Return of Sky Ghost (22 page)

Y’s attempts to have OSS Command clarify this particular order had not been fruitful. The OSS Command was working closely on this with its Psychic Evaluation Corps. Essentially psychics with officer rank inside the military, these swamis-in-medals were saying that for the mission to be a success, Hunter and
only
Hunter, could divine who these mysterious “previous associates” could be.

He’d been thinking about this queer aspect ever since. What the hell did the “previous associates” order mean? The usual suspects—such as Sara’s female fighter pilots, or a select crew gleaned from the bomber gangs now operating off Xwo Mountain—were quickly discounted by him. That solution would have been way too easy.

It was the term “previous” which obviously held the key. But who would his “previous associates” be if not the people with whom he’d fought the Germans out of Iceland or those atop Xwo Mountain?

Hunter had found himself dwelling on this question nearly every hour of every day and very late into every night. Now, as he was roaring along not 200 feet above the desert floor and reaching speeds close to Mach 4, he was working on a new theory.

Back in the other place, he had known Agent Y as Stan Yastrewski, the man nicknamed “Yaz” who was part of the United Americans’ inner circle. In strict terms then, he certainly qualified as a “previous associate.”

The same was true for the bomber pilot currently serving on Xwo Mountain named PJ O’Malley. Back There, Hunter knew him as “Captain Crunch,” president and CEO of the Ace Wrecking Company, a private fighter-bomber outfit. He too could be accurately described as a “previous associate.”

And then the third clue: When Hunter was first being shipped up to Iceland, he’d met a man briefly on the way who was being sent to another front. This man’s face had been extremely familiar; his Irish brogue had been too. Hunter eventually realized who this guy was. Back There his name was Mike Fitzgerald and he’d been as close a friend to Hunter as one could get.

But while some of Hunter’s memories of his previous life were still foggy, there was one of which he was quite sure: Mike Fitzgerald was dead, killed at the Battle of Football City, the turning point in the war, which threw the Fourth Reich out of America.

This had brought up a tough question: If there were people who existed in two places—Here and Back There—and one of them was dead Back There, was there a possibility they could still be alive Here?

That thought opened up some rather unnerving possibilities—frightening in their implications. Because if people Hunter both loved and hated and had passed on Back There, they could still be alive Here … well, every time he’d gotten to that point before, he’d had to literally shut his mind off. The ramifications of such a thing were just too broad.

But this day, he willed his mind to stay open and was determined to let it all flow. At the same time, he started climbing. Up from 200 feet to 50,000 in less than sixty seconds. Up to 75,000 in just twenty seconds after that. Then up to 85,000, then 90,000, and then finally topping out at 100,000 feet. From here he could see the curvature of the earth, the edge of space, and the stars beyond. He was high, man. Almost twenty miles high.

And it was up here that he did his best work.

He started from point one. He had apparently been handed a suicide mission by the OSS, but did it really need to be a voluntary death sentence? He had been told to assemble a crew of “previous associates,” but did finding them really have to be so difficult? He had to get the monster bomber in the air in order to drop a bomb so powerful, it couldn’t possibly escape the blast. Or was there some way he could solve this dilemma as well?

He goosed his throttle and pulled back on the stick and began climbing even higher. Up to 105,000 feet, 110,000, 115,000 …

He flew higher and higher, and faster and faster, and allowed his mind to spring wide open and let everything in.

Around 118,000 feet, and Mach 6.6, it began coming to him….

Area 52

I
T WAS STRANGE HOW
Agent Y got the message.

He was sitting in his new office at Area 52, eating a sandwich and slurping coffee when his MVP began blinking.

He lazily sat up and punched the activate button. Because he’d just downloaded a ton of mission updates a half hour before, he was thinking this indication was nothing more than the goose the Main/AC would run through the mission pad every so often to make sure he was still “on the system.”

Usually just turning the MVP to full power was enough for the diagnostic scan check to be run, with any errors found instantly corrected. Then the pad’s screen would go dark again.

But this time, there was actually another message beaming on screen. It had been coded, recoded, and decoded a total of nine times already, extraordinary security for what Y still assumed was a routine transmission.

He worked the MVP’s buttons and was finally looking at the very unscrambled message. It would turn out to be anything but routine.

It was a simple inquiry really: Had Y had any recent contact with two of his OSS colleagues, Agents X and Z?

It was a strange question, because even though Y had worked closely with X and Z in the past, OSS Command as well as every Main/AC in the country knew that he was not working with them on this Area 52 project. In fact, he hadn’t worked with them in some time.

But if this was common knowledge within the odd world of the OSS, why this message?

Y answered truthfully that he hadn’t heard or talked to or had any kind of communications with his two erstwhile partners in nearly four months.

The mission center accepted his reply and began to break transmission. But Y stopped it at the last moment. He was curious. He asked the MVP a question: Why did OSS Command want to know this? The answer took about a minute to churn out, but when it did, it shook Y right down to his feet.

It seemed that the exact whereabouts of Agents X and Z was unknown at the moment.

Y had to read the stark message several times before it began to sink in. X and Z missing? How could that be?

These two were among the high cadre of the highest-clearance agents in the U.S. Someone
always
knew where the hell they were. So how could their present location be unknown to the all-knowing OSS and its mechanical partner in crime the Main/AC? The Main/AC had the ability to find just about anyone in the world. How could it lose track of two of the OSS’s highest agents?

Putting his sandwich away, Y asked the Main/AC that very question.

But no matter how many ways he phrased it, no matter what kind of verbiage he used, the thinking machine replied the same way, over and over again: “Not enough inquiry input.”

In other words, the all-powerful computer simply didn’t know …

It was exactly noon when Hunter walked into Y’s office.

The OSS agent barely looked up when Hunter came in.

“Just getting a new mission update,” he said as Hunter flopped onto the couch.

“The OSS is canceling all this nonsense?” Hunter asked hopefully.

“Far from it,” Y reported. “It has to do with the bomb they want you to drop.”

“What about it?” Hunter asked with a yawn.

“They want you to pick it up and bring it back here for loading.”

Hunter immediately began paying attention. It was strange, because at that moment, the prospect of a trip out of Area 52 was appealing to him.

“Where is it?” he asked, sitting up.

Y laughed as he read the MVP screen.

“Well, this is something,” he said. “They don’t know. At least they’re saying they don’t know. Supposedly the bomb’s location is so secret, it doesn’t exist. At least according to the guys typing on the other end of this thing.”

Hunter reflopped himself back onto the couch.
Alice in Wonderland
made more sense than the OSS did sometimes.

“So, if it doesn’t exist,” he asked Y, “how the hell am I supposed to find the damn thing?”

Y kept reading from the MVP: “You are to proceed to a certain air coordinate, and receive further orders once you get there.”

Hunter nearly burst out laughing. Maybe he was dreaming all this.

“Are you saying that before they send me on a suicide mission, they’re sending me on a wild-goose chase?”

“It says you should launch tomorrow at midnight,” Y continued. “The mission requirements call for you to carry long-range drop tanks on your new bird. They want you to go up with about two thousand gallons of gas.”

Hunter did the math. The Z-3/15 carried 1,000 gallons of gas internally. With its superefficient engines and that much fuel, he estimated its range to be about 4,000 miles. The OSS brain trust wanted him to go up with another 1,000 in gas and, he assumed, be expected to rejuice at his point of return departure. Either way, it was obvious they were sending him someplace out of the local neighborhood.

“Where is this coordinate?” Hunter asked him. “Or is that top secret too?”

Y shook his head and wrote down some numbers. Then he changed screens and came up with a world map on the MVP. He punched in the numbers and had the coordinate on the map in five seconds.

“Sixty degrees latitude, twenty degrees long,” he said. “That puts you right above Bolivia somewhere. Once there, you’ll get your next vector point and the final go orders.”

Again Hunter just shook his head. The OSS was looking at him as some kind of superman now. He was sure that back where he came from, Back There, he had done similar things. But he was also certain that the United Americans had never loaded so much pressure on him, in such a robotic, faceless, impersonal way.

“You know, I don’t even get paid,” he grumbled suddenly to Y.

“You don’t?”

“No, I don’t,” Hunter told him. “I went from flight officer to major after the war. I got my pins and my new uniform, but I never got a paycheck. Not then. Not down in South America. Not now. The least they could do is pay me.”

Y just shrugged.

“I guess now that they consider you a secret weapon,” he said, “they feel they don’t have to pay you. You’re considered priceless, invaluable. Beyond mere monetary compensation.”

“Well, that’s comforting,” Hunter replied, again with a grumble.

There was a short silence between them.

“Is everything about the capabilities of the Main/AC computer classified?” Hunter asked.

“Just about,” was the agent’s reply. “Why?”

Hunter hesitated a moment before asking the next question. If he didn’t have a crew to fly the monster bomber, then he couldn’t go on the suicide mission. Was it a dereliction of duty if a man refuses to dig his own grave?

He didn’t know.

So he pressed on.

“Would it be accurate to say that the Main/AC has a file on every member of the U.S. military, past and present?”

Y actually smiled at that one.

“Confidentially,” he said, “I happen to know the Main/AC has a file on every person in the United States—military or not.”

That reply sent an unexpected chill down Hunter’s back. Suddenly he was back on the roof of the Happy Valley casino again, his psyche pestering him to look north, his mind’s eye trying to find someone else close to him.

Someone other than Sara.

If the Main/AC could find anyone, then …

But he quickly shook these thoughts away and went back to the matter at hand.

“So, in theory,” he went on, “I could give you a list of names, and if they were put into the computer, it would locate them?”

“I guess so,” Y replied. “Why?”

Hunter lay back down on the couch and began staring at the ceiling again.

“Because,” he answered slowly, “I think I’ve found our bomber crew.”

Somewhere in the mid Atlantic

T
HE AIRCRAFT WAS CALLED
Nacht-Sputnik.

It was a bastardization of German and Russian. Roughly translated, it meant “Night Traveler.”

In a world of huge aircraft, the NS-1 was a fair oddity. It was about one-tenth the size of a B-17/36, which made it about as big as a Boeing 727 airliner from Back There.

It was powered by six double-reaction engines, again a small power-pack for a plane these days. Its cabin could support a crew of only a dozen or so, and it had only a single galley, a single head, and just a few foldout bunks. Again, small accommodations for an ultralong-range airplane.

Long-range capability the
Nacht-Sputnik
had, though. It was relatively small for a reason: efficiency. Its engines had been finely engineered in Germany during the last days of the war. Its airframe had been crafted of lightweight but sturdy aluminum taken from downed U.S. aircraft. The smaller the plane, the less it weighed. And the less it weighed, the more efficient its engines could be, especially in saving fuel. This plane was very efficient. As a result, it could stay aloft for three weeks, or even more.

It was originally built for the most senior officers of the German High Command as a kind of escape pod, an airplane that could have left Berlin just minutes before the collapse and stayed aloft long enough for the heat to cool down and a deal to be made for it to land somewhere hidden or neutral or both. Because the planet was 70 percent water, and the preferred hiding place might be a deserted island somewhere, the airplane had been adapted for sea landings and takeoffs as well.

The plane never got to take off on that mission, though. It had been spirited out of Germany by the OSS after the war and brought back to the United States, where it had sat languishing in a hangar in Maryland until recently.

The mission it was on now did not exactly pale in comparison to the original, however. Truth was, in some ways it was even more intriguing.

There were thirteen people on board at present. Two pilots, three navigators, a flight engineer, and a guy to grease the Main/AC. Four other crewmembers were high-priced call girls pulled into duty at the last moment for the two men who were presently acting as Commanders of the Aircraft.

These two were OSS agents: code names X and Z. At the moment, just about the entire U.S. intelligence community was looking for them.