Tomorrow War (22 page)

The Z-16 was still flying somewhat straight, but this did not mean they were out of danger. If anything, the sky was even more crowded than before with the battling blue and red aircraft. Even worse, either by the jostling caused by the explosions, or possibly a stray bullet or two, the Z-16’s flight computer had suddenly glitched up and wouldn’t release from the LANTRAN terrain-guidance system. The last command the computer had received was to guide the Z-16 along the same direction as the westward-pointing track bed, and that’s what it was doing, a mere five hundred feet above the ground. Nothing the Jones boys could do, short of firing a couple bullets into the flight computer, could get them off that automatic-course track.

The Jones boys were yelling back and forth at each other and slamming their fists on the LANTRAN console trying to unlock the hard drive, but nothing was working. They could not get control of the airplane back from the faulty computer. This was disastrous because eventually the tracks would come to an end or, even worse, split off into two directions. Then which way would the airplane go? If it lost its track reference, anything could happen, including plowing into the nearest mountain of which there were many in this part of wild Afghanistan.

In all his time with them, Y had never seen the Jones boys look nervous, ruffled, or anything but cool. At this moment, though, they seemed very nervous, very ruffled, and very,
very
uncool.

Y stole a peek forward and could see the unmistakable skyline of Kabul Downs just on the horizon.

If we have to crash,
he thought, tugging Emma closer to him,
I hope we go down near the city
….

The flight deck’s radios were still going full blast.

“Please repeat order on defensive action?” one of the AirCat pilots was requesting urgently of the Jones boys.

A second AirCat pilot was more direct: “When can we start shooting at these bastards?”

Somehow Dave Jones was able to click in his microphone’s send button.

“One last time,” he shouted, slamming the LANTRAN console again to no effect. “Fire only if you’ve been fired upon!”

Not a second later, a ball of bright-red flames and smoke went right by Y’s bubble. It took a moment for Y to realize the flaming wreckage was one of the AirCat fighters dropping out of the sky. Frozen by shock and horror, Y saw that two airplanes—one red and one blue—had collided with the huge AirCat, and this mass of metal and wood was now plummeting to the ground.

In the next second all hell broke loose. The remaining AirCats, believing that their comrades had been attacked, opened fire on both the red and blue airplanes. Suddenly the air was filled with flaming wreckage spiraling down as the more powerful AirCat guns began blowing the strange little biplanes out of the sky.

This, in turn, caused the two swarms of biplanes to stop attacking each other and begin shooting at the suddenly very vulnerable Z-16 recon plane. The next thing Y knew he was firing his twin-barrel machine gun out the bubble access hatch at a pair of red bijets coming at him full speed from the port side.

In seconds Y’s nose and throat were filled with the stink of cordite. He was firing wildly for two reasons: first, the double-MG was heavy and its kick was awesome. Second, he was very drunk and in those little slivers of time that seemed to be exaggerated by combat, he wasn’t sure if he was shooting at two red bijets or four.

But somehow he was hitting targets—or at least he thought he was. The machine gun was blasting away, and there were numerous small explosions going off about fifty yards in front of him, and there were more clouds of broken wood and metal flying all over the sky.

The strange thing was that the whole air battle had commenced not a minute before. Everything was slowing down dramatically for Y. He continued firing, and things continued blowing up, and the Z-16 continued being flung all over the sky and in the midst of all this, they all passed over the next mountain and found themselves over the valley that led up to the fairy-tale, castlelike city of Kabul Downs.

One of the AirCat fighters whooshed by the observation bubble, chasing four bijets, three blue and one red. The big plane’s huge cannons were splintering the four bijets into thousands of flaming pieces. Zoltan and Crabb, firing double-MGs from the Z-16’s top observation bubble, bagged two red fighters as they were trying to perforate the recon plane’s flight-deck canopy. This attack caused the Jones boys—who were expert at jumping the Z-16 all over the sky—to bank the huge winged plane to the right, causing Y to be smashed up again against the observation bubble Texiglas. He almost lost the double-MG in the process.

Now he was looking straight down again, and by chance Y found himself staring at a huge railroad bed—no wonder the Z-16 was all over the sky! There were at least a hundred railway lines jutting all over the huge facility. Y couldn’t imagine what havoc this was playing with the aircraft’s locked-in LANTRAN terrain-tracking system. A quick glance up to the flight deck produced a blur of flashing lights and a cacophony of warning buzzers.

A moment later, there was a huge explosion up on the flight deck. Y was firing his machine gun at anything that moved, but the flash from the flight deck was enough to blind him for a few moments. The next thing he saw was a pair of missiles rising up from the ground and heading right for the nose of the airplane. Somehow the Jones boys were able to twist the big airplane away from the pair of antiaircraft missiles—but the strain on the already creaky airframe was getting to be too much. The airplane’s skin was now perforated with cannon and bullet holes from the swarm of attacking fighters. The main flight console had blown up due to overloading of the LANTRAN system, and now the cry of metal against metal was telling the tale of impending double-reaction engine failure.

Y recovered somewhat, grabbed Emma closer to him, and looked down. They were right over the city of Kabul Downs itself. There were many narrow streets below them, and soldiers running through the streets, firing at each other. Y’s drunken eyes told him that this war between the reds and blues was not confined to the air.

What bad luck was this? he asked himself in the beat of a heart. Busting in on someone else’s war ….

But then Y saw one more thing that was even more disturbing: Sitting at the edge of the rail yard, not far from the center of Kabul Downs, was a train that was at least three miles long. It contained many, many flat cars, all of them holding at least several wrecked or knocked-out weapons. Machine guns, rocket launchers, triple cannons. This train was a wreck. A total wreck.

In that next blink of an eye, Y knew that they had actually accomplished the second part of their mission. Below them was undoubtedly the train Hunter and the others had armed and had taken across half of southwest Asia, just to end up here, in Kabul Downs.

But why?

Y couldn’t fathom that answer—and in the next second it was gone from his mind completely. Its place was taken over by something more overwhelming.

The Z-16 was crashing ….

The Jones boys were fighting with the controls, but there was nothing they could do. Between the equipment fire and the numerous bee stings caused by the bijets, the huge recon plane was fast becoming unflyable. The Jones boys were trying their best to level the plane out. Their only hope was to attempt a survivable crash landing, but weight and gravity were against them on that score.

Y pulled Emma even closer to him; she was crying. Zoltan and Crabb were holding on with one hand and firing their double-MGs with the other—even now picking off bijets as their own plane was about to auger in.

And weirdly, Y’s mind was suddenly at peace.
If this is where he was to die, then so be it.

He was surprised how calm he was as the ground raced up to meet him.

Of course, he was very drunk. And in that one last time sliver he decided this: If one has to go down in an airplane, then being drunk during the experience was the only way to go.

Wasn’t it?

The Z-16 went in three seconds later ….

Fiji

S
O, IS THIS HEAVEN,
or not?

It was a question that Viktor had been asking for the past twenty-four hours, and now the words themselves were taking on a comical tone.

If this was Heaven … would I have to ask the question?

He leaned his head back and allowed one of the bevy of bare-breasted young girls to pour another stream of sweet pineapple wine down his throat. The “pine-wine” was delicious, nutritious, and to Viktor’s mind, had a slightly opiate effect to it.

He’d been drinking it almost nonstop for the past day and night, ever since he’d somehow washed up on the pearl-white beach of this paradise on earth.

He’d also been eating up a storm. Coconut soup, plum cakes, pinkfish, a hundred different types of fruit. Viktor imagined, after downing yet another long gulp of pine-wine, that he could see his previously skeletal frame taking on some bulk, though he was sure this was an illusion. In any case, in the short memory of his life, he’d never been that interested in food or drink, but now, here in Heaven, that had changed.

He looked around the guest hut, and the candles were now flickering in syncopation with the mellow electronic island music that was wafting in from nowhere. There were at least twenty-four beauties either attending him or lounging around nearby, waiting to serve. Each girl was more beautiful than the next. Each one willing to do anything his heart desired.

More pine-wine went down his throat, another piece of sweet fruit was placed on his tongue.

If that wasn’t Heaven, what was?

The illusion was diluted a bit, though, when Viktor detected Soho’s approach in the air.

The girls smelled it, too, and they immediately became stiffened and reserved. The stink of body odor arrived about ten seconds before the man himself did. By the time Soho actually stepped into the hut, most of the girls had fled to the far corner and had cuddled up close to a wall full of candles, hoping the heat would dissipate some of the BO.

Viktor sat up and greeted the smelly guy with a friendly nod. He didn’t dislike him. After all, Soho was the reason he was having such a delightful recovery. From what Viktor had culled from their conversation the day before, just about everything—and everyone—on the island belonged in some way to Soho. He was slightly odd and slightly mysterious. His hospitality didn’t seem forced, but not entirely genuine, either. He had told Viktor yesterday that he considered him his guest and that he could stay here indefinitely. Viktor had to admit that the night before he’d dreamed of staying on the island permanently.

After all, with the beautiful weather, scenery, food, wine, and girls—why leave? There were enough girls to go around for him and Soho. Viktor figured, all he had to do was best Soho in the personal hygiene department and he would get the pick of the beauty litter, so to speak.

“Are you busy?” Soho asked Viktor now. He was carrying a frying pan with him. “Am I disturbing you?”

“Not at all,” Viktor lied, casting a woeful glance toward the cowering girls. “Can I do something to repay your kind hospitality?”

Soho slipped the frying pan behind his back in an amateurish attempt to hide it.

“Yes,” he replied. “Walk with me. Talk with me.”

So they took a long walk.

They passed the crude airplane sculpture up on the ridge, strolled along a path that led over to yet another taller cliff, and slowly meandered along the rim of an ancient volcano. The views were spectacular.

Soho did most of the talking. He spoke of how beautiful the island was, how much he cherished it, and how he had spent a lot of time arranging for the right “helpers”—the beautiful young girls—to come to this part of Fiji and stay with him.

He pointed out his favorite plants and trees. He talked about how the weather affected everything on the island, and that the weather was always perfect. Therefore, the island was perfect, too.

He spoke about how he would leave the pineapple rinds out in the sun for a week and then bury them to give the pine-wine its slight hallucinogenic affect, though Viktor did not believe this was the only reason for the wine’s kick. Soho was pleasant, and in a jolly mood. Still, Viktor wanted to do nothing else but turn around and walk—no, run—back to his “recovery” hut.

Their walk went on for about a half hour before Viktor became aware that Soho was leading him around to the other side of the island, a piece of the paradise he’d yet to see.

They reached a peak that anchored the northern end of the island and provided a breathtaking view of the ocean beyond. Soho stopped and looked at the great sea beyond, the high winds blew away his cloud of body odor for the moment.

“Strange things have been happening up that way,” he said, indicating a northeasterly direction. “I had a dream that someone told me most of Japan does not exist anymore.”

Viktor just shrugged.

“Strange things are happening all over,” Viktor said, more for lack of anything else to say. “One big war concludes, another begins. Some wars last a day, some for half a century. This is a strange world you live in.”

Soho turned and looked him in the eye.

“You say that like you’re from someplace else,” he said.

Viktor froze for a moment He was not going to tell this individual his life story—brief as it was to his mind. That was something the Man back on West Falkland Island had warned him about. The less people who knew his origins, the better.

“Just an expression,” Viktor finally replied. “Though I have to admit I have no idea how I made it from the bottom of South America to this paradise. One second I was being enveloped by a huge wave. The next, I’d been washed upon your shore. It’s almost as if we have a link, you and I. Perhaps the cosmos wanted us to meet.”

Soho just smiled and stared at him for a long moment.

“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps …”

Soho started walking again and Viktor naturally followed. They went over the next hill and for the first time, Viktor realized that there was more to this island than just Soho’s smelly being and a bevy of tropical angels.