And that just didn’t make sense.
What was also making Yaz more than a little nervous was his promise to Hunter about not making contact with their commander-in-chief, General David Jones. Yaz did not like keeping his boss in the dark almost as much as he was sure General Jones did not like being cut off from receiving a full report of the Task Force’s successful mission. In fact, at this point, Yaz knew that his actions almost bordered on insubordination. Yet he’d made a promise to Hunter, and he would stick by it—at least for now.
He shifted uneasily in his captain’s chair. Suddenly it seemed way too big for him.
And now, more trouble was on its way.
At that moment, the weather officer hastily came on the bridge.
“I’ve just got the latest condition update, sir,” the young ensign told Yaz with a quick salute. “I thought you’d better look at it right away.”
Yaz sat up straight in his chair.
“Okay, let’s have it,” he said firmly.
The young officer took a deep breath. “Sir, we’ve had a substantial rise in the barometer over the last hour. It’s been combined with a dramatic temperature flux. Wind speed has picked up ten knots in the last five minutes alone and is continuing to rise. There is a large high pressure area moving in from the north, and …”
Yaz held up his hand, interrupting the man.
“Please translate, ensign,” he said.
“In a nutshell, sir—if the weather conditions to our northeast continue to develop as they have, we might have a typhoon condition.”
Yaz was stunned. He looked back out to the northeast: the approaching storm clouds appeared even angrier than last time. “My God, are you saying that’s a typhoon out there?”
The ensign already had a sea chart pulled out.
“It’s an eighty-five-percent possibility, sir,” he began. “It’s one hundred percent that we will run into increasingly rough weather very soon. Much worse than on the trip out. If the typhoon develops, it will be at its peak right in this area, at our present position. The good news is that it won’t be here for another three to five hours. Six, tops. So if we were to increase our speed to twenty knots, we should be safely out of the way of the worst of it. We’ll have substantial rain and wind, and the sea will be high. But we won’t take the full punch.”
Yaz’s head was now pounding like a steam piston. His main problem had just been compounded. To speed up now would certainly ensure that Hunter would never make it back to the ship. Yet not to increase speed would surely endanger the lives of the crews of the Task Force.
Yet Yaz surprised himself by making a quick decision.
“Pass the weather advisory to the rest of the ships,” he told the ensign calmly. “And inform them they’d better batten down the hatches. We will be maintaining our present course and speed until further orders.”
Seventeen
OKINAWA WAS ONE OF the last in the chain of Japanese mainland islands.
Relatively small, it was thin and crooked and surrounded by many other smaller islands. At the moment, its center seemed to be wrapped in a thick fog.
Hunter had been circling at 70,000 feet twenty miles north of the island for the last two hours. The high orbit not only kept him off any radar screens, it also allowed him to conserve fuel while waiting for dawn to come. He’d done a lot of thinking in that time—but he’d yet to come up with an answer to the most important question: Why had his mysterious instincts compelled him to come to this place?
He just didn’t know. But now, with the eastern horizon brightening, so, too, came the light he needed to do a proper recon of the island. Maybe then he would learn why the feeling had brought him here.
He did a quick check of his flight systems and nose cameras. Everything came back green. He checked his weapons; everything was prearmed and ready. He took a deep breath of pure oxygen and felt the smaller resultant rush in his bloodstream.
“Time to get to work,” he thought soberly.
With that, he booted his afterburner up to full military power and put the ’XL into a screaming dive. Down he went, his futuristic airplane almost blurring from view as its velocity increased in vast geometric proportions. Only when the jet was 200 feet above the water’s surface did the frightening supersonic plunge end. At that split second, Hunter pulled up on the side-stick controller and evenly leveled off to an altitude of exactly fifty-five feet. It was a maneuver so violent, it would have blacked out the best of fighter pilots. For Hunter, it had barely caused him to blink.
Now down low, under any known radar levels, he lined his tail up with the ball of the rising sun and headed west, toward the mist-enshrouded island.
Yet no sooner had he turned toward the island than his inner psyche began buzzing.
Something was wrong.
He suddenly detected small splashes in the water around and ahead of his airplane. At first, he thought it might be hostile fire from the coast now just five miles away. But he saw no smoke or any other activity coming from the island that would indicate hostile fire. Still the small splashes continued. He scanned the control panel once more, looking for any hint to explain this odd phenomenon.
That’s when a glint of a metallic reflection high above him caught his eye. Twisting around to see behind him, Hunter was uncharacteristically stunned.
“Jesus, what the hell is that?”
In an instant he had pulled back hard on the stick and booted in his afterburner. A second later, he was screaming straight up at full military power.
It took him just two seconds to appraise the situation. Right above him, at about 1500 feet, there was a pack of airborne unfriendlies. All of them were diving toward him, guns blazing in his direction. Yet it was no longer a mystery that his threat-warning radar had failed to alert him: these aircraft were incapable of shooting any kind of sophisticated weapons that would be picked up on the device. In fact, he knew that aircraft like these hadn’t seen combat since the days of World War Two. And that in itself was astonishing. The enemy airplanes were Mitsubishi A6Ms, the airplane once called the “Zero.”
As he streaked up toward them, Hunter took another two seconds to wonder why his ESP warning system failed to alert him to the flying museum pieces until the very last moment. Had he been dealing with enemy jets so long that he hadn’t needed to tune in with anything built to fly before 1945?
He didn’t know.
Maybe I’m still in the dream … he thought.
But now he had a more immediate concern. The ancient airplanes had initiated hostile action against him. He had to answer it in turn. With a flick of his finger he armed his nose cannons. An instant later, the climbing F-16’s snout erupted in a fusillade of vicious fire.
Panicking now, the mysterious green-gray Zeros scattered. Diving, climbing, twisting, turning, they began moving completely independently of each other, abandoning any pretense of group battle tactic.
Within seconds it was every man for himself. That suited Hunter just fine.
His first salvo ripped through the brushed aluminum underbellies of two Zeros. Before the pilots could appreciate how Hunter had come up underneath them so fast, their planes exploded into balls of shredded flaming metal. A third Zero was unlucky enough to pass in front of Hunter’s crosshairs; he never knew what hit him. Hunter’s cannons sliced through the old propeller-driven airplane like a welder’s torch, cutting it in two.
Hunter quickly pulled level a thousand feet above the sudden action and surveyed the situation. There were four Zeros remaining and they were weakly attempting to regroup. He couldn’t allow it.
He put the XL into a shallow dive, streaking right through the middle of their hastily reassembled formation. Two more Zeros were dispatched by Sidewinders. Fired nearly simultaneously, their heat-seeking nose-cones were barely able to key in on enough engine warmth to make the kill. Once hit, though, the Zeros simply disintegrated, their near-microscopic remains leaving thousands of smoking trails behind as they fl
uttered toward the surface of the sea below.
Five down, two to go, he told himself. This might be too easy.
He was right. The two remaining Zeros suddenly split up. One streaked northward, the other to the southwest. Hunter had no choice but to go after the Zero closest to him, the one heading away from Okinawa.
The piston-driven engine of the Zero was hardly a match for Hunter’s turbofan, and he was up on the Zero’s tail in no time. He was amazed to see the outstanding condition of the Zero. Obviously this was not a reconditioned aircraft—rather, it appeared to be brand new. This twist only added to the mystery surrounding the sudden appearance of the fabled World War Two airplanes.
Hunter was now merely 500 feet behind the aircraft, in perfect position for a cannon shot. But he did not fire—a vibration deep within his psyche told him that destroying the airplane and killing the pilot would not help his true mission here. What he needed was information.
Throttling back, he rapidly decreased his speed to match that of the fleeing Zero. Then he pulled right up alongside the legendary warplane. Something was telling him that he needed to get a good look at this pilot and to see just who was attacking him.
The pilot of the Zero was dressed in an authentic leather flight suit, with headgear to match. Glancing over at Hunter, he suddenly broke into a wide smile. Hunter didn’t smile back. But he was not prepared for what happened next.
Calmly, the Zero pilot drew a pistol from his side holster and placed the barrel against his temple. Never losing his eerie grin, he squeezed the trigger and sent a slug crashing through his skull.
Instantly the inside of the Zero’s cockpit was splattered with blood. Hunter watched in utter astonishment as the airplane nosed forward and went into a flat, winding spin. It finally struck the water and disintegrated in a ball of smoke and flame.
Hunter took a long, deep breath. A distinctly unnerving chill went through him. The psychic warning had been correct. Witnessing the suicide of the Zero pilot had certainly given him a quick, grisly lesson on who he was dealing with.
Now he quickly turned his attention to the last Zero. Within seconds, his incredible vision located the airplane just as it was making landfall at Okinawa. At that moment, his bingo warning light snapped on: he was now critically low on fuel. Yet his inner vibes were telling him that locating the mysterious Zeros’ base was suddenly very important. And following the last Zero was his only hope of doing that.
Swinging the ’XL around to the west, he once again hid himself in the direct rays of the rising sun.
Then, still shaken by the sudden, violently self-inflicted death of the smiling Zero pilot, he grimly increased the F-16’s speed and headed straight for the heart of Okinawa.
Lieutenant Fatungi was still shaking.
Never before had he made the treacherous landing directly into the mouth of the cave on the first attempt. There always had been, at the very least, one fly-by to make sure that the landing crew had properly drawn back the enormous camouflage netting that covered the cave opening, as well as check the area’s unpredictable air currents and poor visibility. But this time he did not have the luxury of checking anything. There was simply no time. If the strange-looking jet had caught him out in the open, he would have died.
Thus, Lieutenant Fatungi’s brief radio message to the secret base moments before had been clear: “You must open the netting immediately and you must close it immediately behind me.”
As it turned out, the landing crew had performed flawlessly. No sooner had Fatungi flown his Zero through the cavernous 200-foot-wide opening than the 55-man crew had the netting closed. Just seconds later, the pursuing jet roared right over the covered opening. The landing crew watched with amusement for the next two minutes as the seemingly-confused enemy pilot searched the smoke-obscured valley floor below them, vainly looking for an airfield that was right under his nose.
When the strange jet finally went away, Lieutenant Fatungi breathed a long sigh of relief. At last he was certain that making such a hasty landing had been the correct tactical decision.
Rather than fighting to the last man in what was most surely a one-sided battle, Fatungi had made the decision to return to the secret mountainside base and make a full report, hoping that the information he would supply on the strange jet would please his superiors. Now, as he climbed down the built-in steps of his prop fighter, he was met by his commanding officer. Half-expecting a compliment on his superb landing, Fatungi was stunned when the officer slapped him hard across the face with his pair of leather dress gloves.
“You have disgraced us all!” the officer screamed at him, before turning on his heels and casually strolling away. As he passed by his personal guard, two of the soldiers came forward and took Fatungi into custody.
Relieving him of his personal sidearm and short symbolic samurai sword, the two soldiers began marching Fatungi toward the lower passageway that led deeper into the cave, their razor-sharp bayonets prodding him along. As Fatungi shuffled past the fellow members of his flying squadron, not one of them would look him in the eye. These pilots were the men with whom he had spent the last five years of his life, training together in the most rigorous conditions. They had shared among them their most personal secrets, their food, their sake. Now each one turned away from him, disgraced by the dishonor he had placed upon them and their unit.
Oddly it was only then that Lieutenant Fatungi knew without any doubt that he had made the wrong decision. In the world of the Asian Mercenary Cult, misguided honor was more important than solid battlefield intelligence.
As the guards marched Fatungi deeper and deeper down the twisting and turning passageways, the disgraced pilot had to summon what little strength he had left to keep from vomiting out of sheer terror. No one brought to the lower compartments of the secret mountain base ever returned alive. Fatungi was certain that this too would be his fate.
After twenty minutes, they finally reached the end of what Fatungi supposed was the base’s deepest passageway. Before them were two massive oak doors, each with obscured numbers carved into them. Fatungi’s breeches were soaked with urine by this time, so great was his terror. He was sure he had only seconds to live.
But then he got a surprise. After knocking twice, the two guards quickly left, leaving Fatungi alone. Oddly, he could smell something cooking on the other side of the massive doors.
Then he heard a woman’s voice call out: “Come in, please.”
Totally confused, Fatungi opened the oak doors and was astonished to find not a vast death chamber but a spare, well-lit, elaborately-appointed apartment. A young woman in a sheer silk dressing gown was standing in the middle of the room, smiling and bowing to him.
She was beautiful. Small, with delicate features, she had the most amazing long red hair.
Fatungi was suddenly very embarrassed about his soiled pants.
“Please don’t worry about that,” she reassured him. “I understand it happens to everyone. Please take off your clothes. I have just arrived here myself, but I think I have something over here you can wear.”
The woman walked over to a small closet and retrieved a man’s red silk dressing gown. Walking back toward Fatungi, she stopped briefly in front of a small shrine. In the center of this flower-laden altar was a tiny photograph of someone Fatungi could not make out.
The woman bowed twice and then stared for a long time at the photograph, seemingly caught by the stare of the eyes of its subject.
Meanwhile, Fatungi had quickly stripped off his clothes and was now standing totally naked. Though he was still baffled by the sudden turn of events, his appreciation of the woman’s beauty, hinted at through her sheer silken dressing grown, was becoming more and more apparent.
The woman knelt briefly, then rose from the altar and turned toward Fatungi. This time there was a faraway look in her eyes.
“I hope you don’t mind the smell,” she said, motioning toward a small portable stove. “I’m cooking a small meal. Will
you join me in dinner? Do you like liver?”
Fatungi was terribly confused now. Dinner? Liver? But he was smart enough to say yes.
Or so he thought.
The woman smiled, beckoning the naked pilot toward her. With that, she pulled a long, razor-sharp carving knife from her gown and plunged it deep into Fatungi, just above his pubic bone. Lifting it up through his stomach, and then all the way up to his ribcage, she had expertly gutted him before he even realized what was happening.
“Bon appetit,” she hissed in his ear.
Eighteen
Washington, D.C.
THE YOUNG OFFICER HESITATED once before knocking twice on the door simply marked “Commander.”
“Come on in,” came the casual reply.
The officer went in and found General Jones behind his desk as usual, buried in paperwork.
“Got a very unusual message from Task Force, sir,” the officer said. “It’s been decoded, checked, and double-checked. It’s legit. It’s got to be …”
Jones looked up over the piles of documents, his well-chewed unlit pipe in his teeth. “Well, what’s it say?”
The young officer bit his lip for a second.
“It says they’ve stopped,” he told Jones.
Jones’s glasses nearly fell off his face. “They’ve stopped? Stopped for what?”
The officer passed the yellow cable paper to the commander in chief.
It read: “URGENT … REQUEST THAT ALL MEMBERS OF THE TASK FORCE COME TO AN IMMEDIATE STOP. ALL CAPTAINS TO MEET ON USS FITZGERALD IN THIRTY MINUTES.”
General David Jones dropped the intercepted radio message on the desk and then looked up at the officer.
“What the hell is going on out there?” he asked.
The small boat was being violently tossed in the swelling fifteen-foot seas.
Wolf stood in the prow of the launch, his black cape snapping behind him, sea spray soaking his mask. Off in the distance, he could make out the launches of the two accompanying supply ships, the USS Cohen and the USS Tennyson, making headway through the rough water toward the Fitzgerald.
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