Return of Sky Ghost (28 page)

Y just didn’t know.

Other things were troubling him as well. There was still no word on the missing Agents X and Z. From everything he could determine, it was as if the two agents had simply vanished into thin air. Though there was a report that a very unusual plane was also missing from its berth at Maryland, no one he’d talked to was connecting these two events—yet.

There had been no word from Hunter yet either. He’d left on his bomb retrieval mission very late the day before—and not a word had been heard from him since. According to Y’s MVP readout, the Sky Ghost had received his last vector order, and the location where he was to pick up the Bomb. But there had been nothing but silence since.

This was war. Y was in special operations, and it was the nature of special ops that when agents go out, they sometimes go out for a long time. Some come back. Some don’t.

As far as X and Z, who knows what they were up to. But if Hunter turned up missing for any length of time, it would certainly put the kibosh on the War Department’s very secret Big Plan.

All this gave Y an odd feeling. The world of special ops was treacherous, true. But it was also very exciting, intriguing. And suddenly he felt like he was stuck in the wrong part of the world. At that moment, someplace else, he knew things were happening. Important things. Historic things.

Yet he was stuck here.

In the middle of the desert.

Missing everything …

He finally arrived at the reception hangar and slipped in the back door.

The group of passengers were seated in the middle of the huge barn, about a dozen Area 52 security people lining the edges. The passengers were reading a briefing paper which had been distributed to them as they came in. This had been Y’s idea. The reason these people had been brought here was so unusual and so unexplainable, he thought it best if they read about it first.

He watched as the fifty-six individuals scanned their mission papers, their heads moving back and forth in an almost choreographed fashion. Gradually, Y made his way to the front of the hall, where a slightly raised platform with a microphone and podium had been placed.

By the time he reached the platform, many in the crowd were just finishing the mission paper. To a man, they were now looking up at him, their faces masks of absolute confusion.

Y looked out at them for a moment. They were a disparate bunch. Forty-four of them were dressed in football warmup gear; these were the New Jersey Giants. Eight were in monks’ robes; these were the Brothers of the Living Desert. In the front row were the four individual targets picked up in the sweep. Y knew their names by heart now: John Thomas Toomey, Benjamin Wa, Jacques-Ivan Frost, and, sitting on the end, a beaming Mike Fitzgerald.

Seeing them for the first time, Y found something slightly unnerving about this bunch, especially those in front. The reason they were all called here was simple: Hunter believed that these people were connected to him somehow. They, or people exactly like them, had been colleagues of his, back wherever the hell he came from. They were the Associates. Looking at them, studying their faces, Y realized something else.

They all looked familiar to him too.

He waited until the last person had finished reading the mission paper. Then he tapped the microphone and asked, “Any questions?”

They came like a torrent.

One man stood up. He was Geraci, the head coach of the New Jersey Giants.

“Excuse me, but I think a huge mistake has been made here,” he began politely. “According to this, you are looking for people who know about building airplanes and flying combat missions. We’re football players. We don’t know squat about any of that stuff.”

A second man stood up, Jim Cook, the head monk.

“It’s the same situation here,” Cook said. “We are men of the cloth. We know nothing of what you are looking for.”

“Same here!” the man named Wa called out.

“And here …” said Frost.

“And triple here….” Toomey yelled.

Only the guy named Fitzgerald remained quiet. He just kept on smiling.

Y raised his hands and politely asked for quiet. Then he recited something he’d been practicing all day.

“We realize this is highly unusual,” he began. “And we realize it’s highly extraordinary. But no mistake has been made. Your government needs you—all of you, for this very special, very secret mission. We are hoping you will serve willingly.”

That last word sent a chill through the room, as it was meant to.

“You mean, we still have to do this, even if it’s unwillingly?” Geraci, still standing, asked. “You will make us?”

“Your country has called on you to serve it in wartime,” Y said. “It is your duty to serve. We at the OSS hope you do so.”

With that a silence descended on the room. Y had said the three magic letters: OSS. No one wanted to be on their bad side.

Y saw the resistance crumbling and spoke quickly again.

“Your families will be notified. They will be told you are safe and working for the war effort—but nothing more. Hopefully, you’ll all be back with them very soon.”

One hour later, the three buses were pulling up to the huge isolated hangar called Building 2A.

The fifty-six men were led into the hangar. They were all now wearing nondescript work coveralls, boots, and gloves. Each man had been give a personal field pack which included a one-man tent, a foam mattress, bathing items, snack food, cigarettes, and two changes of clothes.

The inside of the hangar had been reelectrified and now a series of bright halogen lamps bathed the place in a deep golden light. The colossal bomber took on a particularly eerie glow in this illumination. It really did look like something from someplace else now.

Twenty-four air mechanics from the Bride Lake base had accompanied the Associates here. They too were carrying personal field packs. They were at the disposal of the Associates. They would do the heavy lifting; they would do whatever the fifty-six men found they could not do. To aid in this task, the mechanics were lugging boxes of manuals on the gigantic airplane with them, and trunkloads of tools. They too were in awe of this monstrous aircraft.

As the small army began to fan out over the hangar, looking up at the huge plane from all sides, Y corralled Fitzgerald, Toomey, Frost, Wa, Geraci, and Cook and asked them to step to one side. These men had been designated as leaders for the group.

“This is it gentlemen,” Y told them. “Everything you might need is here. Now you know the problem. You know what we want you to do. My advice is to just stick with your instincts and see what happens.”

But the guy named Toomey was scratching his head. The college professor seemed to be the most confused of the bunch, and also the loudest.

“OK, let me get this straight,” he began. “You have a little bomb and you have a big plane, but the little bomb creates such a big blast that if the big plane drops it, the big plane won’t be able to get out of the way in time. So you want us to figure out a way to adapt this plane to a mission that can only be described as suicidal? And you want us to do this even though none of us has had an ounce of experience in this area?”

Y thought about what Toomey had said for a few seconds and then finally nodded his head.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s
exactly
what we want you to do.”

The South Atlantic

T
HE STORM HIT WEST
Falkland Island just after noontime.

It was a typical December gale—high winds, sheets of rain, lots of sideways snow. Once it was upon them, an enormous frozen fog bank enveloped the island like a cumulus cloud.

As uncomfortable as it was, however, the bad weather provided perfect cover for a rather desperate operation.

By 0100 hours, four of the STS SuperChieftain tanks were being positioned along a spit of sand near Point Curly called Tenean Beach. Sixteen heavy machine guns, four antipersonnel rocket launchers and a pair of recoilless rifles were being placed on the beach too. Manning all these weapons were some very cold, very anxious STS commandos.

The weapons were being placed inside a series of trenches which had been dug into the hard ice-encrusted sand along the half mile-long beach. The first trench was filled with pieces of wreckage claimed from the cratered runways at McReady airfield and carried here by the ancient Beater. Jagged and charred, they made for good low-tide water obstacles. Placed in the thick sands way out on the sandbar, they could prove a hindrance to any troop-bearing landing craft, though not a very large one.

Behind the beach obstacles was a line of light machine guns. These posts were manned by twenty STS soldiers spread out in a pathetically thin line that stretched more than a quarter of a mile. Behind them was a second trench bearing twelve more commandos and eight survivors from McReady airfield. They were manning the rocket launchers and the remaining AA guns salvaged from McReady. Despite their heavier firepower, they were stretched along the beach in ranks even thinner than their comrades in the first slit.

Behind them were two more STS tanks. They were being partially dug into a sand dune, the bent branches of a grove of scrub rag trees providing convenient covering for their very long gun muzzles. Behind them were two more tanks and the last of the rocket launchers. These were manned by a squad of remaining troopers.

This was the defense force that would face the twelve warships of the approaching invasion fleet.

On the highest part of the tallest dune stood Hunter. He looked down at the fortifications he and the other commandos had carved out in the last two very uncomfortable hours. Shovel in hand, digging madly along with a handful of commandos, he tried like hell to remember back to a time Back There when he’d faced such overwhelming enemy odds. But there was no memory of anything quite so lopsided as this. He figured from the size of the troopships he’d seen, each one was carrying at least 300 troops, probably more. This meant that within an hour or so, as many as 1,800 enemy troops could be splashing ashore—and there would be less than seventy people here on the beach to stop them.

Hunter looked up and down the trenches again. It would be nothing less than a slaughter.

It was strange, because the only thing of which everyone was absolutely sure was that the invaders would come ashore here, at Tenean, simply because, between the rocky northern shoreline and the perpetual ice and snow, this small beach was the only place where landing craft could get a clean passage to shore. But for this twist of topography, they would have been hard-pressed to land at all.

Helping to dig in one of the recoilless rifles, Hunter had gained much admiration for the STS commandos. They were as cool as the situation would allow, and certainly responding well to the dire turn of events, while at the same time not giving any indication at all what such an elite unit as their own was doing here on this very desolate South Atlantic island.

Of course, it wasn’t a hard question to answer. A certain amount of deduction told Hunter a few things: Obviously the STS was here to protect something highly secret in nature—and what else could that be than the same facility from which Hunter was supposed to pick up the Bomb.

By backtracking, he could also assume that, the Main/AC being as timely as it was, the message that Hunter was on his way to retrieve the Bomb probably arrived some time during the attack on McReady, where the main radio transmitter was located. Once the main radio shack had been bombed, all hope of the message getting through had been lost. With his MVP totally out of juice, and the STS’s Boomer not reaching very far, any hope of getting any kind of SOS message out to anyone was practically nil.

So Hunter was stuck here. The Z-3/15 was sitting up in a cow pasture near the farmhouse. There was nothing even resembling a runway anywhere on this island, so in effect, his jazzed-up airplane was useless.

Try as he might, there just wasn’t any scenario he could come up with that had this coming battle turning out any other way but disastrous.

But even darker were Hunter’s premonitions about this invasion, now probably less than one hour away. The question was a simple one, and it was on everyone’s lips:
Why?
Why were the Japanese invading the lonely Falklands?

Expansion of their South American empire would seem to be the logical conclusion—but there was something cockeyed about that notion. Hunter knew firsthand the true state of affairs of the Nipponese Occupation Forces in South America. They were on the defensive just about everywhere. They were confused. They were paranoid. They feared Brazil coming into the war. They were frightened to death of the nightly firebombings. Not exactly the time to be going off on some wayward adventure, trying to capture two empty islands nearly 600 miles off the coast of the very tip of their very shaky South American empire.

No, it didn’t add up—that is, if one looked at the attackers’ motives as being purely military. But if not military, then what would their motives be? Clearly they wanted control of McReady airport—and soon they would have it, because it would be impossible to defend it again. Clearly they had thousands of men with which to take the islands. But why? If not a military exercise—what was this then?

A special operation? That really was the only other answer. A massive covert act. But again, why the Falklands?

There was only one answer there too: They were coming here for the same reason Hunter had. Somehow they had found out about the Bomb; somehow they had divined its location in the Falklands.

There really was no other explanation.

Hunter kept digging into the rock-hard frozen sand, at the same time scanning the work being done on the trenches in front of him, as well as behind.

The STS commandos were doing their work well, and with amazing pluck, considering what awaited them when the Japanese finally landed. A cold wind blew across Hunter’s face as he turned west, looking for the first sign of the invaders.

Is this really how it is going to end?
he asked himself gloomily. On some small beach in the middle of nowhere? A heroic death would be hard to manage here. There were no components in place to show much courage. With the odds running nearly 50 to 1 in manpower alone, there probably wouldn’t be any medals won today. Hunter chuckled grimly to himself. It was darkly funny. After nothing less than a transuniversal journey, he’d thought the cosmos had bigger plans in store for his demise.