Skyfire (21 page)

But it was also Hunter who had led the attack on her fortress, thus ending her brief reign as Queen of the Alberta wilderness. However, even amongst her jumbled brain fibers, she knew she had just about dared Hunter to come. After all, what other reason had she for kidnapping his celebrity girlfriend and imprisoning her in the fortress? And why had she arranged to have Hunter's precious F-16 XL stolen as well?

There was something about this Wingman-something that despite her madness she couldn't deny. She knew that he, above others, represented the biggest obstacle in her path to rule America and, eventually, the world. Yet her soul still burned in passionate desire for him. For many nights on end, she and Juanita had lain her bed chamber, deep within the fortress, performing various sex acts on each other while the Spanish beauty regaled her with detailed tales of sex and hypnotism with the famous pilot. These kiss-and-tell sessions had Elizabeth walking around in an orgasmic fog for weeks, intensified as they were by the fact that Hunter's actual girlfriend was imprisoned close by in the tower of the castle. Perhaps it was for this reason that Elizabeth never revealed herself directly to this Dominique during her captivity at the fortress.

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Later on, after she and Juanita escaped and entered into the long, preplanned negotiating sessions with the Norsemen, she had devised the Sapphic Fighter Pilot "substitute" ritual, to the utter delight of the lovely, sex-starved Norse wenches the raiders kept on board the Fire Bats. And even though the distractions were many in the midst of these orgies, Elizabeth still found herself thinking about Hunter during the long, astonishingly carnal nights.

Juanita was fully awake now and Elizabeth was quick to order her to kiss her entire body-slowly, starting at the toes and working her way up in an attempt to drive off the hangover. The Spanish beauty sleepily obliged.

As she felt Juanita's warm tongue pass up one ankle and down the other, Elizabeth's mind felt clear enough for her to consider the day ahead.

It would be a particularly busy twenty-four hours. As soon as she was able, she would be briefed by the captain of the submarine on the results of the many raids carried out by the Norse troopships the night before. Then she had to prepare three coded messages that would .be bounced off a satellite and beamed to several points around the globe. One would be sent back to Norway.

Another would go to Central America.

Ihe third, and most important, would be beamed to a warship sailing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, •>nalf a world away.

Then she would be briefed by radio by the captains of the other three Fire Bats, they being her closest conspirators in her wild, all-encompassing scheme.

Only then would she be prepared for the most important event of the day: her trip to the Great Ship, the Stor Skute.

She wriggled with delight as Juanita's tongue finally 187

reached her pubic area and then began a long slow trip to her heaving breasts.

Her hangover was now a thing of the past. Her spirits were boosting to manic heights. If all was successful this day, she thought, especially aboard the Stor Skute, then perhaps when she returned to the sub, she could convince Juanita to climb back into the fighter pilot's uniform and pick up where they had left off the night before.

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The retrieval of the RPV had gone remarkably smoothly for the crew of the fishing boat.

They had erected the net barrier, caught and secured the drone, and gotten underway again, all within fifteen minutes' time. And best of all, they had completed their critical covert mission without being spotted.

Or so they thought.

The RPV itself returned in good shape; it had sustained no damage despite being so close to the spot where the massive shells had exploded on Slaughter Beach. Its TV nose camera had worked perfectly, sending back live pictures from the Delaware beach which, ;" turn, weiy relayed instantaneously to the ordnance-men on the mothership a farther twenty-five miles from the target.

With the RVP's cameras providing the longdistance eye-in-the-sky, coordinates had been instantly calculated and the extremely high-explosive shells deposited exactly on the spot.

Nuw the fishing-boat captain was straining his vessel's engines to their breaking point. It was especially important for him to reach the mothership as quickly as possible as it would soon be sailing farther south. It was a journey that the fishing boat would have to make also, and the captain had no intention of going it alone.

It was close to 9 AM when the fishing-boat captain spotted the outline of the massive cloud of mist and

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steam on the horizon.

He let out a breath of relief and then called down to his three-man crew to stow all their phony fishing gear. There was no further need to keep up their disguise as peaceful, innocent trawlers. Now they could return to their real world, that of sea going warriors.

Inside the half-mile-long, manmade cloud sat the mothership. Generated of nothing more than heated seawater, the "smokescreen" wrapped a protective envelope around the vessel anytime a fog bank was not available to do so.

While the screen would not fool any enemy on a clear day such as this, it did serve to hide the precise location of the ship within. And preserving the secret of the mothership was the highest priority.

Once the fishing boat was within ten miles of the cloud of vapor, the captain sent out a message in Morse code via the powerful lantern located on his

-stern. He smiled again when the message was quickly acknowledged.

"Wine and hot bread are waiting for you" the message had said.

For the captain of the fishing boat, there were-no better words in the entire world.

Once again he called down to his crew, telling them that they should prepare to tie up to the mothership. The captain was well aware that his men were now going about their tasks with speed and renewed enthusiasm. They, too, were glad to be home.

With one last check of his instruments, the captain slowed his speed to one-third and turned the boat slightly to the north, lining it up with the mothership's strobe light blinking invitingly through the manmade mist of gloom.

Thirty seconds later, the fishing boat entered the artificial fog bank. Ten seconds after that, the captain heard the sound of a jet engine. . .

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Hunter couldn't help but stare at his main TV screen in disbelief.

The signals being provided by the AAS-38 pod slung under the jumpjet's left wing were creating an image on the screen that was both amazing and baffling.

The FLIR device-as in Forward-Looking InfraRed-used thermal imaging to find targets at night or in bad weather. Heat thrown off by the target was detected and processed into a remarkably sharp TV picture, similar to infrared NightScope binoculars.

But the picture that was being bounced back to Hunter at this moment seemed so unbelievable that he thought the FLIR system itself was out of whack.

The target that was registering five thousand feet below amongst the murk of the obviously manmade fog screen was an enormous vessel. Guns of all sizes seemed to poke out of every available space from stem to stern and it carried more than a few missile launchers-both SAMs and ship-to-ship. There were even indications of torpedo tubes both amidships and in the rear. Above it all was jungle of radar and radio antennas that covered the top of the ship's superstructure. Yet strangely, none of them were activated at the moment.

More mysterious was the fact that while the heat im-age was more or less uniform above and below the decks of the ship-indicating the vessel was crammed wijh much sophisticated electronic and communications "equipment-there was a large evenly spaced "cool" spot running along the entire deck itself.

This indicated to Hunter that the deck was made of nothing more high-tech than wooden planks.

But it was the outline of the entire ship that he found unbelievable. He knew what kind of a ship it was right away-its profile was unmistakable. What astonished him was that he-like many others-had be-191

lieved no ship like this was left on the planet.

He had assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that all the US Navy's massive battleships had been lost long ago.

Suddenly it seemed as if every warning light on Hunter's cockpit panel came on at once.

One moment he was flying undetected high above the artificial fog bank, in the next his Harrier jumpjet was being "painted" by at least three blazing threat-warning radars. Already, as many as a half-dozen smaller SAM

acquisition radars were locking in on him, as were twice as many antiaircraft guns.

Everything his instruments were telling him indicated that within three to five seconds, the air around him would be filled with so many missiles and AA shells that even the best of pilots would not survive.

But he was better than the best.

Within a micro-second of the first warning, Hunter had gone on the offensive.

In the snap of a switch he had armed his twin Aden cannon pods, putting hundreds of 30mm cannon shells at the ready. In the flick of a button, he likewise activated his pair of wingtip-I mounted Matra 155 twin rocket launchers, as well the single Harpoon antiship missile he carried undei his right wing. .

As predicted, four heartbeats later, the air was filled j with hundreds of deadly AA shells and four screaming * SA-2 missiles homing in on the strong radar signal of ' the Harrier. '

All of them missed.

Hunter had already yanked back on the jumpjet's vertical thrusters, literally bringing the Harrier to a screeching halt. From this position he watched as all of the high-tech flack passed through the airspace where he would have been if he hadn't slammed on the

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brakes.

"OK," he whispered, jamming the thruster controls back into the full-forward flight position as the deadly storm of missiles and shells abruptly stopped.

"Now it's my turn . . ."

The captain of the fishing boat had to hold his fingers in his ears to block out the roar of the jet engine that had suddenly become so excruciatingly loud.

Looking up through the cloud of mist and steam in no small terror, he searched in vain for the source of the banshee-like engine shriek. But he could see nothing other than the gigantic outline of the battleship and the dirty brown contrails left over from the four automatic, but obviously unsuccessful, SAM

launches just seconds before.

Thinking an attack on the mothership was just seconds away, the fishing-boat captain turned his steering wheel hard to the port, bringing him on a course parallel to the huge, slow-moving vessel. At that moment, the scream of the jet engine reached truly deafening proportions. His eyes going fuzzy from the high-decibel roar, the captain nevertheless squinted off into the murk off to his left.

That's when he saw the barest outline of the approaching jet.

It was coming in low and fast, and the first thing the captain noticed was that its wings were so full of weapons and bombs that they appeared to be sagging under the combined weight. Fate had positioned him now directly between the attacking jet and the battleship, but he knew that even as a suicidal shield, his boat would not serve admirably. The weapons being aimed at the battleship were so destructive and powerful they would tear through his little fishing boat as if it were made of cardboard.

There was nothing he could do at this point. Nothing 193

he could call out to his crew, no prayers that he could say in time. In seconds it would be over for him, and he would die in a less than courageous manner.

But then something strange happened.

The attacking jet did not open fire. Nor did it drop any bombs or launch any missiles. Instead, it roared directly above him, and up and over the main sail of the battleship. Even stranger, none of the battleship's automatic defense systems-from the SAM to the AAA's to the close-in Phalanx Catlings-opened fire, either.

It was almost as if the pilot of the airplane and the master of the battleship had come to an instantaneous truce. But how? Even a hasty radio conversation could not have delayed the airplane's attack in time.

Somehow the fishing-boat captain knew that it had to be something more . . .

Hunter's psyche was still buzzing after he pulled the Harrier out of its attack dive.

It was a familiar sensation running through him. A wave of intuition had washed over him just seconds before he was to launch the Harpoon missile into the conning tower of the battleship. Some might call it ESP or clairvoyance, but for Hunter it was much more than that. It was the special gift that he had always possessed, the kind of forward-looking psychic radar that, for good or bad, was able to briefly take him several steps ahead in time. It was what made him the best fighter pilot who had ever strapped in. He had always simply called it "the feeling" and the one overriding thing he had learned from it was to never, ever question it.

So it was, as his finger was poised over the Harpoon launch button, just moments before he would have sent the high-explosive-packed missile into the huge battleship's vital organs, something told him not to do it. A 194

psychic voice, crying deep down inside his soul told him that firing on the battleship was not the thing to do, even though it had attacked him.

But with this flash of intuition came more questions, questions that Hunter knew had to be answered.

He brought the Harrier up to twenty-five hundred feet and then banked back down toward the ship. Kicking back his speed to a crawl, he lowered his landing gear and then lined up the nose of his jet with the ship's stern. He was hoping this approach would serve two purposes. First of all, it was the position that would give the majority of the ship's AA gunners an almost unworkable firing angle on him. Second, it was an angle that a jet would least likely take if attacking a ship.

In other words, he was coming up on the ship in the most non belligerent manner he could think of. He just hoped someone understood the gesture.