Sky Ghost (41 page)

He was able to remove some of the unnecessary weight from the strange aircraft. He took off the chrome exhaust guards, the chrome front grille, and the heavy rubber seat. He was able to take one tire off of each of the four landing struts, and this freed up space for him to attach two of the bombs.

The second pair had to be strapped alongside the seatless saddle. There was just enough room to slot them in between the engine mounts in back, and the wide steering column in front.

It was the fifth and sixth bombs that were such a bitch to hang. Finally Hunter was able to winch both of them up under the nose. No rope would hold them here. He had to strip out the metal bindings of the plane’s saddlebags to get wire strong enough to mount each bomb.

Then, he had to push and pull and ultimately drag the flying bike up to the top of the hill, a distance of maybe 500 yards that took him more than three hours to cover.

But his timing couldn’t have been better. By the time he got to the top of the hill, night had fallen, and a huge moon was rising.

He was higher than he thought; the view of the German midlands was incredible from here. To his right, flooded farmland and pasture. Over the horizon, the glow of the still burning cities. To his left, nothing less than a small sea—the one created by the burst dam. In front of him, more burning cities. Behind him, the same.

Now he had a real question to consider, one he hadn’t really given much thought to: Where was he going exactly?

He didn’t know. Way in the front of his skull, the place where everything now percolated, a voice was telling him to wing it, use his instincts, fly away and see where it gets you. But the part of him that actually did his rational thinking for him was questioning just how wise this course would be.

It was a long drop down just about any place in the Ruhr Valley these days, and where it wasn’t solid ground, it was square miles of lake water. And Hunter knew this crate, packed as it was, would sink like an anchor should he find himself forced to ditch into the wet deck.

He’d also have to watch out for enemy aircraft, though he already had two up on any German pilot who happened to spot him. Hunter would certainly be flying way too slow and way too low to interest any pilot in engaging him.

But said pilot would probably have a radio and just spotting Hunter in the pokey flying machine could be catastrophic. For a helicopter or a smaller prop-driven airplane, Hunter would be meat on a hook. If the enemy’s bullets didn’t light off one of the H-bombs first, that was.

So, this would be an interesting flight, to say the least.

He started the preflight stuff on the FlyBike. The engine came to life with just a few foot-pumps. It roared, quieted down, and then roared again. It had excellent throttle control and the engine was more powerful than Hunter had first surmised. At last he’d be a firsthand witness to some of that vaunted German engineering he was always hearing about.

He extended the wings and brought the control surfaces to trim. Everything looked to be working fine. His fuel gauge read full: 25 gallons in the main, two and a half in the reserve tank. Hunter’s mind briefly recalled a time in his other past where one notch of the throttle would burn that much fuel in a matter of two seconds. That was in his old F-16XL. He felt another pang in his chest. That was another thing from his old world that he’d never see again.

He yanked his mind back to the matter at hand. He revved the engines just one more time and guessed the oil system must be vacuum-controlled, because the engine sounded both juiced and lubed.

OK, then, there was nothing to hold him back. So he climbed on, hit the throttle, pinched the brakes, and started rolling.

Off the cliff he went, his airspeed barely 10 knots after the running start. He immediately dipped dangerously low. The bombs were not only heavy, they were unstable, and thus wreaking havoc with the craft’s center of gravity. Hunter instinctively pulled back on the steering bars and raised the nose. This immediately ended the juggling act Then he increased throttle just slightly and the FlyBike stopped dropping. He went hard right to get some sideways momentum and, once gathered, pulled back on the steering again and at last began to climb.

He’d been right. The loaded-down FlyBike was slow and he couldn’t get more than 200 feet under its ass, but at least it was flying. And one thing Hunter had found out here, in this strange place, as well as the other: he was always better off when he was airborne.

His head began to clear as he pointed the FlyBike’s nose right at the rising moon and laid on a little more gas.

He was achieving his first objective. To get the six nuclear bombs away from the Germans. He was sure they were trying to get to them too, but because he was the only living soul inside the area devastated by the flood, he’d somehow beaten them to it. Thanks to the young girl. Whoever—or
whatever
—she was. His mind curiously turned blank when he thought about her. Try as he might, her image was fading quickly from his memory. What was she doing out there? How had she found him? How did she know to take him to the bombs? He didn’t know.

But because of her, he might be able to get the H-bombs into American hands and perhaps someone would be able to pull them apart and figure out a way to disable them so they could never work again.

Or something.

OK, but where was he going? He didn’t know if anyone was still looking for him—or if anyone even came out at all after the dam burst. From the conversation with the bomber that night, everyone just assumed he’d been killed from the start. But if the rescue units had been sent out, and if by some grace of the Cosmos they were still looking for him, then they would probably expect him to stay near, or get back to, the last location he was seen alive. That would be the busted dam itself.

And just like that, he had his goal, his destination. How far away was he? He couldn’t be sure. But he was certain he wouldn’t have any trouble finding it. All he would have to do is follow the coastline of the new inland sea and eventually find its source.

He climbed a little more and took in the moon for a few moments. Even though he was only a couple hundred feet off the ground, it still felt like he could just reach out and touch it—it seemed that close.

He began thinking about how he felt when he was airborne. He’d flown a hell of a lot in his other life—he felt like that’s all he did. Just the same here as there, being on the ground was the unnatural state of affairs for him.

He climbed just a little more, and soon he was at 400 feet. He steered over to the coast of the inland sea, and then completed a sluggish yet effective 45-degree turn to the left. Now his nose was pointing north, up where the big Merne-Sorpa Dam used to be. If his calculations that he had about two hours flying time in the bike were correct, there was a chance he might actually make the dam site with fuel to spare.

He looked over at the moon, now brilliant and dazzling on his left. The airbike’s motor was humming right along. The bombs seemed secure. His head was remarkably clear.

This was going well, he thought.

Too well.

His body started vibing just a second later.

Damn—something bad was on its way.

He quickly sorted out the sounds around him. Take away the wind, take away the burping FlyBike motor, take away his own heart beating. What was he left with?

A high-pitched, sizzling sound. And sizzling meant fuel being burned. It was getting louder, higher pitched. He looked to his right. Nothing. Behind him, nothing. In front, all clear. And then his left—and that’s when he saw it. A plume of smoke and fire coming right up at him.

Someone was shooting rocket-propelled AA at him!

The flak shell exploded just a second later, no more that 50 feet off his left wing. The blast went off about 15 feet below him though—and ultimately, that’s what saved his life. The flak shell blew down, and most of the shrapnel went that way as well. But the concussion itself was enough to knock Hunter on his side and drive the FlyBike horizontally. He came very close to going inverted, a dive from which he knew he could never recover. So he fought the FlyBike’s controls viciously, yanking the plane all over the place, overcompensating one way, while fighting to keep it from going over the other way.

Somehow, he was able to level the plane out and even get the nose elevated again. That’s when the second flak burst went off. This one was closer and about even with him in altitude. It threw him nearly an eighth of a mile to the left, and at the end of the spin, he actually did go 180 degrees over.

The force of the unexpected maneuver righted the Fly-Bike almost instantly though. Hunter looked down and saw shrapnel burns scoring the entire right side of his body. Yet, somehow, none of the bomb’s jagged pieces had pierced his skin.

He recovered again and managed to look behind him and saw two more flak trails. But both shells exploded too high and too far away from him to do much damage. Still, the shock waves had him fighting for control once again for the next few anxious seconds.

Hunter had to think quick. He pushed the nose over and was able to bring the airplane down to about 20 feet; now he was just skimming along the top of the water of the inland sea. He thought he’d be safe from the flak from here—and he was. But now he saw a storm of luminescent streaks coming out of the woods. They were cannon shells, lighting up the night, and coming right at him. He threw the FlyBike into a climb, but heard two distinctive pings on the bottom of the frame.

One round had hit his rear left tire, blowing it out and sending him momentarily out of his skin. The next tracer round bounced off one of the nose-mounted bombs—and nothing happened. Hunter couldn’t get the air in and out of his lungs fast enough. He began climbing again, a flood of tracers following him up as the FlyBike screamed for altitude.

Somehow he managed to escape all this too, and was huffing and puffing as the bike climbed to 300 feet again. He steered his way further out over the water, away from the shore-based ground fire. Either these guys had been waiting for him, or he had chosen to fly over what must have been a large contingent of German soldiers hidden in the woods, quite possibly troops who’d somehow survived the carnage in the flood.

This thought was driven from his mind by the roar of an angry engine behind him. He turned left and was horrified to see a German helicopter had flown up right beside him. It was a troop carrier, a big, strange, gangly thing sprouting rocket-assisted rotor blades and a gaggle of side-mounted weaponry.

Now there were about a dozen gun barrels pointing at him. Somehow Hunter managed to lift his own gun up and squeeze the trigger. The gigantic cloud of shot hit the flying machine in the worst place possible: its fuel tank. Gas was suddenly leaking down onto its hot engine. The pilot banked steeply away from Hunter, but the machine blew up seconds later.

Riding the shock wave through this, Hunter’s ears were filled with another sound. He turned to see an even stranger German flying machine on his right. This was a flying platform, circular in shape, four separate helicopterlike rotors barely keeping it up. Standing out on the platform, like the deck crew on a submarine, were six men crowding around what looked to be a 88-mm antiaircraft gun.

A flying flak wagon? Really?

But Hunter didn’t have to time to think about it. The thing was so close to him, he could see the gunners looking right down their sights at him. He flipped the big rifle over, somehow slammed a shell in, and fired.

The storm of shot scattered the gun crew; three were hit seriously. The others naturally tried to get out of the way. In doing so they must have violated one of the operating rules of the platform because it quickly became unstable and unbalanced. It began to wobble and then flipped over and disappeared below him.

Hunter flew on, still trying to control his own unstable airplane. Now more flak was coming up from the woods on both sides of the lake. He could clearly hear the
pomp! pomp! pomp!
of an 88-mm AA gun firing at him from the tree line. He was almost moving too slowly and too erratically for anyone to get a real bead on him. But how long could that last? Even now, more machine gun tracers and large-caliber carbine rounds were whizzing and pinging all around him. But still he flew on.

Up ahead, he could see a huge gun muzzle pointing out of the woods near a narrow in the inland sea. Suddenly fire started coming out of this barrel like water out of a hose. It was blocking his flight path—and he was too wounded, and too low, and too underpowered to attempt a climb over it. He would have to go under it instead.

He rammed the steering column down and gave the throttle a goose and he was soon looking at the water coming right up at him. Just as quickly, he yanked the steering bars back and gave the throttle another goose and the nose went up. The engines coughed, the flame was right above him, but he made it through. He reached up to his helmet and found the top of it was sizzling hot. That’s how close he’d come.

Now it seemed like every gun in the woods was firing at him. The sky was lit up with tracer rounds, pom-pom shells, flak, fire-shells, concussions blasts. The FlyBike’s engines were perforated in several places now, one of his fuel lines was leaking directly onto one of the H-bombs. The tiny jet turbines themselves were beginning to cough badly, and he could feel their power slowly ebbing away.

The bombs were shifting all over the place too, one of them was hanging by just one strand of wire. What happened to a hydrogen bomb’s fusing mechanism when it is soaked in fuel and exposed to a spark? He didn’t want to know.

Hunter yanked back on the throttle—fuel was his most important commodity now, but it was draining out of his tanks quicker than it was flowing into his carburetors. This was the problem.

He was slowly going down, too injured to stay airborne any longer.

But where or how could he find a safe place to land? With the sky filled with bullets and AA rounds, only water below him and thick forest on either side.