Return of Sky Ghost (20 page)

They were soon roaring down a barely paved roadway marked Highway 6. For the next thirty minutes, the road carried them through miles of open desert, around several buttes, and through a few dry washes. Then they went up and over a small mountain. On the other side, off in the distance, they could see their destination: an enormous hangar nuzzled into the side of a blind canyon. The jagged ledges above it made it nearly impossible to see from just about any direction save south.

It was the perfect place to hide something. Something very big.

They made for this place, per instructions from the MVP. But Hunter soon realized that the long, straight-as-an-arrow road they’d picked up at the bottom of the mountain was actually not a road at all. It was a runway. One that was at least ten miles long and ended at the front gate to the huge hangar.

“If whatever is in that barn needs ten miles to take off, I don’t even want to see it,” Hunter said.

“This time I tend to agree with you,” Y replied, looking at the MVP. “But that’s exactly what we’ve been told to do.”

They finally reached the main gate, where they were met by a pair of sentries. These men were attached to the Air Guards, the Air Corps’s infantry wing. They were a bit surprised to see them.

“Are you lost, sir?” one asked Y. “We don’t get many visitors out here.”

Y showed his OSS pass plus one for Hunter and then displayed his orders on the MVP screen. The sentries saluted and they were waved in. Up close, the hangar looked like a gigantic cigarette box. No windows. Two doors. Another pair of guards was stationed at the front door. They too checked their passes and the MVP orders and directed them to a small parking area. Here they left the jeepster.

Y punched the combination into the hangar’s side-access door and this time it opened on the first try. He and Hunter stepped inside, closing the door behind them. The inside of the barn was cold, dark, and extremely dusty. The sentry had been right. This place didn’t get many visitors. Judging by the musty odor, it seemed like no one had been inside the hangar in years.

They walked into the main room and Y somehow found the light switch. Like before, he fumbled a bit and then finally turned it on. The lights flickered once and then stayed on for good.

What stood in front of them now was both startling and slightly unreal.

It was an airplane—and it was a huge one all right. Huge wasn’t the right word—this thing was way bigger than a B-17/36, way bigger than a B-24/52. It was even bigger than a Navy CB-201.

It was enormous. Immense.
Colossal.

“Wow,” was all Hunter could say.

Y was speechless.

The monster had wings at least three hundred feet long
each.
Ten giant reverse contra-prop engines adorned each wing, with an additional four-jet array down near each tip. The fuselage was about 1,000 feet long, and the tail wing assembly probably ten stories high. The giant plane most closely resembled the B-17/36; it bore the nose of a ’36, as well as the wings. Its fuselage actually looked closer to what Hunter knew as the B-29 Superfortress, a late-entry long-range propeller-driven bomber from his version of World War II. But this airplane was a hundred times bigger than what he remembered a B-29 to be.

In this strange world of big, bigger, and biggest aircraft, this one was simply the largest airplane either one of them had ever seen.

“Who in the world built this?” Hunter asked, astounded. “And why?”

Y was already punching buttons on his mission pad to find out. But he read the next set of orders and again was simply left shaking his head.

“It says we have to climb into this thing and look around before we can find out,” Y said.

They did.

If possible, the airplane was stranger inside than out. It was so immense, it actually had a little shuttle car to carry crewmembers the length of the fuselage. The flight deck looked better suited to a battleship. There were seats for six pilots above which the commander of the aircraft sat like a king lording it over his court.

The flight chamber was encased almost totally in Plexiglas. It sat above the nose of the airplane like the huge glassy pupil of a monstrous one-eyed bug. A four-stop elevator was used to get from this lofty position to the lower chambers.

The fuselage itself was as cavernous as a subway tunnel. It was pockmarked with observation blisters and four sets of catwalks for traveling the sides of the great airship. Once at mid fuselage, Hunter was astonished to see one could walk
inside
the wings. There were actually small living compartments inside the wing roots, complete with bunks, sinks, heads, and even observation windows.

The long ride to the end of the airplane revealed mountains of tubes and wires and switches and more wires. Sitting in the tail, protected somewhat by a wire mesh enclosure, was a larger than usual Main/AC Battle Management Computer. The interconnected “thinking machine” could be found in one form or another aboard every U.S. Navy warship, Air Corps aircraft, Army tank, jeep, and mobile gun, as well as inside many noncombat sites, from the office of the highest general in the War Department to the cubicle of the lowliest supply clerk.

The Main/AC was everywhere—even in the back of this enormous airplane.

They walked the length of the aircraft again, still astonished at its size. But could it fly? Y didn’t know and Hunter wasn’t asking.

But once they’d reached the forward compartment again, Hunter took another long glance down the interior of the ship and then turned to Y. “OK, I’ll ask again: What exactly do they want me to do with this thing?”

Y pushed some buttons, retrieved his next set of instructions and immediately frowned again.

“Sorry, I can’t tell you yet,” he said. “We’ve got another place to go.”

The MVP had them driving back out into the desert ten minutes later.

The heat was searing now, beating down on them in their unprotected jeepster. But Hunter’s mind was not so much on the sweaty conditions, as it was on what he’d seen here already and the surprise he knew the OSS was laying for him.

The monster airplane was intriguing to him at least—as all things aeronautical were. Back There, if he recalled correctly, the usual process for building military aircraft began in the design stage, then advanced to building several prototypes. The best performing prototype would be selected, and soon, factories would be turning out the new airplane based on this design.

Here, in this place, the building process was more specialized. Instead of 5,000 copies of one design being produced, there might be 100 copies of
fifty
designs. It seemed to be the less efficient way of doing things, but it did have one positive aspect: It made for a world that was rich in different airplane designs and capabilities. Back There, Hunter could count on one hand the number of airplane designs a typical military pilot might fly in a typical career. Here, that number would be doubled, maybe even tripled.

But even this, that he might have dozens of cool airplanes to fly, wasn’t enough to lift the suspicion that the OSS was about to use him, rely on him, entrust him with something way out of proportion to what he could really do. It was a very uneasy feeling.

Strangely, he accepted the premise that he was a “secret weapon,” as much as a human could accept such a thing. He
was
an anomaly here in this world, and he couldn’t argue with the thesis that he did have an effect on the outcome of the last war. But was that because he was not from here, and just by his transference to this place alone caused the war to end once he jumped into it? Or would it have ended anyway?

It was a strange but important question and he didn’t have the answer and that’s what bothered him the most. It was not long after he found himself in this world that he had made one important discovery: that the people here had no conception of the idea of “coincidence.” Everything that happened Here just simply happened, and if two events seemed to coincide, the people here just accepted it as the way it was supposed to go. They did not appreciate the irony of the coincidental event because they had no concept of it.

Hunter’s insertion into the war against Germany and the fact that the conflict finally came to an end shortly thereafter could not be labeled a “coincidence,” no matter how mystical or cosmic or strange it might be. Here, it was just accepted as the way things were.

But now, with these new burdens being placed upon him, what would be their result? Would Hunter’s simple presence in the OSS’s future plans actually guarantee them to work? Or did they depend more on his skills, his reasoning, his derring-do to pull the fat out of the fire at the end?

He just didn’t know. But one thing seemed certain: He felt he was used to doing these things—leading desperate missions, fighting against the odds, and trying to win big. The vast majority of his memories were still hazy. But back where he came from, Back There, he knew he must have been quite a hero.

They drove for about half an hour, again staying on the barely paved roadway, passing enormous buttes, dozens of small canyons, and innumerable dry washes.

Finally they reached their next destination: It was another hangar simply plunked down out in the middle of nowhere. It was ringed with concertina wire and had the requisite pair of guards watching the front gate.

Y flashed their OSS passes and again, they were waved in.

The size of the hangar was interesting, because it was normal. Something built to house just one, normal-size airplane. This was another oddity here. In this bigger-is-better world, it was the small things that were special.

Y got them by the second set of guards and they soon gained access to the small hangar. Like the one before, it was dark in here, and musty. The air stank, telling Hunter that the door to this place hadn’t been opened in a while either.

But when Y flipped on the light, what Hunter saw next made him forget the stink, the heat, the dirt, the dust, and the fact that the OSS was counting on him to win a major war—again.

What he saw gave him such a jolt, all these things were suddenly washed away. A spark in his memory turned to flame. Years ago. Back There. He’d walked into a hangar and seen his beloved F-16 revealed to him. It would be his plane for the next five years, through many air battles, many wars, many memories.

Now that identical feeling was running through him again.

Before him was an airplane. A jet-powered one. Those were the only two things he knew for sure.

It was sleek. Sleek to the
n
th degree. It was so sleek in fact, it looked like a flying hypodermic needle. Its nose was so sharp it did indeed look like it could puncture skin. Its fuselage was extremely long and thin, so much so that the canopy blended right into the airframe. Its wings were short, stubby, almost nonexistent. The fuselage ended, quickly, with a small tail section positioned slightly above the twin exhausts. It was painted all white, with silver and chrome trim.

Quite frankly, Hunter had never seen a more beautiful plane in his life.

“Jessuzz, what is it?” Hunter heard himself exclaim.

Again, Y checked the MVP.

“It’s called the Z-3/15,” Y said. “Nickname, ‘Stiletto Deuce.’ First flight, October 1972. Reason for being: a high-speed transsonic fighter, capable of near-space flight. Development off and on until 1991. Top speed attained: Mach 6.1. Highest altitude climbed: 111,000 feet. Wow, that
is
the edge of space. Armament: two cannons, two antiaircraft missiles. Only one model exists. This is it.”

Hunter was slowly nodding his head as if he was paying attention to every word Y was saying—but he wasn’t. He couldn’t. His ears weren’t working. Neither were his knees.

This plane looked so … well,
cool,
he really couldn’t do anything else but stare at it.

“What … is it for?” he finally managed to ask Y.

Y checked his orders. And at last he saw something that didn’t make him frown.

“What is it for?” he replied. “It’s for you. It’s yours. This is your new mode of transportation. To do with what you like.”

Suddenly, with those words, everything that had been weighing on Hunter’s mind simply ceased to exist. Suddenly everything had changed. Suddenly he was more one with Here than ever. Because now, he had something that he’d had Back There. He had an airplane. His airplane. Sure, the Mustang-5 of his European war days was a great plane. And the Super Ascender was also a neat little bird.

But they weren’t like this.

Y consulted the MVP, then walked over to a utility deck which was on wheels next to the sleek airplane. He rummaged through the top drawer and came out with a silver-plated card with many numbers displayed on it. It was an activation card, the thing that was needed to plug into the cockpit’s Main/AC computer extension and start the airplane

With no ceremony at all, he simply handed the card to Hunter. It was like giving him the keys to the Kingdom.

As soon as that card touched his fingers, Hunter knew his world Here would be different. No more doubts. No more questions. He was suddenly complete. Stay tight. Stay cool. It was time to do the impossible.

His seduction by the OSS was now complete. And he knew it.

“I’ve got to hand it to your bosses,” he said to Y. “They really know how to pull a guy’s string.”

T
HEY RETURNED TO AREA
52 and after tracking down the security officer, were given the use of an office, a telephone, and a place to plug in the MVP for recharging.

Hunter lay sprawled on the couch in the small office. Its only window looked west, out away from the runways and the rest of the base, and into the mountains beyond. He was drinking coffee and watching the sunset as Y, seated behind an ancient oak desk, fiddled with the power-drained MVP.

A number of thoughts drifted through Hunter’s mind, as was his wont at the end of most long days. As the sun was going down, the desert was turning golden. His thoughts went backwards from there. Seeing all the strange planes at Bride Lake. The wild nights in Texas. Xwo mountain. The battle at Axaz. The Super Ascender. Sara.