Before they could run to him, he was back out again, a large black, smoking box searing his hands.
He dove for a nearby ditch just a half second before the Me-262 exploded. When the fuel tanks finally lit off, it blew the jet’s frame more than thirty feet into the air. All that came down were smoking pieces and sparks.
By the time the women fighters reached Hunter, he was already on his feet, examining the still-smoldering black box even as he was cooling off his burnt hands in a nearby marsh pool.
He looked up at them and surprised them with a smile.
“That was close,” he said.
By the time Crunch and his Li-Chi Chi guards reached the crash site, Hunter and the two women fighters were marching the pink plane’s pilot back towards the plateau.
Hunter ran up to him, the strange black box in his hands.
“Ever see one of these?” he asked Crunch. “I ripped it out of the 262’s cockpit.”
Crunch studied the box. It was about a foot square, six inches deep. It had a series of multicolored wires running out of its back—or was that the front? Other than that it seemed to be nondescript in every way.
“Some kind of autopilot?” Crunch guessed.
“Very close,” Hunter told him excitedly. “It is a guidance system. But it was not originally designed for an aircraft. I think it’s supposed to be on an ICBM.”
Crunch stared at him and then back at the black box.
“You’re kidding.”
Hunter shook his head. “It looks like it might be part of a targeting system, probably used by a subsurface launched weapon.”
Crunch looked back up at him. “Sub-launched?” he said, “You mean like in Fire Bats?”
Hunter nodded. The Fire Bats were the nuclear-armed subs that were known to roam the Pacific like moving pieces in a huge blackmail game. They were first used by the Fourth Reich, the cult of Super-Nazis who overran most of the American continent a year before, only to be run back out by the United American forces. At least one Fire Bats was sunk around that time; two others were on station off the Pacific American coast, working under orders of the Asian Mercenary Cult, and providing a nuclear umbrella for the Cult’s occupation forces. When the Cult pulled out of California for the titanic battle at Pearl Harbor, the pair of mysterious nuclear-armed subs disappeared again. Their whereabouts at the moment was unknown.
“You think this is from one of the Fire Bats?” Crunch asked.
“Could be,” Hunter answered, turning the strange black box over in his singed hands. “Could very well be.”
Crunch scratched his head. “But what the hell is a nuke missile guidance system doing on that old jet bucket?”
Hunter just shrugged. “I can’t wait to find out. I’ll bet it will be a shocker when we do.”
But they were both in for a more immediate surprise. One of the Li-Chi Chi guards was suddenly tugging on Crunch’s sleeve. She whispered something into his ear and Hunter watched a puzzled look wash over Crunch’s face.
“You’re kidding?” he asked the woman in broken Cantonese.
She vigorously shook her head no, pointing to the pilot.
Two other women fighters held the still-helmeted pilot up straight. A fourth woman put her hand inside the pilot’s flight suit and violently ripped it open.
Both Hunter and Crunch were astonished. Beneath the flight suit was a thin T-shirt and beneath that was a pair of breasts. They were small, young, pert—but breasts nevertheless.
They couldn’t believe it: the pilot of the strange Me-262 was a woman.
Six hours later
Hunter was stumped.
He looked around the small communal hut, and suddenly nothing was making any sense. In one corner was the pilot of the destroyed Me-262. She was a woman, or more accurately, a girl. Probably no more than fifteen, sixteen at the most, and either Asian or Polynesian. She was absolutely terrified, shaking, possibly in a state of shock.
Just how she came to be flying the decades-old airplane, he had no idea. She couldn’t speak English, and no one on the plateau could speak whatever language she seemed to speak in between the torrents of tears.
Resting on a small wooden table in the other corner was the strange black box he’d ripped out of the burning airplane. He had removed one of its top covers and peering inside confirmed that it was indeed a guidance system for a ballistic missile, most probably one that was nuclear-tipped, and fired from below the surface of the water.
In the third corner was Crunch. Half-asleep, half-fondling a pair of his favorite Li-Chi Chi. There was some connection to the three, and to the Me-262 jet that was still smoldering down on the marshes.
Crunch had seen the strange Me-262 months ago while on his recon flight prior to the pivotal battle against the Cult at Pearl Harbor. But he had told Hunter that at the time, it was definitely a man flying the jet and it was not painted in garish pink. At the time, Crunch had been overflying some deserted South Pacific islands, and the Me-262, being of somewhat limited range, could have conceivably been heading for one of them, such as Tarawa, Kiribati, or maybe all the way to Fiji. If that was the case, that would explain the girl pilot’s apparent Polynesian origin.
But what the hell was she doing flying the plane? And why was she here, now, in Vietnam, on the verge of a huge conflict, flying the same pattern, over and over? And carrying a fairly sophisticated piece of guidance equipment with her to boot?
Hunter closed his eyes and tried to dredge up some psychic prowess to help him put the puzzle together. He recalled the great axiom of Sherlock Holmes: If one eliminates the impossible, then what remains, no matter how improbable must contain the truth—or something like that.
So it came down to a basic question: How is it that a girl barely old enough to know better is flying an old Nazi-designed jet over Vietnam on the same flight pattern day after day, with a ICBM targeting device hooked up to the flight controls?
Hunter concentrated. Eyes closed, falling into a trancelike state, he began to hear voices. There were many as usual, but one stood out above the cacophony. It was the one that kept saying: Just twist it around, dummy….
Hunter opened his eyes slowly. Twist it around? What did that mean? Girl flying airplane with ICBM guidance box aboard? Airplane flying girl with ICBM guidance box aboard?
No—wait a minute … How about: ICBM guidance box flying airplane with girl aboard.
Hunter was up in a shot—that might be it!
He quickly grabbed the black box and began ripping it apart in earnest. The first level was already unscrewed, it came off in a snap. The second level had no less than twenty-four tiny screws to be undone; it took him about a minute to do so. This level contained the black box’s memory circuits. A quick glance told him they’d been rearranged recently; that was a good sign.
He went into the third layer, which looked like a nightmare of semiconductors, all crossbred and out of sync; more evidence that the box had been realigned recently, and not by any real genius.
He finally made it down to the fourth and final layer and it was here that he found the proof for his “twist it” theory. The actual guidance system itself—that part of the black box which sent signals to the key components of an ICBM’s guidance apertures—had been recast big time. More than two thirds of the conducting units had been disconnected altogether, as had the computer terminal ducts. This was definitely the work of someone who was trading down in the world. They didn’t want the box to guide anything as complex as an underwater ICBM; rather they wanted to dummy-it-up and fly nothing more than a simple, old airplane.
He sat back down in his corner and stared at the disassembled box. They wanted the airplane to fly somewhere, with the girl as a passenger. She could no more pilot the airplane than any schoolkid could. She was just along for the ride. But why? And where was she going?
The ritualistic daily flights up and around the Delta—what was the point of that? It wasn’t for recon purposes, or prestrike stuff. Just g
oing around and around—didn’t make much sense, unless … He looked back at the black box’s important fourth layer. Was there a chance that maybe the person rewiring the thing screwed up a connection? If they had, that might send the plane’s controls into a constant circling pattern as the box’s commands simply began repeating themselves.
He carefully scanned the fourth layer looking for any evidence of a semiconductor not sitting right or a connection not quite nailed down to a conducting point. To his dismay, everything looked properly connected, haphazard as it might be. Then he studied the third layer, the memory part of the box. Right away he noticed there was indeed not one, but two connectors that hadn’t been fused correctly. They were laying bare as a baby’s bum, their triangular plugs just begging to be coupled.
That was it—the black box had a case of Alzheimer’s. Because of a bad circuit connection, it couldn’t make up its mind what to do at any given moment—so it had just gone in circles.
Hunter closed his eyes again. He could just see the airplane taking off from a base down south—maybe even near the Cult battleship port of Son Tay—flying north, and coming around and back to the base again. The people at the base, for some reason compelled to launch the airplane day after day (now, that was a ritual!), saw it return each day, its flight another failure.
And if they had allowed it to go on long enough, the Me-262 would have kept flying the same nonsensical pattern everyday, until it was too old to get airborne—or until someone shot it down.
It was a nice tidy theory, but it didn’t answer three big questions: Why was the airplane rigged in the first place? Where would it go if the memory circuits had been fused correctly. And why was the girl on board?
Hunter opened his eyes. There was one person who knew the answers to those questions—and many more. And lucky for him, she was sitting right across the room.
It took more than seven hours before Hunter found a combination of languages with which he could communicate with the young girl.
As it turned out, she spoke a little Japanese, a little Korean, a trace of French, and a smattering of Bogonese—an obscure dialect favored by some of the more remote tribes on Borneo. Using these four tongues and a good deal of sign language, Hunter was finally able to get the skeleton of her story.
Her name was Ala.
She’d just turned sixteen by her calendar. She was born on the island of Fiji, and most of her family still lived there. Two years before, the Asian Mercenary Cult invaded the island and killed off most of its male population; those who were spared were sold into slavery.
From the beginning, the Cult had considered the main island of Fiji as a sacred place, though none of the residents knew why. The actual military presence on the island was very small; if any Cult soldiers came at all, they tended to be high officers and their staffs. Typically, they used the most beautiful women on the island for sex; “comfort girls,” they called them. The unattractive ones were put to work doing the menial domestic tasks.
Several months before, a man named Soho came to the island. He was flying a strange jet—the Me-262, as it turned out. He had come to Fiji from Okinawa, while it was being attacked by “white men in ships and planes,” an obvious reference to the United American Task Force which first attacked Japan and then Okinawa, before taking part in the final defeat of the Cult land forces at Pearl Harbor.
Soho was immediately set up as a god on Fiji. The high Cult officers were very quick to kowtow to him and fell over themselves to get him anything he desired, from drugs, to booze, to girls for sex. As a result, Soho was intoxicated round the clock, making it very hard for the Cult officers to get him to make the decisions they needed him to make.
One day, Soho spotted Ala as she was placing flowers on the Me-262 which had been set up as a shrine to Soho, worshipping the “bird of his arrival.” Soho immediately developed a liking to Ala; he told her it was because she was the only female on the island who had red hair. They spent much time together, mostly taking long walks along the island’s miles of beaches.
During these times, Soho told Ala many stories about the Asian Mercenary Cult, and especially about its succession of divine leaders. One was a man named Hashi-Pushi; when he was killed, his “spirit” passed control of the huge Cult to a woman named Aja, via the sex act. She in turn passed the crown to Soho in the final hours of the battle on Okinawa by way of a similar coupling. It was Aja who told Soho to fly to Fiji.
Although Soho more or less respected her during their time together, Ala saw that he was gradually getting sicker, both in mind and body. During their last meeting, he was a bag of bones, his consumption of alcohol and drugs had withered him away. He explained to her that it was his turn to pass on the crown of the Asian Mercenary Cult and that he had selected her to be his receptor. The next day, Soho called a celebration at the island’s airport. In front of a large assembled crowd, including her parents, Soho raped Ala, and then put her aboard the Me-262. Terrified, she was helpless as the airplane took off on its own.
Thus began a very long odyssey. With the plane’s flight controls being manipulated by the black box, Ala flew from base to base, all over the South Pacific, absolutely terrified. Each place she landed was under some kind of Cult control, either directly or through allies like the Minx.
Though she was treated like a goddess where ever she arrived, her hosts were very obvious in their haste to get her fed, washed, the plane fueled up and on its way again.
She’d been taking this remote-control trip for nearly a month when she finally set down at a small airstrip outside of Son Tay, the small port city which was now the calling place for Cult battleships. She and her hosts believed that this was just one more step on her trip to an unknown destination; like the others, the Minx officers at Son Tay were anxious to see her go. But something had happened to the airplane by this time—when she took off, she flew for about 40 miles and then inexplicably returned to Son Tay. Startled, her hosts sent her up again the next day, and the same thing happened. The next day it was the same, and on and on.
Each time she returned, her hosts would wring their hands and pray—literally pray—that the reputed supernatural powers behind the Cult would soon take the goddess-in-waiting off their hands, lest something happen to her on their watch.
She was on her eighteenth circuit when Hunter shot her down.
He sat and listened to her story, equally baffled and fascinated. What the hell did it all mean? Passing the crown of Cult leadership from person to person, via forced sex? It was crazy.
But then again, so were many of the people in the Cult.
Hunter asked Ala if she had any idea who she was supposed to meet at the end of her journey. She thought a moment; her only guess would be a man that Soho told her about once.
It happened during one of their first walks on the beach. Soho told her that it was important she know about this particular man. He came from a place in the Middle East, many years ago. He began preaching and soon gathered a small number of trusted followers. They traveled all over, and soon their number grew. This man had the ability to attract and influence ordinary people, and convince them that they could do extraordinary things.
Soon many people were talking about this man. They would walk miles just to hear him speak. Some people began praying to him—they were convinced this man had a vision for the world, one by which every person could live by.
Soho told Ala that this man’s vision for a new way for men to live brought him many enemies too. Many people disliked him. Many tried to kill him. Soon many were waging wars against him, wars of struggle over men’s souls. Soon these battles were raging out of control. This man knew that only by sacrificing himself could he really influence how others thought of him. So he was killed, murdered by those who disagreed with him.
But then, this man “came alive again,” Ala said Soho told her, and walked among his people again, “like a ghost.” And that he was still alive this day, possibly somewhere in the Middle East
, possibly somewhere closer by.
And maybe that’s where she was heading, to meet this ethereal personage.
Hunter was astounded. He asked her what Soho said this man looked like. She replied the man was supposedly tall, very strong, with long hair and a short beard.
“And did he tell you this man’s name?” he asked the girl.
She nodded.
He stared at her for a long moment. “It’s not Jesus, is it?”
She shook her head slowly. “No,” she replied. “It’s Victor.”
Obsession takes many forms.
Love. Desire. Money. Drugs. Alcohol. Hate. Revenge.
The common thread was that, if taken to the extreme, obsession will eventually drive a person to madness. And at that point, the madness itself becomes an obsession.
Hunter was now a man obsessed.
He was in the cockpit of Crunch’s crashed C-5, grabbing at wires, yanking at panels, tossing aside integrated circuit boards and LED switches—tearing out the heart of the cargo jet’s flight controls in order to get to the brain.
Crunch was there, as were the Z-men, watching him rip through the battered control panel, looking for the small microprocessor which controlled the airplane’s automatic pilot. The three men had given up trying to talk to Hunter—he’d answered all of their previous questions with little more than polite grunts, and sometimes uncharacteristic silence.
It was obvious that he was beyond conversation, and finally the three men just gave up trying to talk with him.
The match that lit the fuse for Hunter’s rage was the name spoken to him by the island girl, Ala. The name was Victor. When he had her spell it out for him, translating the Borneo pidgen language into English characters, the word came out V-I-C-T-O-R, a slight variation on Viktor, by which Hunter had always known the supercriminal—but this made no matter. However it was spelt, the name was synonomous with evil, a culmination of all that was despicable in the world.
Hunter finally found the autopilot microprocessor.
Ghost War Page 26