Tomorrow War (12 page)

He was simply astonished. It was unbelievable. This was not a hallucination, for he could feel the cold mist of the clouds wetting his face and lips. And the wind was blowing at such a clip, his harness was actually preventing him from being sucked down into the hole.

“How …?” was all he was able to blurt out again.

The Man just shook his head. “We don’t know,” he said, staring down at the liner, which was now just passing out of their visual range.

“Is it a wormhole? A small one?” the Man asked rhetorically. “Some kind of portal created by a physics we don’t know anything about? Or simply a hole in the sky? Take your pick.”

He allowed a short silence to pass between them. More clouds flowed into the vault. Viktor found himself suddenly soaked from head to toe.

“All we know is what we are looking at, this place is Earth, but in a different … what? Dimension? Universe? Astral plane?” the Man went on. “We don’t even know what to call it. It seems impossible. We are sixteen hundred feet inside a mountain on West Falkland Island, yet we are looking down on a section of the Atlantic approximately fifty miles north of Bermuda. How can you explain such a thing? How can anyone’s mind even contemplate such a place exists? Yet, here it is.”

Viktor simply couldn’t speak. For a long moment he wished he was back on his ship—the huge liner that had been moved by thousands of rowers. The place where he took care of the children on board. The vessel that had been his home for more than a year. Things were so much simpler back then.

“Why … why did you bring me here?” he finally asked, his eyes glued to the absolutely impossible scene below him.

The Man just shook his head.

“I’m not really sure myself,” he began haltingly. “But I know—from what you’ve told me about your amnesia, about your past and also what you did … well, with my wife yesterday. I know from these things that you are special. You are a very special individual. And if I might say, almost
too
special for this world. As a scientist I should have to try to find an explanation for you. And as someone once said, once all the untruths are swept away, whatever remains, however ridiculous, must be the real truth. You are special, this place is special—that’s why I brought you here.”

Viktor felt a nudge on his elbow; the Man was handing him something. Viktor looked down and felt his eyes go even wider.

It was a parachute …

“I believe you belong back there,” the Man was saying. “It’s the only explanation I can come up with. As a scientist, I know I should keep you here, study you, dissect you like a bug—and maybe find out just what this thing is before us.”

The Man took a deep breath. “But I can’t do that now,” he continued. “Not after what you did yesterday. I have to pay you back for that. For bringing her back to me. The only way I can think of to do that, is to give you this opportunity ….”

He put the parachute into Viktor’s shaking hands.

“You can put that thing on, wait for another ship to pass, and jump,” the Man explained simply. “If you do, I believe you will wind up where you came from. I also believe you will be your former self—whoever that might have been. After all, you seem to recall being picked up in this part of the Atlantic last year. Obviously, with this portal looking down on that same section of ocean, that indicates you
belong …
back there ….”

Another very long pause.

“That is the only thing I can offer you for what you did for me yesterday,” the Man finally concluded. “In my opinion—and maybe a few others if given the facts, I believe you are an angel. And you must be compensated. So I can give you your life back. Your old life …”

Viktor just stared back at him. His mouth was still open, his eyes still the size of golf balls. He was silent for a very long time.

“But … but,” he finally began stuttering. “S-supposing I was n-not an angel … back there?”

The Man’s brow furrowed at the comment. Even with all his knowledge, it was something that had not occurred to him before.

“It might be the chance you have to take,” he finally replied.

Viktor began shaking his head slowly from side to side.

“No,” he said. “No, this is not the time to do it.” He handed the parachute back to the Man.

“It isn’t?” the Man asked. “When is the right time?”

Viktor stared at a big black cloud passing by the Hole.

“I seem to recall I fell into
this
world with two others,” he began slowly. “I know one is dead. That means one remains. This person, he would know who I was Back There.”

“What are you proposing?” the Man wondered.

Viktor just shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But maybe … well, maybe I should find this guy.”

Another very long pause.

“And when I do, maybe he and I should jump through this hole together ….”

T
HE BOMBARDMENT HAD BEEN
going on for twenty-six days.

Every minute of every hour, twenty-four hours a day, more than a dozen high-explosive mortar shells rained down on the three-square-mile area known in another place as Khe Sanh, but in this world as Long Bat. That was more than 720 shells an hour, more than seventeen thousand explosions a day—for nearly three weeks.

No wonder the place looked like a part of the moon.

It was actually worse at night. That’s when the enemy in the hills launched dozens of star flares, lighting up the battered valley even brighter than the harsh daytime.

When the siege began, the small force of surrounded mercenaries had numbered 1,202. Now less than seven hundred remained, and that was only because the earth was relatively soft in this awful place, allowing the doomed soldiers to dig their trenches, their foxholes, and eventually their graves very deep.

But they were trapped. There was no passage in and out of the valley that was not covered by the enemy in the hills. The force surrounding the mercs was estimated to be more than five thousand, and they were armed with not only high-powered mortars but also howitzer-style artillery, ultralong-range flame throwers, and more than two dozen mega-tanks.

The only mystery about the siege at Long Bat was why the enemy in the hills just didn’t launch a ground attack and get it over with ….

“What are those guys doing there anyway?”

It was midnight. The small combat-planning room on the aircraft carrier seemed particularly cramped. There were thirteen people sitting around a huge TV monitor. Y was there, as was Zoltan, Crabb, Bro, and the Jones boys. Several of Emma’s friends were also in attendance, keeping the men fresh with beer or coffee and generally sitting around, looking both beautiful and bored.

They were all watching a long-range video relay of the sad battle at Long Bat. The footage had been shot earlier in the day via a seven-aircraft linkup, which stretched for more than five hundred miles.

It was the first recon target the Jones boys had selected for examination in Vietnam. It was at that exact spot on the map that the ghost named Vogel had burned his hole.

The footage seemed unreal. This was not really a battle at all—that was soon apparent. It looked at first like the valley was actually a target range, a place for soldiers to drill in the art of lobbing antipersonnel artillery. Surely no one was on the receiving end of such a systematically overwhelming bombardment. But then, here and there, the TV cameras caught evidence of return fire. Long but scattered lines of purple and red tracer fire emanated from the center of this moonscape. This fire was symbolic, if anything—last bullets in a long ammo belt of defiance that was quickly coming to an end.

And who were those guys caught in the middle of the massive nonstop barrage?

“They might be what’s left of an infantry outfit called the JF Group,” Seth Jones said after studying the broadcast for a few minutes. “They were lost in Indochina about two months ago—went down there to do some jungle-fighting job. Some rinky-dink thing and never came back.”

Dave Jones agreed with his brother. “I can’t recall exactly,” he said. “But I remember talking to some airlift guys back at the Pit who said they’d dropped supplies to a jungle-fighting unit and that they were in a hole in ’Nam getting their asses shot to pieces. Looks like JFG got caught out in the open, and that whoever controls those hills are playing with them—like a cat with a rat.”

Y sipped his brandy and pushed a button that gave them a fuzzy yet close-up view of the battlefield.

“Well, they’re not having a good day, that’s for sure,” he said. “But does this really affect us?”

The Jones boys just shrugged in unison.

“It’s where the V-man made his mark on the map,” Dave Jones said.

“So that’s where you want to go, right?” Seth Jones added.

Y just shrugged. “Well, I don’t know, I’m hardly an expert,” he said. “I mean how accurate is the burning finger of a ghost?”

“Very
accurate in this case,” Zoltan suddenly piped up.

They all turned toward the psychic. There was some eye rolling in the process.

“I’m getting a very heavy vibe from this,” he was saying, reaching out and actually touching the TV screen. “Something we are seeking is there … or may have been there.”

The Jones boys joined Crabb and Y in a staring contest with the ceiling.

“‘
Is
’ there?” Y asked. “Or ‘
was
’ there? It’s a big difference….”

“Like the difference between getting involved in that mess, or moving on,” Crabb said.

Zoltan just shook his head. “I can’t tell,” he admitted after a few moments. “Something heavy
was
there. And might still be. The vibe remains. But what it is … I just can’t tell.”

“Well, let’s look at this logically,” Seth Jones said, nodding toward Zoltan. “If that’s not
verboten?”

Zoltan nodded back. “By all means ….”

The Jones brother set the broadcast to slow frame—essentially freezing it.

“We are looking for the biggest muthafucker of a jet bomber ever made, correct?”

Those assembled nodded. Y sipped his brandy again and wondered what Emma would be wearing once he got back to his cabin.

“Well?” Seth Jones said. “Anyone see a plane anywhere in that picture?”

The unanimous answer was no—what they were seeing was a devastated valley with thickly jungled hills surrounding it. There was not an iota of evidence that the huge bomber had been there, had crashed there, or had even flown over the place. There was a runway in the middle of the valley, and it was fairly long. But it was also horribly cratered.

However, there was another geological formation nearby. It was a huge mountain. And that’s where Zoltan was now concentrating.

“Inside there …,” he said. “Something we want is inside that mountain.”

They all turned back to the screen. Y pushed a button and now they were looking at a close-up of the mountain. It
was
big—and if there was a cave inside, there was an outside possibility that the huge bomber could have fit inside. But this seemed as unlikely as the bizarre battle that was going on nearby.

But bizarre was the name of this story. Plus those crammed into the small combat-planning center had before them two supernatural clues: the hole in the map and Zoltan’s wobbling brain. Both pointed to this little bloody smudge called Long Bat.

One Jones boy just looked at the other, then they turned to Y, who was refilling his brandy glass and dreaming of Emma. Had he been more sober, he would have been dazed by the fact of how talk of going into a distant valley like Long Bat, and helping out a surrounded unit of hapless mercenaries, seemed so familiar to him.

But he was not sober.

“How close are we to Tonkin?” Seth Jones asked him.

Y scrambled to push the right buttons on his navigation screen in order to project the correct image of their progress at sea.

“If I’m reading this correctly,” he said, hoping indeed that he was, “I see us in the Gulf about six and a half hours from right now. About oh-seven-hundred hours.”

The twins got up, straightened out their flight suits in an identical manner, and put on their flight caps.

“OK,” Dave said. “We’ll leave at oh-five-hundred ….”

T
HERE WERE SO MANY
high-explosive mortar shells landing on the valley of Long Bat this morning, the combination of the flames and fumes was being sucked up into a convex of winds that created a huge mushroom-shaped cloud.

The besieged mercenaries had dug deeper this dawn than any of the previous twenty-five; it seemed the shells being used by
the
unseen enemy in the hills were packing more of an explosive wallop on this nightmarish morning. Every time a shell landed lately, it seemed to shake the ground with more terror; the flame and flash from each explosion seemed brighter, and the resulting craters seemed deeper.

Forty-five of the mercs had died during the night—the highest one-day toll since the first week of the nearly month-long siege. There were only 623 mercs left now. At this rate, they would all be gone in less than two weeks.

It was strange, then, when even above the sound of shells crashing every few seconds, the embattled mercs heard yet another sound. It was a high-pitched, slightly mechanical whine that was not as distinct as the double-reaction jet engines of the day.

Those mercs who dared, crawled out of their rat holes for a few seconds, and ducking the blizzard of shrapnel, looked skyward in search of what was making the odd sound.

Then a few saw it. It was a small aircraft flying very high above the desolated cratered valley. It was gray and green and looked like a gigantic bug ….

There was a headquarters of sorts for the mercs’ position.

It was a command post made of sandbags and concrete chunks and old shattered timber, dug twenty feet into the battered bloodstained earth. Inside was the CO of the merc brigade, a Frenchman named Jean Zouvette LaFeet.

He was beside his bunk, on his knees, praying—a position he could be found in up to twenty-three hours a day—when two merc messengers toppled into the command bunker.

“Sir,” one cried. “A development of which you should be aware.”