Sky Ghost (6 page)

Z pushed his hand away. “Do you really think someone is bugging us even as we are bugging these people outside?”

X leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. The subject was closed.

“Let’s just listen,” he suggested.

Zoltan was lighting yet another cigarette.

“That machine of yours has been wrong before?” one of the looies was asking him. “Hasn’t it?”

“Nope,” Zoltan replied emphatically.

“Nope,” X parroted him.

A silence descended on the room again. It was broken only by the erratic puffing of Captain Pegg’s pipe.

“Well,” the very senior officer said finally. “What should we do now?”

Another silence.

“Get some coffee?” one of the looies asked.

“Talk to him again,” Z said into the microphone and thus into Pegg’s bad ear.

“Let’s talk to him again first,” Pegg said.

The looie looked at Zoltan, who crushed out his cigarette and got up to retrieve Hunter.

“I think this has to go higher up the ladder,” Zoltan told them.

“Save your breath, Swami,” X said from behind the mirror. “That’s the last place this is going.”

But just as Zoltan was about to go out the door, it suddenly swung open and the sleepy corporal left to guard Hunter rushed in.

The three elderly officers were shaken. Behind the mirror, Agents X, Y and Z quickly sat up again.

“Shit, now what?” Z exclaimed.

“What’s wrong?” Pegg asked the young soldier.

“He’s gone,” the corporal replied.

“Who’s gone?” Pegg asked.

“That guy,” the soldier replied shakily. “The weird guy. He just got up and ran out of the room. Pushed me aside like I wasn’t even there.”

Behind the mirror, X reached over and quickly pushed the button on his phone bank.

“Alert security,” he barked into the phone. “We have an unauthorized individual on this base…”

“Damn, I don’t need this,” Z grumbled. “Who the hell
is
this guy that he’s causing us so much trouble?”

Agent Y, the one who had stayed silent all this time, remained so. But in his head he thought:
Now that’s a good question.

Two seconds after that, the airfield’s attack warning siren went off.

H
UNTER WAS RUNNING.

He wasn’t sure exactly why, but he was running, full-out. Out of the red brick building, across the road, and toward the air base’s longest runway. His body was shaking so much, it felt like his head was going to burst. It was as if he had no control over what he was doing. Something very deep, very primal was telling him to run, toward the runways. Toward the airplanes that sat nearby.

He didn’t hear the base’s attack warning sirens begin to blare. Didn’t hear the Intruder Alert Klaxons either. It was as if all sound was shut out of his head, all except his own huffing and puffing. All around him, people were running towards shelters, building basements, even slit trenches that seemed to be dug everywhere. Everyone was running in the opposite direction as he.

It took him less than a minute to reach the runway. Now, without breaking stride, he ran over to a line of Pogo fighters, selected one, and climbed up the access ladder.

There was no one around the plane. No flight personnel or ground crew. It didn’t matter to him. He opened the cockpit on the vertical fighter himself and climbed in. The dials and switches inside looked like everything else in this strange world: props from a bad sci-fi movie. Again, this did not deter him. He began pushing buttons and throwing switches and in seconds, the big tail-sitter aircraft began to come alive.

He was now aware of people around the bottom of the aircraft, pointing up at him. One man had a rifle and was aiming at him, but another was pulling it away from the would-be shooter. Hunter hit a few more buttons—oil pressure checks, electrical system readouts—and then pushed the start lever and the huge double propellers at the top of the strange aircraft burst to life.

This served to scatter most of the people buzzing around below him. The cloud of thick black exhaust drove away the rest. The Pogo was shaking so much, Hunter’s teeth were chattering. He scanned the rest of the flight instruments, and somehow knew immediately what each one was supposed to do.

Another check of the oil pressure, another check of the electrical readouts. Everything was green. He flipped a switch that read,
WEAPONS LOAD.
It blinked back on with a message that said: Full.

Hunter then strapped himself in, leaned back in the seat, and reached for the throttle bar.

And then, at that moment, it hit him…

He spoke the words out loud:

“What the hell am I doing?”

He didn’t know. Just as he was compelled to get up and run out of the hypnosis session and climb into this peculiar airplane, now he was compelled to launch the damn thing and go somewhere to do something.

But what?

He just didn’t know.

And could he actually fly this thing? Could he fly at all? Was he a pilot?

Again, he just didn’t know.

But something was telling him to go. Now…

So he kind of shrugged and took a deep breath and realized at that moment that he wasn’t even wearing a crash helmet or an oxygen mask. But he hit the launch lever anyway.

The big airplane shuddered once, twice. And then, in an amazing burst of power and speed, the Pogo jumped off the runway and went straight up into the cloudless morning sky.

While it was not an unusual occurrence for the base’s attack warning signals to go off at Otis Field, it had been quite a while since they had done so.

The vast air base had been attacked a dozen times in this latest phase of the war, the last time being 18 months ago. In that incident, two missile-firing U-boats surfaced about 20 miles out and launched a half dozen concussion rockets at the base’s main runway, cratering it badly.

But no defensive measures were taken then or after any other attack on the base for one simple reason: the U-boats were usually long gone before any aircraft crews could get scrambled and any aircraft could launch. The standard procedure then for an attack on the base was for everyone to get to a shelter or a slit trench and stay hunkered down until the attack was over.

That’s what most of the personnel at the base were doing now. The shelters were filled and the slit trenches were too. However, the sixth floor of the red administration building still held several people. The elderly officers had retreated to the basement shelter along with the stenographer.

But Agents X, Y, and Z were still on hand, as was a very concerned Captain Zoltan, who was now in their secret room with them. He was looking out the huge unshuttered window to the ocean beyond. His body was shaking. Bad vibes were everywhere.

“What if a German missile hits this building?” he asked the shadowy agents. “We’ll all be killed.”

Agent X just stared back at him. “You’re supposed to be one who sees the future,” he replied snidely. “Do you see this happening?”

Zoltan wiped his brow and nervously tried to push down the creases in his uniform jacket. “No, I guess I don’t,” he replied finally.

“OK, good,” Agent Z said to him. “Then what’s to worry?”

But Zoltan
was
worried, though he really wasn’t sure why.

“That man, Hunter” he started to say. “He is someone you must not lose track of.”

Agent Y was standing at the big window looking up at the Pogo’s contrail as it disappeared into the deep blue sky.

“Well, that might be a problem,” he said wryly.

The base’s attack sirens were now wailing louder than ever. They’d been triggered by a rather outdated system of sonar buoys laid into the seabed about 50 miles off the coast, devices specially designed to detect U-boats. If one was tripped, a warning would go up and down the entire coastline. The sirens were annoying though, so X picked up a phone and called to the base’s security office—he wanted the alarms turned off. But of course, no one was in the SO’s office to answer the phone.

Agent Z turned back to Zoltan.

“What is it about this man that concerns you so?” he asked the hypnotist.

“He’s just a very strange one,” Zoltan replied, lighting a cigarette.

“They’re all strange,” Z said nonchalantly.

“But not like him,” Zoltan said. “He’s either the best actor in the world or…”

“Or what?” Z asked. “Or he’s telling the truth? You don’t really want to go down on record as believing that, do you?”

Zoltan began to reply, but this time thought better of it.

Instead he just crushed out his cigarette and nervously lit another.

Hunter was at 10,000 feet and laughing hysterically.

Yet he didn’t know why.

He was spinning through the air, maxed out on the weird airplane’s double-prop engine, laughing and yelping and screaming. He was uncontrollably happy. Either that, or his brain was slowly being starved for oxygen and he was suffering from some kind of narcosis.

Either way, it was euphoric.

The airplane drove like a truck. But he really didn’t care. He was doing something here that he hadn’t done in a very long time.

He was flying.

He let the g-forces flow through him as the plane climbed higher. The further he got from the ground, the better he felt. This was a battle with gravity, he realized, and for the moment at least, he was winning. And it felt so good, he never wanted to come down.

So he continued to climb—15,000 feet, 20,000, 25,000, 30,000. He was ecstatic! 35,000 feet, 40,000. He could start to see the dark edge of the stratosphere above him. He believed he could see the stars, the planets. 45,000 feet, 50,000! Damn, he’d done this before. Exactly this! He let out another whoop. He didn’t know who he was or where he was, but he knew this is what he’d been born to do, no matter where he’d come from.

He began doing loops. Crazy eights. One-point star-bursts. He felt that at one time he might have been part of a group of airplanes and pilots who performed these things, but only the stunts and his ability to do them remained, and so he did them with great vigor. An upside-down crossover. A controlled stall. Four-point turns. Eight-point turns. These maneuvers, he didn’t even know what they were called, yet he was performing them with incredible precision. And all the while laughing uncontrollably.

But then his body began buzzing again—and this time, it was definitely a different vibe.

He was up here to do something, his brain was telling him. That same something that had compelled him to take off in the first place. But what was it?

He put the airplane into a steep dive. Again, the g-forces felt good on his face. He had a panel that read
WEAPONS STATUS.
But he had no idea what kind of guns the airplane was packing.

However, somewhere in the back of his brain, way in the back part of his skull, it seemed he had a file on this airplane and on its guts. When the Pogo was first built, it was intended to be fitted with two machine guns. But in this place, that all happened years ago. The airplane looked the same, more or less, but what about the weapons? There really was only one way to find out.

He reached over and pulled the weapons lever. There was a bright flash! He was sure the nose of the airplane was about to blow off. There was a huge flame, a huge puff of smoke. And a cloud of sparks.

He quickly disengaged the lever and took a deep breath. Wow!

There must have been…wait a minute, was it possible? He pulled the lever again. In amongst the smoke and fire and sparks he detected six telltale streaks. Six machine guns on an airplane? That seemed way too many!

He did a third burst—and sure enough. There were six long fiery streaks. Jessuzz, he thought. What a frigging punch!

He pushed the throttle ahead and the little airplane leapt through the air again. It was oddly shaped, but quick and powerful. He put the Pogo into a spin. And felt the laughter start to gurgle up inside him again. Heavy as it was, the thing handled perfectly!

The plane was strange, but in a great way. It was outlandish, but cool at the same time—though he wasn’t sure exactly why he felt both opinions so deeply. Had he flown a similarly outlandish plane before—back wherever he’d come from?

He didn’t know.

But suddenly a piece of the puzzle fell into place. Suddenly he realized that he knew something more about himself: He was a fighter pilot. He could feel it. In fact, he might have been more than just an ordinary fighter pilot.

Something was telling him he might have once been the best fighter pilot in the whole world.

But once again, he had to drag himself back to the matter at hand. Why was he up here?

His body vibed again—and he was compelled to look down. And right below him, outlined in black against the deep blue Atlantic, were two submarines. Each was just surfacing. Each had a giant Iron Cross painted on its conning tower.

Their decks were sporting two missile launchers apiece. Crewmen in dark green uniforms were scurrying about these launchers. It was obvious they were getting ready to fire the weapons.

And at that moment, Hunter knew the answer to the question as to why he was here.

From way back deep in his mind, way back in his skull, he heard a familiar voice say:
Time to get to work.

The pair of German submarines that had just broken the surface were U-boats #153 and #419.

Both were Raeder Class vessels, meaning they were the biggest—and oldest—of the German underwater fleet.

They boasted crews of 311 and 356 respectively. They ran on cogenerating gas turbine reaction power, which made them efficient and gave them superior range. Their weapons may have seemed unusual for a submarine. They carried no torpedoes, no antiship weapons at all. The subs barely had periscopes. These weren’t attack submarines. Rather they were missile-firing boats, known to all as “Zoomers.”

What they could do under the right conditions was launch sea-to-surface missiles, the biggest of which was called the Dogglebanger-13.

The DG-13 carried a warhead the size of a small car. It contained nearly five tons of high explosives. It was partially guided by a set of coordinates preset into its nose cone. But with a DG-13, pinpoint accuracy was not a major concern. With its blockbuster-type weapons load, the missile could lay waste to a five-square-mile area. Getting the missile to impact anywhere in the neighborhood of a 2500-foot radius did just fine.