Return of Sky Ghost (9 page)

As it turned out, he was fluent in the language of the Oxapi.

Ganganez’s soldiers rounded up the tribe’s leader, a small elderly man with a smile so wide he was called Cizi, or “Toothy One.” Ganganez had Cizi brought to his command vehicle, a fifty-ton tracked behemoth which was a combination tank, assault gun, and mobile headquarters for the Night Brigade. Ganganez gave the man a package of candy, a delicacy among the natives. He also gave him a baseball cap and a pair of very cheap sunglasses.

A brief conversation established that the Toothy One was in close contact with the other tribes in the area. If anything happened anywhere within a fifty-mile radius, Toothy would usually hear about it, though he rarely had anything to report back to them. This was exactly what Ganganez wanted to hear.

He asked the chief if he would like to take a ride in the command vehicle; the elderly man heartily agreed. Ganganez ordered the driver to pull out of the village and head for a nearby ridge. The villagers cheered as the command vehicle left their little settlement. The Toothy One was laughing and waving to his people. Hat on, sunglasses in place, this was the greatest day in his life, he was shouting to them.

The huge tanklike vehicle rumbled up a dirt path, breaking trees and fauna as it did so. Finally they reached the crest of the ridge. From this elevation, the huge river valley stretched out before them.

Ganganez took Toothy from the back of the vehicle and stood him at the edge of the cliff. They could see for miles from here, and Toothy began pointing out places of interest to Ganganez: the river, the fields where his people hunted, the sacred mountains beyond.

Ganganez asked Toothy if he or his people had seen any strange things in the sky lately. Toothy answered the only way he could: that he and his people
always
saw strange things in the sky. Their religion was based on the sun spirits. But they could not speak of these things as it was a very private thing within each individual. In fact, it was forbidden to discuss such things with anyone who was not an Oxapi.

This upset Ganganez, but not very much. He stood Toothy closer to the edge and asked him again: What had he seen in the sky recently?

Toothy stopped smiling for the first time. He explained again in his odd click-clack language that he could not say. It was against his religion to speak to outsiders about these things. Ganganez nodded to one of the guards who’d accompanied him to the ledge. The man immediately made a radio call back to the village.

Then Ganganez took Toothy’s new hat and threw it off the cliff. The chief nearly began crying. Ganganez asked him a third time: Tell me what you’ve seen. But again Toothy refused.

Ganganez nudged him closer to the edge. All pretense was gone now. A fourth time he asked what Toothy had seen lately. A fourth time, Toothy refused. Ganganez flipped the sunglasses from his face and threw them off the cliff as well. Toothy was in tears by now, so sure he was going to die at the hands of this huge strange man.

But Ganganez surprised him.

He pushed Toothy, not over the ledge, but back into the command vehicle. Then he joked with the man, saying he was testing his manhood and that he was glad the man did not break his religious convictions.

Toothy began laughing again.

The command vehicle returned to the village, but all was very quiet. Ganganez lowered the rear ramp and led Toothy out. He found a horrible sight. Everything in his village was dead. Every man, woman, child, pig, duck, and goat. Slaughtered. Blood was everywhere; the air smelled of death.

Toothy stopped smiling; he would never really smile again. Ganganez and his men were laughing at him as they started their vehicles and began to move out of the village, leaving the chief alone with the dead.

Ganganez’s last words to him were: “Now you have something to tell the other tribes about.”

New Lima

General Wakisaki was smiling.

It was the first time in a while, but he could feel the corners of his mouth start to crease and his eyes start to squint and then, at last, he fell victim to it. He was happy, an experience he hadn’t felt in more than a week.

He was sitting in his penthouse located atop the military government building in downtown New Lima. This was the tallest building around, and with its four glass walls, it gave a fantastic, sometimes startling view of the city surrounding it.

This was not the New Lima he’d stared out at for the past six months. No, many parts of the city were now just burned-out wrecks, the result of the vicious firebombing a week ago. The intelligence building, the television broadcasting center, the communications center, and the indoctrination building, all within one square mile of Wakisaki’s penthouse, were just smoldering shells of what they once were. Hundreds of buildings beyond were in the same sorry shape.

Off shore, the hulks of four warships still lay floundering, further fouling the waters and making it even more difficult to navigate in and around the artificial harbor of Callao. The enormous vessels were total losses, their bombings and the fires that resulted being so complete.

No matter. Wakisaki had finally managed to put all of these negative thoughts out of his mind and again concentrate on the future. He’d been able to do this as a result of three things.

First, he’d spent the previous day meditating. The object he’d concentrated on was a priceless Hintu vase. It was a 16th-century piece of art, delicate, like a pearl, with tiny cherry blossoms painted on its neck and base. It was one of Wakisaki’s most prized possessions, and absolutely priceless. He’d discovered great comfort in the past by simply staring at it, turning it over and over and over in his hands. Feeling it.
Being
it.

It was in front of him now, sitting on the low table, glistening in the morning sun.

Wakisaki’s second object of resurgence was right next to the vase. It was an empty bottle of grape sake. High in alcohol and extremely sweet to the taste, grape sake was considered rather low class back in Japan. But Wakisaki simply couldn’t get enough of the stuff. With the correct combination of meditation and grape sake, the high general could achieve a mental state close to cosmic. He would actually hallucinate sometimes, so inebriated he would become. On these occasions, his staff knew it was best to leave him alone.

The third part of his passage from depression was all around him. Young girls, mere teens, were always a key to Wakisaki’s revivals. There were five of them scattered about his penthouse now. They were all Asian, all beautiful, all barely one-quarter his age. He had used them all, had watched them with each other, had ordered them to do many vile and erotic things and they had complied after ingesting a lot of grape sake themselves.

One who lay nearby was a particular favorite of his. She was of undetermined age, but Wakisaki had grandchildren older. She was sweet, small, innocent. It was her performance around midnight that had finally broken his grand funk. He barely remembered it, so drunk he’d been. But he recalled the smile returning to his face just as he reached his release—and the grin had remained ever since.

She was passed out beside him now, but he stroked her partially clothed body and stared at his vase again.

Yes, life was good for the conqueror. After all, life was simply how one looked at it. Setbacks were actually opportunities in disguise. The burned-out buildings downtown? They could always be rebuilt, bigger and better. The four gutted warships in the harbor? Their scrap could be used to build a statue honoring him. The 2,391 people killed in the firebombing? That many fewer mouths to feed.

Yes, High General Wakisaki was smiling again. He felt vital again. Strong.
Invincible.

It was a great feeling.

It would last all of five minutes.

The knock at his penthouse door was very light.

The general sensed right away the timidness of the person on the other side. He knew immediately this was not going to be pleasant news.

He grumbled a reply and the person entered. It was the new police chief of New Lima, the designated bearer of bad news for the Japanese military commanders. He was carrying with him an insta-film cartridge and a combination radio/TV/film player, the device everyone on the planet called a Boomer.

“What is it?” the general yelled, loud enough to awaken the young girls. “Why are you here?”

“News, sir,” the man said, his voice trembling so much he could not speak above a whisper. “From the front …”

Front?
Wakisaki thought, the word burning a hole right through his stomach, to the acidy juices beyond.
What front?

The chief set the Boomer down and inserted the insta-film cartridge. It began playing right away.

“This just arrived from Ayacucho,” the police chief whispered. “Your staff felt you should see it immediately.”

Ayacucho was a military district capital about 200 miles southeast of New Lima. It served as a major logistics center for men, ammunition, and equipment for both Japanese and native forces on the continent.

At the moment, it was in flames.

Wakisaki watched in horror as the film played out. It was a disturbing case of déjà vu. Gigantic silvery airplanes, flying so impossibly low, dropping tons of incendiary devices on the burning city below. The smoke alone was thicker than cumulus. The flames seemed to be reaching higher in altitude than the attacking airplanes themselves.

Through it all, Japanese SuperZeroes were screaming through the sky above the burning city—not attacking the bombers, but trying their best to get away from a lone airplane that was attacking them. Even as the city burned below, Wakisaki could clearly see this lone enemy airplane darting this way and that, seemingly shooting down his fighters at will.

It seemed unreal; it seemed impossible for one pilot to fly this way. Yet it was happening, right before his eyes.

“When?” Wakisaki mumbled, stunned. “When did all this happen?”

“This morning,” the chief replied. “The film arrived here less than ten minutes ago. There are reports that the airplanes also attacked La Paz and Cosnipata.”

Wakisaki felt his face go hot. His eyes began to bulge. He looked up at the police chief, who was now crying.

“You know what to do,” he said.

The chief nodded sadly, walked over to the balcony, calmly stepped over the railing, and jumped off. It was forty-three stories down.

Then Wakisaki rose, picked up the priceless Hintu vase, and hurled it against the wall. It smashed into hundreds of little pieces.

Then the general broke down and began crying himself.

“Why?” he blubbered. “Why is God doing this to me?”

Pasco Region,

Northeast Peru

C
OLONEL GANGANEZ WAS GAMBOLING
with one of his men when he got word about the attacks on Ayacucho, La Paz, and Cosnipata.

He was furious, yet not at all surprised. After having reviewed the films of the first attack on New Lima, he knew that whoever was responsible for the massive bombing would not likely stop with just one raid. These mysterious fliers had much in the way of firepower and aircraft. In fact, Ganganez had never seen airplanes as big as the ones that had attacked New Lima. He knew being in possession of such military might didn’t exactly lend itself to sitting still and not using it. These people would continue attacking major Japanese installations for as long as they could.

That’s why Ganganez had to find them—and quickly.

He kicked the young soldier out of his quarters in the back of the command vehicle and pulled out his maps. His column had been making its way through the jungles northeast of New Lima for three days now. In that time they’d destroyed five villages and killed more than 1,000 natives. But still, they were no closer to their goal.

Ganganez knew there were really only two locations from which the huge bombers could be flying from. The most likely would be a low, hidden valley, perhaps with elaborate camouflage on both the aircraft housings and the runways themselves. This valley would need access in and out for supplies and fuel. That told Ganganez it would have to be close to the sea, or at least a river which flowed out to the sea.

The problem was, there were no such valleys, at least not on his current maps. This left the only one other option: that the secret air base was located on a mountaintop somewhere.

But this too was very unlikely, and in Ganganez’s mind, judging by the size of the aircraft involved and their numbers, nearly impossible. Japanese recon aircraft had been scouring the terrain within a 500-mile radius of New Lima for a week, concentrating on mountains and highlands. They had all come back with absolutely nothing.

Ganganez was really stuck on zero. Though he and his troops had slaughtered hundreds of innocents in the past few days, they had not received one piece of helpful evidence from any of them. And while Ganganez knew that word of the natives’ deaths would spread through the countryside like a wildfire—after all, that’s why he’d bothered to kill so many—he was finding the natives in this region tough nuts to crack.

But for a man like Ganganez, that just meant he had to hit them a little harder.

The Night Brigade’s column continued winding its way through the vast Pasco region, slowly moving toward the northeast.

At about noon on this, the fourth day of their trek, they came upon four girls bathing in a tributary of the Tisqui river. They slaughtered the girls, ate them, and moved on. By midafternoon, the lead vehicles had topped a series of hills known as the Uni. From here the next region of Huanuco stretched before them. The column remained at rest as a passing thunderstorm went overhead, then resumed when the late afternoon sun reappeared.

They went through the village of Ytapti around 1700 hours. The place was deserted except for two elderly women who were too frail to move. Ganganez shot them and ordered the village burned. The column then skirted the main section of the Tisqui River, coming upon two more deserted villages, looting them of their meager possessions, and then burning them and pressing on. Obviously word of the advancing Night Brigade had traveled very fast through the jungle as the next three villages were also empty. The soldiers burned them anyway and poisoned their water supply.