Tomorrow War (33 page)

That happened just a few seconds later.

If watching the bizarre merry-go-round of fighters was strange, the group’s breakup was even more bizarre.

It was like someone threw a switch. One moment the Blues were flying round and round, dozens of airplanes going in a clockwise motion at several different altitude levels—the next, they all scattered like petals from an exploding flower. Where once there was order and symmetry, now there was chaos and no little panic. A third of the bijets went straight up, a third went straight down—the rest fled in all other directions.

But this made no difference.

The streak of white light, which was Hunter’s VTOL jet on double-burner, never stopping firing.

When blinded, they say, all the other senses become more acute … and this was true ….Sitting in the commander’s stateroom, eyes seeing nothing but white light, his sense of smell increased to a degree that he sniffed and detected the stink of cordite from all the guns firing several decks below him … and he stuck out his tongue and tasted blood in the air of those on board who’d been wounded in the fight … and he could hear the engines of the huge B-2000 straining for speed as it tried to outdistance the pursuing fighters …. And somewhere in the mix, the sound of several different aircraft engines … not just SuperZeros … maybe three American airplanes? Was one joining the Japanese fighters in pursuit?

But it was the third eye’s sense that became the most acute … that indefinable sixth sense that was already a gift to him … now it was allowing him to see things that almost made him forget that he’d been blinded by the light …

Because now, in the white, he could see a face … a familiar face … a crooked smile, out-of-date hairdo, massive head wound. This was a ghost, a transparency … here to talk to him while he was blind.

“You know me, and then you don’t know me,” the ghost said to him … but this was actually just a joke … a cosmic joke … just like the one that was responsible for Hunter being in this world in the first place. “I know you,” he said back to the ghost … “how could I not?”

“I am here for a reason,” the ghost said. “I’m here to make amends … to somehow make up for all the awful things I did before … well, before I became this.”

Hunter tasted the air and laughed … his third eye was playing tricks on him … “No, it’s not,” the ghost replied. “I am real … this is real. And I’m here to pass on something to you. Something you have to do. There is someone you have to save. In the strangest place in the world.”

Hunter laughed again … “I’m blind,” he says … “What good can I do?” … But then the ghost laughed and said: “You’re not blind, old friend … You’ve just seen the Light, that’s all.”

Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five …

Hunter shook his head back into reality and squeezed his cannon trigger again. Twenty-six. The bijets were nimble, little bastards. They could spin out of the way in a split second. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. He found it almost harder to shoot one down in the big VTOL jet than in his old reliable SuperCamel prop plane. But a pilot’s life was about innovation. Twenty-nine. Thirty. And he was innovating like hell in this dogfight.

There was a combination of factors at work. The VTOL was faster that the bijets, so this helped Hunter chase down individual airplanes or pairs of them and let just a few cannon shells do the talking for him.

That’s how numbers thirty-one through forty-two went down. Just a cluster of bijets, their pilots not knowing what to do, where to go, and Hunter weaving his way through them, firing, twisting, firing, turning, firing, looping, firing, diving.

It was strange that even after the huge formation broke up, the Blue pilots tended to stick together. It made it just that much easier for Hunter to pick them off. As it was, it looked like the sky was raining downed airplanes. And not one SuperSpad had tried to fire back at him.

Fifty. Fifty-one. Fifty-two …

Twisting, turning, firing, diving. One hundred enemy airplanes against just him.

Yeah, he’d done this before.

Fitz, Ben, and JT were simply astonished.

They had stopped counting the number of airplanes Hunter had shot down—it was way over sixty by now.

It was almost pathetic in a way. The Blue Forces dispersed, but they did not run very far. By doing so, they simply allowed themselves to be shot down by the coolly rampaging Hunter.

About five minutes into this strange lopsided battle, there were still about thirty bijets left flying crazily above the city. Realizing they were no longer clustered together, Hunter was flying even faster, turning even sharper in order to get kills on them. The flaming bijets were coming down less frequently now, and Fitz could see some of the enemy planes were finally turning and firing at Hunter. Yet this didn’t seem to have any effect on the Wingman. He was now pulling a new trick out of his bag.

As those brave Blue pilots turned to fire at him, Hunter started “viffing.” This meant, he was slamming on his brakes by using the VTOL’s capability to hover. This made those pursuing fighters streak right by him, allowing him to get a clean shot at their tailpipes as they roared past

This new maneuver only scattered the remaining airplanes even further. Yet Hunter now became relentless in his pursuit Fitz knew he must be running out of fuel.

“Hunter?” he started yelling into his microphone. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough, old boy?”

“If there are one hundred airplanes up here, I’ve got to get them all,” Hunter’s reply came back—his voice seemed distant, eerie.

“You must be running on fumes, old buddy,” Fitz warned him.

“Sometimes fumes will do just fine,” Hunter replied.

Fitz checked his own gas gauge. He was way past his bingo point. He had just enough to get back to Red Base One—if he was lucky. It was the same for JT and Ben.

“Just get back to base,” Hunter told them all, knocking down number eighty-nine. “I won’t be long.”

Red Base One

Y
WAS IN A PANIC.

He’d just awoken from a very disturbing dream. He and Emma were together, on an island, somewhere near Midway in the Pacific. Their plane had crash-landed there, and their rescuers had not yet come for them. And though she was there and alive and breaming, for some reason they could not speak to each other, or touch each other, or even look at each other.

What good is this? Y remembered asking her in the dream. This is like you’re still dead ….

The next thing he knew, he was being shaken awake by Kurjan, the Red Army intelligence officer. He was showing him the readout of the Red radar sets. A huge armada of Blue Force SuperSpads had lifted off. Many had been shot down already, but many more were heading right for Red Base One. They were only five minutes away.

He showed Y a long-range insta-film TV photo. A huge swarm of Blue Force soldiers were pouring through the Red line at the bloody bridge. They, too, were heading right for Red Base One.

Kurjan was calling out orders to everyone he could see. There was not enough time to put any of the Red Army’s airplanes into the air—therefore, they all had to be pushed back into their hangars with the desperate hope that the air barns would somehow escape the onslaught that was coming their way.

But what did Y have to do with all this?

Kurjan was desperate, he told him. Really desperate. He was ordering Y to help man a nearby antiaircraft gun. Y was shocked. He knew nothing about how to fire such a gun, but Kurjan wasn’t sticking around to hear it. Already the sound of an advancing Blue Force column could be heard. The air was filled with the cry of enemy bijets on the wing.

“Just do it!” Kurjan ordered him.
“Now ….
”

Next thing he knew, Y was running at breakneck speed toward the gun post, joining three other “volunteers” in a rush to get the triple-barrel weapon cranked up and ready to fire.

But the sad news was, the three other men on the gun were shaking badly, too.

“Have they ever attacked the field before?” Y yelled to one of them.

“No!” one of them yelled back. “The Blues have never flown at night before. And their troops have never gotten beyond our lines—day or night!”

“Well, something woke them up at the wrong time,” Y mumbled through chattering teeth.

The base was in chaos. People running every which way, the air-raid sirens blaring nonstop, the booming of the approaching guns sounding much louder now than just minutes before.

Y had never really been to war before. He’d always been safe behind the scenes doing the noodle work while others did the fighting and dying. Now, his hands shaking, looking at the firing mechanism on the long triple-A gun, he realized that here he was, on the ground, with people who wanted to kill him, coming right at him, both in the air and on the ground.

Such terror was running through his body!

He closed his eyes and whispered a silent prayer:
From this moment on, Lord, I promise I will never drink again. Just get me through this.

He was shaking so much now, one of the young soldiers looked at him and gasped.

“You’ve got to calm down, guv’ner,” the man said to him. “The worst that can happen is we’ll all die.”

With that, the man reached inside his pocket and came out with a flask.

“Drink, sir?” he asked Y. “You look like you need it.”

Y looked at the silver container; he imagined he could smell the rum inside it already.

“Get your blood flowing, sir,” the plucky, young soldier insisted.

Y paused, but only for a second or two. Long gone now were any thoughts that death would actually be a beautiful thing because he would join Emma in Heaven,
if
and
when
a blue-blood fusillade ran him through. That notion held no more weight than a quark for him now. For some reason, getting offed by a firing squad was a bit more romantic than being bombed or strafed out of existence.

Now, he was just plain scared of dying.

That’s why he took the flask and drained it in one gulp.

“Thanks, kid,” he said, handing the empty container back to him. “I owe you one.”

“No problem,” the kid said, checking to see if the flask was indeed empty. “No problem at all.”

The rum had burned its way about halfway down Y’s gullet when they heard the first signs of the approaching enemy.

Any hopes that Y had harbored that this was all one big mistake were dashed as soon as they saw the first chevrons of the approaching enemy air armada.

It was a clear night, stars in full blaze, a full moon on the rise. But now the sky above Red Base One was covered with moving blue lights, some blinking, some not. There were so many of them, the stars were no longer visible. The moon’s glow was pulsating, so many Blue SuperSpads were passing in front of it.

An eerie silence settled over the air base. Even the airraid sirens had gone silent. Now, there was only the mild breeze ruffling through the dozens of tents at the air base—that and the frightening drone of more than one hundred enemy planes flying overhead.

“Have you got any more?” Y asked the young gunner trembling next to him.

The man never took his eyes off the sky. “You got my whole week’s ration,” the gunner replied. “Wish now I had it back.”

Y felt his heart drop even as his stomach began burning with the previously consumed rum.

“Here, take mine.” heard these magic words and looked to see another flask being thrust into his hands. One of the other young gunners was offering it to him. didn’t think twice this time. He took the flask and drained it in another long slurp. The fire in his belly doubled.

“Thanks, my friend,” Y said, giving the empty flask back to the teenage gunner’s mate. “We’ll make it through this … you’ll see.”

All three gunners looked at him. Their faces were dirty and lined with wrinkles, though none of them was over the age of twenty.

“No, we won’t,” one said solemnly.

Y, now feeling a bit looped, looked back at them.
My God, they’re right,
he thought.

Now they saw a commotion off to the north. It looked like a huge line of ants streaming over the bloody bridge and heading right for them.

Y just stared, his mouth agape, not quite believing what he was seeing. It took a moment to sink in, but then he realized that his gunmates’ pessimism was indeed well placed. For at the moment it looked like the entire Blue Force Army was heading right for them.

“God, they finally did it,” one of the young gunners whispered in horror. “They finally broke out ….”

“That they did,” Y replied, the words sticking in his throat.

“How do you want to die, then?” another gunner asked over the commotion. “At the end of a bayonet? Or by some guy in an airplane?”

There was no time for anyone to reply. For the next sound they heard was the scream of many jet engines being throttled up at once.

Now the massive blanket of airplanes overhead began to break up. Like some kind of sinister ballet, the SuperSpads began peeling off one by one, engines screaming, diving down on the Red air base.

Y’s fingers were frozen to the gun’s firing mechanism. Why he’d been designated to do the shooting, he would never know. The young gun crew began turning the weapon on its swivel. A long belt of AAA shells was fed in, the hammers cocked and set. Y looked at his hands. They were shaking mightily now.

“Does anyone know how to fire this goddamn thing?” he yelled, trying to be heard above the increasing scream of the diving SuperSpads.

“Just pull the bloody trigger!” one of his gun mates yelled back.

Now a gaggle of SuperSpads leveled off about 2,500 feet to their north just over the Yabuk river. They went into a line across, and began heading right for Y’s gun. They were no more than five hundred feet off the ground. He screamed for the gun crew to lower the weapon.

This would take a few seconds, but Y started firing anyway. In the span of a heartbeat, the night sky was suddenly filled with three lines of bright red tracers. The noise of the gunfiring shook Y right down to his bones. His premature fusillade had all the earmarks of a disaster. Not only was it making it hard for his gun mates to bring the gun down to its proper elevation, it was highlighting their position to the attacking aircraft.