Ghost War (6 page)

“And tell JT to keep it in his pants!” Yaz yelled after him.

Ten minutes later, Hunter gunned the four massive engines on
Bozo
and ran them up to full power. Slowly, the huge Galaxy gunship began to move down Edwards’ long runway.

To the thunderous applause of those assembled, it rose up and off cleanly, followed close behind by
Nozo,
with JT at the controls and then
Football One.
The
JAWs-NJ104-Football Two
troika went next, with
Crunchtime, Big Snake
and
Football Three
right on its tail.

The air fleet formed up high above Edwards. Then as one, it roared overhead in a three-chevron formation, turning west, toward the other side of the planet. Toward the unknown.

In pursuit of a ghost….

It took more than twenty minutes for the roar of their engines to completely die away.

Fiji

S
UPREME COMMANDER SOHO COULD
hardly hold the chisel steady, his hands were shaking so much.

What is happening to me?
he heard a voice whisper inside his left ear.
Am I dying? Or am I just going insane?

It was close to midnight and Soho’s ears had been ringing all day. On the table in front of him was a chunk of black Turkish hashish the size of a coconut. In his left hand was a large cold chisel; in his right, a heavy ballpeen hammer. He’d been trying to chip off a smokable piece of the hash for what seemed like hours—but his strength was so depleted, all he could get were slivers, most not big enough for even a couple of puffs.

And he needed more than that.

Finally, he summoned up enough strength to drive the chisel into the center of the hash block, chopping off an ice-cube-size piece. This was more to his liking. He took the chunk of hash over to his small wood-fired stove and dipped it into a pan of clear liquid that had been simmering on one of the burners for hours. This liquid was pure opium. He watched, eyes watering in anticipation, as the hash began to grow in size, absorbing the morphia.

Five minutes later, the chunk of hash was twice its original size. Soho retrieved it from the opium soup, put it inside his water pipe and quickly began toking on it, keeping it lit by means of a hand-held propane torch.

Five minutes of opium sucking followed. Then, suddenly, the candles inside his hut exploded and it became dark as night. Soho found himself on a hill, his mouth full of dirt, his eyes watering, his breathing labored. There were scores of dead bodies all around him, twisted in ghoulish poses. He was looking down on a steel graveyard—there were crashed airplanes everywhere. And there were soldiers, dressed in strange garb, carrying flaming acetylene torches, cutting into the dead airplanes and causing them to shriek with ungodly mechanical horror….

Soho opened his eyes; he was shaking from head to toe. What was the problem? Too much opium? Or not enough? He wasn’t sure….

He got to his feet, his knees close to buckling, and headed for the door, pipe and torch in hand. Bursting out into the dark night, he found two guards standing next to the entranceway.

“They … they are still here, sir,” one stuttered in mumbling Japanese. “They are still on the island …”

Soho looked at the man queerly. His face seemed to be melting away. “Who are you talking about? Who is still here?”

The guard gulped loudly. “The men … from the Fire Bats, sir …”

Soho was stumped. He had no idea what the man was talking about.

He turned to the second guard; he was trembling now as much as the first.

“Explain this …”

The second guard bowed quickly, letting out an involuntary grunt. Eyes down, he began to speak.

“The submarines that sail beneath the heavenly oceans arrived here a few weeks ago, Your Highness,” the guard began. “Just yesterday, the men within finally came ashore, and by your supreme wisdoms, you ordered everyone on the island confined to their quarters—even yourself, oh, Great One.”

Soho wiped a bit of drool cascading from his mouth.

“Why did I do that?” he asked the guard.

The man grunted again. He could barely breathe, he was so frightened. “The men from the boats that sail the heavenly ocean said they had work to do here. Very important work. That is why they finally came ashore. That is why they could not be disturbed.”

“Even by me?” Soho asked, his feet suddenly feeling like they were growing roots into the ground.

The man grunted a third time. “By your orders, your Supreme Beingness …”

Soho considered this for a moment. “That doesn’t sound like me,” he said, to which both guards grunted.

“And all our people are inside their houses?” he asked.

“All—except the ones we shot….”

“Shot?” Soho asked.

“On your orders, sir,” the first guard said, finally summoning up enough courage to talk. “Anyone outside their hut while the men from the heavenly submarines were here was to be shot. On sight. With no warning …”

“And you followed those orders?”

“Yes, sir. Two women. An hour ago. They were bringing flowers to you, sir.”

“And you killed them?”

“Aye, sir,” came the reply.

Soho thought for another moment. His arms were going numb. Were the fingers falling off his hands?

Suddenly, he was enraged. “And I suppose you also used acetylene torches to kill these women?” he demanded of the stunned guards, the drool turning to foam at the corners of his mouth. “And did you also burn their wings off? Their propellers? Their wheels?”

The guards looked at him.
What was he talking about?

They didn’t know—nor would they find out. Soho staggered away, the small torch cranked up to high, the chunk of opium-dipped hash glowing in the dark night.

He stumbled through the beautiful floral gardens, down the pathway to the cliff and past the body of Colonel Ikebani, still rotting on its blood-smeared wooden post.

Soho had decided he was going to fly—just fly away. He would have to do this without an airplane—all the airplanes had been butchered by the soldiers with the torches. No—he would have fly by himself, using his arms as wings, his feet as rudders. Getting airborne would be no problem. In fact, if he tried hard enough, he might make it all the way back to Okinawa.

He fell twice before making it to the cliff. Here was the Shrine of the Sukki jet, the hideously pink airplane that he may or may not have flown to the island a couple months before. There were at least 500 lit candles surrounding it as usual, and its cinnamon fire pots were going full blast.

But something was different here.

He strained to focus his opium-soaked eyeballs and believed he could see four or five figures huddled around the jet. They were poking inside the cockpit, fussing with something, quietly murmuring among themselves. They were dressed oddly—their neon blue uniforms were actually glowing in the moonless night. There seemed to be halos around their heads. They may even have been floating several inches above the ground.

Soho approached, his torch still ignited. Suddenly one of the men looked up at him.

“… and you are?” he asked in very heavily accented English.

Soho straightened up. Now all five men in glowing blue suits and white halos were looking at him.

“I am the Supreme Commander of the Asian Mercenary Cult,” Soho told them in his own severely fractured English. “As such, I am your god …”

The men laughed. “Sure you are,” one replied.

They returned to their work, completely ignoring Soho. This infuriated him.

“That is my airplane!” he screamed, “And you are trying to cut it to pieces!”

The men continued their work inside the Sukki cockpit, looking all the world like surgeons, calmly operating on a patient.

“You will not take a torch to my airplane!” Soho screamed at the top of his lungs.

Suddenly one of the men was right in front of him. Soho stared into his eyes. They seemed to be pure white. The man’s hair was long and blond, like that of an angel—or maybe a Viking. And his face—it seemed to be glowing. And the halo looked quite real, too.

The man smiled. He looked at Soho’s torch and suddenly the flame went out. He looked at his water pipe and suddenly the hash stopped glowing. Soho was now trembling—and it was not just from the opium.

“I am … I am your commander …” Soho somehow managed to blurt out. “You … you must obey me …”

The man was smiling so benignly, it frightened Soho even more.

“You are nothing but a lowly pilot,” the strange being told him, his face but two inches from Soho’s. “Now just follow orders …”

At that moment, Soho opened his eyes.

He was alone on the cliff. It was close to dawn. And all of the candles around the Sukki jet had gone out.

The next morning

The small runway on the western tip of Fiji was lined with hundreds of natives, all of them bedecked in flowers, grass hats, and leis.

Gentle string music wafted through the early morning air, broken only by the occasional blast from a conch shell. Off in the distance, a choir of children could be heard softly chanting.

The Sukki jet was at the far end of the runway, a new coat of sickly pink paint still drying on its wings. Soho was there, a cup of opium-laced alcohol in one hand, the everpresent hash pipe in the other, sitting on a throne carried by six of the strongest natives on the island.

The young girl who had been living in Soho’s hut was also there; her parents were at her side, weeping openly. They were convinced that she was about to be killed by Soho’s men as a kind of sacrifice to the higher Cult gods—whoever the hell they were.

A team of Cult flight mechanics was standing around the Sukki—they hadn’t done a stitch of work in months, and now they were wondering how an airplane designed more than a half century before could be returned to flying condition without benefit of any specs, design plans, or schematics.

But as it would turn out, getting the old Me-262 down from its shrine on the cliff would be their biggest task. Because though they didn’t know why exactly, once the airplane was on the runway, it was quite capable of taking off, all by itself.

Soho clapped his hands twice and two aides brought forward a wooden bucket full of ice water. On his command, they threw it directly into his face, brutally reviving him. He stepped from the portable throne and with wobbly knees, approached the Sukki.

He was dressed in a ragged flight suit, with a leather cap and goggles—the same uniform he was wearing when he arrived on Fiji in the Sukki, several months before.

The music drifted away, and a light breeze came up on the airstrip. Soho looked at the assembled natives and the small troop of Cult soldiers lined up at attention behind them. Once again, a question which had been bouncing around in his debilitated brain since he first made Fiji came back to him:
Who the hell are all these people?

He staggered over to the Sukki, barely taking notice of the young girl and her distraught parents. He nodded to one of the flight mechanics who took a deep breath. Reading from a small piece of parchment containing the barely decipherable scrawl of Soho, this man reached inside the jet’s cockpit and pushed a single red button. Suddenly the Sukki’s pair of wing-mounted engines roared to life simultaneously. This even surprised Soho; despite his drugged-out state, he knew that by normal procedure, the Sukki’s jets were started very slowly and always one at a time.

But this lucid thought passed quickly. He took another titanic suck on the hash pipe and washed it down with a long swig of his opium-and-alcohol mixture. He knew there was some kind of ceremony over which he was now supposed to preside, but the details of it were lost long ago. The jet was running; it was obviously meant to take off. But to where? And with who?

He didn’t have the slightest idea.

But the voices inside his left ear began speaking again, and in one ragged heartbeat, it all seemed suddenly very clear to him.

He smiled and beckoned the young girl to his side. She was dressed in a flowing white gown, her hair braided with flower stems and sprinkled with pine-rose petals. She was trembling—and with good reason. Soho reached out and caressed the young girl’s hair. Then he pushed her up against the side of the jet, and to the stunned silence of all, engaged in a quick, exhausting round of intercourse with her.

When he was finished, he drained his coconut cup, and then immediately threw up on himself. The young girl’s parents were crying openly now—they were certain their daughter’s life was about to come to a grisly end.

But they were wrong.

With the Sukki’s engines still screaming, Soho boosted the young girl up into the jet’s cockpit, and then threw two levers. One unlocked the jet’s brakes, the other lowered its canopy. In one swift motion, the jet began rolling down the runway, the startled young girl its only passenger. To the surprise of all, it lifted off and climbed almost straight up, as if it was under some kind of otherworldly power.

Leveling off at about 5000 feet, the Sukki circled the airfield once, came directly over the crowd, and then, with a wag of the wings, disappeared to the west.

As the noise of the jet engines finally faded away, another stunned silence descended on the crowd. All eyes turned back to Soho, who was standing alone on the empty runway, his dressing gown damp with vomit, his undershorts dangling around his knees.

“
Why me?
” he cried out, self-disgusted and mortified. “
Why was it left up to me?
”

With that, he produced a small pistol from his pocket, put it against his temple and pulled the trigger. There was a sharp crack and Soho immediately collapsed, half his forehead blown away.

No one moved to help him; no one dared.

All that could be heard was the sound of the wind, the rustling in the trees, and the chorus of children, still chanting in the distance.

Adora Atoll

Marshall Islands

T
HERE WAS A TIME
when they called the place “Clark Kent.”

It was a small island, barely three square miles in total size, and that included the reefs on its northern and eastern tips. It was 212 nautical miles due west of Bikini, and like that famous island, it was noted for its heavily shark-infested waters, its near-lack of vegetation beyond isolated clumps of palm trees, and its enormous population of goony birds.