“Do you have a good read on that Mayday?” he asked the copilot. The man replied with a solid nod.
“Damn,” Kurjan said, checking his ammo clips. “This’ll make it interesting.”
“We’re forty seconds out,” the pilot yelled to him. “Hang on …”
Kurjan did as the pilot suggested, grabbing the flight compartment frame support. The lead Seahawk went into a sharp left hand turn, momentarily putting the burning battleship out of his view. When it appeared again, the chopper was lined up on the ship’s bow, coming down in both altitude and speed.
“We’re twenty seconds away,” the pilot told him.
“Got another radio transit,” the copilot added. “It’s another Mayday…. sloppy, but clear.”
Kurjan studied the burning battleship as he fastened his crash helmet. If there was any kind of organized force aboard the Cult vessel it could get very hairy for him and his men.
“Five out,” the pilot yelled. “Do you want to do a flyby first?”
Kurjan quickly agreed. Time was of the essence in this landing operation—there was no telling what kind of Cult forces were in the area. But he had forty-five lives at stake here—fifty-two, counting himself and the chopper pilots. With the Mayday calls indicating someone was still breathing on the ship, he decided he could afford the luxury of quick recon before setting down.
The lead pilot led the trio of Seahawks around the port side of the battered battleship. Just about everyone onboard the choppers stared out at the burning battleship. The destruction caused by the two Galaxy gunships was unbelievable. There didn’t seem to be a square inch of the ship’s deck, armor, or superstructure that hadn’t been perforated by some kind of cannon shot or high-explosive shell. There were no large weapons in any kind of working order; the second attack by Bozo had seen to that. Between the fires, the smoke and the multitude of holes in its hull, it was a wonder the ship was still afloat.
“Third transmission,” the copilot reported. “Still sloppy, but pretty clear. S-O-S with rough location coordinates.”
Son-of-a-bitch, Kurjan whispered, never taking his eyes off the burning enemy vessel. It was eerie, looking at the devastated battleship and thinking there might be squads of fanatical suicide troops waiting from them to land.
The three Seahawks swooped around the back of the ship and along the starboard side. If anything the extent of the destruction was worse. The three huge turrets were all pointing in this direction when Bozo took them out, and now they were little more than twisted gun barrels, ripped-apart armor, and deep holes billowing clouds of black and white smoke.
Could anyone still be alive on there? Kurjan wondered.
He tapped the pilot on the shoulder again, and the lead Seahawk immediately swooped down to the cleared area just behind the demolished rear turret. No sooner had the chopper touched down than Kurjan leaped from the troop bay, his Uzi up and ready, his men right behind him. The two other Seahawks managed to squeeze on the stern of the ship too, and their troops were soon pouring out.
“Fourth Mayday signal…” the copilot yelled out the side window at him. “Still pretty clear …”
“Any idea where it’s coming from?” Kurjan asked the man.
The copilot could only shrug back. “I’d try the radio shack first,” he yelled. “Or maybe the bridge …”
Kurjan linked up with his squad commanders and made sure everyone was on the same page. Three troopers would be left behind to guard the helicopters; the rest of the force would split into three groups and quickly search the burning ship.
Kurjan checked his watch. He had to complete the entire mission in less than ten minutes, that’s how long the choppers could keep their engines running and still have enough fuel to make it back to the base on Adora.
“OK, let’s go!” he yelled.
While Kurjan’s group headed topside, the two other groups went below deck.
Because of the dense smoke and toxic fumes, each member of these two teams had to quickly don gas masks and turn on their high-intensity lamps. What they saw was a scene straight out of hell. Burned bodies, severed heads and limbs, blood and other body guts were everywhere. They grimly made their way down the cluttered narrow passageways, using the classic leapfrog approach. Three men would secure a forward position and then wave the rest ahead. As they went deeper and deeper into the ship, both groups were amazed at the thorough job done by the Galaxys. It was like being on a ghost ship. They just couldn’t imagine anyone being alive.
At midships, Group Three began making its way toward the back end of the ship; Group Two would concentrate on the front end.
Because they met no resistance, Group Three reached the radio room far ahead of schedule. They found it empty—but all of the radios were smashed and out of commission. Whoever was sending the Mayday calls wasn’t doing it from here. Group Three went about the business of tearing the place apart, looking for any kind of information that they could get their hands on.
Group Two was also making progress. As planned, they came to a juncture of three passageways, each one of them leading to a forward magazine. Silently breaking up into three smaller units, they advanced down each of the passageways.
The point man of Unit Alpha reached the door of Magazine One. All was still quiet. Covered by the rest of the squad, he kicked in the door. What he saw would give him nightmares for years to come.
There were four Cult sailors; each had a time-detonator strapped to his chest. Obviously they were part of a suicide squad ordered to disperse to the ship’s magazines and serve as human time bombs, triggers which would ignite the battleship’s ammunition chambers and blow the vessel—and all those aboard—sky high on the given command. But it was just as obvious that the command never came—or it was ignored when it did. The four men, still sitting side-by-side, had chosen to die in a more traditional way—by the ancient ritual of hari-kari. What the squad leader found then were the four men horribly impaled by their own swords, their stomachs and lower abdomen organs running out onto the magazine’s floor, their faces identical masks of pure, pale terror.
The squad leader immediately vomited. He was quickly led away by his second officer.
It was this man who discovered that though dead, the time-detonators strapped to the bodies were nevertheless ticking away, the last act of four men who preferred the blade to the explosion as a way to die.
After some anxious, quick calculations, the officer determined the magazine—and the rest of the ship—would blow in less than eight minutes.
Topside, Kurjan and the men of his group had eased down the sides of the smoking superstructure and now surrounded the battered bridge. On cue, one of the commandos fired a burst through the thick greenish plate glass of the front of the bridge and two others immediately lobbed in concussion grenades. The two explosions blew out the rest of the glass, and in an instant, Kurjan and six commandos leapt through the opening, their weapons up and ready.
“What the hell is this?” Kurjan muttered once inside the bridge.
They found the ship’s captain sitting in his command chair. The warm barrel of a Lugar was still in his mouth, his brains literally dripping from the ceiling. There was a wry grin on his lifeless face.
A loud electronic noise was coming from a small room off the bridge. Kurjan and two of his troopers cautiously approached the entranceway to the room. The squealing sound was almost like morse code, yet all jumbled up. Kurjan finally kicked in the door—and immediately solved the mystery of who was sending the Mayday calls. The room was a small, auxiliary radio shack, close to the bridge to serve the ship’s command staff. Stretched across an ancient COMM-SAT keyboard was a Cult sailor. His hands had been blown away as had his right leg. The man nevertheless had been tapping out the SOS calls with an exposed forearm bone—and had done so until he died, quite apparently from shock and loss of blood.
His body was still twitching though and this was the cause of the jumbled radio messages.
�
�A ghost …” Kurjan heard himself say, somewhat involuntarily. “We’re always looking for ghosts.”
He walked over to the dead man and dragged him off the COMM-SAT keyboard, thus ending the electronic squealing. Laying the body aside, Kurjan noticed the man’s uniform’s name tag read: Ueno.
Kurjan’s group returned to the bridge and went right to work, gathering up every scrap of paper, sea chart, and report in the bridge, and tossing them into several duffle bags brought along for the purpose. It was Kurjan who spotted the safe.
“This is really what we’re looking for,” he called to his men. “Let’s peel this sardine can open.”
Just then, the leader of Group Two arrived on the bridge. He had bad news.
“They’ve got the forward magazine on timer detonators,” this man reported. “Our electronics officer says he can delay the zero point for another six minutes or so, but there’s no way he can defuse or move one without setting them all off.”
“Damn ….” Kurjan swore through clenched teeth. “That means we’ve got no time to screw around with this thing,” indicating the safe.
He turned back to Group Two leader. “Tell your man to delay detonation as long as he can and keep in constant radio contact. And get the rest of your men topside with whatever they’ve got already.” Kurjan then summoned his radioman to call Chopper One, telling the pilot to get airborne over the bridge and drop its steel cable and winch.
“What do you have in mind, sir?” Kurjan’s second-in-command asked.
Kurjan looked at the Seahawk taking off and then back at the safe.
“We’re going to take this thing with us,” he declared.
It took eight men over four minutes to wrestle the safe out of the bridge and onto the outside landing where the cable from the hovering Seahawk dangled. Every minute, on the minute, Group Two’s second-in-command radioed up from the forward magazine counting down how much time they had left. It was quickly running out.
With only two minutes to go, Kurjan called all of Group Two topside, and then he ordered everyone to get back aboard the Seahawks.
Kurjan made the final adjustments in locking the aerial cable to the safe. Then, when he was certain that every one of his commandos was safely in the choppers, he pumped his arm up and down, signaling the pilots of Seahawks Two and Three to get the hell out of there and fast. When they were clear, he hopped on top of the safe, tied himself as secure as he could to the cable with his web belt, and then signaled the pilot of Seahawk One to lift off. The copter slowly climbed until the cable was taut, and then added power, going straight up, plucking the safe and Kurjan off the ship.
They made it with just seconds to spare.
Dangling on top of the safe as it swayed from side to side, Kurjan was only 100 feet above the battleship when he heard a low roar from deep within the ship’s hold. The Cult vessel was suddenly rocked from stem to stern by a violent shudder. An instant later, the magazines blew. A great fireball lifted up through the main deck and out both sides of the ship in one deafening roar.
Kurjan was hit with the tremendous shock wave. He clung to the cable with all his strength as he was tossed and spun him around, totally out of control. But he managed to hang on. When the concussion passed and the smoke began to clear, he saw that the battleship had been broken completely in two, each half sliding to its watery grave. In a matter of seconds, there was nothing left but small bits of flotsam churned up by the froth of air bubbles escaping the dead ship.
The huge battleship fleet of the Asian Mercenary Cult was reduced by one.
Now all he had to do, Kurjan thought, his butt dangling out in the breeze, was to relax, and enjoy the ride back to the Adora atoll.
Chapter Ten
Adora Atoll
HUNTER, BEN, JT, AND Frost were sitting on the ivory white sands of Adora, drinking ice-cold beer and eating pork ribs when the trio of Seahawks appeared over the western horizon.
Hunter saw them first, of course—he was up and at the water’s edge in a flash, his extraordinary vision picking up the three dots like a radar screen.
“OK, they all made it back,” he said with some relief as the choppers drew near. “No problems on the return flight. That’s a good sign.”
Five minutes later, Seahawk One was hovering right over the small cove where they had set up their rib spit, Major Kurjan still sitting on the safe which was still dangling from the cable of the bottom of the chopper.
“Those Football City guys are really nuts,” JT remarked, as the safe and Kurjan were lowered down. “Who else would bring back the whole safe with them?”
“Looks like they might have hit the jackpot though,” Hunter replied. “Who knows what could be locked in there.”
The Seahawk finally came down low enough for the others to help Kurjan off and then disengage the safe from the chopper cable. Once released, Seahawk One gained altitude and followed its two companions back to the Clark Kent airstrip, a half mile from the cove.
“Good work, Laz,” Hunter told Kurjan as they studied the safe. “How was the ride back?”
“I can always find work as a trapeze artist,” Kurjan replied. “I just had the crash course.”
JT handed him a beer. “Don’t you know its bad luck to say the word ‘crash’ around pilots?” he asked.
The others were already surrounding the safe, inspecting it.
“It’s a double-lock combination,” Hunter said, slowly twisting the tumblers. “Could be any sequence of numbers. Might take a while to break it.”
“No, it won’t,” JT said. With that, he pulled his everpresent .357 Magnum from his boot holster and fired one shot, right between the pair of tumblers. The safe burst open immediately, much to the astonishment of his colleagues.
JT dramatically blew the smoke from his gun barrel, and reholstered the weapon. “I’m going to put another pig on the spit,” he announced, walking away, “So stay hungry….”
Kurjan and the others just shook their heads. “I’m glad he’s on our side,” Kurjan said.
Hunter was already pulling documents out of the safe. Some were written in Japanese, others in Korean, still others in Mandarin Chinese. It made no difference; he was fluent in all three.
But right away, the news was disappointing. Nearly all the documents dealt with the rather mundane matters of running a Cult battleship: ration proportioning, pay schedules, work orders. One document spelled out the restrictions on drinking sake while on-board. Another detailed with grisly nonchalance a list of looted items pillaged from some unknown location during one of the Cult’s islandhopping death-sprees. Still another documented the quantities of mind-bending drugs on board, a large amount being that of the incredibly-addictive superhallucinogenic myx.
“Well, they’re drinking myx,” Hunter told the others. “That explains why they’re so freaking crazy all the time.”
He kept reading, but nothing rang any bells as to what the fleet of Cult battleships were up to.
Then he came upon the last document, a large sealed blue envelope.
Hunter ripped it open and was astonished by what he found.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he whispered.
The others crowded around and stared at the document in Hunter’s hand. It was a single piece of yellowed onion paper with a little writing at the top.
“What the hell language is that?” Ben asked.
Hunter had a hard time believing it. “It’s Arabic,” he replied. “A very old dialect. Goes way back.”
“What’s it say?” Frost wanted to know. “Can you read it?”
Hunter could, but just barely. “It is a dispersement order,” he said slowly. “Not many instructions. Just some coordinates for a rendezvous point of some kind.”
“So they all might be heading to one place, just like we thought,” Ben said.
“Looks that way,” Hunter replied, quickly taking down the English translation of the longitude and latitude points.
“Any idea where th
ose points are, Hawk?” Kurjan asked.
Hunter closed his eyes and thought for a moment. He conjured up a vision of a world map in his head, calculating over from known longitude/latitude points. He had the answer in less than ten seconds.
“Damn,” he whispered. “I don’t believe it….”
Ben was practically shaking him by now.
“Where the hell is it, Hawk?” he asked. “Where the hell are the battleships going?”
Hunter looked up at them. “Believe it or not,” he said. “I think they’re heading for Vietnam….”
Chapter Eleven
The next day
IT WAS UNUSUALLY FOGGY over Edwards.
General Jones and Yaz were sitting in a HumVee at the side of the longest runway, their eyes straining to see through the unseasonal mist.
“Of all the damn days to be fogged-in,” Jones said, his voice uncharacteristically gravelly. “Whoever heard of fog in the desert.”
Yaz could only shrug. He certainly didn’t know. He was Navy man—oceans, he knew about. Not deserts.
He looked out on the line of C-5s, all of which were in some degree of disassembly. The weather was so bad, Jones had reluctantly called a halt to all flight testing, a critical delay in the timetable for getting more of the converted Galaxy transports over to the South Pacific.
But there was one airplane he had allowed to take off, almost sixteen hours before. They were now anxiously waiting for this airplane’s return.
“What time are we at?” Jones asked.
Yaz checked his chronometer. “I’ve got 1100 hours on the dot, sir.”
Jones began fidgeting with his long-extinguished pipe.
“They were due back here forty-five minutes ago,” he half-muttered. “God, if we lose them—and that plane—then we might as well …”
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