Return of Sky Ghost (34 page)

To which the man nodded gravely. A tear was beginning to glisten in his eye.

“All right, Colonel,” he said. “Send Private McShook to me.”

F
IVE MINUTES LATER, PRIVATE
Andy McShook was knocking on the farmhouse door. The sound of gunfire was very close now. Just before McShook was called off the line, the Japanese had landed another 100 troops or so on the beach. And more were on the way.

That’s why he was very surprised when Colonel Asten got him out of his trench and told him to report to the farmhouse immediately. McShook knew better than to ask why. He’d double-timed it off the beach and up the hill in a matter of minutes.

The man answered the door after the first knock. McShook saluted him smartly. The young soldier had never seen the man close up before. From what he’d heard about him, McShook expected him to be much older. But the man was nowhere near as ancient as the soldier had imagined him to be.

The man told him to come in, so McShook stepped gingerly into the living room. He and the other commandos had speculated about what the inside of the farmhouse might look like; now McShook was getting an eyeful of the real thing.

It was just as he imagined a typical family home would look like, nothing he would know about. It was simple, homey. Pictures on the walls, books on the shelves. A checkerboard on the dining room table.

The man bid him to follow. McShook walked through the kitchen and through the closet door, to the elevator chamber beyond.

His mind was racing now. He was being shown the inner sanctum, the place that was so secret. Suddenly McShook feared some kind of huge mistake had been made. He didn’t have any security clearances past the one needed to be a member of the STS team here on West Falkland Island.

“Sir,” McShook said as the man called for the elevator, “I think I should warn you. I only have a level-one security clearance. I might not be able to …”

The man held up his hand just as the elevator arrived and the door slid open.

“Don’t worry about that, my friend,” he said.

They took the elevator down to the sixteenth level. The guard station was empty as the soldiers were up top, fighting.

They walked down the long corridor and the man sprung the door into the lab chamber. They both stepped inside.

McShook looked around, his eyes wide in awe. What he saw was indescribable. It was a laboratory, but to the layman’s eye, it was much more than that. There were machines, huge devices full of buttons and lights and switches and levers, and McShook had not the faintest idea of their function. Electrical bolts running from here to there. Huge tanks bubbling with unidentifiable liquids. Even the hum of the place sounded otherworldly. This place
looked
like an inner sanctum, McShook thought, as portrayed in a comic book. As the secret places of all of secret places, it really fit the bill.

Again, he felt like an enormous error had been made. Instinctively he knew he should not be seeing any of this.

“Sir, again, I must tell you,” he stuttered, “I am not cleared for …”

But the man again waved his concerns away.

“It really doesn’t matter now,” he told the private.

He brought the young soldier to a table and sat him down, telling him to take off his helmet and to get as comfortable as possible. No one else was in evidence, though McShook thought he could hear voices coming from the next room.

The man sat down next to him.

“Private,” he began. “You are going on a very special mission. One that will save the lives of everyone else here. I want you to understand that from the start, OK?”

McShook nodded slowly. A chill went through him. It was not what the man was saying exactly, but how he was saying it.

“Yes, sir. I understand,” he finally replied.

The man talked to McShook for the next five minutes. They consulted a map of the nearest American allied military installations. The man told the soldier what would be expected of him in the next hour. McShook’s eyes went wide, first filling with terror, then filling with tears as he listened to the man’s instructions.

When he was finished, the man gave him a document to sign. It had one section that served as a last will and testament, and another for any last statements.

McShook sniffled as he spent a few minutes writing down what he wanted. Because of his background, it was brief.

The man asked McShook to stand.

“Do you fully know what you are about to do?” he asked the soldier. “Do you understand your mission completely?”

McShook nodded, tears streaming down his face.

As he was doing this, the man had moved behind him. Now he asked McShook to close his eyes and hold his breath. The soldier did so.

The man pulled a very long, very thin, very sharp knife from his desk and, without hesitation, plunged it into the soldier’s back.

The knife went directly through McShook’s heart. The heart exploded instantly. He slumped into the man’s arms and the man lowered him gently to the floor. He checked McShook’s pulse. The young soldier was dead.

The man wiped a tear from his eye and let out a long troubled breath.

They didn’t call him God for nothing.

Xwo Mountain

Major Payne was working alone in his office.

The mountain base was nearly deserted. It was a very cloudy, stormy day, and the bombers and fighters had been gone for two hours and weren’t expected back for another three.

Anyone who could be was inside now. The ground crews were huddled in their barracks. The staff officers were in their billets or in the mess hall.

Payne was the only person inside the dark, dank operations building at the moment.

Things were happening up north. Payne knew it unofficially. He was not privy to many classified messages. His MVP hardly blinked at all. But he was in constant touch with officers of his own level and rank back in the U.S., and just from their idle gossip, Payne knew that at least two major operations were supposed to be launched against Japan very soon.

One, he was sure, was to going to happen here in South America—and it didn’t take a military genius to figure out that it was probably an invasion from Brazil. A second push was probably going to come in the Panama Canal Zone. Again, no deep thought needed there.

But his grapevine of officers had also hinted, because they had heard it hinted themselves, that yet
another
highly secret operation was up. Though no one had a clue as to what it might be.

There was also some rather disturbing information. One chilling report said that the two top OSS operatives had been captured and assassinated by a Japanese hit squad. Others said they’d heard only that the two operatives were missing. There was also a strange report that the airplane carrying the New Jersey Giants football team had either crashed or was missing.

Strangest of all, and most disturbing, Payne had heard that Hawk Hunter, sent on a secret mission several days earlier, was overdue or had not been heard from. This was typical Hunter stuff—dropping out of sight for days at a time to get the particularly hard jobs done right. But Payne had a bad feeling about this one.

Payne tried to go back to his mountain of paperwork, but suddenly he felt very uneasy. A chill went through him. Beads of sweat appeared on his brow. It was suddenly very dark inside the ops building. And he felt very, very alone.

That’s when he heard the noise come from the outer office. He wasn’t expecting anyone to come see him. With the weather, his huge workload, and the general gloominess of this place, he didn’t expect to see another living soul for at least three hours.

So who was out in the other room?

Payne called out. “Yes, who is that, please?”

There was no reply.

Payne tried again. “Is there someone there?”

Once more, there was no response.

Payne finally got up and walked over to his closed office door. He stopped just before his hand reached for the doorknob. He could hear movement on the other side, maybe a faint murmuring as well. On a whim, he reached into his holster hanging from the coat rack and took out his gun.

Then he opened the door—and was transfixed.

The person on the other side was transparent. He was wearing the combat uniform of a British commando. A small patch of blood stained his breast. But the man wasn’t really there. Payne could see right through him.

He was a ghost. Not all that unusual in this world. But absolutely frightening nevertheless.

“Major Payne?” the ghost spoke, his voice sounding like it was coming from someplace else. “My name is Private Andrew McShook I have an urgent message for you.”

T
HE BATTLE OF TIN CAN
beach went on for another thirty minutes.

Using superior fields of fire and well-situated positions, the defenders had been able to kill more than 1,200 Japanese troops. This death toll was helped greatly by the white jet, making strafing runs continuously up and down the beach, while neutralizing the ships offshore and halting, at least temporarily, any aircraft taking off from McReady field.

The beach was littered with dead Japanese soldiers, many burning landing craft, at least a dozen crashed war-planes—and surprisingly few STS casualties. The problem was, while the defenders had done a heroic job, there was another wave of Japanese landing craft soon to come in. It would contain at least 750 fresh troops, with plenty of ammunition. The defenders were spent, both physically and in their ammo belts. Already many men were into their reserves, and the recoilless rifles had exactly two shots left in them apiece. All four tanks were down to the last six shells, as were the mortar men and the antipersonnel launcher squads.

Worse yet, their protector on high, the man and the airplane which had kept them all alive this far, was running out of ammunition too. Even more dire, he was running out of gas.

Hunter had tried every trick in the book to conserve his fuel. Shutting off all unnecessary electronics, jettisoning his empty fuel tanks, even shutting down his oxygen supply.

But the fuel problem was a finite thing. Once he was out, he was out for good. What would happen then, he didn’t know. He would have about a five-minute warning before his reserve tanks went completely dry, then he would have to make a big decision. Either bail out and let the plane crash, or try to bring it down somewhere soft and preferably not in the hands of the Japanese,
or
—a third choice—crash it into one last enemy target, riding it down all the way.

He decided to put that third option on the back burner for the moment and concentrate on the first two. He didn’t want to bail out and watch the best airplane he’d ever spanked go in with a fiery crash. It was the setting-down-someplace-soft choice that proved the most appealing.

While he was contemplating these things, he was still circling low over Tin Can beach, taking potshots at the troopship currently cruising about two miles out at sea. Inside was yet another wave of Japanese landing craft. Hunter didn’t have enough ammo to take on a whole big ship. He would have to wait for the wave of landing craft to float out of the mother hen and then try to pick some off individually. The problem was, the longer the Japanese waited, the longer he would be burning gas. He checked his fuel readout and asked the computer for a time-link. He had about twelve minutes of flying left. Then it would be time to come down, no matter how, no matter where.

He’d given up on the MVP a long time ago. Given up on getting any kind of message out. Right now his energies were concentrated on keeping the commandos below—on the beach and in the woods—alive for as long as possible. Some Japanese had gained the lower beach and now he could see the large troopships opening their front doors and letting out the next wave of troops.

Damn! There had to be another 1,000 or so invaders heading for the beach. There was no way the men on the ground could possibly fight them off, no matter how much protection he gave them.

The defenders opened up early on these new landing craft, firing on them from 500 yards or more, a sign they were close to running out of ammunition too. Hunter checked his own ammo supply. He was down to fifty rounds in his four machine guns and twelve rounds in his cannon. There was no need to be selective here, he thought. He broke from his protective orbit above Tin Can beach for the first time in an hour, and dove on the landing craft just as they were coming out of the troopship. He walked a line of tracers across the first three boats, getting major hits and putting two out of commission. Hunter circled around and sprayed the next line of boats with machine gun fire. Again, he hit good targets. But halfway through his third strafing run he heard the disturbing
pop-pop-pop
sound that meant his machine guns had just run dry.

He passed back over the beach and saw that the last of Asten’s men were now pulling back. Those Japanese alive behind the barricades finally managed to wade to shore. One fool among them set up the Nipponese flag, which someone firing from the woods instantly cut down. Hunter looped back around and fired off six of his twelve cannon shells, hitting a small command post the invaders had hastily established, but pulling up and away before he blew his entire cannon load.

For this he turned his attention back to the incoming landing craft, lined up the first one, and let loose his last six shells. They hit the landing craft straight on, igniting its fuel tank and blowing it out of the water. It was a spectacular explosion and the wreckage that came back down served to further block the entrance to Tin Can beach. But that was it. Hunter was out of ammo. He could do no more….

Now what?
he wondered.
Look for a soft spot? Or a target?

The question was answered for him. Everything just started shaking. At first he thought it was the airplane. Was he running out of gas sooner than he’d calculated? No—the plane was still flying, his control board was still all green.

It was his body that was shaking so violently. This could only mean one thing: Enemy airplanes were close by. Very close.