Wingman (16 page)

Then, a missile-it looked like a Stinger-hit the F-111 amidship. The big plane shook violently and began to lose altitude. But just as quickly, it stabilized and regained its heading, though trailing some bad-looking black smoke.

Within seconds they were right on the city itself, the F-111 neatly lifting itself above the on-coming skyscrapers. Hunter saw the plane's bomb bay doors open and knew Jones was preparing to drop whatever he had concealed inside the body of his plane.

All the groundfire had stopped by this time as they were directly over the heart of the city. Hunter was going slowly enough to see people scattering on the streets below. Because the Mid-Aks had no fighter jets of their own, their citizens were unaccustomed to seeing such aircraft above their city. Hunter also imagined that the city's air raid siren was cranking full blast.

When he saw Jones wiggle his wings again, he knew the general was coming to the end of the bombing run. All the while the smoke from the F-111 was getting worse. They had passed over the city and were coming up on its airport, which was located a few miles outside its limits. The airport was now a bristling Mid-Ak military base and training center. Hugging the waters of Chesapeake Bay, it gave the Middle Atlantic states an easily defended outlet to the sea, as well as a place to launch their seaborne invasions from. Jones was out to put an end to that.

They started picking up some more ground fire as they approached the airport, but it made no difference. Jones had wiggled his wings a third time then pulled back on his stick and put the F-111 into a screaming climb. Hunter followed suit, guessing that Jones must have planned to drop something big. They had climbed to 20,000 when he saw a single, chubby bomb drop from the smoking F-111. The plane then stood on its tail and with its wings swept back, was kicked into afterburner. Now Hunter knew why Jones was getting them high and out of there quick.

The bomb he dropped was a nuclear one . . .

They were at 40,000 when the blast went off. Hunter rolled to get a better look and was astonished to see a mushroom cloud-this one very authentic-rising up from the airport. The blast wave hit his plane a few seconds later, rocking it and causing his instruments to blink. He knew that whatever-and whoever-was on the base was now vaporized. When or how Jones had managed to get hold of a nuclear bomb, he couldn't imagine. He was still awestruck by the size of the blast and the growing mushroom cloud rising over the airport base.

He should have figured that Jones wouldn’t have let the Mid-Aks off so easily.

Nor would he have involved the rest of the squadron in nuking the Middle Atlantic's main base. It was technically a one-plane mission, and that's how Jones had planned it all along. The paycheck soldier talk was a cover. His hate for the Mid-Aks-their murderous, barbaric ways-had become personal a long time ago. With the constraints of the ZAP out of the way, Jones decided the time was right to deliver his own personal message of protest to the Middle Atlantic States. It was his way of avenging all the deaths and human misery the 'Aks had caused.

Mesmerized by the ever-growing mushroom cloud, Hunter concluded that the Mid-Aks had made a mistake a long time ago by making General Seth Jones their number one enemy.

"You don't fuck around with General Jones," the saying used to go, and once again, the adage was proved correct.

The general's smoking plane had leveled off at 55,000 and had made a wide turn out over the Bay and headed due north. Hunter, realizing that after the nuking of the airport, something like maintaining radio silence seemed unimportant. He attempted to raise the general.

But he got no reply ...

He followed the disabled F-111 as it flew out over the Atlantic and streaked off to the north. Off the coast of the old state of Connecticut, the plane started to drift to a course back over the land. All the time, Hunter was trying to raise Jones on both his VHF and UHF frequencies, but still got no response.

He pulled up beside the fighter-bomber several times and used hand and wing

signals, again to no response. The F-111's canopy windows were tinted in such a way as to make it hard to see the pilot inside. Hunter dropped back to survey the damage to the general's plane and noted that while the jet was still flying, the hole in its side would soon force it down. He figured the plane's radio might have been knocked out by ground fire, but it was spooky that Jones would not acknowledge his wing or hand signals.

And why the hell was he heading north?

Soon they had passed over into the Zone's airspace and still the F-111 flew north.

Hunter could tell the plane was slowing down, gradually losing altitude. He pulled up beside it again, trying to get some response to his hand and wing signals, but it was to no avail.

After flying this way for 20 minutes, the landing gear on the F-111 came down.

This further slowed the jet. Hunter surveyed the ground below and quickly calculated that they were somewhere over the forests of the area once known as Vermont. When the F-111 wings swept out and it banked to the left, Hunter knew it would soon be landing somewhere. He felt he had no choice but to follow suit.

Sure enough, as they broke through the low mists of the Vermont Green Mountains, an airport, carved out of the woods, came into view. The F-111 dropped down even further and began a final turn for landing. Hunter could see that while the strip, would be able to handle the short-landing F-111 easily, it would be a squeeze for the F-16.

After watching the F-111 set down to a perfect, three-point landing, he slowed his F-16, and lowered its gear. The strip would prove a tricky landing for the average pilot, but tricky landings and takeoffs were one of Hunter’s specialties. He coolly set the F-16 down, and immediately reversed the engine for a quick, if bumpy stop.

He couldn't help but think of the amazing events that had transpired in this single day-the explosion at the base club, the attack from the sea, bugging out of Otis, nuking Baltimore's airport and now, with the sun finally setting, his landing somewhere in Vermont. He felt it was time for a change, but this was getting bizarre.

He climbed out from the F-16 and looked around. Except for the F-111, the place was deserted. The only building was a small hangar, which looked like it was sealed up and locked tight as a drum. The general's plane stood at the far end of the runway, slightly off-kilter, its exhaust and wounded side still smoking. Hunter ran to the airplane, hoping to see the canopy popped up and a tired but triumphant Jones sitting on its wing.

But it was not to be. He clambered up onto the wing and crawled along the top of the fuselage to reach the cockpit. It was closed. He reached down with his foot and was able to trip the release handle. The canopy hissed once, then slowly opened. Inside, still strapped down, helmet on and sitting perfectly rigid, was General Jones.

He was dead, of course. Shrapnel from the missile hit had punctured his chest and he had bled to death probably somewhere over the middle of Baltimore. The plane, with its famous sophisticated computer-controlled flight systems, had completed the mission Jones had programmed it to, then flew him to this remote base. The spookiness of it all made Hunter shudder. Suddenly, he was very cold.

He pulled the general out and lowered the body to the ground with the help of the parachute straps. He took one long last look. Here was a truly gallant man; hero in Viet Nam, leader of the Thunderbirds, the soldier, who probably more than any other, turned the tide in the Battle for Western Europe. An officer who respected his men as pilots and as human beings, who felt that to fight for a just cause was the ultimate human experience. Now to have that life end here, on a wind-swept and desolate airstrip in the middle of the mountains seemed not at all appropriate. The man should be written up in history books. If there were any history books. He should have been accorded a full military funeral-a horse-drawn caisson, a flag on his casket, a 21-gun salute.

But it was not to be.

Hunter felt like a huge part of his life had just been cut out, destroyed, vanished.

Gone. For the first time in a long time, he felt utterly alone. Not at all like the solitude of his mountain retreat of a few years back. This was the emptiness one felt upon losing a member of his family. The frank realization that a person you knew, spent part of your life with and loved, was gone. Forever.

He knew he would never be the same again.

He didn't even have a shovel to dig a proper grave for Jones. He felt lost. And stranded. He had very little fuel left in the '16.

It was getting late and a light snow began to fall. He covered the general's body with the parachute and hoisted it back up onto the wing of the F-l 11 to keep it from any hungry animals. Hunter knew he would be spending the night at the airstrip and that he had to find shelter and damned quick. The airport's hangar seemed the likely place.

He tried to force the office door open, but it was nailed shut from the inside.

The windows were bricked over-again from the inside. He hadn't expected it to be so difficult. Finally, taking a wrench from the F-111, he began to work on the lock that tightly held the building's large sliding doors. He had no idea why Jones had programmed the F-111 to fly to this place. It looked to be an old remote strip, possibly used by the Vermont Air National Guard, or maybe an airborne forest fire fighting unit. It was in the damndest place. The area, while technically within the territory of the Northeast Economic Zone, had been vacated long before, its residents among the first to flee to Canada when the New Order came down. It was on the side of a mountain that was surrounded by larger mountains, each covered with snow, despite the month being late April. It was utterly desolate; there probably wasn't a human around for 50 or even 100 miles in any direction. Yet, judging by the tire marks and fuel stains on the runway, it was apparent that the airstrip had been used frequently in the last few months.

He finally managed to bust open the lock and move the doors of the hangar. It was dark by this time, and his flashlight was in his Personal Survival Kit, back in the F-16. He got inside and, after wheeling the big doors closed, wandered around, looking for a light switch that he knew would probably never work. He finally found a bank of them, and started flipping. Nothing happened . . . until the 15th switch.

Suddenly, there was a crackle of electricity and two dozen high powered arc lamps hanging from the ceiling burst into life.

Strangely, he had assumed all along that the hangar would be empty, but he was never so wrong in his life. His jaw nearly fell to his chest as he looked around the building. "Holy Christ!" was all he could say. Over and over. "Jesus H. Christ, I don't believe it ..."

It was Jones's last card to play and it came up the ace of spades. The hangar was filled-literally to the rafter-with enough bombs, guns, missiles, fuel and spare parts to outfit a small air force.

It was all packed away in stacks of wooden crates marked in stencil with signs like "Dangerous-Explosives" and "Napalm-Handle With Care." He saw at least 50 M-61

cannons, just like the one he carried in his F-16, plus miles of ammunition belts hanging from the main beam across the ceiling. Hundreds, maybe a couple of
thousand
bombs-clusters to big blockbusters, frags to antipersonnel-were neatly stacked, in pyramids against one wall. There were probably a couple of hundred air-to-air missiles-Sidewinders mostly-each individually wrapped in a separate protective shroud, and carrying a tag for arming instructions.

At the rear of the building, there were hundreds of barrels of JP-8, the jet fuel that was the lifeblood of a pilot. He checked to make sure it wasn't contaminated-a touch to his tongue told him it wasn't. Neither were the barrels of lubricating oil stacked neatly beside the jet fuel.

He was glad he didn't smoke. One match in the wrong place in this building and the resulting explosion would make Mount St. Helen's look like a pesky landslide.

In another part of the hangar he found a treasure of spare parts-from extra tires to crucial nuts and bolts-all appropriately marked. Hanging on the wall near the parts was a clipboard holding receipts for all the merchandise. Each form held Jones's typically scrawled initials at the bottom and each form carried the name of the same company: "The Wright Patterson Used Aircraft Company, Parts and Ordnance Division."

So Roy From Troy's employers had diversified. Big planes weren't enough for them; they had to start moving the small stuff. Well, he thought, it was probably easier these days to sell an antipersonnel bomb than a B-58 Hustler. Somehow, Jones had bought all the stuff, little-by-little, as the receipts told it, and established a healthy reserve.

He had beaten their system after all. If it ever came to war-real war-with the 'Aks, or the pirates or anybody, Jones had guaranteed that he would be sitting on top of enough material to make it very difficult to defeat him. Or, very hard to be victorious. Hunter realized that Jones would have made a perfect air guerrilla-a Robin Hood of the skies.

On examining the parts, he found that although they were manufactured for use on many different aircraft, they all had one thing in common: They could be used on an F-16. One of the beauties of the plane was that nearly 75-percent of its parts were used on other jet aircraft. From that point on he knew that while he might have the last remaining F-16 in the world, he would never have to worry about spare parts for it. That was, if he could always get back to this place. He quickly began to appreciate the desolation of the airstrip.