Tomorrow War (7 page)

After confirming the radio report, Asten ran out the pilots’ official report on his signal printer and then placed it into a white envelope, which he sealed with red tape. Then he left the command tank and began the long walk up the hill toward Skyfire.

It was up to him to inform the Man of the pilots’ fruitless search.

He found him sitting in his new living room, his back stiff against the new chair Asten’s troopers had provided as part of the refurnishing of the house.

Across the room sat the survivor named Viktor, the man who had somehow saved the children from the storm. The children themselves were down in Port Summer Point, the small civilian settlement located about a mile away from Skyfire. Viktor, however, had been kept at the farmhouse since the dramatic rescue. Asten had learned the night before that Viktor was suffering from shock, exhaustion, and partial amnesia.

Asten knocked once on the front door, and the Man motioned for him to come inside. Asten did so, snapped off a sharp salute, and removed his battle beret.

Asten had seen Viktor briefly the day before, but now he was able to get his first full measure of him. He looked very odd, slightly different than most people Asten had met. It was his eyes, his mannerisms, his very being that made him, well …
different.
In fact, Asten had met only one man before that had this same undeniable yet indefinable alienness about him.

“You have the search report, I take it?” the Man asked Asten.

“I do, sir,” Asten replied crisply. He handed the envelope to the Man. “No surprises in there, sir,” he added.

The Man quickly read the report, then resealed it and put it inside his suit-jacket pocket.

“I didn’t expect any,” he told Asten.

They both turned back to Viktor, who was slumped in another chair near the window, staring out at the cruel sea beyond.

The Man walked over to him, and for a moment Asten thought he was going to pat Viktor on the shoulder. But the Man kept his distance. He lowered his voice.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he began.

But Viktor simply lifted his hand.

“I know already,” he said, his voice dripping with sadness. “No one else survived.”

The Man just nodded—and the room was suddenly filled with intense melancholy. Asten himself felt a mist come over his eyes. Why was this happening? He’d been in war before. He’d seen brutal combat, the most intense here on this very spot a month before, during the invasion by the Japanese. He’d not had any sense of weeping then. So why now? And why so intense?

It was a most eerie feeling.

“I didn’t expect there’d be anyone else left,” Viktor said slowly. “Not after seeing what I saw.”

The Man stood hovering near him. Asten was sure that if it had been anyone else the Man surely would have touched him to comfort him. But the Man still kept his distance.

“Well, you should take heart in the fact you saved so many children,” the Man said softly.

Viktor remained silent.

The very awkward moment continued. The Man looked over to Asten for help, but the British officer could only shrug weakly in return. The sadness in the room was now so thick, it seemed to be dimming the daylight

“I, for one, would like to hear how you were able to save those kids,” Asten suddenly heard himself say.

Viktor just shook his head.

“I don’t really remember how I did it,” he said. “I was in charge of the children on the ship. I used to be a rower but they put me in charge of the kids and I loved it. And we’d sailed these waters and others before—but never through a storm like that. And now—now, they are all gone. Now, it’s just me … and the kids.”

At this point Asten became aware of someone stirring in the kitchen. A moment later the Man’s wife walked into the room. She was an attractive, middle-aged woman with a bright smile and large blue eyes. But as soon as she stepped into the room, something happened to her. She was carrying a tray of coffee and sandwiches—but she dropped it. A stunned look went across her face. She put her hand to her chest and grasped it. Then she collapsed to the floor.

Asten and the Man reached her at the same time. Her face was already turning blue. Her lips were trembling. Her eyes were open, but she could not speak.

“I’ll get my corpsman!” Asten yelled, dashing off.

Asten ran down the hill, literally dragged his medic out of the command tank, and ran back up to the farmhouse.

But by the time they arrived, Asten knew it was too late. The woman was no longer breathing. Her eyes were closed. She had already turned cold. There was no pulse. There were no signs of life at all.

The Man just stared down at her. He couldn’t believe what was happening.

“No,” he murmured. “This cannot be.”

Then something very strange happened. Asten looked up and saw Viktor was standing over the woman.

He was crying.

Then he knelt down and held her head in his hands and whispered in her ear.

“It is not your time to become a ghost,” he said.

And with that, the woman’s eyes opened. She began breathing again and the heavy sadness that had weighed down on the room was lifted.

Suddenly, the woman was alive.

Again.

Y
WAS DRUNK. AGAIN.

He was sitting in Cloud Nine on the Bro-Bird, a bottle of rice wine in front of him.

Zoltan was sitting across the table from him. The band had just taken a break. They were both drinking rice wine, but Y was the only one who was drunk.

“This is ridiculous,” he was saying. “This just isn’t how this mission should be proceeding.”

Zoltan didn’t say a word.

Y took another gulp of wine.

“I mean, my orders were to get over here as fast as possible,” he went on. “With minimum of exposure. We were to determine the last known position of the super-bomber and track the crew from there.”

He took another gulp of wine. His head was beginning to spin. The attack on Kibini Atoll had been a success—with no loss of life on their side, thank God. If Y had lost any men to such a bizarre operation, he wasn’t sure he could have lived with himself. But Unit 167 proved its worth, and the Cherrybenders had been ripe for the picking. The pirates had been caught off guard—demoralized, confused, and unprepared. Managing the operation from the Bro-Bird’s combat room, he had taken Zoltan’s advice and played upon the pirates’ well-known superstitious nature. When it was over, most of the cutthroat pirates were gone and the Americans had … well, they had themselves an aircraft carrier.

“Now look at what we’re doing,” Y went on. “We’re way behind schedule. We’ve attacked the largest pirate force in the region—and now …”

He looked out the large porthole window to see one of the towropes stretching from the Bro-Bird’s port-side wing.

“And now we’re towing a freaking aircraft carrier!”

Zoltan pulled his goatee in thought.

“I know it seems strange,” the psychic said. “But you asked me to come along on this operation because you said you wanted a psychic option. That’s what I’ve been providing for you.”

Y nearly hit the roof. This was not like him. He was usually the coolest cat in the room.

“We are
towing
a freaking
aircraft carrier,”
he repeated slowly for effect. “We are probably sitting ducks out here. We are calling more attention to ourselves than the super-bomber did when it sank Japan for Christ’s sake.”

“Well, I do admit we have raised our exposure a bit …,” Zoltan agreed quietly.

“A bit?” Y asked him back. “Have you seen the size of that thing?”

Zoltan looked out the window. From this angle—yes, indeed—the size of the carrier was in full view.

“Is it as large as the one in your dream?” he asked Y.

The question surprised the OSS man. In his dream the carrier was always enormous.

“Well, it’s not as big,” he began to say. But then he came back to reality—such as it was. “But that doesn’t matter. We have put ourselves in a very vulnerable position. I don’t know why I let you talk me into this.”

“We were just following the psychic path,” Zoltan said. “It might seem crazy now—but somewhere down the road we might need this vessel. That’s what the vibrations are telling me.”

Y just shook his head. He needed more wine.

“When my office gets wind of this,” he said, slowly pouring them both another drink, “they’ll have me tapping phones in Idaho.”

The seaplane lurched forward a bit—this was a typical movement now and they were used to it. There were twelve tugboats in all. When it turned out that their operators had been held against their will, too, by the pirates, they agreed to sign on with the American force and help move the carrier farther south. The odd thing was, all of the operators were Irishmen.

Zoltan took a sip of his wine.

“I agree we do have a defensive problem now,” he said. “That is, if there is anyone left in this area that can challenge us.”

Y just shook his head. “You know how these things work. You have to assume the worst, and hope for the best.”

They were silent for a few moments.

“And you’re sure the damn carrier was empty?” Y asked him finally.

Zoltan nodded glumly.

“Just the few Bugs we were able to get from the atoll,” Zoltan replied. “Six in all.”

Y swigged his drink again.

“If there is anyone out here with any kind of air power, we’ll be sunk with only a half-dozen jetcopters to defend us,” he said darkly.

Zoltan stared at him and countered, “Well, we can always get us some air power of our own.”

The OSS man looked up at him.

“Get some?” he asked. “Get some where?”

Zoltan suppressed a smile. His world was better if he was following his psychic vibrations. If he wasn’t, it was like swimming against the tide.

He felt the tide turning a bit.

“We might have someone on board who can give us some information on that,” he said.

Y just shook his head. “I know I don’t want to hear this.”

Zoltan just shrugged. “This person’s presence has a very high psychic value to it,” he said.

Y didn’t comprehend this part, for he was too busy pouring another goblet of rice wine.

“Just explain it to me,” he said to Zoltan.

“Well, the hostages we picked up,” Zoltan began. “They were, as you know … ladies of the evening. ‘Comfort women’ was how the Japanese once described them. These girls were the top of the line, believe me. Anyway, they’ve been going through debriefing by the Unit One-sixty-seven guys and they’ve come up with some very interesting information.”

“Such as?” Y asked, slurring his words mightily.

“Such as the location of a free-lance fighter-plane group nearby,” Zoltan said. “Good guys who know how to fly jets and protect ships.”

“Air mercs?” Y asked. “Trustworthy ones? Out here?”

Zoltan nodded slowly. “That’s what they said,” he replied. “But they have some even more interesting stuff for us. It’s the real value of why we rescued them.”

“And that is?”

Zoltan leaned forward a bit and lowered his voice; outside the seaplane shivered as the push and pull of the towing operation jerked them all forward.

“I should let one of them tell you herself,” Zoltan said.

Y didn’t say anything one way or the other, so Zoltan took the opportunity to leave the room briefly. Y swallowed his entire glass of saki and poured yet another. He let the gasolinelike fluid run over his tongue, down his throat, and felt it reignite the already raging inferno in his gut.

Why was he drinking so much?

He didn’t know ….

The door opened again, and Zoltan stepped back inside. He was followed by a goddess …

Or at least that’s what she looked like to Y.

She was wearing a long flowing silk gown, and her hair was piled on top of her head. She smelled of lilacs. Her nails were painted red, as were her lips. Blond hair. Slightly pouting lips. Small perky breasts. Deep-blue eyes …

Y nearly fell off his seat. She looked like an angel. One from his dream ….

He staggered to his feet. This girl looked very familiar to him. But he wasn’t quite sure why.

She stood before Y—he could hardly take his eyes from her.

“Tell him what you told me,” Zoltan prompted her.

The girl looked so sweet and demure, Y was having trouble believing the line of work she was in.

“I saw it,” she said simply.

Y just stared back at her—for a moment he wondered drunkenly if his fly was open.

“‘You saw it?’” he asked, baffled. “Saw what exactly?” She looked at Zoltan, who urged her on with a fatherly nod.

“We saw the Big Plane,” she finally replied.

Y felt his heart start to pump mightily. His eyes grew wide.

“Are you sure?” he managed to blurt out.

She just nodded. “It was the biggest flying thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It went right over our heads the same day the world turned dark at daytime.”

Y took out a piece of paper and a pencil from his leg pocket and handed it to her.

“Draw it,” he said.

The girl learned forward on the table and started to draw. Y couldn’t help but look down her low-cut gown to see all but her entire breasts. They were small and erotic.

The girl drew a credible picture—she was artistic, too! And the drawing she produced looked exactly like the missing B-2000 superbomber. It was gigantic, all engines and wings and fuselage. Even more interesting, she added the tow plane the superbomber was towing when it left Bride Lake on its secret transpolar mission.

Y felt another surge of excitement go through him. This was their first solid lead of the journey. He looked up at Zoltan, who was smiling slyly.

“OK, OK,” he said to the psychic. “One of your things finally panned out.”

Zoltan just threw his shoulders back and shrugged with practiced nonchalance.

“Just doing my duty, sir,” he said with a smile.

Y turned back to the young girl. She was so delicate and beautiful—and he could not get rid of the feeling that he knew her from someplace before.

“We will have to ask you a lot of questions about this,” he said to her. “Exactly when you saw the big plane, which direction it was going, and so on. Do you mind? It will be a great help for us.”