by Mack Maloney
Maybe next time, he would take her with him, he thought. Then he pushed the Enter button.
It was snowing.
Blowing, freezing, with heavy sleet, rain, ice. All in the dead of night.
Hunter was suddenly frozen to the bone. His flight suit soaked through. Icicles hanging from his nose.
Someone ran up to him, appearing like magic out of the blizzard. Hunter could hardly see their face.
"Can you fly this thing?" this person was screaming at him.
Hunter was suddenly aware of more people rushing around him. They all seemed confused, anxious, panicky. He realized he was on an airfield. There were flying machines everywhere he looked. Not rocket ships, or Star-crashers, or spacecraft of any kind. These were airplanes. With jet engines, propellers. Run by aviation fuel and dependent on the movement of air around them to fly. Hunter knew all this because in his former life — or make that in one of his former lives — he'd flown vehicles like this. He was a fighter pilot back then. One of the best, maybe the best ever.
They used to call him the Wingman.
Of that, at least, he was sure.
But that was then, and this was now — and he'd been suddenly thrust into this incredibly realistic horror ride. And he was standing on a taxiway, in the frozen wind, watching many of these airplanes scrambling to get into the air. And this person was in his face. He was just a kid, and he was wearing a cold-weather parka that said United States Air Force on it. Sergeant stripes ran down his arm.
"Can you?" he was screaming at Hunter.
"Can I what?" he finally screamed back.
"Fly this!" the kid yelled. He stepped to the side to reveal an aircraft directly in back of him. It was almost lost in the snow, but Hunter didn't have to see it to know what it was. He could feel its presence.
It was an F-16 jet fighter.
Some called it the Fighting Falcon. Others, the Viper. Take your pick. By whatever name, it was a kick-ass jet engine with an airplane built around it. It was small, light, could carry a shitload of bombs and missiles and still dogfight with a full rack. Yes, even blindfolded, Hunter would have known what it was. Way back when, a few lifetimes ago, he used to drive one of these babies.
The confusion around him increased threefold in just a matter of seconds. He turned back to the teenage sergeant.
"Yes, I can fly it," he told him. "I can fly the hell out of it!"
"Then, if I might be so bold, sir, I suggest that you strap in and get your ass going!"
"Going? Going where? What's happened?"
The kid seemed furious and on the verge of tears at the same time.
"The Soviets just wiped out half of Europe!" he yelled at Hunter through the torrent. "They launched thousands of Scud missiles with poison gas warheads — on fucking Christmas Eve! Now we've got to stop them before they wipe out the rest of it!"
With that, he ran off into the snow.
Hunter looked down at his hands and realized for the first time he was holding his crash helmet in one and a map case in the other. A huge airplane crossed in back of him. He recognized it immediately. It was a KC-135 in-flight refueling plane, a flying gas station that other planes could draw precious fuel from, while still in flight. It took off in a great explosion of exhaust and dirty-water spray. Right behind it was another one. Behind that, another one. To his right, on another slippery runway, two F-16s took off in tandem. Behind them, two more. Back on the main runway, a line of big planes with propellers and gun muzzles sticking out of their sides were waiting for their turn to take off. Gunships, Hunter thought.
He turned back to see two ground crew members standing beside the lone F-16, frantically beckoning to him. Hunter started running, putting on his crash helmet as he did so. He had to get going! Bounding up the access ladder, he literally jumped into the cockpit. The two drenched airmen strapped him in. He fired up the fighter's engine and felt a jolt of electricity surge through him. His entire body began vibrating. His hands automatically went to the side stick controller and the throttle. His feet to the control pedals.
And suddenly he didn't seem so insane anymore. He blinked — and when his eyes opened, everything was still there. The plane. The snow. The two airmen. No flash. Nothing.
Completing their task, one of the airmen smacked him twice on the top of his helmet and then disappeared down the ladder. The bubble top canopy came down with a thump. Hunter looked at his control panel and saw nothing but green lights. He knew this meant the plane was ready to fly.
Someone was trying to talk to him through the radio headphone in his helmet, but Hunter wasn't in the mood for conversation. He had places to go, things to do.
He looked over his shoulder and saw that the airstrip to his left was unoccupied. He gunned his engine, steered onto the hard tarmac, and a moment later went screaming down the runway.
This was very strange. Hunter really did feel like he was part of this machine. His hands seemed to be melded to its controls, his brain to its flight computer. He didn't even have to think about doing what he was doing. The F-16 was essentially the same flying machine he'd built back on Fools 6—from memory. If he didn't know how to drive this one, then he didn't deserve to draw another breath.
A flick of the stick, a push of the throttle, and he was airborne. The electricity rippling through his body turned into a lightning bolt. He hadn't felt this way in a very long time.
The airplane threw itself into the air. Hunter booted full throttle, which engaged the plane's afterburner and shot him forward with bone-crushing acceleration. He pushed back on the tail and was immediately going nearly straight up. In ten seconds he was already a mile high.
At thirty seconds he was passing through 25,000 feet. Only then did he level off and take a breath.
His ship's clock told him it was 0430 hours. There was nothing but darkness all around. He clicked on his cockpit light, unlatched his map case, and found a folder within marked Operations and Orders. He tore open this envelope; inside was a single piece of yellow paper. These were his orders. He was to connect with the large aerial convoy that had just left the airfield. He was to ride escort for it to Rota, Spain, and from there "engage in combat operations against any Soviet units found on continental Europe at the discretion of the local commander."
World War Three…
The words suddenly popped into his head. Though he arrived in the seventy-third century suffering from near total amnesia, some of Hunter's memories had returned to him in bits and pieces, some coming hard, but others very easily. First and foremost, he knew he was an American. He knew he was a soldier, a pilot. Some kind of national hero. But he also knew that he'd fought in a great war as a young man, several lifetimes ago.
That conflict was called World War Three. And for some reason, here he was, fighting it again.
He headed east, out over the water, streaking above the snow clouds, the storm in full retreat behind him. A bare hint of the sunrise came off his airplane's nose. The sky above was clear, filled with chilly stars. His first job was to catch up with the hundreds of airplanes belonging to the massive convoy that had taken off before him. He figured he was about five minutes behind them at the most.
His orders gave two radio frequencies, both UHF, that the convoy of refueling tankers, jet fighters, and AC-130 gunships would be using during the long flight across the Atlantic. Getting a communication link going was essential if everyone wanted to make it to Spain in one piece. He punched the first frequency into his radio set, adjusted the volume, but heard nothing. He tried the second frequency, but again could find no chatter between the dozens of airplanes.
This was strange.
While he was sure that the air convoy would be flying under the cloak of radio silence for the majority of the 2,000-plus mile flight, with this many planes in the air, there were always a few last-minute radio calls back and forth. From air traffic control to the departing airplanes. From one plane to another. Or, at the very least, one last weather report. But
all Hunter could hear in his helmet headphones was static.
He pushed his throttle ahead. The engine roared in response. He scanned the skies ahead of him. The planes in the air convoy would be flying without their navigation lights, but the sky was quickly getting bright, and he was surprised that he couldn't see at least a few silhouettes of the last few planes to take off. But even though he had tremendous eyesight, the sky in front of him held nothing but scattered clouds and fading stars.
Very strange…
He went up to 30,000 feet, a mile above the convoy's assigned altitude. Sometimes it was easier to find something in the air if you were looking down on it. Hunter scanned the huge expanse of sky before him again, still he could not yet see the tail end of the convoy. He read his orders again. They included his heading, altitude, and so on. He compared the numbers on the yellow sheet with what his navigation computer was telling him. Everything checked out. He was where he was supposed to be, at the right speed, going in the right direction. Yet from what he could see, he was the only one in this very big, empty sky.
He tried the radio again. Nothing on the first frequency.
Static on the second. He turned the UHF tuning knob through the entire range of frequencies the radio was able to receive. He heard nothing on any of them.
He checked his flying orders again, double checked them, then triple checked them. He was heading in the same direction as the hundred or so planes in the air convoy; they'd all received the same orders. The sky should at the very least have been filled with contrails, so many planes were supposed to be up here, but for as far as his eyes could see, his was the only aircraft.
This was getting very weird. He booted his throttles, and in an instant, doubled his speed. He felt a double sonic boom as he broke the sound barrier and was soon driving the F-16 at 1,000 mph-plus. He held this speed for exactly thirty seconds, which by his calculations, would have put him right where the air convoy's location should be.
But all this did was use up his extra fuel. The sky around him remained empty.
He was just about to consider turning around and returning to the base when his radio suddenly came alive with voices. It was immediately horrible. Screams of panic and fear were pouring out of his headphones. He could hear the sound of explosions, too, and of jet engines failing, airplanes going down, people dying.
It was obviously the convoy, and obviously it was in big trouble. The entire concept of radio silence was out the window as Hunter could hear dozens of voices in the cacophony. They were screaming altitudes and positions of other aircraft. He had no doubt what was happening: the convoy was under attack.
But where were they?
If nightmares are a conglomeration of a person's most acute fears, then Hunter was suddenly living a nightmare. The most helpless feeling any soldier can have is to hear his comrades dying and know there is nothing he can do about it. That's what was happening to Hunter now. He flew on and on, desperately looking for the convoy, but he still could not see them. He flew for another ten minutes, twenty, then thirty. He flew for more than an hour, and not once did the cries go away. If anything, they grew in intensity and desperation.
It was only when he met the sun that the voices began to fade away. They went out not with a bang but with a whimper. One last pilot, helpless as someone was shooting him down, leaving a message for his wife and kids that was cut off in midsentence. His voice was replaced by static, and then nothing at all.
Hunter found the convoy a few minutes later. It was scattered across the next ten square miles of ocean. Every plane reduced to debris floating on what looked like a sea of red aviation fuel. Or was that blood?
There was no piece of wreckage bigger than a few feet across. The planes in the air convoy had been the victims of an ambush. Hundreds had been killed. But how?
Hunter had his answer a few moments later. Sitting about five miles east of the vast sea of debris was a warship. A very big one.
An aircraft carrier…
Hunter didn't even think about it. He armed his weapons, specifically his four antiradiation HARM missiles. He knew they had a warhead powerful enough to blow apart a radar station. He was sure they could do a job on the skin of a boat.
He was furious. Scores of his countrymen were dead, and the people on this ship did it, of that he was sure. He went into a power dive, dropping four miles in a matter of seconds. The ship was now just a few thousand feet in front of him. The sun dawning on the horizon provided him with a perfect silhouette of the target. He went so low he was certain he would not show up on any of the ship's radar screens. He checked his weapons again. They were ready to go.
The ship was dead in his sights now, this as he lowered himself to just twenty feet off the surface of the rough Atlantic. He was intent on putting at least one of the guided bombs into the ship's midsection where he was sure the fuel compartment and the magazines lay. There was a chance he might even crack the hull in two.
He spotted the ship's mast. It was flying only one flag. Big and red with a yellow sickle and hammer on it. Even over thousands of years and several lifetimes, he remembered this flag, too. It was the banner of Soviet Russia, the people who'd just wiped out half of Europe and had killed many American pilots and airmen just minutes ago.
Mad Russian or not, it was now time for some payback.
It struck him suddenly as strange that this aircraft carrier would be out here all alone, with no escorting ships, not even any of its jump jets patrolling its airspace. No matter; that just made his job easier.
He fired the first HARM at about 500 feet out. It shot ahead of his airplane, leaving a long trail of yellow smoke in its wake. Just before it impacted, he let loose a second missile. Both were designed to home in on the signals produced by radar, and the big Soviet carrier was literally crackling with these waves. Again, he knew one HARM missile impacting on the right spot could do serious damage to the ship. If two hit on the money, he could set this murderous boat on fire. If three and four hit good, he might even send it to the bottom and revenge the American souls just lost.
The first missile hit the hull of the ship just where he'd wanted it, directly below the superstructure, about fifteen feet above the waterline. He instinctively knew that something either combustible or explosive was located there. But as he was pulling up over the ship, he saw his missile not bursting through the carrier's hull as he intended, but instead bouncing off of it.
The missile exploded harmlessly in the water. It didn't even chip a piece of paint off the ship's skin. The second missile arrived just a second later, to the same effect. A hit, a bounce off, an explosion, and absolutely no damage.
Everything went into slow motion after that. Not only did Hunter see the two missiles fail, he could see hundreds of Soviet sailors lining the huge flight deck and the catwalks ringing the superstructure. They were pointing and laughing at him as he roared over. He couldn't believe it!
He turned the F-16 sharply and found himself approaching the huge ship at the same low altitude, but now from the opposite direction. Either way, a missile hit here or there would have the same effect. He let both HARMs go, again in tandem, and watched their yellow trails head for the side of the carrier. From this angle with the sun at his back, Hunter saw the ship in a brighter light, and he was amazed how gleaming and special it looked. He couldn't have imagined a ship like this. It seemed to be made of the brightest chrome and shiniest steel. It was spotless, glowing, sparkling in the rising sun.
At the same time, he was beginning to notice that the inside of his jet was actually quite old and run down. His seat was threadbare. The canopy was scratched. Some panel lights were not working. He looked back up at the ship. He saw even more sailors now, massing on the deck, pointing and laughing at him.
The two missiles hit, and the same thing happened… which was nothing at all. They bounced off and exploded in the water, doing absolutely no damage to the ship. All this was to the great delight of the sailors on the deck. Hun
ter pulled up and away again, feeling like he'd done no more than provide a few moments of entertainment for these people who had just killed hundreds of his countrymen.
This only enraged him further. He turned the F-16 over a little too sharply, causing him to collide violently with the right side of his cockpit. He nearly lost control of the plane, regaining flight only through a quick boost of the throttle and a sharp turn to the left. This put him in a position just behind the ship, pointing toward its stern. He opened up with his nose cannon and watched the stream of shells rush toward the vulnerable ass end of the ship. There were sailors on the rail here, too. They weren't making any effort to shoot at him. Instead, they were waving at him, jeering at him, shaking their fists, and even giving him the finger. Making him look foolish.
And the cannon shells?
They bounced off, too.
He arrived over Rota two hours after daybreak.
According to his orders, he was to link up with American warplanes already on the ground at the Spanish NATO base, and then join in a systematic aerial assault on the advancing Soviet forces.
The background section of the orders stated that the Soviet army would take at least forty-eight hours before moving into those areas of Europe they'd poisoned with their Scud attack.
The main thrust of this assault would come, it was believed, through the center of West Germany, with Soviet forces moving in from Poland, Hungary, and, of course, East Germany. There were many bridges along this 300-mile section of the autobahns. By taking out a few of these key bridges and then hitting the Soviet columns in the rear areas, a large air armada, such as what was supposed to be waiting here in Spain, could deal a crushing blow to the invaders, perhaps delaying them long enough for the bulk of U.S. forces to get to the war zone.
But there was a problem. While Hunter could indeed see dozens if not hundreds of warplanes on the ground below him, he could see no activity going on around them. Instead it looked like they were simply left standing where they'd stopped rolling after landing. Many were gathered in haphazard fashion at the end of the main runway. Others looked simply abandoned. Even the clarity of the air around the base told him that nothing had taken off or landed here in hours, perhaps even days.