Return of Sky Ghost (7 page)

Some of their soldiers, getting over the shock of the bizarre aircraft’s sudden appearance, began firing back. But this was also a foolish gesture. It simply turned the attention of the people in the weird aircraft toward them and now these soldiers were being perforated just like their colleagues in the lead two tanks.

By this time the rest of the Japanese column had gone into hard reverse and backed up into the jungle, hoping the dense undergrowth would offer them some protection from the weird flying death machine. And it did. The jungle was so thick, and the engineering tanks so well camouflaged, that they blended right in, almost disappearing from view.

The strange machine stayed hovering, though—as if it was waiting for something.

About thirty seconds later, another scream came from the sky. This was from a very strange plane—and compared to the Octocopter, a small one. It had a long slender fuselage that appeared to have been cut off right behind the cockpit. It had an oddly crooked pair of swept-back wings. It had a very strange set of tails and a very powerful engine.

It was also loaded with bombs. The wings and fuselage were so laden with huge, teardrop-shaped weapons, the weird little plane’s wings were actually drooping a bit.

This new airplane seemed to have come from nowhere as well. It went right over the pair of burning tanks and dropped two teardrop-shaped bombs into the thick jungle beyond. Instantly there were two huge explosions, followed by two balls of orange fire and smoke. The swift little fighter had to veer off dramatically in order not to get caught in these fiery mushrooms. It did so, but just barely.

The fighter climbed now, flipped over, and came back down at twice its escape speed. It roared over the jungle again, letting loose two more firebombs. Its engine screaming, the airplane twisted away again as another pair of gigantic fireballs erupted from the thick forest. Above the roar of this jet, the racket of the eight rotors of the Octocopter, and the four fiery explosions, a new sound could be heard: the screams of the Japanese soldiers being incinerated by the firebombs.

The little fighter twisted over and was coming back again. Meanwhile the Octocopter had moved off and was now hovering above the spot where the huge bomber had crashed. Rope ladders were cascading from the bottom of the weird aircraft, and soldiers were being lowered on them. Within seconds, these ladders were being raised again, each one bearing a rescue soldier and a survivor from the crash.

The fighter kept sweeping over the jungle, plastering firebombs on the hapless tanks leading all the way back to the road itself. Many of the Japanese soldiers that had somehow escaped the conflagration had scattered into the thick jungle, getting tangled up in the many vines and roots that twisted in a nightmarish patchwork along the jungle floor. The heat was so intense by this time that the leaves were actually melting off the trees, in some cases dripping a burning, rubberlike substance onto the panicking soldiers.

All thoughts of reaching the wrecked bomber were long gone now.

Those few soldiers who did survive saw the Octocopter raise up a total of thirty-two people from the crash site, along with six bodies. The little fighter, its wings expended of firebombs, was still strafing the jungle where the column of burning tanks now lay. Only after the Octocopter began pulling away from the crash site did the little plane go into a steep climb and take up a position above and to the rear of the strange eight-rotor craft.

Together they moved off to the north, leaving behind barely twelve survivors of the column of 200 men and twenty tanks.

In all, the one-sided battle had lasted just ten minutes.

In the basement of the main military government building in New Lima was a small hospital used for officers of the Nipponese Occupying Armed Forces.

There was only one patient being treated here at the moment, though; while nearly two dozen army and navy officers lay dying in the waiting room, no less than seventeen surgeons were praying over High General Wakisaki.

The general had been hurt in the attack on Callao Beach. Not by enemy action per se—the reviewing stand under which he and many others fled at first sight of the bombers had collapsed, giving the general a slight cut on his nose.

The wound required not even half a dozen stitches, but still the top doctors in New Lima were working on closing the cut, and trying their best to reassure the general that no scar would remain, or if one did, it would look rather “manly.”

But Wakisaki wasn’t really listening to them at the moment. Laid out on the operating table, lights and masked faces staring down at him, he was simply too busy crying.

The tears had been flowing for almost an hour now. They’d started soon after the mysterious bombers had left New Lima ablaze, and had continued unabated through the general’s evacuation to the basement hospital.

The very unmanly waterworks had little to do with the general’s nose wound, though it did sting anytime his salty tears found their way into the cut. No, the majority of tears were
the
result of shame—
his
shame—and from his hurt feelings.

He just couldn’t understand what had happened. Why would anyone want to bomb New Lima? Or his troops? Or his ships offshore? What was the point of it?

For his army and navy to be attacked was an affront to his own personal honor, and no blade could go deeper into Wakisaki than a disgrace of his good name. That’s why what happened to the general this day became a scar that would last much longer than the cut on his nose. This day, he knew, would live on inside him and haunt him right to the core.

Such a compulsive obsession was a result of his psychological makeup. Unbeknownst to anyone, Wakisaki actually regarded his occupation of South America not so much as a conquest, but as a thing of beauty. Like a pearl vase or a sculpture, he’d shaped it, he’d executed it, he’d dreamed of its every detail. And for the first six months, this thing of beauty had grown, had been nurtured by him. Had taken on an extra beauty. In his hands, he’d crafted no less than a new kind of culture. He had projected the Asian way of life to another continent, half a world away. They might as well have been on another planet!

And now, this thing had been ruined, had been fouled.

Why?

This was why there were tears rolling down his cheeks and sometimes getting into his nose wound. His perfect record had been besmirched. His pure white soul was now stained. His heart was now ringed with filth.

But the real question ran even deeper than why. The real question was who.
Who
could have done this?

And just as these words were on his lips, there was a knock at the treatment room door. A very shaky officer in a very sweaty uniform stepped in. He was not a military officer, rather he was the police chief for New Lima, a sacrificial lamb if there ever was one. In his trembling right hand was the report on the action from the bomber crash site; in his left hand, a small pistol with one bullet in it.

The police chief handed the report to the high general, who was eating him alive with his teary eyes. Then, calmly, the police chief raised the pistol to his own head and pulled the trigger. There was a crack, a splash of cranial matter hit the far wall, and the man slumped to the floor, bleeding profusely. The seventeen doctors ignored him, of course. They were too busy tending to the last stitch on Wakisaki’s wounded nose.

The report was stark in its details. Twenty tanks and 189 men had been lost to enemy action in attempting to reach the bomber crash site. All survivors of the bomber had been rescued; even the bodies of those killed in the crash had been carried away. The wreckage had by now burned away to nothing, destroyed by time-delayed magnesium bombs left behind by the mysterious rescuers.

Wakisaki felt his spirits plummet even further. What a difference a day makes! Now there was no wreckage to be recovered, no survivors to torture. No way to find out where they all came from.

He let out another gush of tears, and thought he saw a few of the doctors laugh at this girlish display. But two words in the report were beginning to burn their way into Wakisaki’s brain.
Enemy action.

Yes, Wakisaki realized, forcing back the tears. He suddenly had an enemy on his hands. But who were they? Certainly not the Colombians, or the Brazilians. Neither of those troublesome states would dare attack New Lima. Nor did they have anywhere near the military technology Wakisaki and thousands of others had seen during the bombing raid. Huge bombers, huge gunships, small swift fighters, strange hovering aircraft bristling with guns. Wakisaki knew aircraft, and he knew that no one on this continent flew the kind of airplanes he’d just seen.

Then where did they come from? Even the most obvious choice—the
norteamericanos
—made no sense. Wakisaki had seen the heavy bomb loads these aircraft had been carrying. There was no way they had flown all the way down from North America carrying such heavy loads for this sneak attack. And from the reports of the survivor-rescue, the strange eight-rotor flying contraption certainly could never have made such a long trip.

Yet Wakisaki was sure there were no American megacarriers on either coast of South America. In fact, in the six months since the Japanese takeover of South America, there had not been one peep from the North Americans. Not one. They were exhausted, the conventional wisdom went, from their very draining, very close-run victory over Germany after fifty-eight years of war. It was a keystone of Wakisaki’s plan that North America would not lift a finger when Japan invaded South America, or took over the Panama Canal. The attack on Pearl Harbor had taken care of the aircraft carrier fleet, they had nothing left to fight with, even if their citizenry wanted to.

Yet logic dictated these attackers had to be North Americans. So then, where was their base? How could the
norteamericanos
hide an entire air base anywhere on a continent that was so firmly in the grip of Japanese hands?

Wakisaki didn’t know.

But as the tears continued to roll down his face, he made a vow right then and there to find out.

Two days later

T
HE ALL-BLACK AIRPLANE SET
down at the New Lima airport just after sunset.

It was a troop transport, an eight-engine miniknockoff of the infamous
Spruce Goose.
It came in easily and took the full three miles of runway to slow down.

The airport itself was cordoned off to all but the highest level of security troops. The damage from the freak air attack two days before—one small airplane had knocked the base out of action at the height of the bombing raid—bad been repaired by now, or simply covered over. The entire security detail and air traffic control staff for the air base had paid the price for the single plane attack. All of them had been quietly executed earlier that day.

The huge plane rolled over to an isolated hangar and finally came to a stop. Its rear clamshell doors opened and slowly but surely a long ramp extended from its rear. No sooner was this platform down than two long lines of dark figures began disembarking.

Black uniforms. Black helmets. Black face masks, gloves, and boots. Even their weapons were black. No surprise then that they were known as
Brigata de la Noche,
literally, the Night Brigade.

They were Argentine commandos, special-ops troops who had terrorized the Argentine population and those in neighboring countries for years before the Japanese ever came ashore. Each man was more than six feet three inches tall and many were a half a foot taller than that. They lived on raw meat—and literally drank cow’s blood at least once a day. The Night Brigade, 1,200 men strong, were experts at both jungle warfare and urban combat. They could kill a man with a twig; crush his skull with a pebble. They had made torture an art form. They sometimes ate babies.

The Japanese had been very concerned about dealing with the Night Brigade, that’s why the unit had been paid 2 million dollars in gold before the Japanese invasion even took place. Now they were beholden to the Nipponese High Command and especially to General Wakisaki. He’d called on them several times since the occupation to take care of particularly nasty holdouts in Colombia and the forests of Brazil. On all occasions, the Night Brigade resolved the problem quickly, if brutally.

Wakisaki was expecting no less from them this time.

The bombing raid on New Lima was now firmly implanted in the combined psyche of the Japanese occupation forces. The first six months of their invasion had gone so smoothly, the troops had begun to think of themselves as agents of destiny and of Wakisaki as being divine. Now the jewel city of the New Japan lay half in ruins. The other half was soaked in water and muddy ash. A foot thick in some places, it was the lasting result of fighting more than a thousand fires.

Wakisaki knew that whoever was responsible for the fire-bombing raid had to be found and had to be punished in a very public manner. That’s why he’d called on the Night Brigade. Being home troops, they would be able to handle any terrain on the continent to get at the perpetrators. This was something the imperial Japanese troops could not do as well. The Night Brigade also knew how to deal with native populations, something else the occupation troops weren’t too good at.

This is what Wakisaki knew had to be done. The mysterious bombers had to have come from within a 150-mile radius of New Lima—this figure from analysis of several insta-films that had been made during the raid. The huge bombers—definitely of North American design—had been so weighted down with bombs, Wakisaki’s aeronautics people told him the planes couldn’t have been carrying very much fuel, and thus a 300-mile round-trip would have been their limit. There were only three directions from which the bombers could have come: north, east, and south—west was simply the ocean, and the planes definitely did not come from an American megacarrier. There was only one left, the USS
Chicago,
and it was still in dry dock in San Diego.

Another clue: The raiders had come from the northeast and departed in that same direction. Japanese and Peruvian airplanes had been overflying the area northeast of New Lima for forty-eight hours straight, looking for any sign of a secret air base, but with no luck. This was not unexpected, though. The area the planes were canvassing was among the most rugged on the continent, all mountains and thick jungle and valleys so deep, reports persisted that dinosaurs still lived in some of them.