He shifted his binoculars slightly north of the city and saw plumes of smoke rising from Da Nang air base. There were still explosions going off all around the perimeter of the sprawling base, but as far as he could tell, the defensive forces were successfully holding their own against the would-be Minx invaders.
And that was exactly all they wanted to do.
Three Omani officers appeared on the deck next to Crunch. Between them, they could muster up a passing semblance of English.
“Weapons are ready,” one told him.
“Range is set,” said another. “Shells are fused.”
“Nothing on radar,” said the third. “We have yet to be detected.”
Crunch looked at his watch. It was one minute to 2100 hours. He checked the ship’s position. They were cruising at five knots, heading north, maintaining a ten mile distance offshore. He did a quick mental check, making sure he’d crossed every T and dotted every I.
Then he turned back to the Omanis. “OK, boys,” he said. “Let’s open them up.”
Not five seconds later, the three guns on the battleship’s forward turret erupted in a trio of flames and smoke. The huge, 50,000-ton ship shuddered as three, massive, one-ton shells left the sixteen-inch barrels and screamed away into the night.
Crunch fixed his spyglasses back on the lights of Da Nang just in time to see the three high-explosive shells hit right in the center of the city. The explosions were so quick and so bright, they actually hurt Crunch’s eyes. He blinked, and when he refocused he saw three huge fireballs rising above the city.
“Hit ’em again!” he cried out.
A moment later, the trio of guns on the second turret fired, shaking the ship again, and delivering three more one-ton shells to the middle of Da Nang. Crunch kept his eyes open this time and saw the shells hit, raising three identical fiery mushrooms above the city.
“Again!” he yelled.
Now the rear turret erupted, sending three more shells into the enemy-held city.
“Again!”
The forward turret fired again.
“Again!”
The second turret fired.
“Again!”
The third turret erupted.
Now all Crunch could see through his binoculars were fireballs and smoke. Crunch imagined what it was like inside the walls. At least 30,000 troops. Total confusion, panic, fire, smoke. No escape.
Death.
He grimaced and wiped his weary eyes. He was quite nearly tired of this combat stuff. Very tired of all the killing. He promised himself a good long drunk when all this was over.
Then he put the spyglasses up to his eyes once more.
“Fire again!” he cried.
Inside the Jersey Tunnel
Geraci’s ears were ringing.
He looked around the well-lit tubular concrete shelter and saw not one person who wasn’t holding his or her ears. Small cascades of dust and mortar were falling from the newly poured ceiling. Geraci winced at each one—he knew every support, every stud, every metal beam in the place.
And if just one of them broke…
He didn’t want to think about it, so he put his hands up to his ears, too. One hundred feet above them and too damn close by, the city of Da Nang was undergoing a fierce bombardment. He imagined he could hear the screams, the cries of panic and pain, the sound of death itself all around him. But at the same time he realized this was impossible simply because the sound of the massive sixteen-inch gun explosions were so loud, so violent on the eardrums, it was clinically impossible to hear anything else.
He looked up and saw his closest officers—Matus, Cerbasi, McCaffrey and Palma—all sitting nearby, scrunched in between various-uniformed mercenaries and the odd civilian, who more often than not was a hooker or some form of bar room girl. With each crash of a high-explosive shell outside, they all grimaced and shook their heads—but he also noticed something else. Between blasts, they were all smiling. But why? Relief that the previous shell had not come crashing through the ceiling? Satisfaction at the thought that the brutal Minx were finally getting their well-deserved comeuppance? Or was it a mixture of both? A kind of whistling in the dark. He wasn’t sure. But strangely enough, he soon found himself smiling after each shell crash—and then it hit him. They were in a well-protected bunker, theoretically out of harm’s way, where just a few weeks before, they’d been scraping the sides of a battered, very fucked-up airplane, withstanding massive Minx mortar barrages, and fighting off blood-curdling human wave assaults.
Now he knew the reasons for the smiles. These guys had cheated death so many times, death was no longer interested in playing the game. They had won. They were nearly invincible.
Hunter, JT and Ben were also holding their ears.
They all witnessed some massive bombardments before, but nothing like this.
They were holed up inside one of the concrete aircraft repartments, watching through binoculars the systematic destruction of Da Nang city. With each barrage of shells from the captured Cult battleship, it seemed like another piece of the city died. They correctly presumed that thousands of Minx soldiers, unprepared for such an onslaught, were dying too. Even if their commanders had ordered them into the cellars of the buildings within the city, there was no way anyone could escape the massive bombardment.
And even though the Minx troops surrounding the base itself were still shelling, it was now much more sporadic and untargeted; almost as if they too were in awe of the hell and fire their comrades were going through.
There was a row of radios and radiophones next to them in the bunker, and with these Hunter, JT, and Ben were keeping in close contact with the people inside the Jersey Tunnel, the front line commanders of perimeter defense forces and Crunch on board the captured Minx battleship.
From every perspective it was evident that the enemy was being slaughtered—and with it, the city of Da Nang was slowly but surely disappearing from the map.
Aboard Battleship 57
The girl named Ala was also holding her ears.
The rumble and crash of the huge guns going off just two levels up and one over from her stateroom was so frightening and intense, she could not keep her teeth from chattering.
How had she come to this? By what devil had she changed from the simple island girl on Fiji, to this, a passenger on this massive warship, confused and terrified?
She pressed her hands closer to her ears and tried to think about her parents. How were they? Were they still alive? Or had the madman Soho killed them? There was no way she could know—or would ever know.
She began crying. All this fighting, all this warmaking—it made no sense to her. She no longer had any idea of time; the long stop and go journey in the pink airplane had taken care of that. And though the strangers under whose care she was presently seemed human enough, there was no way she could ascertain their intentions.
She felt then like a poo-wa pow-wa, a small piece in a game favored by her people which the players moved and tugged constantly as a way of seeking to defeat their opponents.
Another barrage caused her to scream out in pure fear—it was so loud, two of her Li-Chi Chi bodyguards burst into her stateroom just to make sure she was all right.
She quickly dismissed them—she wanted to suffer alone. The only regret she had was not telling them—or anyone else—that every time she closed her eyes, she saw the face of a man that looked like Satan himself.
Chapter Forty-six
THE BATTLESHIP DIDN’T STOP firing until first light the next morning.
Finally, after a one, last nine-gun barrage, the cannons fell silent. It was 0645 hours.
Geraci was the first one out of the southern end of the Jersey Tunnel. He emerged, his M-16 up and ready—but he quickly realized he wouldn’t need his weapon.
There was nothing left. No buildings, no streets, no trees. Certainly no people. He was stunned. The massive bombardment have leveled every thing within a square mile. He couldn’t see anythi
ng that was more than four feet high. Even stranger, there were no bodies—or at least none that could be seen out in the open. They too had been baked by the hellish temperatures and then snuffed to dust by the shelling.
Other members of the 104th and the civilians began emerging from the shelter. To a person, each stared out at the utter destruction, jaw agape, eyes nonbelieving. Just about everyone was of the same mind. The desolate landscape looked as if a nuclear bomb had hit it.
More than 5,000 people had spent the night in the Jersey Tunnel and now they were pouring out of the shelter. Within minutes a Huey helicopter appeared overhead and landed where the city square used to be. Hunter climbed out, followed by JT, Ben and Crunch.
They walked over to Geraci and shook hands.
“Everyone made it, OK?” JT asked him.
Geraci nodded. “Everything held together,” he replied. Then, looking around him: “Thank God.”
“Quiet morning, isn’t it?” Hunter asked him.
Geraci took a moment to listen. All he could hear was the wind whistling through the rubble and the sounds of waves on the beach a short distance away. There was no gunfire, no mortar tubes popping, no artillery. No action at all around the massive air base nearby.
“They take their toys and go home?” Geraci asked the Wingman.
Hunter just shrugged. “Seems like it,” he replied, looking back towards the heavy jungle to the west. “We did a dawn recon, couldn’t see a soul down there. Nothing on infrared, nothing on the Jason module.”
Geraci stared at the desolate vacant lot that a day before had been the city of Da Nang.
“Can’t say I blame them,” he observed quietly.
At that moment, Hunter felt a tug on his arm. It was Ben, motioning past the stream of civilians walking out of the Tunnel to a lone figure walking down what used to be a street. It was Crunch.
“Wonder what he’s thinking,” Ben said to Hunter.
Hunter walked over to his old friend. He’d been absolutely quiet during the chopper ride in from the battleship.
“I’m going to have to tell Jonesie to break out the medals,” Hunter told Crunch. “You deserve at least a dozen or so.”
Crunch just shook his head. “Not me,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “Not for this.”
Hunter put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “It’s war, Crunchie,” he said. “It was either them or us.”
Crunch just stared straight ahead. “You know, Hawk” he began, “when I landed on Xmas way back when all this started, I couldn’t imagine what kind of person would actually be responsible for that. Just total absolute destruction. I just couldn’t imagine anyone living with it—having known that they were responsible for snuffing out the lives of so many people.”
Then he turned and looked Hunter in the eye. “And now, the devil has become me.”
Hunter began to reply something, but stopped himself. There really wasn’t much that could be said.
Crunch started walking away, down the shattered roadway, looking at what the guns under his control had wrought.
“I should have stayed down in the Delta,” Hunter heard him say.
Da Nang Air Base
One hour later
As always, it was Hunter who saw it first.
He was deep in work at the base ops room, studying the video shot not thirty minutes before by video cameras attached to a pod on Ben’s F-20. The latest footage confirmed what the previous recon flights had discovered: the Minx units formerly attacking Da Nang air base had withdrawn, and were now in flight down old Route 7, heading no doubt for sanctuaries deep in the jungle.
The massive battleship attack had accomplished its twin purpose: it had destroyed one Minx army and had sent the other packing, its members no doubt concluding that no wage was worth facing certain screaming death from the skies, as their comrades inside Da Nang city had.
Hunter had just switched off the VCR/TV combo when he felt a slight vibration run through his body.
He checked his watch. It was straight up 1200 hours.
“Right on time,” he thought.
He walked out of the ops building and onto the vast tarmac. The base was already getting back to some kind of normalcy. Repair crews were patching the far runways, the fire brigade finally snuffing out the several inconsequential fires started by the Minx shelling. Though intense, the enemy attack had failed to damage any vital piece of equipment on the base. All of the aircraft—from the trio of Football City Galaxys to the F-20s—had survived in their concrete shelters. Even more important, there were few casualties among the defending forces, and most of those were minor.
Shielding his eyes, Hunter stared up into the brilliantly lit blue sky and immediately spotted a small speck coming in from the east. The speck grew quickly, a testament to its high speed, and soon was fairly distinguishable: a long snout, swept cranked wings, twin tail fins. The trademark dull black color. There was only one plane known on Earth like it.
It was the SR-71 Blackbird, the hyperfast, high-flying recon plane operated by the Sky High Spies, Inc.
There was a crowd of 100 or so gathered by the time the SR-71 came in for a landing. The Blackbird’s ramjets engine emitted such a scream, many were forced to block their ears, so high-pitched was the distinctive whine.
The airplane rolled up to a stop right next to the crowd, its engines winding down. The twin canopy popped open and the two pilots climbed out. It was the Kephart Brothers, Jeff and George, the proprietors of Sky High Spies, Inc. They’d flown over from Edwards to do a high-altitude sweep of South Vietnam the day after the Minx offensive.
Bulked up in the high-altitude, spacesuit-looking outfits, they waddled over and shook hands briskly with Hunter.
“Nice place,” Brother Jeff deadpanned, looking around the airbase and then over at the smoldering crater that was once Da Nang city. “But it looks like we missed the big party.”
Hunter just nodded. “Did you ever,” he replied.
Brother George produced a video cassette.
“Well, there’s plenty more going on,” he said grimly.
They hurried to the ops room where they were joined by Ben, JT, Frost and Geraci. Quickly inserting the videotape into the VCR/TV combo, within seconds the screen was filled with the crooked green shape of South Vietnam. Everyone in the room grew absolutely silent. The country’s outline was barely visible, so intense was the smoke and fire. In fact, to Hunter, it appeared as if the whole country was on fire.
“When we did our first mission a few weeks back,” Brother Jeff began, “we didn’t believe it could get much worse. But obviously, it has.”
The video rolled on, showing close-ups of such places as Cam Ranh Bay, Hue, Quang Ngai, and New Saigon. Each illustrated in the most graphic terms that incredibly intense battles were raging just about everywhere to the south of them. In fact, only the quick shot of the Da Nang area itself showed any semblance of peace.
“It was same up and down the coast,” Brother George told them. “These Minx guys are everywhere. Troops moving, on foot or in trucks. Mobile guns. Tanks. Towed artillery. If you count them, you’ll see there are more than three hundred big guns—81s up to big 120s—just around New Saigon alone. They’re just pounding whoever the hell is defending that place. Same is true at all the major coastal cities. No wonder we were getting all those Maydays.”
Hunter felt his spirits sag to an all-time low. They had all been so caught up in their own survival, they had had no time to even ponder the situation in the rest of the country. Now it was quite apparent that it was all very grim.
As always, JT spoke for them.
“Jessuzz, we’ve been breaking our asses here,” he began, his voice bitter, “just to save our own necks. But looking at this, it all amounts to a pee hole in the snow. We were just lucky. We can’t beat these guys. They’re overrunning the other ninety-five percent of the country.”
No one argued with him. As the videotape rolled on, it displayed with sicken
ing accuracy, a country that was in its death throes.
“And once they get finished down there,” JT concluded, “they’ll all be back up here. And no matter what the hell we throw at them, it will never be enough.”
The Kephart Brothers looked at each other and grimaced. It was up to Brother Jeff to deliver another slice of very bad news.
“There’s more,” he said simply, hitting the fast-forward control.
Within seconds, the fuzzy green shape of Vietnam dissolved, and soon the screen turned cloudy blue. The spy pilot returned the tape to normal speed and those gathered saw the new sequence was of the ocean from about ten miles up.
“We shot this about five hundred miles out from Cam Ranh Bay,” Brother George began. “We started picking up microwave emissions and figured we’d check it out before coming in.”
The room fell absolutely silent as they watched the scene’s thin cloud cover clear away. Then an audible gasp went up. The screen clearly showed a group of ships sailing in three distinct lines.
“Damn,” Hunter whispered. “The battleships.”
Both Kepharts nodded grimly. “There’s at least twenty of them,” George said. “They appear to be under full steam, sailing due west.”
“… and heading right for us,” Ben half-whispered.
JT flung his coffee cup against the far wall.
“That’s the ball game,” he said, teeth clenched. “It means we went through all this for nothing.”
Even Hunter had to agree. Staring out the window at the huge airbase, he couldn’t help but think he’d been transported back in time, that his own recent past crazily mirrored the American effort in Vietnam in the 1960s. First, an encirclement by the shadowy enemy, saved only by a narrow escape. Then the deceptive beauty of the Delta, that, like the rest of the country, hid unspeakable horrors committed by the most unlikeliest of soldiers—the Li Chi-Chi. Finally, the art of destroying a city in order to save it. And now, evidence of more enemy on the way—unchecked, uncheckable. And more enemy meant more fighting, more war, more death.
What was it about this place? It was a green jungle masked as black hole, sucking in more and more lives. And for what? Rice paddies? Oil?
Ghost War Page 33