. The words it was showing now were: Access Not Possible. Overload situation. Try later.

  Hunter was barely able to contain his fury. Calm down, he told himself. Stay cool. Stay tight. After all, this might be a temporary thing. He tore up two more landing craft and hit the MVP’s send button again. Again, he got the overload message. He tried again, but to the same result.

  He just couldn’t believe it. He was getting a fucking busy signal!

  He tried again and again and again—to no avail. He imagined every goddamn Main/AC computer in the United States was plugged in at the moment, everyone feeding off the thing on the eve of the great American counterstrike and thus causing the electronic logjam. But the fools were cutting their own throats because down here, where it was all happening, the one message that had to get through wasn’t going anywhere.

  He tried again and again and again—and finally the screen began blinking with a new message. It repeated the overload problem again, and then, in big red letters, it informed him that the next possible access wouldn’t be for three hours. Then it blinked off for good.

  For Hunter, that’s when the sun went down again.

  Colonel Asten knew the time had come.

  Despite the grand heroics of his men in the trenches and the slightly frightening performance of the crazy American in his slightly unreal jet, the reality of the situation was now quite clear.

  At least 200 enemy troops were now firmly established on the beach. Dug-in on the soft sand or using the many wrecked landing crafts littering the beach as cover, this vanguard was hanging on, at great cost, for the second wave of the invasion to come in.

  The landing craft of that wave were no doubt still within the belly of the Japanese troopship which had just appeared offshore. Called up from San Carlos Bay at the first sign of things going badly, there was no reason for Asten to believe it contained anything less than another 1,000 or more heavily armed Japanese troops.

  His men were preparing to fall back. Behind the beach was a small forest of scrub trees, then a large peat bog, then the east road. About a third of a mile up that road was the farmhouse they’d all been sent here to protect.

  There was a series of booby traps and mines set in the woods behind the shoreline. Defending the road to the farmhouse would give Asten’s men an advantage, as they would be in possession of the high ground at all times. But these would simply be delaying actions. It would be just a matter of time before the enemy overcame them and marched up the hill to the farmhouse itself.

  The problem was a failure to communicate, the cause of most major defeats. All attempts by Asten’s radiomen to get a message out on their field Boomers had been fruitless. Asten was sure that Hunter’s communications gear was not working either. They were all isolated here at the bottom of the world, fighting a battle which could literally turn the current war and perhaps affect history for decades, even centuries to come. Yet they were losing simply because there was no way to get an SOS out to any friendly ears.

  At least no way that Asten knew of.

  But maybe there was someone else on the island who knew of another way….

  The STS commander figured the enemy was less than an hour from overwhelming his small force. It really was time for desperate measures. He left the defending force in the hands of his seconds, and jumped into the unit’s only jeepster. Ducking bullets that were pinging off his bumper as he slammed the vehicle in gear, he was off the beach, through the woods, and roaring up the road to the farmhouse in a matter of seconds.

  The men of Third Squad were startled to see him coming; even more so when he crashed the jeepster into the farmhouse’s front gate, he was so much in a hurry.

  He jumped out of the vehicle unhurt and ran up the path to the farmhouse. Gaining the front porch, he stopped before the front door, took a deep breath, and then began knocking loudly.

  The man answered right away. Helmet in place, a look of concern was drawn on his face.

  There were none of the usual pleasantries between them now. Asten got right to the point.

  “Sir, we have about one hour left and …”

  The man held up his hand. He’d been watching the battle from the porch or from inside. He knew how desperate the fight was becoming.

  “I know you’re doing the best you can,” he told Asten.

  “Sir, I must ask you an important question,” the STS commander went on. “Even if it breaks every security rule in the book, I must ask it anyway.”

  The man nodded. “Go ahead….”

  Asten cleared his throat. A series of huge explosions from the beach rocked the small front porch.

  “Sir, do you have in your possession,” Asten began, “any method of communication—maybe a highly classified one—that we might use. We must get a message out for help immediately, sir, or …”

  Asten let his voice trail off. He didn’t want to say the final words—and from the look on the man’s face, he didn’t have to.

  The man steeled himself. This really was a desperate act. The facility beneath the farmhouse held many, many secrets and there was a means of communication he could use. But it was most unusual and he had sworn he would never resort to it, no matter what. But now, he had the lives of so many people in his hands, it would have been sacrilege not to attempt it. Though he doubted he would ever have peace again, once the deed was done.

  There was another round of explosions from the beach. These sounded louder, closer. A Japanese SuperZero streaked directly overhead; Hunter�
��s Z-3/15 was right on its tail, firing madly. They disappeared into the low cloud cover an instant later, like they were phantoms fighting some other distant war.

  Both Asten and the man had to hang on to the porch railings now, the vibrations all around them were so intense.

  Settled that he was going to go ahead, the man had to ask the STS commander a very strange question first.

  “Colonel, among your men, is there someone who is an orphan? Who has no family? No wife, no children?”

  Asten just stared back at him. “Excuse me, sir?”

  The man nearly lost his nerve. This was a hard decision to make.

  But he repeated the question. Asten took in the words, thought about them, then replied: “Yes, sir. Private Andy McShook. He just came in three months ago. I happen to know he has no family. No relatives. He was raised as a ward of the state.”

  “And if he should die,” the man went on, “the impact would be less than if it happened to one of your other men?”

  “Yes, I believe that’s true, sir,” the STS commander replied.

  The gunfire was getting closer.

  “And Colonel, is it your opinion that all of your men will be killed within the next hour? Every last one of them, if something isn’t done?”

  Asten didn’t even have to think about that question.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied truthfully. “They will be dead. We all will be.”

  To which the man nodded gravely. A tear was beginning to glisten in his eye.

  “All right, Colonel,” he said. “Send Private McShook to me.”

  Thirty

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, PRIVATE Andy McShook was knocking on the farmhouse door. The sound of gunfire was very close now. Just before McShook was called off the line, the Japanese had landed another 100 troops or so on the beach. And more were on the way.

  That’s why he was very surprised when Colonel Asten got him out of his trench and told him to report to the farmhouse immediately. McShook knew better than to ask why. He’d double-timed it off the beach and up the hill in a matter of minutes.

  The man answered the door after the first knock. McShook saluted him smartly. The young soldier had never seen the man close up before. From what he’d heard about him, McShook expected him to be much older. But the man was nowhere near as ancient as the soldier had imagined him to be.

  The man told him to come in, so McShook stepped gingerly into the living room. He and the other commandos had speculated about what the inside of the farmhouse might look like; now McShook was getting an eyeful of the real thing.

  It was just as he imagined a typical family home would look like, nothing he would know about. It was simple, homey. Pictures on the walls, books on the shelves. A checkerboard on the dining room table.

  The man bid him to follow. McShook walked through the kitchen and through the closet door, to the elevator chamber beyond.

  His mind was racing now. He was being shown the inner sanctum, the place that was so secret. Suddenly McShook feared some kind of huge mistake had been made. He didn’t have any security clearances past the one needed to be a member of the STS team here on West Falkland Island.

  “Sir,” McShook said as the man called for the elevator, “I think I should warn you. I only have a level-one security clearance. I might not be able to …”

  The man held up his hand just as the elevator arrived and the door slid open.

  “Don’t worry about that, my friend,” he said.

  They took the elevator down to the sixteenth level. The guard station was empty as the soldiers were up top, fighting.

  They walked down the long corridor and the man sprung the door into the lab chamber. They both stepped inside.

  McShook looked around, his eyes wide in awe. What he saw was indescribable. It was a laboratory, but to the layman’s eye, it was much more than that. There were machines, huge devices full of buttons and lights and switches and levers, and McShook had not the faintest idea of their function. Electrical bolts running from here to there. Huge tanks bubbling with unidentifiable liquids. Even the hum of the place sounded otherworldly. This place looked like an inner sanctum, McShook thought, as portrayed in a comic book. As the secret places of all of secret places, it really fit the bill.

  Again, he felt like an enormous error had been made. Instinctively he knew he should not be seeing any of this.

  “Sir, again, I must tell you,” he stuttered, “I am not cleared for …”

  But the man again waved his concerns away.

  “It really doesn’t matter now,” he told the private.

  He brought the young soldier to a table and sat him down, telling him to take off his helmet and to get as comfortable as possible. No one else was in evidence, though McShook thought he could hear voices coming from the next room.

  The man sat down next to him.

  “Private,” he began. “You are going on a very special mission. One that will save the lives of everyone else here. I want you to understand that from the start, OK?”

  McShook nodded slowly. A chill went through him. It was not what the man was saying exactly, but how he was saying it.

  “Yes, sir. I understand,” he finally replied.

  The man talked to McShook for the next five minutes. They consulted a map of the nearest American allied military installations. The man told the soldier what would be expected of him in the next hour. McShook’s eyes went wide, first filling with terror, then filling with tears as he listened to the man’s instructions.

  When he was finished, the man gave him a document to sign. It had one section that served as a last will and testament, and another for any last statements.

  McShook sniffled as he spent a few minutes writing down what he wanted. Because of his background, it was brief.

  The man asked McShook to stand.

  “Do you fully know what you are about to do?” he asked the soldier. “Do you understand your mission completely?”

  McShook nodded, tears streaming down his face.

  As he was doing this, the man had moved behind him. Now he asked McShook to close his eyes and hold his breath. The soldier did so.

  The man pulled a very long, very thin, very sharp knife from his desk and, without hesitation, plunged it into the soldier’s back.

  The knife went directly through McShook’s heart. The heart exploded instantly. He slumped into the man’s arms and the man lowered him gently to the floor. He checked McShook’s pulse. The young soldier was dead.

  The man wiped a tear from his eye and let out a long troubled breath.

  They didn’t call him God for nothing.

  Xwo Mountain

  Major Payne was working alone in his office.

  The mountain base was nearly deserted. It was a very cloudy, stormy day, and the bombers and fighters had been gone for two hours and weren’t expected back for another three.

  Anyone who could be was inside now. The ground crews were huddled in their barracks. The staff officers were in their billets or in the mess hall.

  Payne was the only person inside the dark, dank operations building at the moment.

  Things were happening up north. Payne knew it unofficially. He was not privy to many classified messages. His MVP hardly blinked at all. But he was in constant touch with officers of his own level and rank back in the U.S., and just from their idle gossip, Payne knew that at least two major operations were supposed to be launched against Japan very soon.

  One, he was sure, was to going to happen here in South America—and it didn’t take a military genius to figure out that it was probably an invasion from Brazil. A second push was probably going to come in the Panama Canal Zone. Again, no deep thought needed there.

  But his grapevine of officers had also hinted, because they had heard it hinted themselves, that yet another highly secret operation was up. Though no one had a clue as to what it might be.

  There was also some rather disturbing information. One chilling report said that the two top O
SS operatives had been captured and assassinated by a Japanese hit squad. Others said they’d heard only that the two operatives were missing. There was also a strange report that the airplane carrying the New Jersey Giants football team had either crashed or was missing.

  Strangest of all, and most disturbing, Payne had heard that Hawk Hunter, sent on a secret mission several days earlier, was overdue or had not been heard from. This was typical Hunter stuff—dropping out of sight for days at a time to get the particularly hard jobs done right. But Payne had a bad feeling about this one.

  Payne tried to go back to his mountain of paperwork, but suddenly he felt very uneasy. A chill went through him. Beads of sweat appeared on his brow. It was suddenly very dark inside the ops building. And he felt very, very alone.

  That’s when he heard the noise come from the outer office. He wasn’t expecting anyone to come see him. With the weather, his huge workload, and the general gloominess of this place, he didn’t expect to see another living soul for at least three hours.

  So who was out in the other room?

  Payne called out. “Yes, who is that, please?”

  There was no reply.

  Payne tried again. “Is there someone there?”

  Once more, there was no response.

  Payne finally got up and walked over to his closed office door. He stopped just before his hand reached for the doorknob. He could hear movement on the other side, maybe a faint murmuring as well. On a whim, he reached into his holster hanging from the coat rack and took out his gun.

  Then he opened the door—and was transfixed.

  The person on the other side was transparent. He was wearing the combat uniform of a British commando. A small patch of blood stained his breast. But the man wasn’t really there. Payne could see right through him.

  He was a ghost. Not all that unusual in this world. But absolutely frightening nevertheless.