Tomorrow War (5 page)

Zoltan looked deep into his eyes—an embarrassing thing to do.

“Have you ever dreamed you were on an aircraft carrier … one that was being towed by tugboats?” he asked him.

Y dropped his drink onto the table, causing a small crash and splashing bourbon all over his lap.

He was astonished.

“What … why would you ever ask me that?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?

“Why
would you ask me
that?”

Zoltan just shook his head. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t know. I’m a psychic. Not the best in the world—but not the worst, either. And I just know things. And I know that at some time in your life you dreamed this thing … am I correct?”

Y stared back at him for the longest time. He’d had the dream since childhood. He was on an aircraft carrier. It was huge, with immense power plants in its belly—but for some reason, the power plants didn’t work. So they had tugboats. Pulling it. Pushing it.
Push-pull.
Back and forth the ship rocks from bow to stern, not port to starboard. It was such a detailed dream … it was like a movie. They were going somewhere. On a crusade. There was a crazy guy named Peter. Then they saw the Pyramids. And birds with wings on fire falling out of the sky. It was all nonsense really, like a child’s daydream. And it would not have been so compelling if he hadn’t dreamed the damn thing so many times in his life.

But he had never told anyone about it—never spoke about it. Until now.

“Yes, I have dreamed this thing,” Y finally replied. “But I don’t see how—”

Zoltan just held up his hand, and Y stopped talking. The psychic pulled a sheet of blue photo paper from his coat pocket. Y recognized it as a still video capture taken from one of Bro’s long-range insta-film TV cameras.

Zoltan unfolded the paper and presented it to Y. It showed an island, one that was indeed very isolated. It was tropical in nature, with a large connecting atoll and a massive lagoon on its eastern face.

And tucked inside that lagoon was an aircraft carrier. And surrounding it was a small fleet of tugboats.

Y’s jaw dropped when he saw it. He tried to say something but couldn’t. It was his dream come to life.

Zoltan ran his finger along the edge of the photo, past the carrier, up a steep hill to a prisonlike building located in the middle of a cleared section of jungle.

“This,” he said, “is where he SOS is coming from ….”

T
HE PLACE WAS CALLED
Kibini Atoll.

Located at the northernmost end of the Bonin Islands chain, it was just one of several hundred dots floating in the South Pacific Ocean.

Kibini was the home turf of a gang of pirates known as the Cherrybenders. They had been terrorizing this part of the Pacific for many years now. Under the auspices of the Imperial Japanese government in Tokyo, the Cherrybenders provided a kind of roving terror service, an instrument to keep the native peoples who populated these islands in line, freeing up Japanese imperial troops for their more ambitious adventures overseas.

But it had not been a good month for the Cherries. Usually their Japanese masters were in touch every day in some manner, whether it be by secure radio, back-channel video conferencing, or highly secret face-to-face meetings.

Twenty-nine days ago a delegation from the High Command was supposed to visit Kibini. Their flight was due in at nine in the morning. It never arrived. When the mucky-mucks atop the Cherries’ food chain tried to send a radio message up to Tokyo to inquire about the delegation’s flight, there was no reply.

Repeated attempts all that day to get ahold of any one connected with the Japanese High Command were fruitless. The next day brought the same result, as did the next. And the next. It was almost as if Tokyo had disappeared off the map.

Which, of course, is exactly what had happened.

Word about the massive bombing of the home island gradually made its way around the Pacific Rim, and suddenly the Cherrybenders were without their protection. Knowing the power balance in the Pacific would now change dramatically, the sea pirates became desperate. They’d made hundreds of enemies over the years, and now without their Japanese protectors they were extremely vulnerable for payback.

The Cherries did two things they thought would shore up their position: They raided the nearby island of Wiki-Wiki and took its entire population back to Kibini and were now holding them hostage. Then they pulled off one more high-seas pirate action. They boldly turned against their previous Japanese masters and planned a raid on the former High Command naval base on the island of Okinawa. It was here, the Cherries’ cut-rate intelligence operatives had told them, that a massive aircraft carrier was being refurbished. It had no crew on board but was stacked with hundreds of airplanes and thousands of weapons. Even better, most of the ship’s navigation, steering and internal systems were automatic and run by computers.

In other words, amateurs could sail the big carrier. Such a warship would be very helpful in the post-Japanese Pacific.

So the Cherries raided Okinawa, sailing up to the island in their small fleet of gunboats and assault ships and sneaking in under the cover of darkness. Two thousand troops landed secretly on the west end of the island and quickly overwhelmed the practically nonexistent contingent of home guard protecting the naval base.

But this was when the Cherries realized that they had not paid enough for their intelligence.

There
was
a naval vessel tied up at the Okinawa docks—but it was not the massive aircraft carrier the Cherries had wanted. Most of the Japanese High Command’s carriers were actually superhuge aircraft-carrying submarines of the same type the imperial forces had used to invade South America nearly a year before. But this vessel at Okinawa was a surface ship. And while not small, it was only about one tenth the size of the massive Japanese submarine carriers. In fact, this ship was not Japanese-built at all. It was an escort carrier, built years before by an Italian firm not to carry massive jet bombers but to transport small jet aircraft and supplies only. There were no aircraft on board, save for a few small jet-powered helicopters, and practically no weapons to speak of.

Though disappointed, the Cherries knew it was wise to get away with whatever prize they could. They took over the small carrier and found that many of its mechanisms were indeed automatic. They sailed it out of Okinawa and back down to Kibini with little trouble, parking it inside their well-protected lagoon. The plan was to evacuate Kibini, take the hostages, and sail to another island farther south, away from the bad vibes of the newly created Japan Sink.

But then problems developed. Suddenly the automatic systems on the carrier no longer worked. The computer glitched up and only a minimum of power could be generated on the ship. It couldn’t move on its own any faster than five knots, essentially a crawl.

The Cherries were forced to plan another raid—this one on the island of Ugo, just off the coast of Taiwan. Here they captured twelve tugboats and took their crews hostage. If their carrier couldn’t sail under its own power from Kibini, then they would tow it to where they wanted to go.

These plans went full steam ahead for a while. But the Cherries, never accused of being very smart, spent so much time trying to get the carrier ready to sail, they became lax in the holding of the hostages snatched from Wiki-Wiki. These civilians, a plucky group, had somehow managed to get hold of a radio and turned its guts into a transmitter. For two weeks they had been sending out a rudimentary SOS signal.

And now that signal had been picked up.

And that was the beginning of the end for the Cherrybenders.

The lagoon on Kibini Atoll was nearly three miles around.

Even in the best of times, the Cherrybenders had had a tough time guarding its perimeters against threats from both the land and the sea.

Now with the pirate band planning to move on, men were being drained from the supply of lagoon guards to work on the stolen carrier. But morale was very low. The pirate band wanted to leave within forty-eight hours, but nasty rumors were swirling about the island that the Cherries had not stolen enough tugboats to move the carrier. They had twelve in their custody, at least eighteen were needed to get the carrier to budge. This problem had caused their concerns for perimeter security to grow even more lax. Many checkpoints were now manned by only two guards, where at least six had been stationed before. For the Cherries, this was not a good situation.

So it was strange, then, when two guards at a checkpoint located near the northernmost approach to the lagoon spotted two people walking down the path toward them.

These guards were both rookies. One was named Aki, the other Laki. They knew there weren’t too many people on the island who weren’t connected in some way to the Cherries. And they had certainly never encountered anyone just casually walking down the beach path that they were charged with guarding. Yet two individuals were definitely coming their way.

But there was something else slightly strange here. It was near dawn. The sun was just rising over the water to their right. But oddly, both Aki and Laki found a bright glare was hindering their vision to the point where they could not make out exactly who was approaching them.

Confused, both guards raised their rifles and clicked their safeties to off.

A few seconds passed and the glare still remained in their eyes. But then Aki, the elder of the two, squinted mightily and in doing so, thought he noticed two things. First, the people approaching them appeared to be two young girls. Secondly, both were apparently topless.

Both guards lowered their weapons.

Perhaps this was a present for them, they thought rather naively. A gift from the top pirates for their good work in previous campaigns. Though Aki and Laki were “newbies,” they had been among the most bloodthirsty of the Cherrybenders. Their specialty was slitting throats. Men, women, children—it didn’t matter to them. They had slaughtered more than two hundred innocents in that grisly manner in just the past six months.

And now they believed two young, beautiful girls were walking toward them, bare chested and laughing. With such pretty necks.

The two visions reached the small guardhouse and just stood there for a moment Aki and Laki spoke only Japanese. But it made no difference—these girls could not speak at all. Instead, they began stroking the barrels of the guards’ rifles. It seemed like they were speaking in a very universal language.

“You are gifts for us?” Aki asked in Japanese.

The girls just smiled.

“From our commanders?” Laki asked.

The girls smiled again.

“And we can do anything we want to you?” Aki asked.

More smiles.

Aki laid down his rifle and pulled out his razor-sharp knife. His idea of “anything” went way beyond normal sex.

“Come here, sweet one,” he said to the nearest girl, hiding the knife from view.

The girl took a step forward. Aki, bulging with anticipation, looked over at Laki to give him a wink. Laki was looking back at him—but he had the oddest expression on his face. His eyes appeared twice as big as normal, and his complexion had turned pale white. His mouth was open as if he was trying to scream, but couldn’t.

That’s when Aki noticed a silver shaft protruding from Laki’s chest, just below his rib cage. It was the handle end of a long, razor-sharp bayonet. A gurgling sound came from Laki’s mouth, and then, in a very strange way, he began laughing.

“If they … try to … rescue the princess,” he said in halting Japanese. “They have to take … the train first ….”

And with that, Laki toppled over face first.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

Aki just stared down at him. When he looked up again, the two girls were still smiling at him. But then, in the space of a heartbeat, their images dissolved, only to be replaced by those of two paunchy, middle-aged men, one with an outrageous goatee. This man was swinging an old gold timepiece, back and forth at the end of a long gold chain. This accounted for the glare in Aki’s eyes.

“What demon thing is this!” Aki cried out.

“It’s called hypnotic suggestion,” Zoltan told him. “Scary, isn’t it?”

Aki did not understand what Zoltan was saying, but it didn’t matter. Aki dropped his weapon and began running down the path, heading toward the interior of the island.

Zoltan spun his watch around once and returned it to his pocket with flare.

“Mission accomplished,” he said. “Hypnotism, I’ve heard of,” Crabb said, taking the weapon from the dead guard. “But how can you project the suggestion that
we
are two young girls? I mean, that’s a real stretch ….”

Zoltan tapped the side of Crabb’s head.

“You would not believe what I can make you—or anyone else—see up there,” he replied enigmatically. “Want another example?”

Crabb watched as the hysterical Aki scrambled over the next hill. He was screaming at the top of his lungs.

“I don’t think so,” Crabb replied.

The next Cherrybender outpost was a small launchpad located about a half mile from Aki and Laki’s position.

This housed one of the few aircraft the Benders knew how to fly—the TRX jetcopter. In a world dominated by huge eight-rotor helicopters/airliners known as “Beaters,” the jetcopter, or Bug as it was also known, was a fish out of water. Large enough to carry four people, and that rather uncomfortably, the Bug took off like a helicopter, its smallish rotors powered by movable jet thrusters located on each tip. Once airborne, the Bug could translate to the horizontal and move with the speed of a slow jet fighter. They could be incredibly maneuverable under control of the right pilot, and could pack a minor wallop in armaments, including a machine gun in the nose and up to five hundred pounds in bombs carried under two small winglets sprouting from its forward fuselage.

Its nickname was apt, as well. With a bubble cockpit and long, thin fuselage behind it, the TRX looked like a fifteen-foot-long metal-coated flying insect. Most were painted bright green, adding to the giant-fly appearance. Best of all, just about anybody could pilot one. The controls were simple and not much more complicated than driving an automobile. In
this
part of the world, TRX jetcopters were as numerous as real flies. The Cherrybenders had a small squadron of six at their disposal.