Tomorrow War (21 page)

“One bullet in the right place might have been all they needed to get through here,” Crabb remarked as they flashed over the deserted, smoldering city.

“Sometimes that’s all you need,” Y replied, chugging on his twelfth beer of the flight.

They passed over into Bangladesh in the early-morning hours. This rich, prosperous country had featured just four of Khen’s railway military outposts, and like all those before, they had been utterly destroyed.

Using his intuition and a calculator, Zoltan determined that the train was probably moving at close to seventy miles per hour when it came upon the hapless outpost. “If every gun on that train was firing as they roared through,” he offered, “and the train is several miles long as the swami said, that’s an incredible amount of firepower concentrated on a small target for a very short period of time.”

“They are like an army of rolling shock troops,” Crabb commented, looking down on yet another devastated outpost. “A nightmare on wheels. Those guys down there never knew what hit them.”

They passed through Bangladesh and into northern India. Approaching the city of Gorakhpur, they saw evidence for the first time that Khen’s men had made an effort to stop the hugely armored train.

At several points along the tracks just outside the city, they saw huge logs had been cut and apparently set in place across the railway. But these logs now lay in fragments and splinters, tossed aside by the train’s mighty locomotives and a battering ram Swami had spoken of as being attached to the lead engine’s nose.

Farther into the city, the Z-16 observers saw several antiaircraft-gun emplacements whose barrels had been lowered to the horizontal. Apparently, they had been altered to fire directly at the train as it passed through. But again, the sheer speed and the armored plating of the train had made it difficult to get off a good shot before the guns themselves were destroyed. As it was, these gun sites were all now just smudges of black and gray against the bright green of the surrounding fauna.

In some places the jungle had already overgrown the cracked and broken gun barrels, reclaiming what it hadn’t held sway over for many years.

Y crawled back up into his bunk around 0300 hours.

He was tired and drunk and getting bored at observing the path of destruction left by the armored train.

He drank three more bottles of Toomey’s beer and then passed out. Emma was beside him, keeping him warm and making sure he didn’t roll out of the berth. Feeling somewhat secure, Y lay back and dreamed.

He was on a huge cruise liner, a luxurious ship that always seemed to be sailing in calm weather under the hot sun. And there were two women aboard this ship, and they just would not leave him alone! For whatever reason they were always bugging him to have sex with them. Both were beautiful, but he was always too drunk to perform.

Pretty soon these two women started locking him up in chains in a small room and making him perform. It was a miserable experience and Y almost wound up peeing in his bed.

But then the ship sank, and the two women became queens or something, and he was rustled awake by Emma moving.

Then his head was filled with voices. Many voices. Then screams. Then the sound of the Z-16’s engines revving very high.

The next thing he knew, Emma was shaking him awake. He slowly opened his eyes to see Zoltan pulling Emma out of the berth and jamming a crash helmet on her head. Zoltan grabbed Y and did the same thing; the OSS agent came out a lot less delicately than had Emma. He fell immediately to the floor and stumbled once the helmet was on his head.

All the while the Z-16 was bouncing all over the sky. Y caught a glance of the Jones boys up on the flight deck, and they were battling viciously with the controls.

“Jeesuzz!” Y finally cried out once his head had cleared a bit. “What the fuck is happening?”

Crabb was suddenly in his face holding a huge two-barrel machine gun.

“We are under attack,” he said starkly, handing him the gun. “We must get to our battle stations ….”

“Battle stations?”
Y said completely confused. “Who said we had battle stations on here?”

A second later, there was a huge explosion off the Z-16’s right wing. The concussion sent the airplane reeling to the left. This sent Y sprawling across the flight compartment and rolling head over heels up to the flight deck itself. Just by luck, for there was no coincidence in this world, he landed—hard—on the navigation table. It was here that he was somehow able to get a firm grip, his nose pressed up against the big TV display screen.

He was able to hold on and actually read the navigational display, and that’s how he knew they were now over the country of Afghanistan.

It was strange, for a moment it seemed like time stood still. And Y’s soaked brain became clear—again just for a moment.

As it turned out, he knew a lot about Afghanistan. When he was a junior OSS agent he’d studied the place and had actually done a couple drops into the wilderness country as part of the fifty-five-year war effort against Germany.

In this universe, Afghanistan was a very different place—for two reasons. Firstly, the Fifth Crusades had actually taken hold and had brought many European influences into the culture where they became firmly implanted.

Secondly, when the British empire was taking hold, the British Royal Army set up major garrisons all over the country, and stayed. They were never thrown out. This made Afghanistan a very strange place, indeed, for it was like a small part of Europe transplanted into what was actually southwest Asia. While there were plenty of mosques and marketplaces and red-tiled mud houses sprinkled throughout the rough-and-tumble countryside, the cities themselves were distinctly European. They were made up of high walls, narrow streets, stonewashed houses, Christian churches, and government buildings, which had stood for hundreds of years and resembled nothing less than medieval castles.

With his nose pressed by gravity against the navigational screen, Y was also able to see exactly where they were over Afghanistan. The Z-16 was thirty-five miles southeast of the city of Kabul Downs, not too far from the famous Khyber Pass. Y had been to Kabul Downs many times, both on duty and off.

How ironic, then, that it appeared he was about to be killed in a plane crash near there.

The Z-16 ran into another explosion, this time off its left wing, knocking the huge airplane and everyone in it to the right.

After another backbreaking tumble Y found himself pressed up against the middeck observation bubble. The g forces holding him there were so intense, it was all he could do to get a breath in and out. He felt like a gigantic hand had him by the neck and was squishing him harder and harder against the Texiglas window.

And again, it seemed like time stood still. Y could see what was going on outside, and why the Z-16 recon plane was being thrown all over the sky.

They were under attack by literally dozens of tiny airplanes, each one sporting a very large cannon in its nose.

At least, that’s what the situation appeared to be at first.

What Y actually saw was a bit more complicated.

The sky was indeed filled with the tiny aircraft, which seemed to move extremely fast and were of biplane design. But in that slice of a moment Y could see that these airplanes were not all exactly alike. There appeared to be two different kinds.

One group of these tiny planes was powered by jet engines. Even though they were of biplane design—with two wings slightly askew but parallel to each other—there was a small double-reaction engine midfuselage, spewing jet exhaust and streaks of flame from the rear tailpipe.

These jets were painted in various shades of blue. They seemed to carry cannons on the wings, smaller than the other group of airplanes. To Y’s eye, these odd jet-powered craft looked most like an airplane of almost ninety years before called the Spad.

The other airplanes were painted red. They were propeller driven and were lugging the huge nose cannons. They mostly resembled another ancient airplane called the Sopwith Camel. There were many more of these airplanes than the jet-powered Spads, and their pilots seemed to be firing with wild abandon.

And this is where something else became clear to Y. These airplanes weren’t shooting at the Z-16 necessarily. Rather, they appeared to be shooting at
each other.

Y tried to move his head a bit, and sure enough two red airplanes went streaking by the Z-16’s bubble, clearly pouring cannon fire into the smaller, swifter, but mortally wounded jet-powered Spad. An instant later, he saw just the reverse: two jet Spads were ganged up on a lone Sopwith and were viciously pouring fire into it. Y saw the hapless pilot’s head come apart in a thousand bloody pieces after taking a direct hit from the Spad’s guns.

That settled it in his mind. This swarm of aircraft was not trying to shoot down the Z-16. Rather, the Z-16 had blundered into a battle.

This seemed like important information to Y—important enough for him to attempt to turn his head and yell out this news to the others aboard the Z-16.

But at that moment the Z-16 was thrown across the sky a third time, and Y was sent flying again.

He closed his eyes before impact this time, but this didn’t do anything to lessen the blow of hitting the deactivated Main/AC console, shattering just about all of the critical components inside. He bounced off the Main/AC, past a vaulting Crabb, who was being thrown in the other direction, and landed again against an observation bubble.

The Z-16 was in serious trouble now. It was losing altitude, and this was bad because it wasn’t flying that high to begin with. Y found himself pressed even tighter than before against an observation bubble, his bloody nose smearing the Texiglas.

Outside, the swarm of small aircraft battling each other was as fierce as ever. Y had no idea how the Jones boys were keeping the Z-16 airborne—there was so much wreckage, and so many airplanes, in the sky it was a miracle that they hadn’t collided with anything. Yet …

At this point Y’s ears cleared a bit, enough for him to hear other voices up on the flight deck.

“Why the fuck weren’t these things picked up on radar?” Seth Jones was screaming at someone.

“Because they are made of wood mostly!” someone screamed back.

“Are we supposed to be shooting at these guys?” a pilot in one of the escorting AirCats was calling down to the Z-16.

“Only if they shoot at you!” Dave Jones was screaming back.

The Z-16 did another toss, and Y rolled across the floor and back up against the starboard-side observation bubble. From here, he could see that Crabb and Zoltan had stationed themselves at the next bubble down. They had opened the bubble’s access hatch and were sticking two large-caliber twin-barrel machine guns out of this hole.

They went to their battle stations,
Y thought, his cognitive processes now on a downturn as a result of so many whacks to the head.
Where
the hell
is mine?

Somehow, the Jones boys were able to level off the unwieldy Z-16. Y took a deep breath—it had been less than thirty seconds since he’d been thrown from his bunk by the first aerial explosion. To him, though, it seemed like he’d been bouncing off the walls of the cabin for an hour or so.

He peered out the bubble again and was simply astonished at the number of airplanes flying all around them, guns and cannons blazing, a blizzard of red bullet streaks going every which way.

The radios were alive with calls from the escorting Air-Cats:

“Damn, these guys are so damn close to me!”

“Shit—if they pull that again, I’m going to shoot up a bunch of these little bastards!”

“Whoever heard of jet engines in biplanes …!”

It was strange. Even though these words were going into Y’s ear, they were floating out the other. He was actually staring out at another scene entirely—one that sent a chill streaking through his spine and back again.

In the midst of this very crowded sky, taken up as it was by the hundreds of buzzing swift fighters, the Z-16, and the AirCats, Y’s mind was seeing something else.

There were three huge aircraft about a half mile above them. Two were airplanes, but they were of a type he’d never seen before. They were both big and painted black. They both had their wing attached to the top of their fuselage, and each had four big propeller engines. High tail, snout nose, thick body—for some reason the name “Hercules” popped into Y’s addled mind, though he knew of no aircraft by that name, and he had certainly never seen any aircraft like these two before.

Another strange aircraft was attached to one of the airplanes by a long hose. It was a helicopter, a big one and it seemed to be connected to one of these Hercules airplanes by this long slender tube. Possibly
this
was a gas line and the airplane was refueling this huge helicopter. But then, in a wink of the eye, one of the Hercules airplanes opened fire on the one connected to the helicopter. A tremendous explosion resulted, destroying the fueling Hercules and sending the helicopter plummeting to the ground in a cloud of flaming debris.

Y’s brain suddenly locked up. What the hell was he really seeing here? These strange airplanes? The helicopter? It seemed real, and then again it seemed very
un
real. In horror, he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and took in a deep breath and opened his eyes again.

The sky was still filled with the strange, swift, battling biplanes and the AirCat fighters, but nothing else. No big airplanes, no big helicopter. Y felt a cold sweat suddenly soak him through. His mouth dropped open and words started to tumble out.

“I’ve got to stop drinking,”
he heard himself say.

Suddenly Emma was beside him. She’d retrieved the huge twin-barrel machine gun Zoltan had just given him, which he’d managed to drop during the first jolt to the airplane.

“Take this!” she commanded him. He obeyed, and somehow knew enough to cock the feed drive and slip both safeties to off. The gun was belt fed, the ammo compartment being a plain black box hanging beneath the stock. It was heavy and cold, and Y had never been within ten feet of one before.