Tomorrow War (40 page)

Not the kind of terrain suitable for landing a plane.

The airplane’s wings folded down and a bunch of rockets started firing, and the plane came in like a graceful bird. Asten thought he was still dreaming. He’d never seen anything quite like it.

He approached the aircraft as one would have approached a UFO. He was astonished again to realize that the first person to climb out from its hatch was someone he recognized. It was Hunter, the pilot who had helped them repel the brutal Japanese attack on West Falkland just a few months earlier.

Even more astounding, the second person out of the plane was Viktor, the guy who’d saved all the kids from the shipwreck only to disappear a few days later.

The third person he did not know: he was a little, wiry guy, who looked like he was recovering from a very bad hangover.

But it was the fourth person out, helped by Hunter and Viktor, who really set Asten’s heart to beating. She was without a doubt the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She was blond, her face like a painting. She was simply radiant. She smiled at him and he felt as though a bolt of electricity had run through him. He wasn’t sure why, but he went down on one knee the second he saw her.

Hunter immediately went over and helped him up.

“It’s a natural reaction,” he told Asten.

Hunter pointed to the farmhouse that sat atop Skyfire Hill.

“How are they?” Hunter asked, referring to the two people who lived inside.

“They are well,” Asten said, still not able to take his eyes off Dominique.

“Can you tell them we’re here, please?” Hunter asked him.

Asten kind of half stumbled away.

“Sure thing,” he said.

Hunter turned to the Jones boys. Their airplane’s engines were still turning. They would not be staying long.

“I know you guys will never understand what is going on here,” Hunter said. “But I’ve just got to thank you for all you’ve done. I knew you both, in another place. You were great guys then, and you’re great guys now.”

They all shook hands.

“Please tell the others,” Hunter began stammering. “That I-I thank them, as well. And I’ll try like crazy to see them all again s-someday …”

But he knew that would never happen.

They shook hands again. The Jones boys walked back to their airplane, revved the engines, activated the rocket bottles, and lifted off as smoothly as they had landed. They did a 360-degree spin as soon as they were airborne.

To Hunter’s mind, that was their way of saying goodbye.

Forever.

Ten minutes later, Hunter was sitting in the living room of the farmhouse.

It was strange: they were all drinking milk and eating cookies the Man’s wife had just made. It seemed like such a familiar setting for Hunter. Even though it was six in the morning, the Man and his wife couldn’t have been more gracious. They were very happy to see them all, especially Viktor.

Hunter did not have to say why they were here. The Man already knew.

“Are you ready to go through this?” he asked Hunter. “Have you done all you need to do here—in this place?”

Hunter contemplated both questions. His heart sank when he thought that he’d never again see the friends he’d made here. But he had no nostalgia for this odd place.

It seemed like his whole time here he’d been involved in one kind of war or another. He told this to the Man.

“I’ll bet you also felt like you were reliving things that happened to you before, am I correct?” the Man asked him.

“That’s for sure,” Hunter replied. “It’s like I lived an entire lifetime all over again in the space of one month.”

The Man grinned. “Well, then, I think you’re ready to go.”

He looked at Dominique and smiled. She smiled back.

“She was a princess in this world,” he said. “Was it worth coming to a new universe to find her?”

“Absolutely,” Hunter answered right away.

The Man patted him on the shoulder in a very fatherly way.

“Well, take care of her this time, OK?”

Hunter just nodded. “I’ll try,” he said.

They stood up. It was time to go. Y was still stuffing cookies in his mouth. The wife came over to Hunter and looked deeply into his eyes.

“I want you to promise me that you will be careful,” she said, welling up a bit. “Promise me.”

Hunter stared back at her. She looked and sounded so familiar. It was as if he’d heard those exact words many, many times before.

“I promise,” he said.

A few minutes later, they were all deep inside the mountain, squeezed into the small cloud chamber.

The Man pushed the button on a combination lock, and after making sure everyone was holding tight to the restraints, he opened the huge heavy metal door.

There was a loud
whoosh
and immediately the room was filled with a fine mist. The deep blue Atlantic was about a mile below hem.

Y nearly passed out. A million questions started spinning in his head—but he chose not to ask any of them.

“I’m ready,” he just said instead. “I know I am. I’ll do anything to see her again. Even this …”

Hunter put his hand on Y’s shoulder.

“Just remember: wherever we are going, Emma will be there too. And we will find her. OK?”

Y nodded. “Deal and sealed—that’s all I want.”

The Man handed them their parachutes. There were only three, but that was not a problem.

Viktor climbed into his chute, then embraced the Man warmly.

“Thank you for what you did for me,” the Man told him. “Good luck always.”

Viktor brushed a tear away and then without another word, stepped out into the abyss. They watched him go down, his parachute opening almost immediately.

Y went next. He closed his eyes, whispered Emma’s name and then stepped out too. He fell head over heels twice before his chute opened.

Then Hunter turned back to the Man.

“Can I ask you just one more question?”

The Man nodded.

Hunter took a deep breath. His lungs filled with the fine damp mist. On the sea below, an ocean liner was passing by.

“Could you be who I think you are?” he asked him simply.

The Man began to say something but stopped himself.

“You will have to find out for yourself,” he said finally. “But remember this: Wherever
you
go,
I’m
there—and so is my wife. So always look for us. OK?”

“OK …” Hunter replied.

With that, they shook hands and Hunter put on his parachute.

Then he took Dominique in his arms and they stepped through the hole together.

But then something went wrong.

He remembered drifting towards the water and watching Y and Viktor land safely below. He turned to Dominique and put his lips to hers. At that instant, there was a flash of blinding light. Suddenly Dominique was gone—it was as if she’d evaporated in his arms! He began falling faster, his parachute long gone. Tumbling end over end, a deep warmth began to fill him—it was a pleasant feeling, but frightfully close to what he had felt during his near-death experience just the day before.

Then the sensation of falling ceased—and suddenly, he was sitting on the floor of a rickety wooden cabin. Through the dirty and cracked windows he could see green mountains all around him. The unmistakable sound of a small airplane, flying far away, began echoing in his ears.

He turned to look over his shoulder and found himself in a dark saloon. The place was crowded with drunken pilots and beautiful bar girls. He was wearing a deep blue combat uniform. On his right shoulder was a patch with the letters “ZAP” emblazoned on it.

He felt something in his left hand and when he looked down, he found himself in the cockpit of a crashed airplane, a racy picture of Dominique trembling between his fingers. Another flash of light. He looked up to see he was in a different saloon, this one in the middle of the desert. A movie crew had all its cameras trained on him.

He took a sniff and the stink of gasoline went up his nostrils. He closed his eyes from the pungent stench and when he opened them again, he was inside the battered cockpit of his old F-16XL fighter, a jungle surrounding him. His sleek jet was mired up to its wings in what he knew was Panamanian red mud.

He wiped his eyes only to find his fingers were freezing. Another blink and he was in deep snow, the wreckage of a B-1 bomber crumpled and burning beside him.

He heard a train whistle behind him. When he turned towards it, he realized he was at the top of a steep hill, looking down into a deep river valley. A massive battleship was just barely squeezing its way through the narrow, winding waterway, heading north.

Hunter rolled down the hill and fell into the water and was immediately taken under by a huge wave. He fought his way to the surface, and when he finally came up, an island with a huge volcano appeared in front of him. He saw soldiers running up the side of the volcano, firing their guns wildly. Hunter called out to them, but they could not hear him.

Another wave overwhelmed him. When he came up this time, he was in a rice paddy. A strange pink jet was flying overhead. He suddenly had a gun in his hands but by the time he went to aim it, the pink jet had turned into a spacecraft—something that looked like a space shuttle, yet much bigger and more elaborate. It was taking off, going straight up in a cloud of smoke and flame. Hunter began firing at it. But it kept going up and up until it disappeared amongst the stars.

And then, just like that, he was flying among the stars too.

Mack Maloney is the author of numerous fiction series, including Wingman, Chopper Ops, Starhawk, and Pirate Hunters, as well as
UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn’t Want You to Know
. A native Bostonian, Maloney received a bachelor of science degree in journalism at Suffolk University and a master of arts degree in film at Emerson College. He is the host of a national radio show,
Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files
.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1999 by Mack Maloney

Cover design by Michel Vrana

978-1-4804-0721-3

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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