Return of Sky Ghost (39 page)

So Y agreed to drive him out to the big barn and Hunter tried to enjoy each mile of the long, quiet journey.

When he walked through the door of the place, it was as if the world had stopped for him again. Yet this time it was more than just an illusion. This second time he stepped into the place, everything and everybody came to a stop.

Staring back at him were fifty-seven sets of eyes. They belonged to such a mélange of people, Hunter nearly burst out laughing. They
did
look like football players and monks and ordinary Joes, just as Y had told him. But there was something different about them as well. Hunter knew them. Every last monk, every last New Jersey Giant. He knew who was a soldier and who wasn’t. He knew all these men. From Back There. These were his “associates.”

Everything began moving again when one of these people finally approached him. It was Mike Fitzgerald. He walked up to Hunter and stuck out his hand.

“Hi, Hawk,” he said simply. “Welcome back.”

Hunter felt frozen to his spot. He’d already seen a few ghosts since coming to this world. But this one was different. Back There he and Mike Fitzgerald had been tight. When he was killed at the Battle of Football City, Hunter had wept as though he had lost a brother.

But now, here he was—again. Same guy. Same red nose. Same powerful build. Same sophisticated graying of the jet-black hair. The same guy he had seen briefly before shipping out to Iceland.

Mike Fitzgerald. Back from the dead.

“Hey, Fitz,” Hunter said, shaking his hand. “Good to see you … again.”

What followed was a guided tour of the airplane that the Associates had just rebuilt.

Hunter was astonished at what they had done. It was the same airplane. It looked the same, had the same number of engines, same gigantic size, same gigantic capabilities.

But it was a different beast.

Radically so.

Fitz gave him the tour and laid most of the praise on the New Jersey Giants. When Hunter first came to Y with the crazy notion as to where he might find his “associates,” he had recalled working with a large group of engineers back in the other world. Combat engineers. He’d been able to recall just about all their names and those were the ones fed into the Main/AC. That all these people would be together here in this world—not as a combat engineering unit but as a pro football team—was mind-blowing enough. That they would be able to be put into a situation which by all rights, should have been totally alien to them and work the miracle they just had worked, was nothing short of well,
miraculous.

Hunter spent the next two hours going over all the modifications the Associates had made. It was the monks’ idea to hang five of the rogue squadron fighters from the bottom of the huge airplane. The Bantams were hanging way out near the wingtips. The VTOL planes were hanging about halfway in toward the fuselage. The swing-wing ugly was attached to the forward belly. As for the big Z-16 ultrarecon plane, it couldn’t be attached to the gigantic airplane because its wings were too long and they would have interrupted the airflow coming off of the colossal fuselage. So they were going to tow it, on a long tether sticking out of the back, right around the planet.

It was Frost’s idea to defend the colossal airplane with more than just machine guns, of which there were no less than a hundred lining both sides of the fuselage. Frost’s notion was to take as many antiaircraft rockets as they could find and install them under the leading edge of the bomber’s wings, similar to where a fighter would carry such a weapon. In the Air Corps inventories they’d found a type of AA rocket known as the Rattier. They’d put a call out for these weapons, and in one day were able to secure 200 of them, plus their attendant launching packages. Frost had overseen their installation and now the wings of the monster bomber were heavy with dozens of air-to-air missiles.

Ben Wa had come up with the sticky solution to the question of what to do with the flight compartment of the colossus when the moment of truth came. The people who would be in the most peril right as the bomb was being dropped would be the primary flight crew. Hunter looked over the work that Wa and his crew had done. It was nothing short of brilliant. The survivability factor of the airplane had been increased at least threefold.

Fitzgerald was obviously the one who had pulled it all together. That left only the man named Toomey. He had worked just as hard at reconfiguring the airplane—helping Frost with his idea, helping Ben Wa with his, and so on.

But what had his own personal contribution been?

It turned out he’d suggested they put an ice cooler on the airplane. A place that would be stocked with beer for the long trip awaiting them. For some reason, the rest of the group agreed. So there was now a fully stocked beer cooler down near the navigator’s station. Hunter realized this was the strongest confirmation that what he was working with here was real. There was a long possibility that if you put forty football players in a room long enough, they might build you an airplane. And if you took a bar owner from northern New England and asked him how best to defend that airplane, he eventually might come up with the idea of stringing 200 air-to-air missiles along the plane’s wings. And if you asked eight monks how to make an airplane more survivable in light of where it was going and what it would be doing, maybe they would come up with the rogue-squadron attachment idea.

But it took a certain kind of mind to suggest that they install a
beer cooler
for the long ride toward Armageddon. The J.T. Toomey Hunter recalled from Back There would have suggested exactly that. The one here did too. This was proof to Hunter’s mind that the two universes he’d inhabited were, in fact, parallel. And now, they had connected.

At the end of this long day, and at the beginning of what would prove to be a very long night, it was that fact that warmed him greatly inside.

M
ANY SEARCHLIGHTS HAD BEEN
brought out from Bride Lake to illuminate the enormous hangar known as G-2.

The doors to the barn had finally been opened and the nose of the gigantic B-2000 bomber was barely sticking out.

No less than twenty vehicles—tractors, trucks, even a few jeepsters—had lines attached to the monster’s wheels and wings, and on one call, they began the long task of pulling the Colossus out of what had been its home for many years.

Once the plane was clear of the barn, another long process commenced: starting the giant’s twenty engines. Just to get each one of them running up to pitch would take an hour. It would prove to be a very noisy sixty minutes.

Watching all this from the sidelines was Agent Y, his MVP in hand as always, its screen going absolutely crazy with messages.

The forces that would be in motion this night were mind-boggling. From Area 52, down to Panama, down to the Brazilian jungle, everyone was waiting for word to proceed. That word would only come when Y sent a message to OSS Central that their secret flying beast was finally on its way.

It was this strange scene that the chugging, smoking, jittery Beater came upon—long beams of light playing on an aerial monster in the middle of the Nevada desert.

The Octo came down with a bang not far from where Y was stationed. The side door opened and the sole passenger fell out, coughing from the internal exhaust.

Y greeted him, checked his ID, and gave him a good looking over. The man was familiar to him. His name was PJ O’Malley. He’d just arrived from South America.

O’Malley’s eyes had gone as wide as half dollars at first seeing the gigantic plane; they had not decreased in size yet.

“You want me to fly in
that
thing?” he asked, totally in shock.

“Your government has called on you to perform a special duty,” Y replied, giving him the standard line. “The OSS is hoping you’ll accept.”

But that veiled threat wasn’t working with a veteran like O’Malley. There was no way he was getting aboard this beast. Not unless …

“Who is piloting this plane?” he asked Y.

Y actually smiled. It was his ace in the hole.

“Want to see for yourself?” he asked the bomber pilot.

O’Malley had already started walking toward the plane. It got bigger with every step. The noise from the engines was not only deafening, it was disrupting the air all around the monster. A veteran of untold combat missions, O’Malley actually felt his knees begin to quiver as he got closer to the big plane.

The side front door was open when he arrived. He stepped in only to find it was actually a small elevator. It carried him to the flight compartment, four stops up. He stepped out onto this tier and found it nearly five times as big as the flight suite on a B-17/36, which in itself was huge.

There were at least twenty people inside. They all glanced at him, and he thought he saw a lot of familiar faces—he just couldn’t place any of them.

“Who’s the skipper of this mother-effing tub?” he asked the room.

The guy sitting in the left-hand pilot’s seat turned around and gave him a friendly salute.

It was Hunter.

“Hello, Captain,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

The engines were finally warmed and ready by 2315 hours.

No less than six MVPs had been installed in the plane’s flight suite, and it took some time getting them all in sync. Then a special squad of armorers came over from Area 52 and installed the single bomb in the monster’s gigantic bomb bay. A few tests went well. By 2345 hours, the plane was ready to go.

There were no speeches. No last-minute prayers or sentimentality. Y shook every man’s hand—the entire group of Associates was going on the mission—then left the airplane and secured the outer hatch himself.

Anyone who was in the immediate area was cleared to 1,000 feet away. The shock wave from all twenty engines revving at once would be strong enough to break eardrums, so the manual said. Therefore everyone was also equipped with industrial-strength earplugs.

At exactly 2345 hours, the plane started rolling. It moved so slowly at first, Y was sure that something was wrong with it, that it would never get airborne, that this whole thing had been a colossal waste of time, and that Japan would eventually prevail in this damn war.

But slowly and surely, the beast began to pick up speed. By the first mile of the ten-mile-long runway, it was moving at fifteen knots. By mile two, it was up to twenty-five. Mile three, maybe thirty-five.

By mile five, it was up to nearly seventy knots, but it was clear that all ten miles of asphalt would be needed to get the giant into the air.

Y watched in awe, one eye on the departing monster, the other on his MVP, counting off the seconds and the miles. Finally, at about 9.5 on the mark, Hunter pulled back the controls, and the gigantic bird began climbing into the air. It went so slowly that Y, watching now through nightscope binoculars, was convinced it was going to crash.

But up it went, the scream from its engines masking the groan made simply by such a large mass getting airborne. The large-enough Z-16 recon plane, in tow behind the monster, looked puny in comparison.

Y watched for a signal from Hunter telling him all was OK. It came about a minute into the flight, when the plane had achieved a somewhat miraculous 500 feet in altitude. Hunter simply blinked the huge array of navigation lights hanging all over the B-2000. This was the high sign. They were go for the mission.

Y dutifully punched this message into his MVP and told it to send the word immediately to OSS Central.

When he looked up from this operation, he was disheartened to see the big plane was fading fast from view. It was a clear but moonless night, and soon the only evidence that the giant was in the air were those fading navigation lights.

After five minutes or so, they disappeared completely.

At 0100 hours, exactly sixty-five minutes after the B-2000 had left the ground, two squadrons of Air Corps attack bombers swooped in on the eastern edge of the Panama Canal and began bombing Japanese gun emplacements. At the same time, Navy warships, including the USS
Chicago
megacarrier, the only survivor from the Pearl Harbor sneak attack nearly a year ago, began striking at Japanese positions on the western entrance to the waterway.

Several hundred miles to the south, three entire armies—made up of twenty divisions, or close to 400,000 men, crossed the Brazilian border into Peru and moved like a juggernaut to positions west.

By 0500 hours, the monster airplane, flying at 85,000 feet and at a speed of an incredible 1,400 knots, was approaching the outer coastline of Antarctica. If all went well, it would pass over the south pole by 0730 hours and begin its long polar suborbital trip back up the other side of the planet. Always drifting to the west, it was intent on topping the north pole and coming down right above Japan itself.

On West Falkland Island, the man they called God was all alone.

He was in his lab. Everyone else was topside by now. The civilians were back at Summer Point, and his wife was helping them get settled. The STS commandos were already over on East Falkland, starting the rebuilding process at McReady airfield.

The fight was over. It had been a close call. But they had survived. Until next time. Still, he had learned many things from the strange little war. He’d learned about heroism and cowardice. He’d learned that valor had no bounds. He’d seen just how far some men would go to save their comrades. He learned that he might have a son….

These were the thoughts going through his mind as he sat in the room behind the big thick metal door. Yes, there were many secrets down here, near the middle of the earth. Big bombs. The secret of ghosts. Other things.

But nothing like what was behind this second door.

Now the man put his ear to the door and could hear the wind blow, even though he was 250 feet down in the middle of the hill.

He hit a few buttons. After all that had happened, he felt like looking on the other side today.

He unlocked the portal and waited for it to swing open. He had to be very careful here. Sometimes this could be a little unpredictable. He strapped on a safety harness which was attached to chains on the opposite side of the wall. One could never be too cautious, he liked to think.