The knock on Major Payne’s billet door was quiet but direct.
The chief operations officer for Xwo Mountain was awake, lying still, intravenous tubes sticking out of his arm, resting quietly in bed as the doctors had ordered.
The lights were on in his room though; he had insisted upon that and his doctors, considering his condition and what he’d just gone through, finally said OK.
The last thing Payne wanted to be was alone in the dark.
He was a little shy about blindly answering the door too.
He called out: “Who is it?”
“It’s O’Malley, sir. May I come in?”
“Are you alive, O’Malley?” Payne called to him in all seriousness.
“I am, sir,” O’Malley replied from behind the closed door.
“OK,” Payne finally said. “Come on in.”
O’Malley found Payne looking very pale and drawn. The bomber pilot knew Payne was under the care of a psychic evaluation officer long-distance through an MVP, and even now he could see the mission pad on Payne’s nightstand, blinking messages to him. Much care had to be taken in what O’Malley said then. He did not want to upset Payne in any way.
Payne sat up a little on the bed and shook O’Malley’s hand. The bomber pilot hoped his facial expression wouldn’t show it, but Payne looked awful to him.
Of course, he was the first person O’Malley had ever met who had actually seen a ghost.
“How are you, Major?” O’Malley asked him.
“I’m alive,” Payne replied wearily. “They tell me I’ll be OK, someday. I can’t ask for more than that.”
“Well, if it’s worth anything,” O’Malley told him, “you’re considered a hero around here—and in other places as well. If it wasn’t for you …”
If it wasn’t for Payne then the enemy invasion of West Falkland Island would have been a success and the Bomb, which was now heading toward Area 52, would have wound up in some very nefarious hands.
“I mean, no one I’ve talked to really understands what was going on down there,” O’Malley went on. “But I can tell everyone thinks you took the full brunt of this thing, and as a result a lot of people on our side are still alive and a lot of people on the other side ain’t ….”
Payne smiled for the first time in a long time. The psychic eval guys told him the shock of actually communicating with a ghost would wear off in time. Maybe a week. Maybe a month. Maybe a year. But a smile or two wouldn’t hurt the process.
“I’m glad for that,” he finally told O’Malley. “So is this strictly a cheer-up visit? You didn’t smuggle me any brandy from the OC, did you?”
O’Malley just shook his head. “They’d shoot me if I got caught,” he said, and they both laughed.
“Actually, I got orders to ship out,” he told Payne. “Leaving in an hour. I’ve just come to say good-bye.”
Payne’s face went slightly pale again.
“You? Leaving? Why?”
“My exact questions,” O’Malley confessed. “But then I read the orders, and now I get it. I think.”
“Anything you can tell me?” Payne wanted to know.
O’Malley drew a little closer to the man’s bed. “It’s all classified,” he began. “But I’ll let you in on a little bit, seeing what you’ve been through.”
He lowered his voice to a whisper.
“I’ve been ordered to help pilot an airplane on a very top secret mission,” O’Malley began. “The rest of the crew are a bunch of unknowns and exactly what I’ll be doing, what I’m flying, and where we are going, I don’t know.”
“Typical,” Payne responded. “The OSS is behind this I suspect.”
“Good guess,” O’Malley told him. “But there is something I will tell you: I think or at least it was hinted in the orders, that there is another pilot going along as well, and it’s someone who I think you should know is still alive.”
Payne’s left eyebrow went up a notch.
“Really?”
O’Malley nodded. “The way this whole thing was laid out to me in my orders,” he said, “I’m sure Hawk Hunter is involved. In fact, this will sound crazy, but I think he was flying around down in the Falklands when we arrived to do our bombing run. Someone had been driving a crazy-looking jet all over the sky just before we got there.”
Payne settled back down into his bed. The smile returned a little to his face.
“So he’s still among the living?”
O’Malley nodded. “I’m almost positive of it. I know he’s a friend of yours, so I thought I’d tell you.”
Payne smiled fully now. “Well, that is good news then,” he said. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
O’Malley got up and shook hands with Payne. “Got to get going, sir,” he said. “Take care of yourself, OK?”
“You too,” Payne told him. “And tell Hawk he owes me a drink.”
O’Malley smiled. “If I get to see him,” he said, “I’ll tell him he owes both of us.”
With that, O’Malley saluted and went out the door.
Thirty-five
THE CRANE THAT WAS used to reattach the large section of the left wing of the gigantic airplane was so big, they had to cut a section out of the G-2 hangar roof to allow its tip to poke through.
Even with the help of this hydraulic giant, it took all the muscle power that could be mustered among the strange group inside the hangar to get that last wing section attached.
It took four hours of nonstop pushing and pulling and grunting and groaning, but finally the wing was reconnected and an army of rivet-fastener men went to work making the attachment permanent.
With that, the reconfiguration of the B-2000 “Colossus” was complete. In a stunning achievement, the football players, monks, college professors, and aging soldiers had done exactly what their country had wanted them to do. At least now, when the huge bomb blast went off, there was a chance that the crew didn’t necessarily have to go up with it.
Now, all they needed were the pilots.
It might have been described as fate, or as a cosmological initiative, or simply the way it happened.
But no sooner had the last fastener been put in place on the huge airplane than the hangar door opened and the man charged with flying the colossal airplane walked in.
Hunter had landed at Area 52 two hours before, the Z-3/15 running out of fuel the exact moment his wheels touched down.
The next thirty minutes were spent in the delicate operation of taking the Bomb off its belly-mounted rack and getting it ready for transfer to the colossal airplane.
A briefing with Y followed, taking another hour or so, and again Hunter could only give him the highlights of his adventure in the Falklands, including the evidence that the notorious agents X and Z were involved. It would be left to a later time for Y to explain exactly how word of the dire situation on West Falkland had reached Xwo Mountain. At the moment, those circumstances were still highly classified.
While this debriefing session was going on in Y’s office, his MVP began blinking. A burst message from OSS Central was beaming in. According to the shadowy Psychic Evaluation Corps, the time to begin the mission in the big plane was looming very near.
The airplane was ready, the bomb was in place, and most of the crew was too. The airplane should take off no later than midnight, the MVP declared.
It was now 1800 hours. That gave them just six hours to pull the last strings together.
The trip out to the huge hangar ate up another thirty minutes, but Hunter needed the long ride in the desert to cool him off. The last thing he wanted to do was take an Octocopter out. If he was just hours away from leaving on the most dangerous mission he’d ever accepted, he didn’t want to waste what could be some of his last precious minutes of life getting sick on a Beater.
So Y agreed to drive him out to the big barn and Hunter tried to enjoy each mile of the long, quiet journey.
When he walked through the door of the place, it was as if the world had
stopped for him again. Yet this time it was more than just an illusion. This second time he stepped into the place, everything and everybody came to a stop.
Staring back at him were fifty-seven sets of eyes. They belonged to such a mélange of people, Hunter nearly burst out laughing. They did look like football players and monks and ordinary Joes, just as Y had told him. But there was something different about them as well. Hunter knew them. Every last monk, every last New Jersey Giant. He knew who was a soldier and who wasn’t. He knew all these men. From Back There. These were his “associates.”
Everything began moving again when one of these people finally approached him. It was Mike Fitzgerald. He walked up to Hunter and stuck out his hand.
“Hi, Hawk,” he said simply. “Welcome back.”
Hunter felt frozen to his spot. He’d already seen a few ghosts since coming to this world. But this one was different. Back There he and Mike Fitzgerald had been tight. When he was killed at the Battle of Football City, Hunter had wept as though he had lost a brother.
But now, here he was—again. Same guy. Same red nose. Same powerful build. Same sophisticated graying of the jet-black hair. The same guy he had seen briefly before shipping out to Iceland.
Mike Fitzgerald. Back from the dead.
“Hey, Fitz,” Hunter said, shaking his hand. “Good to see you … again.”
What followed was a guided tour of the airplane that the Associates had just rebuilt.
Hunter was astonished at what they had done. It was the same airplane. It looked the same, had the same number of engines, same gigantic size, same gigantic capabilities.
But it was a different beast.
Radically so.
Fitz gave him the tour and laid most of the praise on the New Jersey Giants. When Hunter first came to Y with the crazy notion as to where he might find his “associates,” he had recalled working with a large group of engineers back in the other world. Combat engineers. He’d been able to recall just about all their names and those were the ones fed into the Main/AC. That all these people would be together here in this world—not as a combat engineering unit but as a pro football team—was mind-blowing enough. That they would be able to be put into a situation which by all rights, should have been totally alien to them and work the miracle they just had worked, was nothing short of well, miraculous.
Hunter spent the next two hours going over all the modifications the Associates had made. It was the monks’ idea to hang five of the rogue squadron fighters from the bottom of the huge airplane. The Bantams were hanging way out near the wingtips. The VTOL planes were hanging about halfway in toward the fuselage. The swing-wing ugly was attached to the forward belly. As for the big Z-16 ultrarecon plane, it couldn’t be attached to the gigantic airplane because its wings were too long and they would have interrupted the airflow coming off of the colossal fuselage. So they were going to tow it, on a long tether sticking out of the back, right around the planet.
It was Frost’s idea to defend the colossal airplane with more than just machine guns, of which there were no less than a hundred lining both sides of the fuselage. Frost’s notion was to take as many antiaircraft rockets as they could find and install them under the leading edge of the bomber’s wings, similar to where a fighter would carry such a weapon. In the Air Corps inventories they’d found a type of AA rocket known as the Rattier. They’d put a call out for these weapons, and in one day were able to secure 200 of them, plus their attendant launching packages. Frost had overseen their installation and now the wings of the monster bomber were heavy with dozens of air-to-air missiles.
Ben Wa had come up with the sticky solution to the question of what to do with the flight compartment of the colossus when the moment of truth came. The people who would be in the most peril right as the bomb was being dropped would be the primary flight crew. Hunter looked over the work that Wa and his crew had done. It was nothing short of brilliant. The survivability factor of the airplane had been increased at least threefold.
Fitzgerald was obviously the one who had pulled it all together. That left only the man named Toomey. He had worked just as hard at reconfiguring the airplane—helping Frost with his idea, helping Ben Wa with his, and so on.
But what had his own personal contribution been?
It turned out he’d suggested they put an ice cooler on the airplane. A place that would be stocked with beer for the long trip awaiting them. For some reason, the rest of the group agreed. So there was now a fully stocked beer cooler down near the navigator’s station. Hunter realized this was the strongest confirmation that what he was working with here was real. There was a long possibility that if you put forty football players in a room long enough, they might build you an airplane. And if you took a bar owner from northern New England and asked him how best to defend that airplane, he eventually might come up with the idea of stringing 200 air-to-air missiles along the plane’s wings. And if you asked eight monks how to make an airplane more survivable in light of where it was going and what it would be doing, maybe they would come up with the rogue-squadron attachment idea.
But it took a certain kind of mind to suggest that they install a beer cooler for the long ride toward Armageddon. The J.T. Toomey Hunter recalled from Back There would have suggested exactly that. The one here did too. This was proof to Hunter’s mind that the two universes he’d inhabited were, in fact, parallel. And now, they had connected.
At the end of this long day, and at the beginning of what would prove to be a very long night, it was that fact that warmed him greatly inside.
Thirty-six
MANY SEARCHLIGHTS HAD BEEN brought out from Bride Lake to illuminate the enormous hangar known as G-2.
The doors to the barn had finally been opened and the nose of the gigantic B-2000 bomber was barely sticking out.
No less than twenty vehicles—tractors, trucks, even a few jeepsters—had lines attached to the monster’s wheels and wings, and on one call, they began the long task of pulling the Colossus out of what had been its home for many years.
Once the plane was clear of the barn, another long process commenced: starting the giant’s twenty engines. Just to get each one of them running up to pitch would take an hour. It would prove to be a very noisy sixty minutes.
Watching all this from the sidelines was Agent Y, his MVP in hand as always, its screen going absolutely crazy with messages.
The forces that would be in motion this night were mind-boggling. From Area 52, down to Panama, down to the Brazilian jungle, everyone was waiting for word to proceed. That word would only come when Y sent a message to OSS Central that their secret flying beast was finally on its way.
It was this strange scene that the chugging, smoking, jittery Beater came upon—long beams of light playing on an aerial monster in the middle of the Nevada desert.
The Octo came down with a bang not far from where Y was stationed. The side door opened and the sole passenger fell out, coughing from the internal exhaust.
Y greeted him, checked his ID, and gave him a good looking over. The man was familiar to him. His name was PJ O’Malley. He’d just arrived from South America.
O’Malley’s eyes had gone as wide as half dollars at first seeing the gigantic plane; they had not decreased in size yet.
“You want me to fly in that thing?” he asked, totally in shock.
“Your government has called on you to perform a special duty,” Y replied, giving him the standard line. “The OSS is hoping you’ll accept.”
But that veiled threat wasn’t working with a veteran like O’Malley. There was no way he was getting aboard this beast. Not unless …
“Who is piloting this plane?” he asked Y.
Y actually smiled. It was his ace in the hole.
“Want to see for yourself?” he asked the bomber pilot.
O’Malley had already started walking toward the plane. It got bigger with every step. The noise from the engines was not only deafening, it was disrupting the air all a
round the monster. A veteran of untold combat missions, O’Malley actually felt his knees begin to quiver as he got closer to the big plane.
The side front door was open when he arrived. He stepped in only to find it was actually a small elevator. It carried him to the flight compartment, four stops up. He stepped out onto this tier and found it nearly five times as big as the flight suite on a B-17/36, which in itself was huge.
There were at least twenty people inside. They all glanced at him, and he thought he saw a lot of familiar faces—he just couldn’t place any of them.
“Who’s the skipper of this mother-effing tub?” he asked the room.
The guy sitting in the left-hand pilot’s seat turned around and gave him a friendly salute.
It was Hunter.
“Hello, Captain,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
The engines were finally warmed and ready by 2315 hours.
No less than six MVPs had been installed in the plane’s flight suite, and it took some time getting them all in sync. Then a special squad of armorers came over from Area 52 and installed the single bomb in the monster’s gigantic bomb bay. A few tests went well. By 2345 hours, the plane was ready to go.
There were no speeches. No last-minute prayers or sentimentality. Y shook every man’s hand—the entire group of Associates was going on the mission—then left the airplane and secured the outer hatch himself.
Anyone who was in the immediate area was cleared to 1,000 feet away. The shock wave from all twenty engines revving at once would be strong enough to break eardrums, so the manual said. Therefore everyone was also equipped with industrial-strength earplugs.
At exactly 2345 hours, the plane started rolling. It moved so slowly at first, Y was sure that something was wrong with it, that it would never get airborne, that this whole thing had been a colossal waste of time, and that Japan would eventually prevail in this damn war.
But slowly and surely, the beast began to pick up speed. By the first mile of the ten-mile-long runway, it was moving at fifteen knots. By mile two, it was up to twenty-five. Mile three, maybe thirty-five.
Return of Sky Ghost Page 30