By mile five, it was up to nearly seventy knots, but it was clear that all ten miles of asphalt would be needed to get the giant into the air.
Y watched in awe, one eye on the departing monster, the other on his MVP, counting off the seconds and the miles. Finally, at about 9.5 on the mark, Hunter pulled back the controls, and the gigantic bird began climbing into the air. It went so slowly that Y, watching now through nightscope binoculars, was convinced it was going to crash.
But up it went, the scream from its engines masking the groan made simply by such a large mass getting airborne. The large-enough Z-16 recon plane, in tow behind the monster, looked puny in comparison.
Y watched for a signal from Hunter telling him all was OK. It came about a minute into the flight, when the plane had achieved a somewhat miraculous 500 feet in altitude. Hunter simply blinked the huge array of navigation lights hanging all over the B-2000. This was the high sign. They were go for the mission.
Y dutifully punched this message into his MVP and told it to send the word immediately to OSS Central.
When he looked up from this operation, he was disheartened to see the big plane was fading fast from view. It was a clear but moonless night, and soon the only evidence that the giant was in the air were those fading navigation lights.
After five minutes or so, they disappeared completely.
At 0100 hours, exactly sixty-five minutes after the B-2000 had left the ground, two squadrons of Air Corps attack bombers swooped in on the eastern edge of the Panama Canal and began bombing Japanese gun emplacements. At the same time, Navy warships, including the USS Chicago megacarrier, the only survivor from the Pearl Harbor sneak attack nearly a year ago, began striking at Japanese positions on the western entrance to the waterway.
Several hundred miles to the south, three entire armies—made up of twenty divisions, or close to 400,000 men, crossed the Brazilian border into Peru and moved like a juggernaut to positions west.
By 0500 hours, the monster airplane, flying at 85,000 feet and at a speed of an incredible 1,400 knots, was approaching the outer coastline of Antarctica. If all went well, it would pass over the south pole by 0730 hours and begin its long polar suborbital trip back up the other side of the planet. Always drifting to the west, it was intent on topping the north pole and coming down right above Japan itself.
On West Falkland Island, the man they called God was all alone.
He was in his lab. Everyone else was topside by now. The civilians were back at Summer Point, and his wife was helping them get settled. The STS commandos were already over on East Falkland, starting the rebuilding process at McReady airfield.
The fight was over. It had been a close call. But they had survived. Until next time. Still, he had learned many things from the strange little war. He’d learned about heroism and cowardice. He’d learned that valor had no bounds. He’d seen just how far some men would go to save their comrades. He learned that he might have a son….
These were the thoughts going through his mind as he sat in the room behind the big thick metal door. Yes, there were many secrets down here, near the middle of the earth. Big bombs. The secret of ghosts. Other things.
But nothing like what was behind this second door.
Now the man put his ear to the door and could hear the wind blow, even though he was 250 feet down in the middle of the hill.
He hit a few buttons. After all that had happened, he felt like looking on the other side today.
He unlocked the portal and waited for it to swing open. He had to be very careful here. Sometimes this could be a little unpredictable. He strapped on a safety harness which was attached to chains on the opposite side of the wall. One could never be too cautious, he liked to think.
Beside the door was a box of rocks he’d collected from the nearby beach just for this occasion. The door finally opened, and sure enough, there was a thick cumulus cloud rolling by.
The man inched his way over, testing the safety harness with every step. To fall now would be disastrous. Or at least he believed it would be.
He finally reached the door’s open edge and felt the vapor of the cloud on his face. It left his forehead and nose covered with hundreds of tiny water droplets.
The man leaned further over the edge and looked at the deep blue North Atlantic below. The sea was especially churned-up today.
He picked up a handful of rocks and threw them over the edge. He watched as they fell exactly 1,865 feet to the ocean surface below, landing with a barrage of splashes.
Then he smiled. And he felt better, and, the cloud came into the room again and drenched the man they called God, but he didn’t care.
It was windy Back There today.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Wingman Series
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
The Sea of Japan
THE KUMO-DO MARU HAD been at sea for almost four days.
It was a small fishing barge, thirty-four feet long, with a very shallow draft, a cranky diesel engine, and a crew of five. Four scientists were also on board. Two were marine geologists, the other two, triatomic physicists. They were all from the University of Seoul.
They had been plying the waters around 35 degrees latitude and 140 degrees longitude for nearly one hundred hours, through rough seas and very heavy downpours. This typhoonlike weather had been the norm in this area for the past week.
But now it was close to dawn and the weather was settling down. The skies were clearing, the rain had stopped, and the wind was dying to a breeze.
For the first time in a long time, the sea was peaceful.
The senior scientist on board was Dr. Chin Lo Ho, a triatomic physicist with nearly thirty years of experience studying quantum fusion. He’d been at his daughter’s wedding when the Great Blast occurred. He would never forget the feeling of the earth moving beneath his feet and seeing all his wedding guests stagger in unison as they danced the bride’s tribute. The whole reception building shook—the entire city of Seoul shook—for more than two hours.
When Ho called his colleagues in the seismic department at the university on the last working phone in Seoul, he learned two were unconscious and two were busy trying to fix their earthquake-monitoring station. The two-hour rumble had been the largest earth disturbance ever recorded, by a factor of ten.
But Ho knew even then that this titanic disturbance had not been an earthquake. Not a natural one anyway. And though it might have seemed perverse, the first thing he wanted to do once the ground stopped shaking was hurry to the east coast of Korea and see what the oceans were doing.
He was finally able to secure transport to the city of Kangnung two hours later, arriving on the coast just before dawn. He and two students set up a small control station on a ridge that rose about seven hundred feet above the sea. At the time Ho believed what he was doing amounted to little more than an experiment in suicide. He was convinced that if his estimates were right, he and his students would be washed away by a tsunami he was sure was going to come sometime later that day.
But it never did.
That was six days ago.
Now, standing on the bow of the fishing barge looking out at the ever-calming sea, Ho’s brain was stuffed with more questions than before. The whole of Northeast Asia was still in chaos because of the Great Blast. Communications were out everywhere, power grids thrown off-line, water main breaks, thousands of scattered fires. But amazingly, no tidal waves, and very little earthquake-related damages. That’s why Ho knew that whatever event shook the Earth six days before, it had not been “natural.”
The biggest question in Ho’s mind was: Had it been “supernatural?”
Ho studied the water before him now, and then turned back to the captain of the skiff.
“Are you certain your coordinates are correct?” he asked Tuk-Pak, the grizzled old skipper.
“They are the coordinates you gave me, Professor,” Pak replied. “Because I’ve never had the opportunity to act
ually sail in waters at these particular coordinates, I cannot tell you if we are at the right place or not. I can only tell you that we sailed to where you told us. Nothing more….”
Ho looked in all directions—all he saw was water.
He checked his map again. Did he have the coordinates right? One hundred forty degrees longitude, 35 degrees latitude. Yes, they were correct.
Then there was only one explanation….
He turned to the skipper and said crisply: “Bring us to a stop.”
Pak motioned to his second in command to kill the barge’s engine. Soon the vessel slowed to a stop.
To the amazement of all on board, Professor Ho then did a very strange thing: He stepped over the railing, and lowered himself down the side of the vessel into the water below.
The crew rushed to throw him a life preserver—but none was needed. Ho simply stepped from the skiff’s bottom rail into the water—and stood up.
Those aboard the barge stared in amazement. For a moment it seemed like Ho was walking on top of the water!
But then the reality of the situation began to sink in—and this was even more startling.
They had entered a part of the sea that, though vast, was at best, just a couple of feet deep.
Ho looked up at them and spread his arms wide.
“My friends,” he said. “This is where the city of Tokyo used to be ….”
About the Author
Mack Maloney is the author of numerous fiction series, including Wingman, Chopper Ops, Starhawk, and Pirate Hunters, as well as UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn’t Want You to Know. A native Bostonian, Maloney received a bachelor of science degree in journalism at Suffolk University and a master of arts degree in film at Emerson College. He is the host of a national radio show, Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Mack Maloney
cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4804-0680-3
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Return of Sky Ghost Page 31