Return of Sky Ghost (15 page)

Payne sought to recover.

“Look, Miss Kalloway,” he began, “Major Hunter just returned from a long mission. I’m sure his mind is, well … in other places. Why not give him some time to get back to Earth, so to speak? Then we can all get together again real soon.”

The newswoman frowned at this suggestion, but knew it was one she would have to take, mainly because Hunter was already on his feet and leaving the room.

“OK, Major,” she called after him. “But tomorrow morning. Bright and early. We begin again.”

N
IGHT FELL AND THE
jungle beneath Xwo Mountain finally quieted down.

As always, several squads of Air Guards—the U.S. Air Corps’s infantry division—went outside the LSD screen for their nightly patrols. Between these soldiers, the hundreds of electronic detection devices scattered about the mountain, and help from Xaxmax’s extended family, as well as all the neighboring tribes, the mountain and the area around it were virtually impenetrable.

Any time any Japanese airplane came within 100 miles of Xwo, fighters were scrambled and the enemy was either shot down or chased away. After a while, the Japanese and their allies knew better than to approach the area from land or air. In many ways, Xwo Mountain was probably the safest place on the South American continent.

Still, every other night, whenever the sun went down and the jungle got quiet, Hawk Hunter would find a pang of concern begin to well up in his stomach. As the hours grew to midnight, this feeling would grow no matter what he was doing or where he was.

By 2300 hours, he would usually start walking down to the flight line, and this knot in his stomach would grow until it felt like it was the size of a small boulder.

There was a reason behind this seminocturnal bout of stress. The 2001st Fighter Squadron flew the Mustang-5s off Xwo. Twelve aircraft in all, the squadron was made up exclusively of women pilots.

Hunter had served with them during the last days of the war against Germany, first in Iceland, and later off one of the Navy’s megacarriers. He’d gotten to know all of the female pilots, and had come to admire them greatly for their courage, skill, and openness.

The fact was, though, he’d come to know one of them very well.

She was Captain Sara James, the squadron’s CO. She was smart, funny, and drop-dead gorgeous. A brunet with big blue eyes and lots of curves wrapped tight in a compact body, she and Hunter had grown close since their first meeting.

Very close….

More than once they had broken regulations about officers sleeping together in a combat zone. But with Hunter’s stealth skills being what they were, he’d yet to get caught sneaking in the window of her billet to spend the night or sneaking back out again before the crack of dawn. Their romance was not exactly a top secret though, despite all these high jinks. Sara served with eleven other women and, like men, they talked.

He cared for her deeply for many reasons. She was there during the coldest days of his service in Iceland, when he was battling the Germans with one hand and trying to figure out just who the hell he was with the other. She was with him during his rise to superhero status after the war. She stood beside him at every celebration, at every boring speech, at every boring party that followed. All this while never asking him a question about who he was, or why he seemed to be able to fly an airplane like no one else in this place.

She was a very important person in his life now. What’s more, the skills of her squadron mates and their ability to adapt made them perfect for this strange mountain top duty. When Hunter requested they be assigned to the secret air base, the Air Corps heartily agreed. Their romance simply went south of the border after that.

The problem was, Sara flew the midnight patrol mission three times a week, and it was this that caused the stress bubble to grow in Hunter’s stomach. Though he knew she was a great pilot and tough as nails in the air, Hunter was still afraid for her every night she went up. He couldn’t imagine what he would do if she went off on a mission and didn’t return. He would be lost without her.

So he would walk down to the flight line every night she was going up and help her do her preflight walkaround. He wanted to make sure for himself that her plane was in optimum condition to fly. If he didn’t, and something happened, he knew he’d never be able to forgive himself.

This night, they met at her plane as usual and stole a brief hug in the shadows. She was letting her hair grow long and with each day she grew sexier, if that was possible. The preflight went quickly and without a problem. Hunter then accompanied her into the ready room.

“I hear a reporter has sunk her hooks into you,” Sara said, as she began climbing out of her duty overalls.

“I just don’t get it,” Hunter told her. “We’re here, in a top secret operation, and yet the press is here as well. I’m not sure that’s how it should be or how it was back …”

He caught himself before he blurted out the next sentence.

She stopped dressing for a moment and just looked over at him. She knew exactly what he’d been about to say.

“Well, you should be used to talking to the press by now,” she said, changing the subject slightly. “I’ve seen you give the same song and dance a hundred times myself.”

But Hunter was only half listening to her. Instead he was intently watching her dressing process. She had slipped out of her duty overalls, wearing only underpants and a bra beneath. Then she’d slipped out of the bra, giving him an all-too-fleeting glimpse of her pert breasts. Finally she’d slipped into her skintight flight suit, zipping it up like a cocktail dress.

In all, the process took just twenty seconds or so, and Hunter had seen it many times before. But his breath never failed to catch in his throat when it happened.

She laced up her flight boots, grabbed her helmet, her survival pack, and her gun, a massive double-barrel Colt .45.

That’s when Hunter’s stomach began tossing at full throttle.

They embraced, as always, and kissed, once, twice, three times. It was a ritual now after three months, and again he was loath to break it. She’d come back every time since beginning it; he wasn’t about to break that streak now.

He walked her back out to the flight line. The three other pilots going up with her were already in their cockpits warming their birds up.

They would be flying a patrol route which would take them 300 miles to the south, 250 miles to the east, and then back on the northwest line for about 400 miles. They would fly this route three times; the mission would take five hours. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, he would meet her for breakfast at 6
A.M
.

She climbed into the cockpit and he helped strap her in. They kissed goodbye—again three times. Sara looked up at him and smiled.

“Listen, if that woman reporter is too hard on you,” she said with a wink, “just leave her to me. I’ll take care of her.”

Hunter smiled, saluted, and went back down the ladder. He watched her taxi away; she was waving and smiling as if she were going no farther than the corner store for a quart of milk. Hunter felt his chest heave again. It was very strange. He’d only known her a short time, yet he felt like they’d been together for years.

The four black Mustang-5s roared off into the night, expertly slipping through the hole in the LSD screen. Hunter watched them disappear into the starry abyss. He checked his watch. It was five minutes past midnight.

Now the real waiting began.

Ten minutes later, Hunter had made his way up to the highest point on Xwo’s peak, a place where the LSD screen gave way to the stars overhead.

There was a ledge here on which he could perch and watch the constellations march across the sky. This was where he usually wound up on a night Sara was on patrol.

It was usually his only time to think as well.
Really
think—about his present life as compared to his previous one. There were still many things he couldn’t remember about the other place. He knew he was called the Wingman back there, and he remembered how he’d gotten that name and what battles big and small he’d fought in. But other things weren’t so clear. He had a hard time remembering individuals, friends, lovers, enemies. This was especially frustrating considering the never-ending sense of déjà vu he experienced anytime he met a person he thought he might already know back in the other place.

This had happened twice for real so far. The first example was the man known here as Agent Y. He was an OSS officer, an intelligence agent who had engineered Hunter’s assignment to Iceland from where he had led the air war against Germany. Back in the other place, Hunter knew Agent Y as Stan Yastrewski. In fact, “Yaz” and Hunter had fought many times together and were close friends “Back There.”

The Yaz here and the one Back There were exact duplicates of each other, in physical description, age, and so on. They were exactly the same, in temperament, courage, and professionalism, too. The only real difference was that in this world, Yaz was an OSS agent; Back There, he was a liaison officer for the United Americans.

Hunter and Agent Y had become good friends since the end of the war against Germany; in a way, Y was Hunter’s guardian angel. The OSS agent knew that Hunter was an extremely valuable commodity on an almost cosmic level. It was his entry into the war against Germany which had provided the defining moment that turned the tide back in favor of the U.S. Y also knew that Hunter was from somewhere else, which for various reasons was highly classified information. So Y acted as Hunter’s shield. Sure, the American people knew Hunter as a mysterious hero. But only Y and a very few others knew just
how
mysterious he was.

The other example was Captain PJ O’Malley of the 99th Bomber Squadron, one of two units presently operating off Xwo Mountain. Hunter had known O’Malley as “Captain Crunch” back in the other place, and, like Y, this man was in fact the same person. Back There, Crunch had also been a close friend of Hunter. He’d run an outfit called the Ace Wrecking Company, had fought many battles along with the United Americans and had drained just as many whiskey glasses with them too. In this place, Crunch was still hard drinking, still absolutely fearless. Except here, he was a superheavy bomber pilot. Back There, he flew fighters. Just like many things, the difference between Here and Back There was usually very small.

The reporter today looked fairly familiar to Hunter too, as had dozens of people he’d met since coming here. He just assumed these were people he might have had a passing acquaintance with Back There, and thus would cross paths with them infrequently here. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret when he thought about people who he’d been close to Back There and who he would
never see
again.

Unless, somehow, he got back home …

He shook these sad thoughts away, and looking back up into the heavens, tried to recall more from his previous existence. He knew he dropped into this place after detonating the string of nuclear bombs which diverted the comet from smashing into his old Earth. This meant he’d been in space, of course. But oddly enough, he couldn’t really remember what it had been like up there. This was strange, because in his heart he felt a deep urge to fly in space. It was a dream, a vision:—and Back There, he’d obviously done it. But, curse of curses, he could not remember any of it. Liftoff, orbiting, weightlessness—it was all a blank. His memory banks as far as space travel was concerned had been deleted, a particularly cruel joke that the cosmos had played on him.

What made it worse, there
was
no space travel in this world. No satellites, no high-velocity rockets, nothing. The decades-long World War II here had made the notion of spending money to travel in space both ridiculous and unthinkable. In fact, it just wasn’t something the people here even had in their consciousness.

That’s what fifty-eight years of constant war could do.

So Hunter could only stare at the stars and wonder what it had been like and what his lost memories had been.

He watched the stars spin across the sky for another two hours.

The concern he’d felt for Sara was still there, but it was gradually replaced by another emotion—one of growing relief that the long night would eventually end in a couple of hours, and that he was over the hump, and that he would see her again soon and that she would be safe.

He was just starting the climb down from the ledge when suddenly his body began shaking. He knew what it meant right away: An aircraft was approaching the base. His internal psychic-radar usually gave him advance warning of such things. But this wasn’t an enemy aircraft coming in. The vibe was all wrong. Yet something about it gave him a tinge of dread.

He scrambled down from the peak just in time to see the faint red light approaching from the north. The noise arrived a second or two later. Engines misfiring, the sound of the air being chopped through. He watched as the LSD technicians opened a hole in the screen not at one end of the runways, but in the roof. This was not a fixed-wing aircraft that was coming in. It was one of the monstrous eight-rotor aircraft known as Beaters.

It came down through the LSD hole like a sack of bricks, standard landing profile for the ungainly thing, bouncing twice before settling down on solid earth. The crew immediately shut down all engines and the base ground personnel routinely hosed down a few of the aircraft’s side-mounted engines, power plants which always seemed to be catching on fire.

The access ramp was lowered and Hunter saw the aircraft had only one passenger aboard.

It was Agent Y.

Hunter met him at the bottom of the ramp. They shook hands heartily. They hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months.

“Hawk, how are you?” Y asked.

“Doing good,” Hunter replied. “This is an unexpected visit, isn’t it?”

They began walking away from the smoldering Beater.

“Unexpected and quick,” Y replied. “Per order of our friends in Washington.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Hunter said.