They had watched the battle from a gun turret, a guest of the ship’s high commander, and had narrowly escaped the brutal strafing the white airplane had delivered on the vessel.
Now as the ship made its way slowly west, the men were scouring the cabin for anything mildly alcoholic, but having a hard time of it, much to their dismay.
The third man in the cabin however had had no problem getting and staying inebriated. He may have needed to be in such a state even more than they. They were simply discouraged. He was devastated, his failure to succeed in the operation had reached new lows of shame for him. He could hardly speak, he was so depressed.
It was, of course, High General Hilo Wakisaki, the man who was responsible for the Japanese invasion of South America in the first place, slumped in the chair across from the two agents, simply staring out into space, not talking, hardly breathing. His loss of face following the embarrassing Battle of Axaz plain on Xwo Mountain and the overall failure of the Night Brigade had affected him greatly. It was like a knife had been thrust in his heart and become stuck there. He was no longer the darling of the population back on the Home Islands, he was no longer regarded as Japan’s greatest general. His triumph had so quickly turned to failure, it was almost surreal.
When the pair of OSS men had approached him through back channels to make a deal on invading the Falkland Islands, Wakisaki had jumped at the chance, hoping to regain his previously lofty reputation.
But now with the dismal failure of this operation, Wakisaki was running out of options.
“You would think the highest bug on the Japanese food chain would have something decent to drink,” X said to Z as he ransacked the captain’s cabin once again, looking for some liquor.
Z just shrugged. He was tired. The last few weeks had been a bitch for him.
“Why do you expect this guy to have taste?” he replied nodding toward the nearly comatose high general.
X went right over to the Japanese commander, got down in his face, and, in perfect Japanese, asked him: “If you were going to hide something like brandy or bourbon, where would you put it?”
Wakisaki simply grunted. In his eyes one could see he was reliving the triumphs that had become him until recently. His eyes were watering. He was hardly alive. X resisted the temptation to slap him across the face. Instead he reached inside his gun belt, drew out a revolver, and placed it in Wakisaki’s hand.
“Here you go, pal,” the OSS man told him. “Do the right thing.”
Finally Wakisaki moved. He looked down at the gun, then back up at the two OSS men.
“That man in the white jet,” he began asking in halting, stuttering Japanese. “He was this Sky Ghost?”
X slumped back onto the couch beside Z.
“That’s right, pal,” the OSS man told him. “He was the brick wall we were unlucky enough to slam into.”
“There was no way it could have gone in our favor no matter what we did,” Z said, more to himself than to Wakisaki. “Damn, that guy is a pain in the ass.”
“A valuable pain in the ass,” X moaned.
But Wakisaki wasn’t listening to any of this. He was staring down at the pistol in his hand. Before his eyes flashed many, many final scenes. Strangely, the last one was his memory of his favorite vase, the one he’d smashed that morning in his suite in New Lima. It seemed like things just never got any better after that.
“If only I could have that moment back,” he whispered. “And a bottle of glue.”
Then he put the gun to his head, pulled the trigger, and blew his brains out.
The cloud of blood and brain mist stained the far wall of the cabin, but X and Z hardly moved a muscle.
Z reached down to the only bottle they could find in Wakisaki’s supply cabinet and took a swig, but spit it all out just as soon as it touched his tongue.
“Grape sake!” he said with disgust, wiping his mouth. “Who the fuck would ever drink this stuff?”
Thirty-four
HUNTER TOOK OFF JUST as the sun was going down.
Bomb-pod finally attached to the bottom of his aircraft, fuel tanks filled to the brim with something, he left McReady field, climbed to a mind-numbing altitude of 101,000 feet, and turned northwest.
Timing was everything, he knew. For this plan to finally reach its last stage, Hunter would have to make the 7,500-mile trip to Area 52 in record time.
Luckily the Z-3/15 was just the airplane to do it.
The events of the past few days ran through his head now like a movie reel set to replay. The cold, cold Falklands. The battle at McReady. The strange tale of the hooker in the crashed airplane. The battle on Tin Can beach. The world beneath the hill. Seeing Chloe—and the man and woman glimpsed briefly in the rubble of the farmhouse.
It all seemed unreal, and so intense it made what he was about to do—his “suicide” mission—almost seem dull by comparison.
He reached optimum height and booted in the Stiletto’s double-reaction engines to 93 percent power. Whatever was feeding his power plants definitely had a kick to it. Previously he had shied away from opening up the plane’s throttles all the way, simply because he wasn’t sure it could take the strain. But now was not the time for caution. Now was the time to get from one lonely, secret spot on the Earth to another as quickly as possible.
So he pushed his throttles ahead and watched the airspeed indicator begin spinning madly around the dial.
Mach 5. Mach 6. Mach 7….
Once again the needle-nosed airplane cut through the air like a knife. The steamy green of the South American continent was soon in view, even though Hunter was barely two minutes out of the Falklands. He nudged the throttles ahead further. Mach 7.5. Mach 8….
The g-forces were pinning him against his seat with an intensity he could not ever recall, at least not in this world. It made it hard for him to move, to breathe, to blink—but he didn’t care. He loved the feeling, loved the pressure he felt on every square centimeter of his body. Why? Because he knew it came as a result of ultimate flight. Fast, faster, fastest. That’s all he ever wanted to be.
But the feeling had a downbeat to it as well. As soon as he reached his destination, he knew the chances that he would ever fly this beautiful, if slightly muddy airplane again, were practically nil. He had to enjoy it while he could.
So he hit the throttle again and now the engines were burning at 110 percent, and he was approaching Mach 9, close to 5,500 miles per hour. Below him, the entire South American continent looked like a green blur. He sucked in a long breath of oxygen and let it out very slowly. He knew it would be wise to savor this.
His control panel began blinking just a moment later. It was not a warning light or a trouble indicator that was flashing—it was the MVP, coming back to life. Hunter lifted his oxygen mask and tried to spit at it again, but the saliva simply rocketed back into his own face. This gave him a laugh. The aerodynamic properties of a loogie. Interesting thesis, he thought.
He strained his sore elbow lifting his finger to push the MVP activator button. Once engaged, the screen immediately came to life. It was filled with the routine jumble of numbers and letters and computer codes at first, blinking at him like it was happy to be back on, and flushed out and working and what have you been doing Mr. Hunter since we last spoke? Finally the message screen went all white and then purple, an indication that an animation was forthcoming.
Hunter did a check of his aircraft’s vital signs and everything looked fine, despite the fact that he was traveling more than a mile a second.
He turned his attention back to the MVP screen and was surprised by what he saw. It was not the long list of instructions and inquiries he’d half expected, but rather the same cartoon he’d viewed when he first received the orders for the top secret bombing mission.
Well, at least the OSS wasn’t wasting time getting him back into the game, he thought.
The cartoon showed the huge hangar out in the middle of the Nevada desert, the one containing the col
ossal airplane. The first time he’d seen this visual, the briefing animators had showed it shaking slightly, giving the impression that work was being done inside. Now, in a very bizarre comic fashion, the hangar was shaking again, but even more so, and puffs of smoke and steam were emitting from the windows and the doors. The whole building was shaking at its foundations. Slowly the huge hangar doors were beginning to open.
It looked ridiculous, but the meaning of this comical animation was crystal clear: Much work was going on inside the huge hangar. The doors opening told him that, incredibly, the project was nearing completion. In three days?
The implication for him was clear as well. He had to get back to Area 52 as quickly as possible.
This deflated him again. The urgency of the animation was pressing on him like the monstrous g-forces. It meant at least one diversion he’d been toying with was now impossible. He wouldn’t be able to stop at Xwo Mountain.
That meant he would probably never see Sara again.
He let out a long slow breath and sucked in another one. Maybe that was the way it was supposed to be.
He reached forward and managed to hit the throttle again and now the Z-3/15 was going full out at Mach 9.2.
At this velocity, he’d be in Area 52 in less than two hours.
Nevada
Mike Fitzgerald was exhausted.
He’d been up for three straight days now. In that time, he’d drunk more than five gallons of coffee, six gallons of highly caffeine-enriched soda, had eaten 35 candy bars, and eighteen bananas.
After all that, and with the strange excitement within the big hangar, Fitzgerald’s sugar buzz had him high as a kite.
Which was good. Because if he fell asleep, he had no idea what would happen to the others. They’d been following his lead since they were brought to this fateful place. This enormous hangar with its colossal airplane. The place called G-2. He’d become the project foreman. The mother hen. His main fear was that if he lay down and went to sleep, the rest of them would too.
And that would be a disaster.
So Fitz continued gobbling Snickers bars and draining huge mugs of coffee.
If it was up to him, he’d never have to go to sleep ever again.
Probably the most startling thing about the past forty-eight hours was how smart the New Jersey Giants turned out to be.
Fitz had always held the impression—and he knew he wasn’t alone here—that most football players were basically big and dumb. But not these guys. These guys were wizards. They had performed engineering feats way beyond anyone’s expectations, the OSS included. They had provided the backbone and the muscle for this bizarre project. They had contributed a lot of the reasoning too. True, the majority of this inspiration was coming from Coach Geraci and his assistants. But the players themselves—the linebackers, the defensive ends, the linemen, and both backfields—had contributed some outstanding ideas in the reconfiguration of the colossal airplane, and once approved, implemented them by way of some frighteningly efficient time-saving dictums.
As a result, the project was miles ahead of schedule—almost as if that’s how it was meant to be.
They were presently in the process of rebuilding the colossal airplane, all fifty-seven of them, plus the small army of Bride Lake mechanics. Rebuilding was the key word here, because they had spent the first twenty-four hours un-building it.
The mission statement had posed this problem to them: This gigantic plane had to deliver a bomb whose blast would be so big and so quick, the plane would virtually have no chance of escaping it. There was no other way to deliver this bomb because it had to hit a certain spot at a certain time per the calculations in its warhead, and no rocket on Earth was accurate enough to deliver it. So the little bomb with the big blast had to be dropped from an airplane that had the size and the staying power to fly around the world, literally, via the transpolar route.
It was an extremely large order, especially since the people who the government was convinced could fulfill it had all just been plucked from their relatively simple lives and plunked down here in the middle of a vast secret project with nearly zero experience in things aeronautical. It made no sense. But that’s what had happened.
The strange thing was, it was working.
At first there was an element of shock involved, but as soon as they’d spent some time all together in G-2 building, people thought they started recognizing each other. Football players knew monks. Monks knew hedonistic college professors. People became instant compadres. It was as if all of them had known everyone else before—yet no one could remember when or how or where or why.
Still, it was massive, rather instantaneous bonding. Everyone was so stunned by it that they began thinking that maybe the real spooks inside the OSS—the Psychic Evaluation Corps—were on to something bringing them here.
Buoyed by this feeling, real or not, the Associates got to work.
Fitz believed it was one of the monks who first suggested that if they were forced to work with an airplane that was too slow to get out of its own bomb blast then perhaps the emphasis should not be on the plane’s performance, but on something else. It was clear that they weren’t going to make the airplane any faster, or the bomb blast any smaller. So what then became the most important thing? It was, of course, the survivability of the crew. So the focus changed a little. Not in how to prevent the plane from coming apart when the blast hit, but on what could be done to protect the lives of the crew before that happened.
Once that truth had been realized, they really got down to it.
What had followed was two straight days and nights of disassembling, torch-cutting, hammer-banging, and lots and lots of screw removal. Then the reconfigurations were begun. Again, more on guesswork than science, more on instinct than any known set of rules or values, they changed the airplane as they all thought it should be done. They had added several important components as well, got rid of some that were deemed unnecessary. They even had extra stuff brought in from Area 52.
Now, they were putting it all back together again.
Through all this, Y had watched them. He was always at a distance, always keeping one eye on his MVP pad. He was a man who seemed worried about many many things at once. In the few times that he’d spoken to them, he’d alluded to the fact that the pilot of this flying beast would be arriving at any time and that everyone, from the president, through the War Department, to the OSS, and on down was hoping that the giant airplane would be ready to fly by that time.
Incredibly, even though they still had much work to do, it seemed like it would be.
Xwo Mountain
The huge B-17/36 bomber roared through the LSD screen and set down with a puff of smoke and a mighty screech as six dozen wheels hit the hard rocky runway all at once.
The fire crews raced out toward the bomber and sprayed Purple-K flame retardant on its outermost engines. The forty-four-man bomber crew quickly exited the plane just seconds after it had stopped rolling at the end of the runway—standard procedure. They had just completed a mission over northern Argentina, the firebombing of a new Japanese settlement named Okodoko, which was close to the ancient Argentine city of Tazco.
The bombing mission had been long and arduous, the skies full of Japanese fighters, and the flames from a previous firebombing had licked the underbelly of this airplane, as well as the others, as they went in ultralow to drop their bombs.
But the airplane had come through it in one piece, and to a man, the crew knew the person responsible for that was the plane’s COA, the Commander of the Aircraft. He was the most senior bomber pilot on Xwo. His name was Captain PJ O’Malley.
Crewmen fought to be part of O’Malley’s crew simply because it was believed anyone flying in his airplane had the best chance of making it home alive. Invariably O’Malley was a bombing mission’s leader; many times the rest of the group dropped their firebombs on targets already marked by O’Malley’s pathfinder aircraft. It was heard later that the Japanes
e actually had a price on O’Malley’s head, they feared him so much.
O’Malley was that good.
That’s why it seemed so very strange when he reached the debriefing room after securing his airplane at its hard-stand to find a set of orders waiting for him. They were enclosed inside a red envelope.
Every American serviceman operating overseas knew what a red envelope meant: It was standard War Department practice to put home-return orders inside red envelopes. Anyone who got one was usually being told that he was going back to the States. Seeing the red envelope then was usually cause for a great amount of joy.
But in O’Malley’s case, it simply caused a great amount of confusion.
“Going home?” he blurted out when first handed the red envelope. “Me?”
It was strange because O’Malley actually took the red envelope as an insult. He was not completely devoid of ego. He knew he was playing a pivotal role on Xwo Mountain. A crucial one even. He’d come to regard any notion that he would actually be transferred out of the mountain ops to be nonexistent. This was certainly true after the wing’s recent hurry-up mission down to the Falklands. It had been O’Malley who’d taken the divert order first and changed the overall flight plan of the group. It was because of his leadership and innovation that the unexpected bombing raid on West Falkland was now considered an enormous success.
So why then was he being sent home?
The red envelope was handed to him by the officer of the day, the man running all the debriefings in the absence of Major Payne.
“Congratulations, Captain,” the officer had said to him. “You deserve it.”
But O’Malley never heard him. He was just too stunned. Going home? Why? Or more to the point, why now?
He opened the red envelope.
Then he understood.
Return of Sky Ghost Page 29