Return of Sky Ghost (31 page)

“Yes, there he is,” Asten said. “Fifth man down. Duggen, I think his name is.”

Hunter didn’t stay long enough to hear any more. He was scrambling down the icy trench until he reached the man in question.

“You Duggen?” he asked the man.

“Yes?”

“What is the lift capacity of your Octo?” Hunter demanded of him.

Like Asten before him, Duggen looked back at Hunter as if the American pilot had gone mad, which, in a way, he had.

“I don’t know,” Duggen finally replied. “On a day like this, not very much.”

“Can you lift twenty-five long?”

Duggen was startled. This was a strange conversation to be having when death was about to sail into the bay. But Hunter continued to press him.

“Twenty-five thousand pounds?” he replied, astounded. “With this wind, and that bird’s shitty engines? That would be a stretch.”

That’s when Hunter literally picked the man up and out of the trench.

He turned to Asten who had walked up behind him, and made a strange request: “Permission to take this man from the line, sir?”

Asten was totally befuddled at this point, as was anyone within earshot. As if to add to the chaos, the Roamer teams’ latest message was blaring from the radio.

“Thirty-six invasion craft confirmed heading your way,” the dire report came through, washed in static and nearly drowned out by the howling wind and the driving rain. “At least five hundred troops. More like seven hundred … Estimate time to your position is about twenty-five minutes. Tops.”

There might have been another army that, upon hearing those words and knowing their implications, would have simply given up, and fled. But not these people. If anything the people in the trenches began working more furiously, not less. Death was less than half an hour away. They didn’t want to go with a whimper.

Neither did Hunter.

Somehow the STS colonel sensed this.

“Permission granted,” he said with a plucky clip. “But what on Earth are you planning to do? Lift us all out of here with that beast?”

Hunter stopped in midstream. Lift everyone out? On the Beater? … “Not a bad idea,” he finally replied. “But I think I’ve got a better one.”

The Roamer crew hiding atop of Point Curly cliff had the best view of what happened next.

They were still sending back reports on the enemy’s methodical progress up Falkland Sound. Battling high waves and wicked winds, the small fleet of landing craft was nevertheless moving slowly but surely to the other side of the three-mile-wide waterway. After that, they would have to round Ashmont Rocks in order to face Tin Can beach. But this would take only about ten minutes to do once the invasion force was fully across the sound. They were about halfway across now.

Worse still, a long line of Japanese aircraft was waiting along the longest runway still intact at McReady air base. This parade was made up of approximately thirty SuperZeroes and twenty SuperKates, the survivors from the previous day’s disastrously costly air raid. The fact that there were more fighters left than bombers was a telling reminder just how brutal the air battle over McReady had been. It also showed just how badly the fighters had failed in their duty the day before. Despite the fact that McReady was eventually claimed by their forces, the fighters had not protected the bomber force as they had been charged to do. They had run away at the first sight of the strange white airplane which had seemed to come out of nowhere and shot down half their number. Their cowardice would have a big effect on today’s operation as well: The Japanese were lopsided in favor of fighters when, according to the book on amphibious invasions, if one was attacking a beach, one should have as many bombers in the air as possible.

But in this case, common military sense was not too important. There was still a substantial force waiting to take off at McReady, no matter what kind of airplanes they were. And it certainly seemed more formidable considering the defenders of West Falkland Island had no air power of their own to challenge the Japanese.

The Roamer crew continued to send back its dire reports, trying to stay hidden while battling the extrahigh winds and rain up on the cliff.

They had just reported that the Japanese landing crafts were about two-thirds of the way across the sound when suddenly, they heard the most ungodly sound. It was loud enough to blot out the scream of the wind, the splattering of the rain, and the roar of fifty jet engines being warmed up three miles away.

The Roamer crew turned as one and in time to see a very strange thing coming over the top of the hill.

It was a Beater—it was making this hellish sound. But not just any Beater. This was the absolute shitbox, which had spent the last ten years rusting away over at McReady airfield before being moved to West Falkland the day before.

It was a fright to see. Only seven of its eight rotors looked to be actually turning—and two of them were in flames! But the Octo was somehow flying, somehow clawing its way into the stormy icy skies with a bansheelike squeal that seemed multiplied more than just seven times.

But that was not all. The Octo was carrying something—and this was the really strange part. Hanging by a three-strand set of heavy chains below the enormous, slightly banana-shaped fuselage, was Hunter’s Z-3/15.

The Beater went over the Roamer’s position so low, the bottom of the Z-3/15 actually scraped the top hatch of the Roamer’s turret. Just the closeness of such a maelstrom of wind and exhaust and electricity and electronic junk caused all the juiced-up systems inside the Roamer to blink on and off several times before settling back down and staying on, though almost reluctantly.

Once the Beater topped the peak of Point Curly though, it suddenly found about 800 feet of flying space underneath it and its strange cargo, a welcome development. Still, its engines were smoking heavily and its noise only grew louder as it moved offshore. The Roamer crew simply didn’t know what to think. They watched open-mouthed as the Beater slowly made its way—sideways—toward enemy-held East Falkland island, its strange aerial cargo swinging wildly beneath it.

“What are they going to do?” someone inside the Roamer cried out. “Drop the needle-nosed airplane on the Japanese?”

No, not quite.

But close….

They continued to watch in amazement as they saw the Beater close in on McReady field. Incredibly, because of the angle of its approach and its relatively low altitude and the masking wind and rain, the Beater was actually sneaking up on the unsuspecting Japanese.

Once it made landfall over the east island, it got even lower. It was heading right for the runway where the fifty enemy warplanes were waiting, engines turning, their pilots effectively deaf to what was happening outside their canopy windows.

The Octocopter was now down to a breathtaking seventy-five feet and was really pouring on the coals. The Z-3/15 was swinging so madly beneath it, surely the chains would break at any moment. The aircraft tandem looked so bizarre, that if anyone at the enemy-held field
had
seen it, chances were they’d have been too astonished to react.

Whatever the case, the Octo had closed to within 100 yards of the line of waiting jets when someone inside the big flying can unleashed something and suddenly the front strand of chain holding up the Z-3/15’s nose began to go slack. The plane’s needle snout fell perilously by forty-five degrees before the chain caught again. Now the airplane’s needle nose was pointing nearly straight down. By their own eyes, everyone in the Roamer crew was certain that the forward chain had given out somehow, and then had caught again, maybe just temporarily, saving the strange white airplane from falling off completely.

There was no suspicion among them that this desperate maneuver was all part of the plan.

This became apparent a few seconds later when the Beater, the white jet still hanging precariously off its bottom, finally reached the line of unsuspecting jets.

Suddenly the Roamer crew saw a flash of light pour out of the nose of the dangling, sleek white jet.

What the hell was this?

At first they thought the airplane had suddenly caught on fire. After a second or two, it was clear that what was actually happening was the Z-3/15’s cannon was going off. Each time it did, the recoil would cause the plane to swing even more wildly under the Beater, which in turn was swinging wildly on its own, driven crazy by the action-reaction of its strange payload.

Impossible though it seemed, the Beater went right up the line of waiting aircraft, the Z-3/15’s cannon firing nonstop, hitting some taxiing aircraft, missing others, but causing an incredible amount of damage, considering the way it was delivering its punches. From the Roamer crew’s point of view, this was happening almost in slow motion. With great amounts of wind and rain and snow blowing between them and the action, it all had an almost dreamlike quality to it.

The Beater finally reached the end of the line of waiting aircraft. Before anyone at the base could react, the Octocopter started to climb, the Z-3/15 still swinging crazily, its cannon still firing and hitting targets on the ground.

Below, it had left at least ten aircraft in flames and maybe another dozen damaged in some way. What’s more, a major portion of the all-important longest runway was now blocked by several piles of burning fighters or bombers.

In all, the strange attack had lasted only fifteen seconds.

Hunter was dizzy.

Not just a little, not with just a speck of disorientation.

He was dizzy to the point of nausea. The fact that he was now being hauled straight up by the flying Beater was compounding his distress exponentially.

If all this swinging didn’t stop soon, Hunter was sure he’d blow lunch—that is, if he had any lunch in his stomach to blow.

Now
this
was desperation. Possibly the most desperate thing he’d ever done, in this life or the last. And for it to be based on what some crazy if beautiful fortune-teller had imparted to him on the morning after a drunken spree—well, it was just too stupid to think about.

But the defenders of West Falkland Island were looking certain death right in the eye, as was he. He had a perfectly good airplane, half full of perfectly good gas and perfectly good ammunition in his possession—just no runway to get it from point A to point B.

So he had this plan. If the Beater could lift him high enough and then drop him, maybe he could start his engines in enough time to attain flight. If this happened, then maybe he could shoot down some Japanese planes now taking off from McReady and help out the guys on the beach once the invaders finally reached Tin Can beach.

Additionally if his engines started, maybe he could get enough juice to charge up the MVP and get a goddamn call for help out to the world. And then, maybe …

Well, there were already too many maybes, he knew. But something had to be done and so now he was doing it, maybe for no better reason than to avoid dying on some frozen beach. Or maybe not.

He was counting on the Beater to fulfill a fundamental part of this desperate design and at the moment he was sure this very big link in the chain would eventually fail him.

He had no instruments to tell him how high he was. And the fact he was swinging so violently back and forth gave him little opportunity to get a good reading. His guess was that the tincan already had passed 7,500 feet and was still climbing. Below him, in a blur, Hunter could still see the burning wreckage at McReady field; that had been an improvised thing, to tear up some of the waiting airplanes before they started their long climb up. Hunter had literally yelled the hasty plan up to the Beater pilot just seconds before their crazy tandem left the ground.

Had it failed, it would have been a very stupid, lethal move. But it had played out, and he had killed ten airplanes on the ground that he wouldn’t have to kill in the air—plus, he had fucked up the field’s main runway for a while, which was really a good thing because he and the Beater would be sitting ducks for any Japanese plane that could take off and fire at them.

That’s why he was urging the Beater silently to climb as fast and far as possible. The more air they got between them and the ground, the more of a chance this gigantic gamble could work.

But this brought up another question: How high was high? Or better yet, how high was
high enough?

Starting the engines in the Z-3/15 usually took a minute or so, leaving time for oil pressures to build up and the double-reaction process to take full effect. Hunter figured he could probably cut that time down to thirty seconds just by shutting off half the shit on his control panel. But a six-ton airplane could drop a long way in half a minute, and if the engine balked at all on the way down, well, there wouldn’t be any second chance to try it all over again.

If the engine was as nauseous as he was, or if the damp Falkland air had fouled something in the firing system, or if the flight computer didn’t snap in on time, or if a million and one other things had happened to the power plant since his time at the bottom of the world, then he would fall his three or four miles and just keep on going….

He might just die on a cold snowy beach yet.

He had no radio contact with the Beater, no way to tell Duggen when to drop him and how. That would have made it all too simple. The manual said a Beater could go up to 30,000 feet, Duggen had claimed before takeoff. But that was a figure for a brand new Octo. Judging by the rusting hulk above him, Hunter guessed that making it up to 15,000 feet would be a strain it probably couldn’t take.

But still they kept going up. Through the low clouds, through some rain and snow. After a while, the Z-3/15 stopped spinning long enough for Hunter to look down and get a reading on how high they might be. He was surprised—they were maybe as high as four miles already.

Yet the Beater kept on climbing.

Now he started to spin again and ice crystals began forming on the Z-3/15’s canopy, creating a kaleidoscopic effect that did nothing to improve his unsettled stomach. Lots of clouds were getting between him and the ground. Thick ones, thin ones, rain clouds, and more snow. Still, the Beater kept climbing.