Wingman (20 page)

Hunter could barely control the urge to spit on the three black-uniformed men.

"These guys are murderers, Fitz. They killed Jones, for Christ's sake."

Fitzgerald paused for a second. He, too, was close to Jones, a fellow Irishman.

"Jones is dead?"

"Killed. Yesterday." Hunter replied, the words coming out for the first time, hurting on every syllable.

"It was he who nuked Baltimore, then?" Fitz asked as the bartender brought a bottle of scotch and two glasses.

"Yeah, it was him," Hunter said, taking a long slug of the whiskey. It felt good going down. "There was a coup in Boston. We had no choice but to bug out. Jones didn't think it was worth it, to fight the 'Aks. At least, that's what he told us. Then the crazy old coot tries to ditch me in a cloud and heads for Mid-Akland."

"You were with him, then?" Fitz asked in a whisper.

"Yes," Hunter said, tasting his second shot. "Followed him in, got two Voodoos off his ass then rode his tail until he dropped it. Or his plane dropped it. He took a piece in the chest during the final approach."

Fitzgerald knocked his back and poured both of them another. "Well, it caused quite a stir around here, I tell you. First nuclear bombing since the war and all."

"Screw 'em," Hunter said, his words seething with hate. "I wished I had been carrying, too. I would have dropped another right on their ass."

A third shot was followed by a fourth. He could feel the whiskey taking effect on him. With his stomach empty, the liquor was speeding through his veins and right to his head.

"Well, you did your part, riding in with him," Fitzgerald said with a wink. "If those 'Aks knew it was you who rode shotgun, they'd probably dynamite the whole frigging terminal just to get you."

Hunter was tempted to tell him of his one-man bombing raid at Otis earlier that day, but decided to let it rest for a while.

Fitzgerald poured out yet another two shots and raised his glass. "To Jonesie,"

he said, a touch of sadness in his voice. "The poor bastard probably thought he'd live to see the stars and stripes fly again one day."

They toasted the general. Hunter had only buried him that morning, but it seemed like an eternity ago.

"He will not be forgotten," Hunter said, raising his glass.

"Hear, hear," Fitzgerald agreed. Meanwhile, the Mid-Aks at the bar finished their drinks and left. A noticeable sigh of relief came up from the other patrons. It was like a great weight had been lifted from everyone in the room.

"What the hell are they doing here, Mike?" Hunter asked.

"On my sweet mother's grave, Hawker, I can do nothing to prevent them from being here," Fitzgerald said, his voice ringing with sincerity. "No one likes them. But they're customers. And we set this place up to serve a customer. Anyone, as long as he pays, can stay.

"Look, Hawker, there are a thousand little wars going on across the continent.

We can't take sides in them, big or small. It's bad for business. We can't make any enemies. We have to stay neutral. That's the only way it can work. We just don't deal with pirates, but that's only because they never pay their bills."

"How the hell did you get involved here, anyway?" Hunter asked him.

Fitzgerald motioned the barkeep for another bottle. "Right place. Right time,"

he said with a smile. "I was laid up when the war broke out. Pranged an F-15 at Griffith AFB not far from here and busted up my leg. The war was over before they took the cast off. I walked out of the hospital the day they closed it down, the New Order. Everyone else left. Went to Canada. They were convinced the Russians were coming."

"So I heard," Hunter said. "People told me they saw it on TV and in newspapers, saying the Russians were about to invade."

"Aye! I saw them too," Fitzgerald exclaimed. "Scared me shitless. We knew the Vice President was a Quisling. We knew he let the Red ICBMs through the shield. The early warning system was going off for a day and a half over the TV. I was convinced the Reds were going to march over the pole and come down through Quebec."

"But it didn't happen," Hunter said.

"Aye, it didn't happen. Things started to calm down. A few of us banded together at Griffith. I was really the only pilot around, and one of the senior officers. Everyone else had gone to war and never came back.

"We had a few fights with these New Order fanatics who showed up to destroy all the airplanes. Asshole disarmament freaks. We gave them trouble, but in the end, they would have overwhelmed us, so we took off, in an old C-47 Spooky. Only had enough juice to get us here. We landed. It was deserted, so we stayed. There were twenty of us.

Sergeants, monkeys, a few lieutenants. They're looking to me like I'm the leader. You know?"

Hunter had to laugh at that notion. The only thing he'd ever seen Fitzie lead was a tipsy conga line of show girls through the lobby of the Tropicana one night.

"We stayed here," Fitzie continued. "There wasn't a soul around. No airplanes, but plenty of food and booze. It was half party, half figuring out what the hell we should be doing."

"One day, a plane lands. A Lear jet, mind yer. Its engine is coughing and spitting oil. The pilot climbs out and sees us. A bunch of servicemen with long hair and beards who haven't heard a bloody thing since the New Order went down.

"He says 'Can you fix the plane?' and we say 'Sure we can fix the plane. But what do we get from it?' He says 'A bag a silver apiece,' and shows us a bag of real silver.

Silver quarters, Hawk!

"Then he explained how the silver was worth so much more now. And that the New Order Commissioner and his gang were nothing but a bunch of arseholes lying on the beach in Bermuda while the Mid-Aks go hog-wild. So we fix his plane and he says he'll be back.

"Soon, he is, with three more planes behind him. They need fuel. We got fuel.

One needs a turbofan part. We go to the airline shop and jury rig one for him. He pays us. And they're on their way. It was one of the first air convoys going across to the Coast and it landed here.

"And it never stopped. Today we've got ten runways operating. No waiting."

Hunter was fascinated. If these were normal times, Fitz would have been many times a millionaire by now. As it was, the little man was very rich and powerful.

Hunter quickly told him his story. The triumph and the tragedy in Western Europe, the horror on the streets of New York City, his life on the mountain and his days with ZAP.

Then Fitzgerald asked him a simple, yet baffling question: "What are you going to do now, Hawker?"

It was a question he had no answer to. "Long range, I'm making my way to a Coaster air base," he told Fitzgerald. "Jones's brother runs an outfit out there. But the bird is starting to get cranky. I need an engine job, some avionics work, some drop tanks and fuel."

"Well, you've come to the right place, my friend," Fitzie said with a grin "We can do all that work right here and you can visit for a while. Relax. Meet some girls."

"Sounds good," Hunter said, downing his seventh-or was it his eighth-drink. "Now, just permit me one moment of unpleasantness, Hawker," Fitzgerald said. "How can you pay me for the work? Silver? Gold? A few diamonds perhaps?"

The question hit Hunter like a 500pound bomb.

"How much will it cost?"

"Oh, I should say, at least fifteen bags of real silver, or a bag and a half of gold."

Hunter felt his stomach turn. "I ... I don't have that kind of money," he found himself saying. It was the first time in his life the problem had ever come up. He instantly realized that he'd always been taken care of-whether it was by his parents, or a scholarship or the military. He had never had to pay to fly before,

"Well, Hawker," Fitzgerald said in that tone one person always assumes when money is coming between friends. "I can give you a break on some of the prices. Cut a little here and a little there. But you must pay for the materials. It's the way we work here It would like to give it all to you. But I can't."

"I understand, Fitz," Hunter said. "It's not your fault."

Fitzgerald thought for a moment, then said, "Look, I can arrange to have you work for it. Earn your keep."

Hunter's spirits perked up. "You need a pilot?"

Fitzgerald slowly shook his head. 'Well, not right away, Hawker. But we do need line mechanics. And you're the best in the business."

"Are you telling me I have to become a 'monkey?' "

"It's just temporary. You can fill in when we need a pilot, and work the line when we don't." He paused for a moment. "It's really the only way that I can see."

Hunter thought it over. "Well, if that's what it takes. . .

Fitzgerald clapped his powerful hands once. “then it’s settled, then. You can stay in my quarters. I have the whole top floor of one of the hotels.”

“Just you on the entire floor?” Hunter said, reaching once again for for the bottle.

Fitzgerald smiled and gave him an impish wink. “Just me and the girls.”

Hunter started his job two days later, Fitzgerald pulled some strings and installed him as a crew chief for one of The Aerodrome's busiest repair hangars. The work was routine. Stripping down engines all types of aircraft. Checking the plane's structure, its electronics, landing gear, control devices. One of his crew’s first projects was a complete overhaul of an aging Boeing 707. They had to convert the one-time airliner into a cargo plane for convoy duty. His twenty man crew, along with three other crews in the hangar, would have it working like new in a month's time.

Hands down, he was the best mechanic on the base, so his duties increased. He was the one they called on for the emergency repairs that always seemed to land at The Aerodrome. He quickly became the trouble-shooter extraordinaire for the base. If there was a problem no one else could figure out, the call went out for Hunter and he always came through with the needed remedy.

He couldn't complain much about the work. The hours were long, but it actually felt good to get his hands dirty every day. His only flying the first month was taking the planes his crew had repaired aloft for a test run. He found himself behind the controls of a bewildering string of airplanes. from airliners to Piper Cubs, helicopters to fighters. The time he spent aloft became very important to him, whether it
was in a
creaky Boeing 727 or one of the base's F-105s. He appreciated every second he was airborne. He had been denied flight once before—during his exile on the mountain—and he didn't want it to happen again.

Meanwhile, is F-16 sat in a little used hangar at the edge of the base. He

worked on it as much as possible, using used parts, in some cases designing new ones. The plane needed a complete overhaul, he had dec i d e d , b u t s u c h a j o b w o u l d b e e x p e n s i v e . V e r y expensive. Pricing it out with Fitzie, they had determined that he'd have to work for at least four months t o g e t t h e r e p a i r s d o n e a n d b u y d r o p t a n k s a n d enough fuel to get him across the Badlands and on his
way to
the West Coast. He didn't want to wait that long—he had never waited that long for anything, it seemed. But he had no choice.

Then he found out that he didn't need to be in such a hurry to get to the

Coast.

He had just completed his first month of work. After a long day on the

line, he was sitting in one of the huge tubs found in Fitzgerald's suite, soaking in the water's warmth and enjoying a backscrub from one of the 10 maids Fitzie employed.

Fitzie's maids were all young, beautiful, and willing to please. Fitzie had

issued them uniforms that were part-bikini, part pub girl. He liked to boast that they mere on call, around the clock, something Hunter could testify to. Every night since moving into Fitzie's luxury quarters, Hunter had found the comfort of one, sometimes two of the maids. It was one of the best parts of his experience at the Aerodrome.

Fitz walked in while Hunter was getting toweled dry by Hunter's favorite, an Oriental beauty named Aki.

"You need a drink, Hawker, me boy. We've got some bad news for yer."

"Aki immediately gave the towel to Hunter and walked to the huge, luxurious bathroom's wet bar.

"Did you tell me that when you left Otis, a lot of your people flew out on a C-130?"

a worried-looking Fitzgerald asked him.

"That's right," Hunter said, taking a drink from Aki. "All of the monkeys, a bunch of pilots and the base MPs. We were all supposed to link up out on the coast. Why?"

"They never made it out of Zone airspace," Fitz told him.

"What?"

"A pilot just back from Boston said he saw a C-130 with ZAP markings sitting in a hangar there. He asked around, because he knew you'd want to know. They told him that the plane was jumped by six freelancers flying for the 'Aks. Tangled with the plane's Jet fighter" escort, but the C-130 caught some bullets in the fight. It had one engine out and another burning when the freelancers forced it to land at Logan. They got a hefty bounty price for it, too."

Jesus Christ!" Hunter said. "That plane was carrying some of the best fly boys and mechanics of ZAP."

"I understand, Hawker," Fitz said. "It sounds as if you shouldn't be in such a hurry now. It would have been a small reunion out on the Coast."

"I guess so," Hunter said slowly. What's the point in getting to the Coaster base if there weren't more than a few of them out there? He had to wonder whether any of the others-the pilots who took off in the ZAP fighters or the Crazy Eights-even made it.

"So, what happened to the people on board the C-130?" he asked Fitzie.

"They're being held prisoner by the 'Aks. Got 'em all locked up-house arrest-in the old Government building in downtown Boston. Know where that is?"

"I sure do. When the 'Aks took over, they filled the place with women and kids, so we couldn't launch an air strike against them there."