The Circle War (11 page)

Undeterred, the lone rider continued firing at Hunter. At the same time he was diving away from the tracers, the airman realized that off on the horizon he could see in the dim light of the moon, hundreds—no thousands of riders. In an instant his mind clicked and another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Cavalry. That's what St. Louie's recon patrol

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ran into. And that was one way the Soviets intended to defend their SAM

positions. But Mongolian cavalry? Here in America?

He didn't have time to think about it. He spun around. The last rider bore down on him, AK-47 in hand. But he was so close, he couldn't get a good aim on the airman. With the rider just a few feet away, Hunter reached back to his belt, drew his bayonet and threw it. The blade ran true, slicing into the man's throat. Hunter had to step out of the way as the horse, with its rider bleeding horribly, galloped by.

He had no time to lose. The main force of the cavalry was heading his way and he was sure they'd seen the action. He was back up and over the hill in seconds, neatly side-stepping the bloody goop of the first two riders he'd dispatched.

The cavalry was just a quarter of a mile away by the time he reached the minijet. He jumped in and started punching his computers to life. He quickly opened the fuel feeder valves and watched the fuel pressure needle rise.

"C'mon baby, just fire one more time . . ." He crossed his fingers and pushed the engine's ignition switch. The little jet turbine instantly came to life.

He released the brakes and steered around in a circle. He would have to take off the same way he came in. Unfortunately, that was in the exact direction that the cavalry was bearing down on him. Having no other choice, he hit the throttle and the minijet started moving. He opened it up and it moved faster.

All the while, his eyes and brain were

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working the calculations of how close he would have to come to the onrushing cavalry before he could get airborne. The numbers were not with him this time.

He knew by the time he could get off the ground, the aircraft would be twenty deep into the onrushing horde.

With a flick of a switch, he armed the minijet's missiles. They went green just as only 300 feet separated him from the lead element of the charging horsemen. He pushed a button and his outside starboard missile was gone, spiraling toward the riders. It impacted on the fourth man in, the HE

splattering over two dozen or so of his comrades. Hunter launched his outside port missile a split-second later. It became imbedded in a lead horse's body, toppling it and delaying its detonation for a moment. But when it did blow —it was big, fiery, and bloody. Twenty more horsemen were mowed down. The lead horses immediately went into a panic. Those in the rest of the rest of the column that could, quickly swerved either right or left.

Now he had the gap he needed to take off. He yanked back on the controls and the minijet lifted off the ground. He could see the startled looks on the otherwise fierce faces of the cavalrymen as he rose up and over them. Some of the riders managed to fire at him as he raced to get altitude, the tracer bullets lighting up the sky but missing him by a wide margin.

But he still had problems. The power takeoff and the emergency ascent had sucked up a lot of his precious fuel. He still had quite a distance to fly. As 111

he turned the craft westward, he programmed the computer to give him his maximum distance at his current fuel use rate. Once again, the numbers came back bad. He couldn't climb; he would use too much fuel getting up to the higher altitudes to catch the Stronger winds. Yet, if he stayed low to ground, he'd run out of gas more than 150 miles short of the nearest Sea Stallion rendezvous spot. And with all those SAMS in place, he wouldn't even think of asking that a PAAC craft come any closer than the western fringe of the Badlands.

His only solution was to get more fuel.

There was only one place he could think of that might have jet engine fuel out here in the 'Bads. With a turn slightly to the northwest, he plotted a course for the small auxiliary Yak base he'd spotted near the Kansas-Nebraska border.

It was still two hours before dawn when he reached the small airbase. It had been a cinch to relocate it; its buildings were the only things that broke the monotony of the vast midwest plain. Approaching from the south, he could see the five Yaks bathed in spotlights, sitting in the middle of a square metal takeoff and landing platform. Several Hind helicopters waited in the shadows nearby. A radar dish turned lazily atop one of the four buildings surrounding the small installation. Nearby sat two SA-2 mobile SAMs —the same kind that American pilots dodged over North Viet Nam years before.

Hunter figured the Soviet fuel supply would be heav-112

ily guarded; he guessed it was like gold to the Soviet infiltrators. He knew this because despite all the airpo-wer the Russians had sneaked in, he had yet to see any of it flying around. The reason had to be an order by the high command to conserve all the available Soviet jet fuel until it was really needed.

Two gallons would get Hunter where he had to go. The question now was: how to get it. He cut the jet engine and drifted over the base. His guess was right, there were at least a dozen soldiers on guard duty near the base's fuel dump.

Another dozen or so were guarding the Yaks. No one was watching the SAMs though; apparently the Soviets weren't expecting any air attacks. He counted 26 soldiers in all, awake and armed. He had no idea how many other soldiers were sleeping somewhere on the base.

The situation called for a diversion. He landed the minijet about a half mile away from the base and started crawling —not toward the installation but rather to a point north of it. He carried with him his two remaining wing missiles, his last HE grenade and his two signal rockets and his now-empty 5-gallon water jug. The trusty Uzi was also strapped to his back.

Reaching his destination and working quickly, he fashioned two delayed-reaction bombs. Each one contained a wing missile and a signal rocket.

The missile's internal fusing system would serve as the timers, the HE inside would serve as the explosive and the signal rockets would add a little fireworks. He set one timer to go off in 30 minutes, the other would tick just two minutes longer. He was hoping

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the first explosion would get everyone's attention at the base and that second one would bring most of them running. By that time, he would have crawled up to the edge of the fenceless base and, with luck and a lot of confusion, he could withdraw some gas, head back to the hidden minijet and be gone before the Soviets started looking in other directions.

It was a good plan, he thought. But even the best of plans go awry . . .

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Hunter had just finished fusing the second bomb when he heard a loud whining noise coming from the base several hundred yards away. He couldn't believe it; it was the sound of a jet engine coming to life. It was still dark; dawn being more than an hour away. Yet for some reason, someone was warming up one of the Yaks.

It didn't make sense. If the Soviets were flying only when absolutely necessary —if at all —who would be wanting to take off in a Yak, especially at this hour? Could it be they were going to fly out a couple of hundred miles and check on that little commotion he caused back in the ravine? He quickly discounted the theory. They'd send the Hinds for that.

Maybe it was a training exercise. He knew that Soviet conscripts —the rookies, the greenhorns — were sometimes roused early from their sleep and put to work for an hour or two before breakfast. It had something to do with testing their Marxist mettle. Would they be firing up a Yak to let these guys work on it?

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Again, unlikely. But whatever the reason, it was bad news for him. The airplane would be making a racket the entire time it was running and he wondered if anyone at the base would even hear his explosions. Or a hovering pilot might spot him or the minijet or both from the air.

Then he heard a second whine start up, then a third. Now he knew no one would hear his time bombs going off. But maybe it didn't matter. He could tell by the pitch of their engines, these three Yaks were not just warming up. They were preparing to takeoff.

Suddenly, he felt a tingling go down his spine. He turned around and looked into the still-dark, northern sky. The feeling was coming over him. Way off in the distance, he could see four sets of red twinkling lights. They were at about 10,000 feet and coming fast. He watched four more sets of red lights appear behind the first group. Soon they were directly above him. They were Yaks, eight of them, dispatched, he figured, from one of the Soviet zone's northern bases.

Without so much as a wag of their wings, the eight fighters streaked over their countrymen and off to the south. Their roar had not yet died down when Hunter heard a fifth Yak start up at the base nearby. The Soviets had their air units on the move. It could only mean one thing: Something big was up.

Flattened out on the ground, Hunter watched as the first Yak, then the second, rose slowly over the nearby base. As always, he found himself fascinated by VTOL jets. They looked almost unreal as they

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hovered on a cushion of downward jet wash. The noise was intense, the jets'

vertical thrusters churning up a heap of dust around the small takeoff platform. Then, with the flip of a switch inside the cockpit, the jet's powerful thrust was diverted backward. In the snap of a finger the Yaks accelerated and were gone.

Now a third Yak rose, the first lights of dawn catching reflections from its steel gray body. Hunter could see hard ordnance hanging from its wings, but no air-to-air missiles. He knew the jets were going on a bombing mission, and not an aircraft interception.

"This is too good to be true," he thought, instantly knowing he had to take advantage of the situation. Grabbing the two makeshift time bombs, he shifted gears and started running in a low creep directly toward the base.

If he was lucky, he wouldn't even have to change the bombs' timers . . .

The Soviet captain in charge of the auxiliary Yak base hadn't yet put his boots on. There was no time. He had received the highly unusual urgent message just ten minutes before, and now he was following orders and getting four of his five planes armed and into the air. There was trouble to the south. His superiors didn't tell him so, of course, as no one in the high command would stoop so low as to tell a mere captain what was going on. The Soviet officer simply deduced that if the high command had ordered 20 of the Expeditionary Force's 50 Yaks sta-117

tioned in the zone to arm up and head south, then it must be a critical situation.

Did this mean he'd see action at last? the Soviet wondered. He'd already spent 14 months out in the middle of this nowhere, breathing this bad air, eating the bad food and avoiding the water at all costs. He had already suffered through three unintentional bouts with low-level radiation sickness—each episode being worse than the previous one. And he was sick and tired of fighting with the others over the now-dog-eared copy of Playboy they had found a year ago.

What was worse, the Russian wasn't even sure what the hell he was doing over here in the first place. When he had somehow survived the big war in Europe, he thought his troublesome service days were over. In reality, they were just beginning. Not three months after the armstice was signed, his unit began training for this American "Expeditionary" mission.

First came the survival classes on how to operate the Yaks in a foreign environment. Then he was schooled on the proper supervision needed to operate a SA-2 missile system. Then, inexplicably, his commanders put him and 80 other officers aboard a creaky wooden glider and the next thing he knew, they were all vomiting en masse, as the glider battled fierce Canadian crosswinds high above the Great Lakes.

That had been just over a year ago. He had heard that his commanders were using a battle being fought between two American cities as a cover to infiltrate him and his support troops. He was deposited out in 118

the deserted American plain and told that the Yaks — being flown in via Siberia and the American arctic — would arrive any day. They came exactly one year later.

He also knew it was too simple to blame his cement-headed superior officers for the unbelievable delay; the air forces operating on the American continent were known even to the Russian infiltrators as being top notch. The Soviets needed guarantees from their turncoat American allies like the Mid-Aks and The Family, that before the Yaks —or anything else belonging to the preciously small Soviet military machine—came over, at least half the continent had to be in their hands.

Thus the Soviet leaders had watched the battles pitting the Mid-Aks and The Family against the democratic forces with great interest. Despite the battering the Soviet puppets had taken, the power of the democratic forces had shifted to the west coast. All that was left east of the Badlands were isolated islands of democracy —The Syracuse Aerodrome, Football City, to name two. In theory, these would be mopped up once the time was right.

But even he, a Soviet captain, who had spent 14 lonely dull months shooting at jack rabbits for their fur, knew that further promises had been made. Somehow, the Mongolian People's Mounted Army became involved; most likely someone knew the American plains were well-suited to use good old fashioned cavalry. But foremost of all, the Soviets were demanding their American allies provide an infantry to do the fighting once the Soviet infiltration 119

was complete.

That's where this man they called "Viktor" came in ...

The Russian officer's thoughts were broken as the fourth Yak lifted off. The fifth and final Yak would stay; he had ordered the jet warmed-up only as a stand-by in case one of the first four had to return to base due to a malfunction. He would keep the Yak warm for 15 minutes and if none of the others were back by then, he'd shut it down. After all, he was under strict orders to save as much fuel as possible.