Tomorrow War (27 page)

Y just shrugged. He was already wondering where his next drink was coming from—though the Reds had been very generous in doling out extra rum rations to him.

“A ghost, really?” he mumbled. “Now that’s interesting.”

Y thought a moment while Hunter inched his hand down to the engine start button again.

“Ah, just one more thing,” Y said. “One last question, I promise.”

Hunter nodded patiently.

“This ghost,” Y began. “Was his name ‘Vogel’ by any chance? A real bitter guy? Used to fly with the AirCats?”

Hunter just shook his head. “His name was certainly not ‘Vogel,’” he replied, again truthfully.

Y just shrugged again, and seemed to accept this answer at face value.

“Well,” he said, “did he mention if he
knew
another ghost named Vogel? I mean, we communed with that guy—he’s the one who led us to the god-awful place in Vietnam.”

Hunter just shook his head and finally did start his engine.

“No, he didn’t mention anyone named Vogel,” he told Y, yelling over the noise. “And besides, from what I understand, ghosts get really pissed off if you ask them if they know other ghosts. Apparently they are very touchy about the fact that just because they are spirits, people assume they know every other spirit.”

Y just shrugged again and smiled drunkenly.

“Oh, OK,” he said, stumbling away. “Just thought I’d ask.”

Hunter finally took off.

Once airborne, he gave the engines full throttle and was soon soaring high above the Red lines. The formerly magnificent city of Kabul Downs loomed on the horizon.

He wasn’t up more than one minute when he saw the swarm of Blue planes rising into the early morning air. The noise the SuperSpad jet made was unique. Almost a whistling sound, but perversely sweet. In the key of C, Hunter believed.

The two aerial armies met head-on over the bloody bridge, which separated the lines below. As always, the Blue planes tore through the slower Red formation. This was their first tactic every day. No firing, just flying as fast as they could through the Red formation, strictly as an intimidating tactic.

Only after the Blues went through the Red formation did they turn back, slow down, and attack in earnest. The Red Force scattered as planned, and when possible, paired off and went after single Blue Force SuperSpads. In the first thirty seconds, three Blues went down. This told Hunter it would be a good day in the sky.

He did not stick with the Red formation. He preferred to do his own thing. He dove into the thickest concentration of Blues—they tended to stick together if they had losses early on—and simply began twisting and turning and looping and diving, lining up the scattering Blues, firing one shot into the right spot on their fuselage, killing the plane and moving on.

He wove his way through the crowded skies, routinely downing the Blues’ airplanes. Even though he’d been doing this for three weeks, flying the same airplane and scoring the same spectacular hits, the Blues never ran when they saw him coming. Not that they didn’t want to. Obviously, it went against their orders to do so.

This had gotten Hunter to thinking …

Even while he was emptying the skies of the Blues’ SuperSpads he was able to watch the land battle as it commenced in the trenches below him. The Blues’ ground forces seemed to stick to as strict a timetable as their air corps. Every day just as the sun peaked over the mountains to the east, the Blues would launch an attack on the Red lines all around the city. The Red Forces would beat them back, and then a day of attrition and artillery duels would begin.

Hunter found this very odd. The Blue Forces were good fighters—they had ingrained in them the same legacy of bravery and toughness as the Reds, indeed they could be fierce fighters when their backs were against the wall. But they seemed too …
regimented.

Why?

These were the thoughts on Hunter’s mind this morning as he downed seven Blue Forces’ SuperSpads with seven single bursts from his huge nose cannon.

Looking over his shoulder now, he could see dogfights beginning to take shape in the skies all around the city—all four sectors were lighting up at once. It was yet another replay of every day of battle since he’d come here. Regimented. Like the Blues were following the same script, day after day.

This morning he vowed to find out why
this
was so.

He downed another pair of Blue planes, watched their pilots hit the chutes and float down behind Red lines. It was now ten minutes into the dawn patrol and the skies were getting filled with airplanes and tracer streaks.

Hunter took a quick appraisal of the ongoing air battle, and decided that his Red Force comrades were making a good showing for themselves and could spare his absence for a while.

This in mind, he pushed the biplane’s stick forward and increased power to his engine.

Then he pointed the nose of the airplane right toward the heart of Kabul Downs.

Above Kabul Downs

H
UNTER’S THEORY WAS A
simple one really.

Unlike the Reds, the Blue Forces were so highly regimented because they were being controlled by a very strict central command, an entity that insisted on pulling all the strings in every aspect, of every day in this odd war.

The commanders in the field could not take the initiative ever—indeed, judging from what Hunter had seen, the Blue Force commanders had squandered countless opportunities that might have inflicted grave losses on the Reds, simply because some bozo at the other end of the phone wouldn’t give them the go-ahead to do so.

This type of strict central control was not a new concept to Hunter, though it was rather out of place in this world where, more than his last place, people really tended to do their own thing, especially when it came to the military.

Back There, in his first combat against the old Soviet Empire, the American strategy was based almost entirely on the Russians’ adherence to a “no-initiative” type of warfare. No attacks unless assiduously planned. No moving beyond a certain point on the map, even if the enemy was on the run. It even got to the point where Russian pilots had to ask permission to fire on an enemy airplane while in the midst of a dogfight.

It was a stupid way to run a war, worrying about staying in control and not moving onto victory. That’s how the Soviet forces fought in Hunter’s version of World War Three. And that’s how they lost—on the battlefield anyway.

He smelled the same type of thing going on here. It really did seem like the Blues could not make a move until a certain time had clicked off the clock or a certain general somewhere—buried beneath the city in a very hardened bunker, no doubt—gave the word while ordering his lunch for the day.

Finding that invisible bunker was now foremost on Hunter’s mind. The question was where to look?

If there was a central command station somewhere in the city, he knew that knocking it out would probably send chaos through the Blues’ command structure.

But where would that central point be? Kabul Downs was a huge city full of skyscrapers and castles and many large block-size buildings that somehow captured an architecture halfway between Middle English and Southwest Asian. This meant lots of towers, minarets, and buildings with lots of windows that were thickly structured.

In other words, such a place could be anywhere.

But Hunter was not a babe in the woods when it came to these things. If he couldn’t spot the central command station from the air, he would simply allow the Blues to tell him where it was.

So when he reached the inner city limits, he put the biplane into a steep dive, pulling up only when he reached a perilous 250 feet in altitude.

As soon as he leveled off, he realized he was right above a rear area for the Blues. It was a canteen and there were several hundred soldiers hastily eating before being rushed to the front. They were as surprised to see him as he was to see them.

He didn’t want to kill anyone if he didn’t have to—especially when they were eating. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t shake them up a bit.

So he looped around and intentionally put more gas into his engine than necessary. This created a backfiring effect that began to dull his own hearing. Then he notched down to about one hundred feet and went screaming over the mess area.

As one, the soldiers all threw up their food and went facedown on the ground. One pass and the place was a mess—literally!

“Bon appétit,
boys!” Hunter called over his shoulder as he screamed for altitude again.

He was soon over a truck park—the Blues moved everything to the front by truck. This was a place where they kept their constant flow of supply vehicles. This was a legitimate target.

Hunter cocked his gun and set a reading for twenty shells. He flipped over, pulled back on his gas again, and went down to treetop level. The anal-retentive Blues had all their trucks parked in a neat, little row. One incendiary cannon shell perfectly placed in a fuel tank and
wham!
goodbye truck.

This happened twenty times. Actually, there were twenty-three trucks, but the resulting explosions were enough to wreck the other three. Hunter made it all happen in just two passes. A minimum of effort, and a maximum result.

He liked it that way.

He crawled back up to five hundred feet and continued on toward the center of the city. The biggest buildings were looming right ahead of him now, and he could see people in the street were turning his way. He laid on the gas again, making his plane as loud as possible, and zoomed right down the main drag of Kabul Downs, a street called Queen’s Drive.

Well, this was not an everyday occurrence—a Red fighter plane roaring over the main street of the embattled capital. It was obvious even from five hundred feet that those below didn’t quite know what to do.

Hunter just started weaving through the twists and turns of the canyon of buildings, following Queen’s Drive for the most part but sometimes diverting off to a side street—only to scare the bejeezus out of someone walking there.

He was flying so loudly, he began hearing fire alarms going off all over the city below. This gave him a laugh.

Hunter continued his noisy run. A few soldiers on the ground took potshots at him with their rifles, but never to any harm. Oddly, he saw no antiaircraft weapons within the heart of Kabul Downs. This was interesting in that the city was actually very vulnerable to a strategic bombing attack—if only the Red Forces had some substantially sized aircraft to carry out such a campaign.

He finally reached the end of Queen’s Drive, which terminated in a roundabout that in turn flowed into a short avenue leading up to the Ministers Hall. This was the seat of the blue blood’s government, a queer-looking building whose architecture looked like a cross between Westminster Abbey and “1,001 Arabian Nights.”

It was here that he encountered his first serious antiaircraft fire.

It started coming up about a half mile from the Ministers Hall. Three long strands of 70-mm antiaircraft artillery (AAA) shells, lighting up the early-morning sky.

Of course, Hunter knew the AAA fire was coming even before the gunners had pressed their triggers. He was already weaving and dipping before the first shell even left its barrel. The fire was directed at him from a gun emplacement on a hill about one hundred yards away from the ministry building. That, and a few guards on the ground who were firing their combat weapons at him, were the only opposing fire he drew. It was interesting that the Blues did not protect their seat of government better.

It also told Hunter that this was not where the central command station was located.

He flew on.

The next main street was called King’s Walk. Before the war began, it boasted salons and fancy restaurants. It was now the location of the blue bloods rear-area hospitals. Hunter flew past this part of the city as quickly as he could.

The end of King’s Walk brought him out to the huge tree-lined park located smack-dab in the middle of the city.

Here he saw for the first time the wreckage of the Z-16 recon plane. It was still there, just as Y and the others said it would be. Crumpled, wings bent, sitting with its nose down in the shallow, artificial lake.

It was very strange to see the wreck now. It brought all kinds of memories flooding into his brain—things that he’d really tried to put on hold lately. But the horror of the superbombing was a hard thing to keep locked away for too long—even for someone with above-the-ordinary psychic ability.

So even though he renewed his defenses about thinking of that horrible flight, looking at the Z-16, he couldn’t help bits and pieces of it from leaking through.

The flight … down the coast of South America, past the battlefields of the last war … then under the South Pole … the huge B-2000 flying great … all systems go … radio silence … JT making sure his beer is properly iced … everyone else playing cards … music playing somewhere within the vast aircraft interior.

The trip up the other side of the world … over India … over China … adjusting the flight plan all the time … still hidden … still secret ….

Over the North Pole, turning all the time … beginning the bombing run hours before drop … looking out at the snow … it’s not blue like at the South Pole … Ben winning a big pot in cards … JT worrying out loud that he didn’t bring enough beer for their postmission celebration ….

Coming south again … getting ready to see drop zone … magnetic settings confirmed on bomb … the coded message back to Bride Lake that all was a go … seeing the first SuperZeros on radar coming to meet the big plane … Fitz saying, “They know we are coming” … the call to battle stations.

The swarm of Zeros rising to meet them … only in nightmares had he seen so many airplanes at once … the earsplitting sound of hundreds of cannons opening up at once ….

Seeing the Japanese Home Islands … from five miles up … the sound of the B-2000’s engines straining as he put the big plane into a shallow dive … the Zeros are everywhere! … His cockpit window seems full of them …

Fitz telling him that he’s received a radio report … the Zeros are being ordered to ram the big plane … the sky is filled with tracers … Hunter is trying to keep the big plane on its precise course … Twenty minutes to drop time … more Zeros … the crew is shooting them down, but more keep coming … ten minutes to drop … SAM missiles start rising toward them … Hunter wielding the big plane this way and that … avoiding the AA missiles and disrupting the airflow all around them, causing some Zeros to stall and crash ….

Five minutes to drop … some of the Zeros are getting close enough to score hits through the B-2000’s very thick skin … two NJ-104 guys are hit and killed … the secondary radio antenna is blown away … and more Zeros are coming up.

Three minutes to drop … Hunter fighting the controls now, with all the weaving and dipping the plane is becoming unstable … “Just hold it, Hawker!” Fitz had yelled.

Two minutes to drop … an AAA missile grazes the right wing … electricity starts crackling throughout the big plane … short circuits are everywhere … two more NJ-104 guys get it … Hunter’s hands are bleeding, he’s holding the steering yoke so tight.

One minute to drop … the B-2000 is simply full of holes. Many critical systems are hit … bombing run begins …

Thirty seconds … Tokyo appears through the clouds … what looks like a firework display is actually AAA missiles coming up at them … Fitz works the bombing system … bomb-bay doors open … Hunter fights the controls to get the airplane at correct height and proper magnetic alignment …

Twenty seconds … ten seconds … five seconds … three … two … one … zero … bomb away.

Then came the horrible light ….