Wingman (35 page)

Parked at the very end of the highway-turned runway was Hunter's F-16. Red, white, blue and waiting, it was bombed up and ready to go. One of the Crunch pilots had flown it down for him, a favor he greatly appreciated. It was like seeing an old friend again-a friend that had been neglected for too long. He was soon to change that . . .

Hunter conferred with Captain Crunch, and, their plan straight, gave the signal for the strike force to get ready. He climbed into the C-119 beside Clyde and started to taxi. The F-4s followed close behind. The assault Troopers gave him the thumbs-up sign as he passed the Stallion and started his takeoff roll. Phase two was well underway.

"The Stukas will probably need more than a hooker’s word that a snowbird is coming through," he told Clyde once the Flying Boxcar was airborne. "That means it's up to us to convince them. Once we do, they'll be licking their noses trying to get us."

He checked behind him just in time to see the Crunch jets take off. They would immediately climb to 50,000 feet, high above the pirates' rinky-dink radar, and orbit there, providing air cover just in case a stray bandit jet detected the C-119-that was, before Hunter wanted them to.

He steered the old plane toward the north.

"So first we've got to rattle the town a little," he said, sighting the small village sitting on the bend in the Ohio. "Hang on ..."

He put the old plane into a dive, pulling it up at barely treetop level. The C-119

engines, devoid of the luxury of mufflers, were screaming with a roar that would wake the dead-or the dead drunk.

Two of the town's seedier residents were sitting on the steps of the saloon, suffering from chronic hangovers and waiting for the bar to open so as to treat the condition properly. The sun was just peeking through the pine trees in the east when they heard a low, dull drone. It got louder and closer with every second. The men had just enough time to cover their ears.

They looked up to see the big gray hulk of a plane past wildly over the center of the town. It was so low, it clipped the top of a chimney on the building across the street, showering them with a load of red bricks and debris. Then, with a mighty roar that shattered many of the town's remaining windows, the plane disappeared over the trees to the northwest.

That done, Hunter steered the aircraft northeast. Within a minute he was looking down on starkly familiar terrain. Trees, hills and rock. That was it. They were over Stuka territory. Up ahead the hidden base lay. It was even hard to see in the daytime, the shadows of the pine forest surrounding it, bathing it in a protective shadow of darkness. It made no difference to Hunter; he could have flown back to the place blindfolded.

Again, he dropped down as low as possible and gunned the engines. Clyde was sitting with a firm grip on the suicide handle, a smile chiseled on his face. This Hunter was an incredible pilot, but also a crazy man, he was convinced. Buzzing a pirates' base like this was like kicking nest full of hornets.

Of course, in Hunter's mind, that was the idea.

A half dozen lowly Stuka sentries on guard duty were the first to see the Flying Boxcar heading toward their base. Huddled in the single watchtower, they had all just woken up. They knew the trick of being a guard for the Stukas was just to wake up before the pilots did. It was an easy life because, except for three prisoners who escaped a few weeks ago, nothing ever happened. Few people who crashed or were forced down at the base ever lived long enough to tell anyone. So it added up to endless days and cheap-whiskey nights.

But now something was on the horizon. The low drone of the approaching engines arrived a half minute before the airplane itself. When it came into view, they saw it was big and silver and flying low. It couldn't be just another captured airplane the pirates were herding home, because a quick count of the fighter jets on the runway revealed that all the Stukas were accounted for.

Yet this odd-looking plane was heading right for the base. The situation had never come up before; the guards really didn't know what the hell to do. Finally, when it looked like the plane wasn't going to swerve from its path, one of them pushed a button which set off an air raid siren.

Sluggo was the new pirate leader. He had just recently replaced the deposed and deceased Jaws as top man. He was in the middle of an opium-induced hangover when the siren went off. The sound echoes strangely about his filthy living quarters. "Gawd damn guards," he muttered, lifting his soporific body off the cot and walking to the window.

"I'll cut them up if they woke me up this early for nothing."

He looked out the window and immediately saw the C-119. It was coming in low, its engines sounded like they were straining and one of them was smoking slightly. Engine overheat was the first thing to pop into his mind. The next thing was a conversation he had had with one of his lieutenants sometime in the drug-filled swirl of the night before. A whore, Carla, had told his boys that a snowbird was passing through the area, trying to make its way up to New Chicago. It was supposed to have had a broken radiator.

Had to stay by the river. Carrying a half ton of cocaine.

"Bingo!" Sluggo laughed. He smacked his lips. The plane he saw past over the pirate base with a roar was so wobbly, he knew it had about five more miles max before it would have to set down. The likeliest spot, probably in the valley on the other side of Stuka Mountain. If he could get his ground troops mobilized, they might be able to get it while it was still down.

The whole base was up and awake with the blaring of the klaxon. Sluggo, barely zipped into his pants, was shoving his men onto the big Deuces and pointing them toward the road leading to the valley.

"There's an old shitbox plane, down in the valley!" he was screaming at his underlings, "It's filled with blow. Get it! Get it!"

One pilot ran up to him a guy named Rat. "I'll go up and shoot the mother down,"

he said, running toward one of the Stukas F-100 Super Sabres.

Sluggo just managed to grab him by the collar of his leather flight suit. "What do you have?" Sluggo yelled at him. "Dogshit for brains? You shoot that goddamn plane down and that blow is scattered to the winds! Those snowbird pilots will dump it before they let us get them in the air. You know that. Now get in the Gawd damn truck and play soldier!”

By this time a small caravan of pirates-guards, ground mechanics and pilots, a hundred in all-was wending its way down the road toward the valley. A skeleton force of 50 were left behind to watch the store.

Sluggo was in the lead truck and seven followed behind. They reached the bottom of the mountain and had a clear look into the valley. There, through spyglasses, Sluggo saw his prey. Sitting near a bend in the Ohio River about a mile away was the C-119, its two crew members feverishly trying to fill the radiator on its right engine.

The pirate convoy lurched forward and started to race toward the plane. But just as they were closing in on it, the pilot had its engines going and the silver beast began to taxi. By the time the bandits reached the bend in the river, the C-119 had taken off.

"Shit!" Sluggo yelled. "Someone get me a map!"

A map was instantly produced and Sluggo pored over it. The next likely landing spot for the plane was 12 miles to the north, on a stretch of highway that ran close to a tributary of the Ohio.

"Stay in your trucks!" Sluggo yelled to his troops. "Stay in your fucking trucks!

We're moving! We're moving!"

The pirate column pushed on. They kept the Flying Boxcar in view most of the time.

It was following the twists and turns of the river, flying low and slow and trying to preserve its coolant as long as possible.

"Ha!" Sluggo yelled, wishing he had a beer to drink for breakfast. "We got him next time!"

The plane was flying so slowly Sluggo's column could see the straight patch of highway just about the same time the pilots of the C-119 did.

"Yahoo!" Sluggo was yelling wildly, his head, neck and half body hanging out of the window of the truck. "We do some blow-zeen tonight!"

Sure enough the C-119 set down on the highway, two miles down the road from the advancing pirate convoy.

"Go! Go! Go!" Sluggo was yelling, the driver of his truck flooring the accelerator on the already speeding truck. The pirates in the back were being unmercifully bounced around as the Deuce careened down the long-deserted highway.

But again, Sluggo would be denied. Just as the pirates closed in, the pilot gunned his engines and the plane was airborne again.

"Jesus!" Sluggo yelled, shaking his fist at the sky. "You mother! I'll get you!"

"Hey, boss," Sluggo's driver had the guts to suggest. "Why don't we get back to the field and get a couple of planes up to follow him?"

If Sluggo was armed, he would have shot the man. "I'm surrounded by morons," he said. "How far away do you think he'd be by the time we turned around and went all the way back there? In another 50 clicks, he's over the Death Children’s turf. And we've lost him. He knows we're after his ass, now. We got him next time he comes down!"

Sluggo studied his map again. There was an abandoned airfield 15 miles away, just off the highway. It would be a natural landing place for the snowbird, because it was next to a lake that was fed by the Ohio River.

"That's it!" Sluggo said. "We got him now. I can taste that blow right now!"

The column pressed on, breaking the old 55 miles per hour speed limit on the highway by plenty in an all-out effort to reach the next landing spot for the snowbird.

Twenty minutes later, the pirate convoy reached the old airfield. Sitting at the end of the runway was the elusive C-119, one of its engines smoking heavily.

"Up yer nose with a rubber hose!" Sluggo yelled upon seeing the apparently disabled plane. "He burnt the engine right off the old bird. Now it's ours for the picking."

He ordered his driver to floor the truck and soon the nine pirate vehicles were racing across the wide-open field in a helter-skelter motion, each one intent on getting to the plane first.

The bandits were too busy trying to feed their insatiable drug habits to notice the helicopter partially hidden in the woods on the other side of the lake . . .

Despite the breakneck race, Sluggo's truck was the first to reach the C-119. He held up his hand, and all the other pirate trucks reluctantly streethed to a halt about fifty yards from the plane.

"Now listen up, you boneheads!" he said, climbing on the hood of the Deuce. "Let's not forget who's the top man around here. I say who gets dibs on the any blow inside that plane."

"What about us!?" a pirate named Zonk yelled. "We want some too!"

His comment was greeted with a chorus of "Me, too!" from the other pirates.

Sluggo looked out on the 100 or so bandits. "Hey!" he yelled. "When we iced old Jaws, you guys were sucking up to me like no one's business. Now, if anyone here wants to go where old Jaws went, then he can just step his ass forward right now!"

The pirates were silent-so silent, if they listened hard enough, they could have heard the sound of two jets approaching . . .

Sluggo knew no one would call his bluff. He looked out on the gang of pirates, ground crew guys mostly. It never failed to amaze him that guys so stupid knew how to fix a supersonic jet fighter. They were like mice. They liked to be led.

"Okay," he yelled, jumping down from the hood. "That's better. Now, me, Rat, Mal and Eddie are going inside the plane. The rest of you guys wait here."

Again, a sullen silence fell over the bandits. It was almost quiet enough to hear the two F-4s heading their way ...

Sluggo climbed inside the plane, his .45 drawn. It was filled with large bales, 50 or more, all tied tightly with bale and heavy duct tape.

"No one home," he said, putting his gun back in his belt and drawing out a Bowie knife. "Those flyboys are long gone. They'll never be able to show their faces anywhere again after losing this much of the Family’s blow."

"Quick, Sluggo, rip one open," Mal the pirate said after following the top pirate into the otherwise empty plane. "Let's see what we got."

"It's got to be pure," Rat said, actually salivating at the thought of all that cocaine. "The Family doesn't buy stuff that's been stepped on."

"I'll step on you, if you don't shut your mouth," Sluggo said, threatening to slap Rat on the side of the head.

Sluggo gently punctured one of the bales and a thin stream of white powder .flowed out. He reached down with a cupped hand and captured a pile. Wearing a toothy grin, his eyes closed, he put the powder up to his mouth and tasted it.

A look of horror came across his face.

"What the fuck!" he screamed. "This is sugar!"

"What!" Rat screamed as he lunged at another bale, cutting it open and tasting it for himself. He immediately spit out the substance. "It
is
fucking sugar!"

"We've been screwed!" Sluggo screamed.

"Hey! Listen!" the pirate named Eddie said, cocking his ear toward the plane's door. "What's that noise?"

The four pirates froze. It was a high whining noise. Getting louder. They looked out at the rest of the pirates, who had also heard the sound.

As they watched, one of the pirates out in the field shouted something and pointed to the northeast. Instantly, the gang started to scatter.