Return of Sky Ghost (30 page)

Disheartened, Hunter began moving forward. He appreciated the small irony here. It seemed as if he’d spent much time in his life crawling through plane wrecks, looking for clues. The last time was up in Iceland, literally the other end of the planet, when he searched a huge German air transport he’d shot down. This wreck was smaller, more cramped, and nowhere near as damaged. But clues sometimes fall out of the sky, he recalled thinking back then, and he’d been right. He wondered if it would be the same case now.

He and some STS men came upon the first clutch of bodies; these were twelve special ops soldiers, Japanese shock troops who’d been riding up at the front of the airplane. They were well equipped and heavily armed. Right away the STS men started stripping the weapons from them.

One of the commandos reached out and tapped Hunter’s arm. He was shining his flashlight on the face of one of the dead men. The man was badly cut, with many broken bones. He was probably in his mid thirties, with bad teeth, and several scars crossing his face. He looked Asian.

But was he, really?

The STS man rubbed his fingers along the dead man’s cheek and came up with a startling discovery: The man was wearing makeup. The STS man wiped some more and sure enough his fingers were turning dull orange from the makeup.

Hunter pulled out a kerchief and rubbed the man’s face clean. This was a little too weird. Makeup? On a special ops soldier?

It was true though. Once the makeup and eyeliner and other powders and paints were gone, there was no doubt the man lying before them was a Caucasian.

The STS men rolled over another body and wiped its face. The same was true here: The man had been made up to look Asian, but was in fact white. They all were; these twelve special ops troopers as well as the other dead soldiers further back in the plane. Not Japanese regular troops, but white men made to look Japanese.

The Brits were simply stunned. As was Hunter.

What the hell was this?

Then it got stranger.

There was a yell from the rear of the wreck. Hunter immediately began crawling back toward it. Two commandos had found another clutch of crash victims. They weren’t soldiers and no one had tried to make them look Asian. But they
were
wearing eyeliner, blush, nail polish, and lipstick. There were females—four of them. They were young, shapely, but dead—or at least three of them were. The fourth one was still alive.

Not for long though.

Hunter got to his knees and propped her up in his arms. She was dressed in the clothes of a hooker.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“It was a job,” she began. “These two guys hired us to take an airplane ride with them. We thought it was a two-day trip. You know, a party. Well, it lasted three weeks. And these two guys were crazy—crazy and drunk all the time. There was a computer up front, they were always asking it stupid questions. They were also looking for someone they kept called the Third Guy or something like that.”

Hunter gave her water from his canteen. She drank greedily but then coughed most of it back up.

“One day they asked the computer some very hard question,” she went on in a gasp. “And it took so long for the answer to come back, these two assholes thought they’d broken the thinking machine. Finally it spits out an answer that just drives these two weirdos even more crazy. Right away they forget all about looking for the Third Guy. Now they wanted to go get whatever it was that the computer had told them about. I think it was a bomb or something.”

She gasped again and Hunter tried to give her more water. But it was not going down at all.

“We stopped in Bermuda,” she went on, her voice now no more than a whisper, “and they kicked off the regular crew and hired these soldiers. They made them wear this weird makeup and clothes to make them look Asian. They also bought all these weapons for them. Finally we headed south. We landed and met up with some real Asians—I think they were Japanese—and they made a deal. A deal to come here and attack this place.”

She coughed and what came out was mostly blood.

“Where are these guys now?” Hunter asked her.

“The cowards,” she said with her last ounce of strength. “They jumped out, with the only two parachutes on board, just before we got shot down. They knew it was going bad, so they bailed. I’ll see them in Hell, I suppose.”

“Do you have any idea who they were?” Hunter asked her, even though he knew she was fading fast.

The woman shook her head no. “They never said. But before they went out the door I pulled this off of one of them. It was hanging around his neck, like it was a religious medal or something….”

She put something in Hunter’s hand. Then came another cough, and a series of convulsions.

“I don’t want to die here,” she said, looking up at Hunter. “I don’t even know where I am …”

She clutched his hand tightly and then let go. He tried mouth to mouth on her, but it was too late. She was gone.

Hunter gently lowered her to the crushed cabin floor and closed her eyes. Then he looked at what she had given him. It was an ID card. For the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS.

There was no name on the ID, no address, rank, or personal information. All it had for the man’s sole identification was a single letter.

That letter was
X
.

West Falkland

The next morning

T
HE TRENCHES PROTECTING THE
beach at Point Curly looked the same as the day before except they had twice as many weapons sticking out of them.

Thanks to the raid on Casket Island, the small force of defenders had twice as many rocket launchers, twice as many heavy-caliber triple-.50 machine guns, twice as many fire rockets.

But bulked-up as the defenders were, it didn’t change the overall situation. They were still outnumbered more than 50 to 1. The enemy also had at least fifty aircraft still operational over at McReady.
Plus,
they had two cruisers and two destroyers at their disposal, each with plenty of long-range naval guns and sea-launched artillery rockets.

Even worse, now the Japanese knew where they were. A pair of SuperKate recon planes had been flying over West Falkland all morning, undoubtedly taking photographs and paying particular attention to the defenses at Tenean Beach. It was no longer a hiding game for the defenders. The Japanese probably knew more about their positions than they did themselves.

What stealing the extra weapons might accomplish could only be measured in time. Because of the extra guns and ammo, the fight that everyone knew was coming might last a little longer. The defenders might enjoy a little longer life span. But that was it. The extra rockets, bullets, and fire shells would not affect the ultimate outcome of the battle. It would just delay its arrival.

His head thick with these thoughts and a million others, Hunter was in the third beach trench, helping dig a hole in which the last stolen rocket launcher would be placed. The day had dawned with routinely awful weather. Heavy rain mixed with snow. High winds. The waves were crashing on Tenean Beach with the impact of disrupter shells. For the defenders, these were the perfect atmospherics for a cold dark battle that would ultimately be the death of them all.

What a perverse joke all this was, Hunter thought now as he began packing icy sand around the launcher’s legs. He’d been handed a suicide mission which, if anything, would have given him the opportunity to go out as a very big hero, not that it meant very much to him. But still, after all the deep think and anxiety and philosophizing about it, fate or something had determined that he was actually going to die here, on this crummy cold and dirty beach. Nothing more than a piece of sand, going out like a match goes out. One-trillionth of what he’d been imagining.

It
was
kind of funny, he thought, as he hefted his millionth shovel full of wet sand. Yes, the cosmos
did
have a sense of humor. A cruel one.

It was also particularly ironic, considering the circumstances, that he would die on the ground. Whether it was going to be the soft mushy sand of Tenean Beach or the hard ice-packed bogs of inland West Falkland, Hunter knew now that he was definitely going to give it up with his two feet firmly entrenched on terra firma. That too was funny. The least God could do was allow him to die while airborne, preferably while battling the fifty or so jet aircraft the invaders still had at the ready.

But that was just impossible. The Z-3/15 was still sitting up in the cow field, gas in its tanks, ammo in its guns, and absolutely fucking useless.

If only …

A radio began buzzing. The electronic sound ran a cold chill through all the troops in the trench with him; it froze him for a moment as well. This buzz could very well be the death knell for all of them. The Roamer crew was up on the cliff nearby, looking over at San Carlos Bay where enemy troops had been massing all night and morning long. They’d been told by Asten to call down to the beaches when the invaders made their first move. Now the radio was vibrating with its warning buzzing.

The radio man clicked his set to receive and turned up the volume for everyone to hear. The Roamer crew’s message was simple. To the point. Chilling.

“Here they come …” was all it said.

The word went down the trenches in a matter of seconds.

Another report from the Roamer came in a minute later. It said the Japanese were pushing off the northwestern tip of San Carlos in landing craft disgorged from the troopships earlier. This was an interesting piece of news. It meant the invaders would have to travel several miles up the sound, make a wide turn to the west, go around a natural jetty known as Ashmont Rocks, turn south, and finally make for Tenean or “Tin Can” beach, as the defenders were now calling it.

That was a lot of sailing to do in what were basically landing craft built to run in from the big boat to the beach and little else. The awful weather would play havoc with the landing crafts as well. The waves presently breaking on Tin Can beach were huge, irregular, driven by the rain and snow. Many were over six feet at the crest and some even higher than that, possibly the worst weather conditions imaginable for a huge amphibious landing.

But all this meant little to the defenders on the beach. It would not be a gentle ride for their executioners. So what? There was a chance some of the Japanese troops might be swept away before they even reached the beach—but again it didn’t much matter. Whether the defenders faced 40 to 1 odds, or 35 to 1—what difference would it make? At the end of the day, they would all still be just as dead. Maybe it would only be a matter of how many bullets were riddling their bodies.

There was another thing: If the invading troops were on their way, that meant their air support, the fifty SuperZeroes and SuperKates over at McReady, would soon be in the air.

True, the defenders were stretched out so thin, the enemy aircraft would have to try to kill fifty people with fifty separate attacks. But all that meant was the inevitable would simply take a little longer, and the enemy pilots would be slightly more exhausted at the end of the day. Perhaps they would all be rewarded with naps.

Ten minutes went by.

The Roamer crew reported that the invasion force was now four miles away from San Carlos and moving northward fast.

Hunkered down in his trench, trying for some reason to keep dry, Hunter was continually checking his rifle’s magazine and sorting though what was left of his last thoughts.

It seemed like he would die with a real mystery on his hands. Or maybe just a set of totally screwy events. What they had found over on Casket Island had haunted him ever since returning to West Falkland. Like everything else lately, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Somehow the two OSS agents—both, he believed, were colleagues of his friend Y—had gotten wind of the powerful bomb Hunter had been sent to pick up. They had obviously decided to make a play for it first, but had gotten cold feet and bailed out when things got tough.

But now, even though they were gone, the invaders—whether they were real Japanese or not—were still going ahead with the invasion. Did the people behind all this even know why they were attacking West Falkland? Or were they just fulfilling a deal made with the OSS? And why would the OSS pay the Japanese to attack a place that the OSS had sent Hunter to on a highly secret mission? The more he thought about it, the less it made sense.

Not lost in all this was the dying woman’s reference to the OSS agents’ original quest: to find the Third Guy. Could this be Viktor Robotov, the man who fell into the Atlantic Ocean that day along with Hunter and Elvis Q? Hunter didn’t know, and would probably never know—not unless they had network news broadcasts in the afterlife.

The fact that he was going to die with all these unresolved notions was irritating. But what was really pissing him off was the fact that when the Japanese airplanes did come into play, they would be able to attack with impunity. He had an airplane. It was better than theirs. He had ammunition and the gas to fly rings around any of the Nipponese clowns.

All for want of a runway.

Or was it …

You will fly this way and that, and that way and this …

Hunter froze again. He’d heard those words so clearly just then, it was like someone was standing next to him, whispering in his ear.

That’s what the psychic had said. And damnit if her nonsense just suddenly made a lot of sense to Hunter. But was it real? Or was he freaking out because certain death was so near? He didn’t know.

Suddenly he was running.

Up and out of the trench, down a dune of icy sand, toward Colonel Asten’s command position. He reached it less than a minute later to find Asten directing a squad of soldiers who were putting the finishing touches on a fire rocket launcher position.

Just by his sudden appearance, Hunter interrupted them.

“Excuse me, Colonel,” he began, “but is the man who flew the McReady Beater over here with you?”

Asten looked at Hunter like he had gone daft. But then he turned around and searched the trench.