Return of Sky Ghost (38 page)

As a result, the project was miles ahead of schedule—almost as if that’s how it was meant to be.

They were presently in the process of rebuilding the colossal airplane, all fifty-seven of them, plus the small army of Bride Lake mechanics. Rebuilding was the key word here, because they had spent the first twenty-four hours
un
-building it.

The mission statement had posed this problem to them: This gigantic plane had to deliver a bomb whose blast would be so big and so quick, the plane would virtually have no chance of escaping it. There was no other way to deliver this bomb because it had to hit a certain spot at a certain time per the calculations in its warhead, and no rocket on Earth was accurate enough to deliver it. So the little bomb with the big blast had to be dropped from an airplane that had the size and the staying power to fly around the world, literally, via the transpolar route.

It was an extremely large order, especially since the people who the government was convinced could fulfill it had all just been plucked from their relatively simple lives and plunked down here in the middle of a vast secret project with nearly zero experience in things aeronautical. It made no sense. But that’s what had happened.

The strange thing was, it was working.

At first there was an element of shock involved, but as soon as they’d spent some time all together in G-2 building, people thought they started recognizing each other. Football players knew monks. Monks knew hedonistic college professors. People became instant compadres. It was as if all of them had known everyone else before—yet no one could remember when or how or where or why.

Still, it was massive, rather instantaneous bonding. Everyone was so stunned by it that they began thinking that maybe the real spooks inside the OSS—the Psychic Evaluation Corps—were on to something bringing them here.

Buoyed by this feeling, real or not, the Associates got to work.

Fitz believed it was one of the monks who first suggested that if they were forced to work with an airplane that was too slow to get out of its own bomb blast then perhaps the emphasis should not be on the plane’s performance, but on something else. It was clear that they weren’t going to make the airplane any faster, or the bomb blast any smaller. So what then became the most important thing? It was, of course, the survivability of the crew. So the focus changed a little. Not in how to prevent the plane from coming apart when the blast hit, but on what could be done to protect the lives of the crew
before
that happened.

Once that truth had been realized, they really got down to it.

What had followed was two straight days and nights of disassembling, torch-cutting, hammer-banging, and lots and lots of screw removal. Then the reconfigurations were begun. Again, more on guesswork than science, more on instinct than any known set of rules or values, they changed the airplane as they all thought it should be done. They had added several important components as well, got rid of some that were deemed unnecessary. They even had extra stuff brought in from Area 52.

Now, they were putting it all back together again.

Through all this, Y had watched them. He was always at a distance, always keeping one eye on his MVP pad. He was a man who seemed worried about many many things at once. In the few times that he’d spoken to them, he’d alluded to the fact that the pilot of this flying beast would be arriving at any time and that everyone, from the president, through the War Department, to the OSS, and on down was hoping that the giant airplane would be ready to fly by that time.

Incredibly, even though they still had much work to do, it seemed like it would be.

Xwo Mountain

The huge B-17/36 bomber roared through the LSD screen and set down with a puff of smoke and a mighty screech as six dozen wheels hit the hard rocky runway all at once.

The fire crews raced out toward the bomber and sprayed Purple-K flame retardant on its outermost engines. The forty-four-man bomber crew quickly exited the plane just seconds after it had stopped rolling at the end of the runway—standard procedure. They had just completed a mission over northern Argentina, the firebombing of a new Japanese settlement named Okodoko, which was close to the ancient Argentine city of Tazco.

The bombing mission had been long and arduous, the skies full of Japanese fighters, and the flames from a previous firebombing had licked the underbelly of this airplane, as well as the others, as they went in ultralow to drop their bombs.

But the airplane had come through it in one piece, and to a man, the crew knew the person responsible for that was the plane’s COA, the Commander of the Aircraft. He was the most senior bomber pilot on Xwo. His name was Captain PJ O’Malley.

Crewmen fought to be part of O’Malley’s crew simply because it was believed anyone flying in his airplane had the best chance of making it home alive. Invariably O’Malley was a bombing mission’s leader; many times the rest of the group dropped their firebombs on targets already marked by O’Malley’s pathfinder aircraft. It was heard later that the Japanese actually had a price on O’Malley’s head, they feared him so much.

O’Malley was that good.

That’s why it seemed so very strange when he reached the debriefing room after securing his airplane at its hard-stand to find a set of orders waiting for him. They were enclosed inside a red envelope.

Every American serviceman operating overseas knew what a red envelope meant: It was standard War Department practice to put home-return orders inside red envelopes. Anyone who got one was usually being told that he was going back to the States. Seeing the red envelope then was usually cause for a great amount of joy.

But in O’Malley’s case, it simply caused a great amount of confusion.

“Going home?” he blurted out when first handed the red envelope. “Me?”

It
was
strange because O’Malley actually took the red envelope as an insult. He was not completely devoid of ego. He knew he was playing a pivotal role on Xwo Mountain. A crucial one even. He’d come to regard any notion that he would actually be transferred out of the mountain ops to be nonexistent. This was certainly true after the wing’s recent hurry-up mission down to the Falklands. It had been O’Malley who’d taken the divert order first and changed the overall flight plan of the group. It was because of his leadership and innovation that the unexpected bombing raid on West Falkland was now considered an enormous success.

So why then was he being sent home?

The red envelope was handed to him by the officer of the day, the man running all the debriefings in the absence of Major Payne.

“Congratulations, Captain,” the officer had said to him. “You deserve it.”

But O’Malley never heard him. He was just too stunned. Going home? Why? Or more to the point, why now?

He opened the red envelope.

Then he understood.

The knock on Major Payne’s billet door was quiet but direct.

The chief operations officer for Xwo Mountain was awake, lying still, intravenous tubes sticking out of his arm, resting quietly in bed as the doctors had ordered.

The lights were on in his room though; he had insisted upon that and his doctors, considering his condition and what he’d just gone through, finally said OK.

The last thing Payne wanted to be was alone in the dark.

He was a little shy about blindly answering the door too.

He called out: “Who is it?”

“It’s O’Malley, sir. May I come in?”

“Are you alive, O’Malley?” Payne called to him in all seriousness.

“I am, sir,” O’Malley replied from behind the closed door.

“OK,” Payne finally said. “Come on in.”

O’Malley found Payne looking very pale and drawn. The bomber pilot knew Payne was under the care of a psychic evaluation officer long-distance through an MVP, and even now he could see the mission pad on Payne’s nightstand, blinking messages to him. Much care had to be taken in what O’Malley said then. He did not want to upset Payne in any way.

Payne sat up a little on the bed and shook O’Malley’s hand. The bomber pilot hoped his facial expression wouldn’t show it, but Payne looked awful to him.

Of course, he was the first person O’Malley had ever met who had actually seen a ghost.

“How are you, Major?” O’Malley asked him.

“I’m alive,” Payne replied wearily. “They tell me I’ll be OK, someday. I can’t ask for more than that.”

“Well, if it’s worth anything,” O’Malley told him, “you’re considered a hero around here—and in other places as well. If it wasn’t for you …”

If it wasn’t for Payne then the enemy invasion of West Falkland Island would have been a success and the Bomb, which was now heading toward Area 52, would have wound up in some very nefarious hands.

“I mean, no one I’ve talked to really understands what was going on down there,” O’Malley went on. “But I can tell everyone thinks you took the full brunt of this thing, and as a result a lot of people on our side are still alive and a lot of people on the other side ain’t ….”

Payne smiled for the first time in a long time. The psychic eval guys told him the shock of actually communicating with a ghost would wear off in time. Maybe a week. Maybe a month. Maybe a year. But a smile or two wouldn’t hurt the process.

“I’m glad for that,” he finally told O’Malley. “So is this strictly a cheer-up visit? You didn’t smuggle me any brandy from the OC, did you?”

O’Malley just shook his head. “They’d shoot me if I got caught,” he said, and they both laughed.

“Actually, I got orders to ship out,” he told Payne. “Leaving in an hour. I’ve just come to say good-bye.”

Payne’s face went slightly pale again.

“You? Leaving? Why?”

“My exact questions,” O’Malley confessed. “But then I read the orders, and now I get it. I think.”

“Anything you can tell me?” Payne wanted to know.

O’Malley drew a little closer to the man’s bed. “It’s all classified,” he began. “But I’ll let you in on a little bit, seeing what you’ve been through.”

He lowered his voice to a whisper.

“I’ve been ordered to help pilot an airplane on a very top secret mission,” O’Malley began. “The rest of the crew are a bunch of unknowns and exactly what I’ll be doing, what I’m flying, and where we are going, I don’t know.”

“Typical,” Payne responded. “The OSS is behind this I suspect.”

“Good guess,” O’Malley told him. “But there is something I will tell you: I think or at least it was hinted in the orders, that there is another pilot going along as well, and it’s someone who I think you should know is still alive.”

Payne’s left eyebrow went up a notch.

“Really?”

O’Malley nodded. “The way this whole thing was laid out to me in my orders,” he said, “I’m sure Hawk Hunter is involved. In fact, this will sound crazy, but I think he was flying around down in the Falklands when we arrived to do our bombing run. Someone had been driving a crazy-looking jet all over the sky just before we got there.”

Payne settled back down into his bed. The smile returned a little to his face.

“So he’s still among the living?”

O’Malley nodded. “I’m almost positive of it. I know he’s a friend of yours, so I thought I’d tell you.”

Payne smiled fully now. “Well, that is good news then,” he said. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

O’Malley got up and shook hands with Payne. “Got to get going, sir,” he said. “Take care of yourself, OK?”

“You too,” Payne told him. “And tell Hawk he owes me a drink.”

O’Malley smiled. “If I get to see him,” he said, “I’ll tell him he owes both of us.”

With that, O’Malley saluted and went out the door.

T
HE CRANE THAT WAS
used to reattach the large section of the left wing of the gigantic airplane was so big, they had to cut a section out of the G-2 hangar roof to allow its tip to poke through.

Even with the help of this hydraulic giant, it took all the muscle power that could be mustered among the strange group inside the hangar to get that last wing section attached.

It took four hours of nonstop pushing and pulling and grunting and groaning, but finally the wing was reconnected and an army of rivet-fastener men went to work making the attachment permanent.

With that, the reconfiguration of the B-2000 “Colossus” was complete. In a stunning achievement, the football players, monks, college professors, and aging soldiers had done exactly what their country had wanted them to do. At least now, when the huge bomb blast went off, there was a chance that the crew didn’t necessarily have to go up with it.

Now, all they needed were the pilots.

It might have been described as fate, or as a cosmological initiative, or simply the way it happened.

But no sooner had the last fastener been put in place on the huge airplane than the hangar door opened and the man charged with flying the colossal airplane walked in.

Hunter had landed at Area 52 two hours before, the Z-3/15 running out of fuel the exact moment his wheels touched down.

The next thirty minutes were spent in the delicate operation of taking the Bomb off its belly-mounted rack and getting it ready for transfer to the colossal airplane.

A briefing with Y followed, taking another hour or so, and again Hunter could only give him the highlights of his adventure in the Falklands, including the evidence that the notorious agents X and Z were involved. It would be left to a later time for Y to explain exactly how word of the dire situation on West Falkland had reached Xwo Mountain. At the moment, those circumstances were still highly classified.

While this debriefing session was going on in Y’s office, his MVP began blinking. A burst message from OSS Central was beaming in. According to the shadowy Psychic Evaluation Corps, the time to begin the mission in the big plane was looming very near.

The airplane was ready, the bomb was in place, and most of the crew was too. The airplane should take off no later than midnight, the MVP declared.

It was now 1800 hours. That gave them just six hours to pull the last strings together.

The trip out to the huge hangar ate up another thirty minutes, but Hunter needed the long ride in the desert to cool him off. The last thing he wanted to do was take an Octocopter out. If he was just hours away from leaving on the most dangerous mission he’d ever accepted, he didn’t want to waste what could be some of his last precious minutes of life getting sick on a Beater.