Return of Sky Ghost (21 page)

His brain rewound itself, and then took a right turn. Stranger notions began streaming in. Eating bugs on the ground in the Peruvian jungle. Trying to stay invisible atop of Xwo. The strange feeling that night on the roof of the Happy Valley when his psyche had him staring off to the northeast. Then, earlier this very day in Dallas, and the strange fortune-teller.

Hunter laughed a bit to himself. It seemed like ten years ago now. It was strange: He could picture the psychic right down to her dimples and her deep brown eyes. But he could hardly recall what she had told in her prediction.

You will soon be very cold
—he remembered that much intact. But that was hardly true. It was ninety-six degrees inside the office right now, even though the sun was going down and the huge windowframe air conditioner was blowing cold at full tilt.

What came after that?
You will meet old friends again,
she had said. Again Hunter chuckled. Not out here, he wouldn’t.

They will build something to come apart.
What the hell did that mean?

Hunter frowned. What was the rest of it?
Then you will be asked to …

“Holy shit …”

Y’s soft exclamation broke Hunter out of his trance. The MVP was repowered and reconnected. Their new orders were streaming in. Y was reading them—and swearing in amazement with each line.

“Son of a bitch,” he was mumbling. “Are they kidding?”

“Jessuzz, break it to me gently,” Hunter told him, staring now up at the ceiling, as if he was waiting for it to fall in on him at any moment.

“Well, first off,” Y began, “by a presidential order you have been officially designated a ‘secret weapon’ by the War Department.”

“You’re kidding …”

Y shook his head no.

“I’m quoting here: ‘A panel of the senior Psychic Evaluation Officers have recognized that for whatever reason, Major Hunter’s presence in a tactical or strategic situation will probably have an effect in the overall outcome.’ Therefore, Major you are valuable. Therefore, you are now a secret weapon. It also means you can be cleared for some of this.”

Hunter just shook his head and went back to staring at the ceiling.

“Point Two,” Y went on. “The U.S. and its allies are going to attack the Panama Canal.”

Hunter stopped looking at the ceiling for a moment.

“Really?”

Y nodded. “That’s what it says. They’re looking at a two-pronged assault simultaneously on both entrances. The Navy is taking the Pacific side, the Army and Air Corps are taking the Caribbean end. If they can gain both approaches to the waterway, all the Japs left in the middle will wither on the vine.”

Hunter turned this concept over in his mind a few dozen times in the space of about five seconds. “Hey, a plan like that just might work,” he said finally.

“Maybe,” Y replied. “But here’s the real bombshell: It says that the whole Canal attack is just a diversion. For something bigger …”

“Bigger?” Hunter asked. “Bigger, like the Brazil operation?”

“Nope,” Y replied. “Bigger than that even.”

Hunter was stumped. “What the hell could be bigger than a full-scale invasion?”

That’s when Y just handed the MVP to Hunter.

“You should see this for yourself,” he said.

What the screen showed was, to Hunter’s surprise, a huge mushroom cloud. It was an image not seen very often in this world—at least not until the five H-bombs he’d stolen were dropped on Occupied Europe to end the war with Germany about a year before.

This image faded into a long text detailing the mission statement, which had the words
classified
and
top secret
written all over it.

Hunter hit the “Fast” button on all this. He wanted to see the MAS, the “mission animation sequence.” It would tell him not in words but in pictures what lay in store for him.

What he saw was almost comical.

It showed a group of men entering an animated version of the huge hangar they’d visited in the middle of the desert earlier, the one that housed the colossal airplane. Once the tiny figures were inside, the building started spewing smoke and literally shaking at its foundations—this was the animation-briefers’ way of telling him that work was going on inside the big hangar.

Then, after a while, the doors to the big hangar opened, and he saw an animated version of the colossal airplane taking off, using the entire ten-mile runway to do so. Even as a cartoon, this sequence looked a little scary. The plane just appeared to be too gigantic to ever get airborne in real life. It just barely made it off the ground in the animation! Again, this was the briefers’ way of telling him that they expected the takeoff to be a bitch of an experience.

Once airborne, the airplane flew very, very high and very, very slowly, and began a long journey around the world via the polar route. Flying south, the giant aircraft went over the south pole, up the other side of the planet, over the north pole, and back down again.

Toward the end of this long, long journey, the plane was shown being attacked by dozens of smaller airplanes and antiaircraft rockets. The big plane plowed through all of this, only to be attacked again and again. Finally, still in one piece, it arrived over an island land mass, where it was attacked even more fiercely than before.

The view changed and the plane’s enormous bomb bay doors opened—and a single bomb fell out.

The plane speeded up, but just a little—it couldn’t go that fast. When the bomb went off, the resulting mushroom cloud was so enormous, it immediately engulfed the colossal aircraft.

When the smoke cleared, the animation showed the spot of ocean where the land mass used to be. Most of it was gone—exploded into the sea. Only the barest outline remained, but it was enough to provide the only clue needed as to exactly what the target had been: The Home Islands of Japan.

The animated briefing ended.

Hunter just looked over at Y and numbly shook his head.

The point of the cartoon briefing was clear: The OSS wanted the colossal airplane to go on a very secret bombing mission. There was no doubt exactly where the OSS wanted this mission to go.

Even why this big airplane was being asked to carry one tiny little bomb was not that mysterious. Obviously the plane needed both surprise and the ability to fight off masses of enemy aircraft to get to the target and drop what had to be the only available copy of the diminutive bomb.

But who did the OSS expect to fly this thing? It would take a crew of at least a dozen or so, Hunter surmised. Probably three or four times more.

“Well, I only have about a million questions,” he finally said to Y. “Number one being, do they expect me to fly that thing alone? I mean not even the OSS is crazy enough for that … are they?”

“No, they’re not,” Y was saying, going back into the mission statement itself and reading the next set of instructions.

“It says here that you have to gather a group of ‘associates,’” Y revealed. “And again I quote, ‘Individuals who are known intimately to you, who can be trusted, who have flight experience, and who can clear security. And be assembled in a week’s time.’” Y looked up at him. “Now that’s a tall order ….”

Hunter was just shaking his head. “I only know about twelve people here intimately,” he said. “And half of them are SuperBlonds back in Dallas.”

Y just shrugged. It did seem like a strange order.

But Hunter’s mind was already on to the next question. The MVP made it quite clear that this plane was to drop a bomb that would produce a mushroom cloud, obviously the sixth and remaining H-bomb from the cache he stole from the Germans near the end of the war.

But now, as they watched the tail end of the animated briefing again, obviously this sixth bomb had been altered somewhat. Because according to the cartoon, the version this plane was to deliver was so powerful, there was no way the giant bomber could get out of the way of its own blast.

Once this had sunk in, they both just looked at each other.

Y had to say it for both of them.

“From the looks of this,” he said, “it’s a suicide mission.”

Hunter just went back to looking out the window. The psychic’s last words were coming back to him loud and clear now.

You will be asked to die,
she had said.

How could he have ever forgotten that?

OSS Headquarters

Washington, DC

I
T WAS THE NIGHT-SHIFT
maintenance crew who first became suspicious.

The three-man cleaning team who regularly swept, mopped, and buffed the floors of all the offices inside the massive OSS main building had not been able to gain access to Room 222 in nearly a week.

Knowing that the men who used this room were among the highest intelligence operatives in the country, the cleaning crew wasn’t about to ask around as to their whereabouts, not after just a couple of days anyway.

But by Day 3, the cleaning crew grew concerned. Room 222 was probably the hardest office for them to clean simply because the two agents who used it smoked more cigarettes, drank more coffee, and missed the wastebaskets more often than the rest of the people working inside the entire OSS complex combined. In other words, the OSS’s two top agents were also its sloppiest.

There were visions of a nightmare rising then by Day 4 as the cleaning crew, assuming the agents were working during the day and just not leaving the door unlocked at night, feared a powerful mess was building up inside. Four days without a sweep-out meant a colossal job for maintenance once access to the room was reestablished, and that would wreak havoc on the entire cleaning schedule. And that was one thing the maintenance men did not want.

So, by Day 5, their concern had grown to the point that they finally asked the building’s superintendent to please look into it for them. The superintendent asked the building’s night operations officer about the situation, and he expressed surprise that the men in Room 222 weren’t following the common procedure on building maintenance, which was, you left your office door open every night. The officer then turned to his Main/AC computer and asked it to locate the men from Room 222 for a message transfer.

The computer churned and chugged for a while, but then came back with an unsettling response:
Not enough input for evaluation.
This meant the computer didn’t know the whereabouts of the two agents, a highly unusual situation.

This is what prompted the strange delegation of the night officer, the superintendent, and the three-man cleaning crew to journey up to the twelfth floor and unlock Room 222 with a pass key.

The door swung open and it was the maintenance guys who gasped first. The room was spotless. No discarded coffee cups, no small mountain of expended cigarette butts rising from the ashtrays, no sea of litter around the waste-baskets.

Both desks were clean, as was the floor, the windowsills, and the adjoining bathroom.

This was all highly unusual. The office was just as the cleaning crew had left it six days before.

The two agents who used it—men also known by their code names X and Z—had not been here in all that time.

Above Bride Lake

Nevada Desert

I
T WAS JUST A
blur really.

A streak through the sky. A flash, like a lightning bolt. White-hot, no exhaust, moving faster than seemed possible.

Above the barren desert it went, riding a sonic wave that was causing dishes to rattle as far away as Las Vegas.

It was the Z-3/15
Stiletto Deuce
with Hawk Hunter behind the controls, going out for a morning spin.

He’d been at Area 52 for nearly a week, and this was his twelfth ride in the Z-3/15. Without question, it was the ballsiest airplane he’d ever strapped into, in this world or the last. Its needle-nosed appearance, its absolutely clean lines and its incredibly powerful double-reaction engines all conspired to make it so fast, some of its flight characteristics seemed to defy explanation.

For instance, with its nose being so very long, turning the airplane should have been a problem. But it wasn’t. And with its wings being so short and stubby, radically maneuvering the aircraft should have been difficult. But it wasn’t. And the thing could move so goddamn quick, it would have seemed that the whole package would be unstable and prone to stalls. But it wasn’t.

The truth was, the Z-3/15 had been built too well, and made to perform so far beyond the envelope, that a pilot had never been found who could fly it properly.

Until now.

Five days, twelve flights. Each time, Hunter didn’t want to come back down.

But he hadn’t spent all his time flying the
Stiletto,
although he certainly would have preferred to. Per his updated orders, he had devoted many hours to flight-checking each member of the small squadron of rogue planes found in Area 52’s Hangar #19. These airplanes were old but in surprisingly good shape, the major problem being oil sludge which had built up inside their engines simply from lack of flying time.

With the help of some Bride Lake flight mechanics, Hunter had put each airplane through a thorough washing and engine test. As each plane was put back together again, Hunter would take it up, climb to 10,000 feet, roll it over, and come back down in a screaming spiral. Pulling out only at 2,000 feet, he would do a series of rolls, stalls, and wing inversions, then climb back up to 10-angels—and shut the engine off. Letting the airplane plunge back down to 2,000 feet again, he would do an engine restart and pull out of the heart-stopping dive.

If the aircraft survived all that in the span of ten minutes, Hunter deemed it airworthy. In the end, all six planes—from the diminutive Bantams to the ultrawinged Z-16 re-con plane—had passed the test.

Once the rogue planes were checked out, Hunter’s next concern was the mammoth bomber.

His orders called for him to get this ultramonster airworthy as well, but he knew he could only accomplish ground testing on it. To actually get it airborne and fly it would take a crew—a large one.

And that came to the strangest part of his orders from OSS headquarters. The MVP had said he was to assemble a group of “previous associates” with which to crew the monster airplane. But who were these people supposed to be?