Skyfire (24 page)

This in itself was not all that unusual. Hunter had long ago resigned himself to the fact that he was a celebrity. Without an iota of encouragement on his part, his face had become recognizable across America and Canada before the Big War. As the youngest pilot ever selected to flj the space shuttle, he had made the cover of both Timt and Newsweek in the same week, and his mug had beer flooded across TV screens from network news broadcasts to the glut of tabloid TV shows that had been popular ai the time.

If anything, his celebrity status had grown in the post war era, overflowing into the tricky area of legend anc myth. He had been at the vanguard of many high-profil< missions during the desperate period to rid the Americai continent of its enemies, and the revived electronic medii had dug his picture out of various files and thrown it bacl up on the screen with each victory.

In the past two years it had gotten to the point where hi couldn't go anywhere in North America without being rec ognized, a definite hazard when the work he was conduct ing called for him to operate undercover.

Yet these men on the ship who recognized him righ away were not Americans or Canadians. They were non English-speaking Europeans, most of them, and they ha< hardly been exposed to the drumbeat of the American me 215

dia.

But as Wolf would explain to him, these men recognized Hunter for a different reason: they had been in action with him before.

"In the Suez," Wolf said simply. "Against Viktor. . ."

The mere mention of the name caused Hunter to involuntarily freeze up. Several years before, Hunter had tracked the maniacal superterrorist known as Viktor to Suez where the madman was planning on invading the eastern Mediterranean with a huge army. A similarly enormous mercenary force-known as the Modern Knights -had been assembled on ships in England and Spain and charged with thwarting Viktor's plans. However, key to the successful engagement of Viktor's armies was a scheme to launch a series of preemptive air strikes against his legions as they moved up the Suez Canal and thus delay them long enough for the Modern Knights to reach the area.

This holding action was assigned to a band of intrepid British officers who, after hiring several disparate mercenary groups and buying some fighter aircraft, eventually towed a disabled American aircraft carrier to the northern mouth of the Suez Canal, where it served as a platform for the crucial air strikes against the terrorist's army.

Through a series of wild coincidences, Hunter had been "recruited" by the Englishmen for this adventure and wound up being the man in charge of the overall air operations for the mission.

One of the mercenary groups hired by the British was a small fleet of Norwegian frigates-eighteen in all-which provided escort for the big carrier and the tugs that did the actual pushing and pulling. In the series of first clashes against Viktor's armies, the Norwegians had served extremely well, taking heavy casualties in the process. Those who survived linked up with the Modern Knights and played an important role in the subsequent defeat of invaders.

216

"I knew of this campaign very well," Wolf told Hunter between bites of the tepid, oily fish. "When I set out to man this ship, I wanted good men, men who had been through the Jaws of Hell and had lived to tell about it.

"Many of the Suez survivors had made their way back to Norway and they were greeted as heroes there. I spent months tracking down every one of them I could find. Now, of the fifteen hundred men on board, four hundred of them fought with you against Viktor. Many of them are surprised to find you're still alive."

"I've run into that problem before," Hunter replied.

Eventually, the dishes were cleared away and another round of lager doled out.

Instinctively knowing that their part of the meeting was over, the rest of Wolfs officers slowly drifted out of the dining room. Soon, it was just Hunter and the masked man facing each other at opposite ends of the long wooden table.

"Save your breath," Wolf told him just as Hunter was about to open his mouth to ask the first of a hundred questions. "I'll try to explain some of it to you."

"First of all, as you might have guessed, this is the old New Jersey . . ."

The USS New Jersey. The last Hunter had heard of the ship, it had been rushed out of mothballs for the fifth time and was patrolling the Persian Gulf when the Big War broke out. One of just four battleships the US Navy had refurbished and deployed, Hunter had just assumed that the vessel-like many of America's capital warships-had either been sunk during the hostilities or scuttled after the armistice.

Neither was true, as it turned out. In fact, the ship's most recent history was downright odd, even spooky.

The ship was sailing off the coast of Oman, providing fire support in an effort to keep the Straits of Hormuz open when the ceasefire was declared. As part of the armistice agreement-later found to be bogus-all warring factions were ordered to disarm and destroy their

217

equipment. Witnesses said that when the order went out to US ships in the Persian Gulf to return to the nearest port and comply with the armistice terms, the New Jersey simply went into a hundred-eighty-degree turn and sailed away, out into the deeper waters of the Indian Ocean.

When agents of the hated New Order finally found her two months later, she was drifting some two hundred miles off the west coast of Sri Lanka. All of her electronics were up and operating. All of her guns were stocked and loaded.

Even the food in the chow hall was warm.

But no one was aboard. The three thousand members of her crew had simply vanished.

Baffled, the New Order agents had the battleship towed to the former US base of Diego Garcia, which was a speck of land in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

There the ghostly ship sat, rusting away, its engines unoiled and seized, its onboard systems withering in the brutal heat.

Then the mysterious Captain Wolf came on the scene.

"I heard the ship was capable of being salvaged," he told Hunter. "So I bought it from the Sultanate of Diego Garcia."

It took a full year to refurbish the vessel just to the point where it was capable of going out into deep water.

"Just about everything had to be cleaned, oiled, rewired, and tested many times before we put to sea," Wolf went on. "The engines proved to be less of a problem than I thought. But things like the propellers and the steering gears all had to be replaced with new parts.

"We finally got her seaworthy and went on a shakedown cruise in the Indian Ocean. We dropped anchor off Sri Lanka, but the people wouldn't let us go ashore because they had heard the ship was haunted. We went on to the tip of Indonesia-which is a very strange place these days-and then back to Diego Garcia.

"Once we thought she was capable, we sailed her around the Cape of Good Hope and on up to England. It was a hell of a voyage, but we were all the better for it.

218

That was about a year ago."

Hunter forced down another few sips of the bad beer.

"But why did you do all this?" he finally asked. "Is there a need for a battleship in Europe's mercenary market?"

Wolf slowly shook his head. "No," he said, his voice again lowering to a somber timbre. "I'm not a mercenary-at least not anymore."

"But how about the time and effort you've put into this vessel?" Hunter pressed. "And the obvious dangers you faced to get to this point? I mean, you are pursuing these Norsemen, are you not?"

"Again, these are questions without easy answers," the masked man answered.

Hunter was stumped. The man was filled with contradictions. He had openly greeted him on the ship like a hero even though he'd sent up a barrage of AA fire just seconds before. He was obviously admired by his crew and he respected them, yet he chose to hide from them by wearing a mask. Hunter had met few people who played everything so close to the vest, almost as if the purpose of his mask was not just to hide his face but also to represent a symbol of his reticence.

"But I know you've come all this way in pursuit of these Norsemen," Hunter tried again. "So surely there must be some reason for doing what you do."

Wolf stared back at Hunter through his black mask.

"Is there a reason for what you do, Major Hunter?" he asked.

Hunter hesitated for a moment. "Of course," he said finally. "Though it's hard to put into words. . ."

Wolf shook his head knowingly. "That's exactly how I feel," was all he said.

Ten minutes later, they were walking on the teak wood deck of the ship.

219

But no matter how hard he tried, one part of Hunter just couldn't believe that he was walking on the deck of the most famous battleship in history.

Launched in August of 1942 in the midst of World War II, the famous "Big J"-all fifty-eight thousand tons of her-not only saw action in many crucial South Pacific sea battles, she was also on station during the Korean War and the Vietnam conflict, coming out of mothballs both times.

After one tour off Vietnam, the vessel was retired, only to be resurrected again in the early 1980's. Fitted with Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles to complement its already formidible deck weapons, the ship was recommis-sioned for the fourth time in 1982. It saw action during the chaos in Beirut in the mid-1980's, did some time in the Pacific before being retired again, temporarily as it turned out. She was in her fifth reincarnation when the big war broke out.

Now, as they walked the long, slender deck line, Hunter couldn't imagine the mammoth vessel looking any better than it did at this moment.

At 887 feet long, the New Jersey was nearly the length of three football fields. It was 108 feet at its widest point and it boasted a 38-foot draught, meaning more than half the dreadnought's hull lay below the surface. Four giant propellers that Wolf had had painstakingly manufactured by the Omanis, used the 212,000 horsepower produced by the vessel's massive distillate-fueled engines to move the ship at a respectable 20 knots cruising speed.

But of course the real stars of the New Jersey were her nine massive skteen-inch Mark Two naval guns.

With a barrel bore measuring those sixteen inches in diameter and an overall length longer than fifty feet, the gigantic cannons were capable of hurling a high-explosive projectile weighing more than a ton over a distance of twenty-seven miles. Wolf explained that to load and fire one of the guns took a well-trained crew about a minute,

220

during which there was an endless flow of communication between the gun crew, the combat information center, and the bridge. Using as much as eight hundred pounds of gunpowder to fire each shell, just one of these "bullets" could turn concrete bunkers to dust, could release a concussion capable of killing a man a thousand feet away, and could leave a crater fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep.

A barrage of three shells, like the one that had hit Slaughter Beach, could be accurately compared to a small atomic bomb hit.

Firing such guns took a lot of manpower. The Big J had three triple turrets-two forward of the mast and one in back of it. Each triple turret alone weighed seventeen hundred tons and required a crew of seventy-seven to work it, with another thirty-six men stationed below in the gun magazine supporting the gun crew. In fact, manning the guns was such a constant and labor-intensive activity that the third deck passageway that ran beneath turrets two and three was accurately nicknamed "Broadway," for the number of people that used it on any given minute of the day.

After touring the turrets, Wolf led Hunter through a maze of passageways and bulkheads, pointing out literally dozens of cabins and workplaces, all of them in one way or another connected with firing the big guns.

But the sixteen-inch Goliaths weren't the only firepower available on the ship. It also boasted a dozen dual-purpose, semiautomatic five-inch guns which could be used to attack shore targets at ranges up to seven miles, or aircraft flying as high as 4.5 miles overhead, using, like the big guns, a Mark 48 fire control computer. There were also the four Tomahawk cruise missile launchers, as well as four Harpoon antiship missile launchers. Finally, for close-in protection, the ship had four Mkl5 Phalanx Gatling guns capable of firing a hundred rounds a second. There was also room for four LAMP'S helicopters.

221

The tour eventually led up to the ship's bridge where Hunter saw that the ship was bristling with electronic gear both inside and out. Walking through the all-important Combat Communications Center-the C-Three-he recognized control boards for a SPS-67(V) surface search radar system and a SPS-49 (V) air search radar system as well as a LN-66 navigation radar.

None of these systems were manned, however.

"We can only sail it," Wolf offered as a preemptive explanation. "Navigate by the stars and shoot the big guns where the RPV tells us to. Working this stuff is beyond our capabilities, I'm afraid."

Hunter took a quick scan of the entire C-Three.

Most of the essential systems were locked on automatic, including the snip's AA weapons systems. This told him that, in a strange way, neither Wolf nor his crew had had a hand in a firing at him. It had been the ship's main computer, detecting a possible threat and carrying out its program to fire unless told not to. The trouble was, Wolfs crew didn't know how to countermand the ship's main weapons computer.

Besides the three radar systems and the auto-AA function, the battleship also had an extensive antisubmarine warfare setup that was capable of handling a towed sonar buoy array attachment used to detect enemy submarines. But this, too, was not operating.

"Lots of nice high-tech stuff," Hunter said, admiring the impressive arrays.

"It would help you a lot if it was all up and running."

He saw Wolf blink from behind the mask. "We are a ship full of sailors, Major Hunter," he said. "Not technicians. When we refurbished the ship, this equipment was the only stuff on board that didn't need to be overhauled. We've been running it on the simpliest modes possible ever since."

Hunter took another quick look around and then said: "Maybe I can help you in a few areas."