Sky Ghost (43 page)

The OSS man looked absolutely astonished and confused at the same time.

“How could you possibly know my name?” he asked Hunter.

But Hunter certainly didn’t have enough time to explain it all to him now—if in fact there was anything to explain.

“Let’s just say it was more than a lucky guess,” Hunter finally told him.

“Yes, much more,” Y told him. “I was there that first day. I saw you being questioned. I saw you take off to attack those subs. From that day on I was certain that we knew each other before—but I couldn’t remember how or when.”

“Well, set aside a few days when this is all done and maybe we’ll be able to figure it out,” Hunter replied. “But the important thing now is for you get these bombs back to our guys—and out of Germany.”

Agent Y seemed to accept this, and told the crew of his Beater to help the Air Guards in securing the six bombs.

“I think the important thing is that we
all
get the hell out of here and back to the ships,” the OSS man said. “The Germans will certainly spot us down here, out in the open like this.”

Hunter took a deep breath. Pegg and Payne had joined them by now.

“Well, there’s a slight problem with that,” Hunter said.

“What is that?” Payne asked him.

“I can’t go back,” he told them. “Not yet. There’s something else I’ve got to do.”

“Got to do?” Pegg mimicked him. “You’ve been out here for seven days man. The Huns would love to kill you, and all of America thinks your dead. You’ve got to get back right now.”

Payne and Agent Y were nodding in absolute approval.

But Hunter was just shaking his head no.

“I need this Beater,” he said. “And about four hours. I’ll meet you back at the ships then.”

The three men all looked at him like he was crazy, which in reality, he was, due to his near drowning three days before.

Payne especially began to protest—but then Agent Y just held up his hand.

“No,” he said. “Let him go. He knows what he’s doing.”

Hunter shook hands with them, and then climbed up the steep ramp to the Beater. He took a look at its eight rotors and its very ugly shape and stopped for a moment. He had to fly this thing a long long way.

“I hope I do anyway,” he whispered to himself.

T
HE TRIP EAST WAS
one of dodging American firebombs and staying low enough so as not to attract the attention of any German fighters.

Flying the Beater was probably the worst experience Hunter had endured in this strange world. The thing was an unforgiving beast, not appreciative of his infallible piloting skills, and always just one nut and bolt away from going down in a horrible crash.

But it carried him to where he wanted to go. It took more than two hours, and he’d had to dodge smoke, bad weather and the occasional flak burst to do it. But finally Hunter arrived at his destination.

He landed the Beater not far from what used to be the Berlin Military Airport.

Hit particularly hard by American firebombers, the immense airfield was now littered with the remains of the German Home Air Defense Force. More than 200 fighters of all types lay charred or burning up and down the melted runways. The place had been abandoned days ago. With incendiary bombs raining down on it endlessly for nearly a month, the nonstop conflagration had caused the people who used to work here to flee.

Hunter left the Beater and began walking. The streets leading into the center of the city were empty as well. Blocks upon blocks of architectural oddities, opera houses, museums, and sex bars. Murals of fake heroic war scenes, painted like advertisements, next to neon signs hailing the best little whorehouse in Germany. All of them burned or burning.

This place was even stranger on the ground, Hunter thought.

He walked the streets quickly, seeing everything, looking everywhere. His huge double-barrel .45 pistol was loaded and ready. But there was no one to shoot at. The burning city was deserted, too. Except for one person, Hunter believed. That’s why he was here.

There was still no doubt in his mind that Viktor had been the impetus behind this latest German attempt to conquer the world. In this strange and different place, Viktor’s brand of evil was still all-powerful. He’d almost accomplished here what he’d almost accomplished back where he and Hunter first came from.

How ironic then that Hunter would have to cross over into an entirely different universe to finally catch him.

Or so he thought.

He reached the center of town, the grand plaza of the New Reichstag. It was enormous, of course—five times the size of the version Hunter had seen in photos from his version of World War II. All Roman columns and white cement, there was a huge Iron Cross centerstage in the roof. The encrustation of steel and cement was pockmarked and scored from all the firebombing, but was rigidly in place nevertheless.

Hunter studied the plaza from the cover of a nearby building’s front door. It too was completely deserted. A few huge Supertanks sat empty in the square, tracks broken, engines charred and ruined. A crashed Focke-Wulf bomber was nearby too. It looked small in the vast plaza, almost like a broken child’s toy.

Hunter rechecked his ammo load and began to move out when he saw the tiger.

It was about 25 feet off to his left, pawing through a garbage pile looking for food. Hunter hadn’t anticipated this—but it wasn’t that hard to figure out what had happened. Berlin had a large zoo. It had obviously been caught up in the firebombing and now hundreds of exotic animals were on the loose in the enemy capital. The tiger spotted Hunter a moment later. He growled and showed his teeth. But clearly he was more afraid of Hunter than Hunter was of him.

He grabbed something from the trash and then ran off. Hunter began moving across the plaza.

He reached the enormous steps and was mildly astonished to see a small herd of zebras run by off to his left. Above him, three condors were circling. He hoped that they weren’t looking down on him. At least not yet.

He finally reached the top of the stairs of the Reichstag and pulled one of the enormous wooden doors open. It was dark inside—no surprise there. There hadn’t been any electrical power in Germany for more than a week. Hunter walked in, and shut the door behind him. He wanted his eyes to adjust to the darkness before he went any further.

Strange that it would come to this, he thought, inching his way forward again. His foggy memory seemed to recall that more than once he’d hunted down his nemesis through dark hallways, approaching yet another final confrontation. And what would he do when he found the Devil himself this time? He’d vowed to kill him on the spot many times back in his old world. Nothing had changed that now.

He walked through the dark hallways, hand cannon up, sensing that he was getting very, very close now.

Then he turned the corner and saw before him the doors of a huge office. There was a light inside this room, and he could hear it flickering. It was battery-powered; the juice was wearing thin.

Hunter walked into the room, pistol raised high. The place was a mess. There were many war gaming boards thrown about with thousands of black and white wooden pieces representing armies scattered everywhere. There were hundreds of battlefield photographs and instant-news reels thrown about too. And the paintings on the wall, originally intended to depict glorious German victories on sea, land, and air, were now all scarred and ripped, and even fading. Particularly ironic was one showing a massive bombing of New York City; German bombers overhead, the Big Apple, entirely engulfed in flames, below. It was, of course, an attack that never took place.

History is made up of the lies that historians all agree on,
Hunter thought as he quickly studied the mural.

In the far corner of the room was a desk, and at the desk, there was a man. Head down, back to Hunter, it was as if he’d spent the last few days just looking out the window as the city of Berlin burned down around him.

Hunter slowly moved towards the man; his sixth sense was vibrating him madly. At the same time he could tell that there was no other danger about. Just this man was here, the one who had foisted this latest version of German Imperial misery upon the world. Hunter had vowed it would never happen again, in this world or any other. He was so sure that he was close to fulfilling that pledge, he could feel it in his bones.

Strange were the thoughts that went through his head though. That day, in the middle of the Atlantic. It seemed like many years ago now, when the truth was, it was barely nine months ago. What would have happened if the Germans had picked him up—and the Americans had gotten this man? Or any other permutation of three? Hunter just shook his head; there was no sense thinking about it. This was how the dice fell here, in this place. Who knows where they were falling in another place entirely.

He crept even closer, being as quiet as possible. But he sensed that the man knew he was here, knew why he had come, and wasn’t really going to do a lot about it. The scent of crushed human spirit was almost a stink in the air. This man was a failure—he’d rebuilt an enormously powerful war machine in such a short amount of time, only to see it crash almost as quickly as it was born. That would break anyone’s spirit, no matter how clever, how cruel, how cunning.

He was but 10 feet from the man now. His back was still to him, but Hunter saw the characteristic black clothes and long black hair.

The last time he’d seen Viktor was up in space. At that time, he’d been dressed in an outfit that look liked a cross between the pope’s finest garment and those of a drag queen. But now this man, this broken human being who was about to have his life taken by Hunter, was dressed simply in a black uniform, almost bereft of ornaments or insignia.

Hunter took three steps closer and then stopped. He was about six feet away from the man now. He raised his weapon—it would be a clear shot to the head.

Hunter’s fingers began to tighten around the gun. He was finally a microsecond away from completing a task that took nothing less than a transuniversal dispersal to accomplish.

It seemed almost too easy.

And as it turned out, it was.

Hunter was loath to shoot the devil himself in the back—so he took a deep breath and then spoke.

“You know I’m here,” he said. “And you know
why
I’m here. So just turn around, slowly, and take it like a man.”

The person stirred, but did not move in panic. He wasn’t that surprised to hear Wingman’s voice or the unmistakable click of an automatic pistol getting ready to fire.

“We’ve been through a lot,” said the muffled voice from the desk. “And I knew it would be you who would come after me. I knew you would figure out what happened to us, how we found ourselves swimming in the middle of the ocean—and I knew it was just a matter of time before we met again.”

Hunter clicked the safety off his gun.

The man started to turn around. Hunter tensed, and tightened his finger on the trigger just a bit more.

“I’m not a religious man,” he started to say. “But I hope there’s a hell, Viktor, so you can have front-row seat.”

That’s when the man swung around finally and their eyes met and Hunter’s hand went so numb he nearly dropped his weapon.

“Viktor?” the man said, looking at him with a twin expression of bemusement and astonishment. “I’m not Viktor…”

It was true. It wasn’t Viktor.

It was Elvis.

Now what passed was the longest minute of Hunter’s life.

They just looked at each other, not talking, not blinking, just staring, and putting the pieces into place.

Finally it was his old friend who began to talk.

“Many things happen when you go through what we did,” Elvis said, tears beginning to form in his eyes. “It’s not guaranteed that you stay the way you were. That you will remain a good guy.
You
stayed the way you were. I changed. And Viktor…God knows what happened to him.”

Hunter could barely speak. “But how do you know all this?”

Elvis just shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s just in my head, just like I’m sure a lot of things are in your head. But when I got here, people thought I was a god or something. And that was my reality. I just remembered everything quicker than you.”

Hunter had lowered his gun by now; inside him, his very soul was being torn in two.

“Don’t worry about it,” Elvis said, wiping the tears away. “At some point I guess I knew it would end this way.”

He reached into his desk drawer and took something out.

“So let’s just leave it at this,” he said. “See you next time.”

With that, Elvis put a gun to his head and blew his brains out.

New York City

Two Weeks Later

T
HE FIRST THING HAWK
Hunter saw when he woke up was an empty bottle of champagne.

He rolled over on the massive bed, the silk sheets clinging to his body, and felt the very warm form of Sarah sleeping softly beside him.

He wiped the sleep from his eyes and stared at the very ornate ceiling above the bed. They were in the Presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, New York’s finest. They had been here for three days now, and all Hunter had done was eat, sleep, drink champagne, and have sex. He had to admit that so far, the sleeping part might have been the best. He’d been that tired.

Today was the big day. There was going to be a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in his honor. More than 2 million people were expected to attend. For while the rumors of his death had been greatly exaggerated, they did nothing to quell the excitement and sheer disbelief when it was announced that he was in fact still alive. America simply went nuts and the War Department, citing the good of the country, urged him to go along with it.

They were giving him the parade because they were saying he was the person who had finally won the war. But Hunter knew this wasn’t true.

The war was over—completely and finally. It had ended three days before. But its conclusion had taken place while he was on an airplane, heading back to the States.