Tomorrow War (6 page)

It was to this small air base that Aki stumbled about fifteen minutes after Laki’s skewering.

The guards who saw Aki approach in full panic nearly shot him on sight. He looked so horrible they thought they were being attacked by some kind of evil spirit.

“Ghosts!” he was screaming in Japanese to the startled guards. “Ghosts … are everywhere!”

The guards grabbed Aki and held him down.

“What are you talking about!” one screamed at him. “What is happening?”

By this time, there was a strange green foam coming from Aki’s mouth.

“If they try to rescue the princess,” he stuttered through the foam, “they must take the train first!”

The guards were in no mood to play heroes. Things had been strange on Kibini for days and they did not want to see just how much stranger they could become. Aki had gone insane, that was the most obvious conclusion. So the lead guard simply shot him twice in the head—this stopped his bloodcurdling squeals. Then they all made for the jetcopters. If the atoll was indeed under some kind of ethereal attack, the air-base guards wanted to be anyplace other than this isolated hilltop, six miles away from the pirates’ main base.

So they tried to flee. But by the time they reached the southern end of the base, where the jetcopters were kept, they made another grisly discovery. The small contingent of air mechanics, who were charged with keeping the Bugs in flying condition, were all dead, sliced through the heart with bayonetlike skewers. Each man had died with an astonished look on his face.

The air-base guards were desperate now. All six of them piled into one of the Bugs and hastily took off. The man who wound up behind the controls was somewhat experienced in driving a TRX jetcopter. He lifted off cleanly, but had some trouble maintaining a high enough speed to complete the translation over to horizontal flight. Built for four, the Bug was overloaded by a factor of two bodies. The pirates had a quick solution. The two last men who’d climbed aboard were summarily pushed back out the door, both fell several hundred feet to their deaths.

Lighter now, the pilot was able to get the jetcopter level and moving horizontal. He pointed the nose of the Bug due south, toward the main base of the Cherries.

The hasty flight proceeded well for the first minute or so. The guards were convinced that if they just got to the main base, the strength in numbers would protect them from whatever had spooked Aki and had killed the air mechanics. But just as the glow of the main lagoon came into view, the guards were astonished to find another Bug flying right beside them.

They looked over at this jetcopter and were further dismayed to see that it contained not sea pirates but four huge Caucasian men in black combat fatigues and battle helmets. Two were pointing large infantry weapons at the guards.

The pilot in control of the pirates’ Bug was named Zushi. At first sight of the second jetcopter, he banked the Bug wildly to the left. But the second aircraft stayed right with him. He tried increasing speed, but like a banshee, the second Bug stayed right up with them. Zushi put the jetcopter into a steep climb; the second Bug remained on his tail. He tried to dive—but the second aircraft perfectly mimicked his maneuver. Finally he slammed on the air brakes, hoping the second Bug would shoot past him—but the pursuing pilot did not fall for this. He pulled up right alongside the pirates’ aircraft. A second later, the men inside the second copter opened up with their heavy weapons.

Zushi’s Bug was suddenly filled with tracer fire. Zushi felt two bullets enter his right arm and saw a piece of another guard’s head flick off the control panel and land in his lap. Zushi immediately panicked and, in trying to sweep the piece of bloody skull away, hit the Bug’s vertical-translation lever. The aircraft was now on fire and plunging rapidly toward the dense jungle below. Just beyond the next hill, Zushi could see the glowing green lights of the Cherries’ main base. He looked around the Bug cabin and saw his three companions were dead, their skulls perforated with still-glowing tracer bullets.

The Bug plunged into the jungle seconds later.

Just how Zushi managed to survive the jetcopter’s crash, he would never really know.

One moment the aircraft was totally out of control, on fire with his dead companions’ bloody bodies being thrown around the small cockpit like mannequins, and the next thing he knew, he was lying facedown in a jungle stream. The water was warm, gurgling up against his face—it felt too good to be true. He looked up and saw that a colleague’s body was lying in the stream about ten feet away from him. It was spewing blood and other bodily fluids, and it was this warmth that was washing across Zushi’s face.

Zushi leapt up in horror and began scrambling away from the corpse and the bloody stream.

He nearly ran right into the burning wreckage of the Bug—it was hanging from a tall tree, gas and oil leaking down on him just as his dead colleague’s bodily fluids had done. Zushi bounced off the tree and threw himself into the jungle, running as fast as he could away from the crash site.

His body pumped with adrenaline and fear, he topped a hill and saw a bunch of lights over the next ridge. He heard voices—urgent, commanding tones, but not in Japanese. These people were speaking English.

Zushi immediately dove into a thick bush and hugged the ground. Fifty feet away he saw more of the black-uniformed soldiers running this way and that, carrying huge weapons, talking into radios and looking up into the early-morning sky as if a battalion of angels was about to descend down upon them.

Beyond these men was the red brick mansion, a house that had existed on the atoll for a hundred years before the Cherrybenders ever came to this place.

It took Zushi a few moments to realize what he’d stumbled onto. The mansion was where the Wiki-Wiki hostages were being held. The Cherries’ ace in the hole. Now these soldiers in black were running through the building and bringing the hostages outside.

Out from the darkened sky, one Bug appeared over the treetops and went into a hover. It began a vertical translation, and no sooner had it done this, another Bug appeared above the tree line. Then another and another.

As Zushi watched, the hostages were taken out of the mansion, were loaded on the Bugs, and were lifted away. Zushi was amazed at the precision. Within two minutes the Bugs had landed, all twelve hostages taken out, loaded on board, and lifted away.

The thing that stayed on Zushi’s rather rattled mind was the fact that the hostages, while being loaded onto the Bugs, never once lost their poise, their bearing, or even the slightest curl in their hair.

They
looked
like princesses, he thought. But Zushi knew better. These people were comfort women. The hostages the Cherries had taken from Wiki-Wiki were actually high-priced prostitutes who had once served the top echelon of the Japanese Armed Forces.

Each one was more beautiful than the next.

Zushi felt a foam start to dribble from his mouth. He began to lose consciousness. He felt his temple, and for the first time realized he had a bloody gash stretching down to his ear lobe. Stars appeared before his eyes, yet he couldn’t take his eyes off the lovely painted women.

They were so beautiful ….

Zushi passed out shortly afterward—and yet he dreamed.

He saw in his dream frightening air machines flying overhead. The huge soldiers in their black combat fatigues were running all over the island, stepping on him as they did so.

They were cutting down all the trees and burning the rocks and draining all the water out of the lagoon—and …

And taking the beautiful comfort women away with them.

What could be worse? Zushi’s bleary unconsciousness was asking itself. The island without trees would be barren, hot, like a desert in the middle of the vast ocean. The island without rocks would be formless, a puddle of mud—not solid enough to stand upon. The island without water in the lagoon would mean no fish, no coolness in the heart of day.

But the island without the comfort women—that would be the worst of all.

It was deep into the night when Zushi woke up again. The air was filled with smoke. The smell went up into his nostrils, into his lungs, and it felt like it was leaking back out his ears. It was a combination of cordite, burned flesh, and perfume.

It was the perfume that had brought Zushi around in the first place. He began sniffing, and in his semi-delirious state he picked himself up, wiped the blood from his head wound, and began following the smell of perfume.

He stumbled over rocks and bush and down into the creeks and larger streams, and once he’d passed the waterfall, he knew he was approaching the lagoon.

He reached a tall cliff that looked out over the lagoon. And that’s when all his fears came true. He realized that most of the trees on the island were either on fire or had already been destroyed. He saw that many of the huge rocks that had anchored the atoll had been blown to bits, and now the tide was rushing in on the lower parts of the island.

It was at this point that Zushi realized that while he was unconscious, a massive battle had taken place on the island, specifically around the lagoon. There were fires everywhere and bodies and shot-down Bugs and destroyed weaponry.

It was like this little bit of the world had come to an end.

Zushi then saw the most incredible sight of all. For the lagoon was indeed empty—not of water, but of the aircraft carrier he and his colleagues had stolen earlier and had planned on using to escape this haunted part of the Pacific.

The carrier was now about five miles out to sea, covered in thick early-evening fog. There was a bunch of tugboats pushing it, and another group pulling it. But how could this be? The pirates had not been able to get enough tugboats to move the damn thing. How was it moving now?

Zushi had his answer as soon as a fateful wind blew away some of the fog surrounding the carrier. He saw an enormous seaplane riding in the water about a quarter mile in front of the carrier with a huge line attached to its rear end and tied to the bow of the carrier. Along with the tugboats, the seaplane was pulling the vessel, and their combined strength was enough to get the ship moving.

It was such a strange sight!

Tears streaming down his face now, Zushi collapsed to his rear end and just watched as the strange group of vessels faded over the horizon.

He realized that he was probably the only one left alive on the island. All the food and drinkable water was probably gone, and there were no more weapons left, so complete the destruction had been.

But that wasn’t why Zushi was weeping. It was the absence of one more thing, neither food nor drink nor a means of protecting himself.

No—it was the absence of something else. There was no longer any scent of perfume in the air.

And
that
was why Zushi was crying.

The Falkland Islands

T
HE TWO JET FIGHTER
planes lifted off from McReady air base at the first light of dawn.

The huge storm had blown itself out by this time, and though the seas were still very rough, with very high swells, the sky was clear and the sun was peeking through the typically dense overcast.

The jet pilots were on a search mission. They had heard the story of what had happened over on West Falkland Island the day before. How the strange man had somehow shepherded ashore twenty boats filled with children he’d apparently saved from a ship that had been caught in the raging storm.

The pilots were now looking for the ship itself.

But this would prove to be a fruitless task. They flew in box patterns for three hours, covering hundreds of square miles of ocean north of the Falklands, but they could see nothing. No wreckage, no flotsam, no sign at all of the ship that had been carrying the children and the strange man.

The fighter planes were called back to base shortly before noon. The British Royal Army contingent on the island knew that if a ship was caught in a storm such as the one of the previous day, the South Atlantic was quite capable of swallowing it up whole. That no other survivors were found surprised no one.

The fact that the strange man had saved so many children was what everyone was baffled about.

Colonel Neal Asten was commander of all British Royal Forces on both East and West Falkland. His command consisted of 150 men and a squadron of SuperChieftain tanks. These behemoths held a crew of nearly two dozen, featured twin 188-mm guns and a myriad of antiaircraft, radar, and night-detection equipment.

Their mission was basically to protect the ultrasecret research facility located deep in the ground beneath West Falkland Island at a place known as Skyfire.

Just what went on below the farmhouse that sat atop the hill at Skyfire, Asten had little idea. He’d heard rumors of everything from superbombs to Life itself being created within the facility that stretched some sixteen stories into the earth.

The farmhouse had just been recently rebuilt. It had been destroyed a month earlier in the huge battle fought against Japanese forces on the island. The house had taken no less than the brunt of a massive bombing strike. The facility beneath, however, had survived intact.

Two people lived inside the house—a husband and wife, both were in their late fifties. Asten didn’t know their real names. He rarely talked to them on anything but a professionally cordial level. But he did know the Man was an American who many believed knew all the secrets of the universe, and then some.

A person like this was very special. So after the battle had been won and the Japanese defeated, Asten and his men built a new farmhouse for the Man and his wife.

The new farmhouse looked exactly like the old one, right down to the slight lean to the east caused by the raging storms, which always blew in on the island from the southwest. Everything on the island leaned east—and less than a month after its completion, the farmhouse was no different.

Asten was inside the command SuperChieftain when he received the report from McReady air base across the sound on East Falkland. No sign of any ship had been spotted by the search planes. This was no surprise to Asten. He’d been on the Falklands long enough to know what the brutal storms could do. He’d seen some so fierce, he doubted even one of the Americans’ huge megacarriers could make it through without some kind of damage. A smaller vessel would have no chance.