War of the Sun (2 page)

It was shortly after the Nazi invasion had begun that the
Enterprise
was found drifting in the Caribbean, its fascist crew dead, victims of the vicious one-man campaign carried out by Hawk Hunter, the man known to many as the Wingman. Once the fighting against the Super-Nazis ended, the carrier was refurbished once again, and secretly sent to Vancouver to prepare for a very critical mission.

Yaz had overseen this voyage. Both a former commander in the U.S. Navy and a member of the informal group of military advisers that made up the leadership of the United American Armed Forces, he seemed like a natural choice. However, his U.S. Navy duty was on submarines, not aircraft carriers—could there be any two ships more different? Plus, while he’d been given no indication that his mission to get the carrier to Vancouver in one piece was the extent of his involvement in the overall operation, he never dreamed they wanted him to be its captain for the upcoming secret mission.

But here he was, skipper of a supercarrier, on orders from General David Jones, the top military man in United America himself.

But it was an unusual command, to say the least. He had but one-fifth the normal complement of crew. And until this night, only twelve airplanes.

But now that the crates had arrived, at least that had changed. Inside, they contained the components of a very special aircraft.

He considered this now as he looked out across the barren flight deck and into the foggy gloom of the bay.

“Thirteen airplanes,” he whispered glumly. “My lucky number.”

Twenty-four hours later

T
HE AIRPLANE SWOOPED LOW
over Vancouver Bay, banked to the left, and came around again.

There was a sudden thunderous noise, almost like a mechanical wind, as the plane stopped in mid-air. It hovered there for a moment, and then descended slowly, its pilot deftly bringing the VTOL airplane in for a textbook dead-of-night landing.

No sooner was the Harrier down on the deserted deck of the
Enterprise
when Hunter had his safety harnesses undone. He popped the canopy and crawled out of the cockpit over to the wing and then down to the deck of the carrier itself.

He took a long, silent, sober look around. For the first time since he’d single-handedly defeated its Super-Nazi crew, he was back aboard the USS
Enterprise.

It was close to midnight. The message calling him to Vancouver had reached him at his Cape Cod farm two days before. It had come from General Jones, and it “invited” Hunter to a top-secret meeting to discuss a matter “of extreme importance.”

The request had served to effectively end what had been a fulfilling few weeks spent nursing Dominique back to health and getting his small coastal hay farm back into shape. Dominique was making a fine recovery, but his farm was a mess. Fixing the doors and the three bullet holes in the roof had been easy—the hard part was trying to undo the many months of neglect and abuse that the Norse soldiers had wreaked on the place.

But he loved it. With each day worked, he felt he was regaining a very important part of himself. Once again, the place called “Skyfire” had become safe haven from the wars and turmoil that had raged over the globe. More important, it was a place for him and Dominique to be together. They had been forced apart so often over the years that Hunter wanted nothing more than to be with her. And knowing that he could be called away any moment made their time together more precious.

So when it came, the message from Jones served to douse his brief idyllic respite like a bucket of ice water.

But he was a soldier. And obviously something big was up. After yet another painful good-bye with Dominique, Hunter was on his way in a few short hours.

Leaving her in the care of a friend who ran the highly-touted New Boston Militia, Hunter flew the Harrier up to Montreal, where he began a series of refueling stops which had him over Vancouver inside of six hours.

Now another adventure was about to begin.

He turned to see the slightly diminutive figure of Yaz walking across the deck toward him.

“Permission to come aboard, Captain?” Hunter asked his old friend, complete with a deadpan salute.

Yaz waved off the gesture. “You’re not making this any easier, Hawk,” he told him. “I’m the last guy that should have his hand on this rudder.”

Hunter yanked his helmet off. “Look at it this way, Yazbo,” he said. “When your old sub friends hear about it, it’ll drive them nuts.”

“Yeah,” Yaz replied, in mock agreement, “nuts from laughter.”

The conversation quickly turned serious as they walked across the flight deck and toward the carrier’s massive superstructure, known as the Island.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to meet for another month,” Hunter asked Yaz.

Yaz just shook his head. “There been some new developments,” he replied soberly. “This is a real emergency, I’m afraid.”

They walked up to the carrier’s nerve center, a place called the CIC, for Combat Information Center. The last time Hunter had seen it, the room was shot-up and very nearly destroyed. Now it was up and operating at almost full capacity.

They moved through the CIC and toward a small adjacent conference room. Yaz opened the door and Hunter walked in. He was greeted with a round of semiserious applause.

“You didn’t bring coffee?” one of the half dozen men sitting around the large table yelled out. “No doughnuts? No booze?
No nothing?”

Hunter pretended to slap his forehead, as if he had truly forgotten something. This act was greeted with a chorus of fake booing.

Seated around the table were Hunter’s brothers in war, the leadership of the United American Armed Forces. General Jones himself was at the head of the table. He quickly rose and came around the table to greet the Wingman.

“This looks just like the old days, General,” Hunter told him, sweeping his hand around the room.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Jones replied.

Hunter went on to greet the rest of the men. He had fought beside them all at one time or another. Ben Wa and JT “Socket” Toomey, two of the best fighter pilots he’d ever known, had been with him since the very beginning. They had all flown together in the Air Force’s Thunderbirds aerial demonstration team. They had also fought together in the same fighter squadron during the Big War.

The years since that nightmarish conflagration had been a constant struggle to free America from the various and varied tyrannies and dictatorships that arose from the ashes of the postwar United States. He had come to know the other men in the room during these conflicts.

Major Pietr Frost, the Free Canadian pilot who served as the military liaison officer between United American Armed Forces and the democratic Canadian government. Major “Catfish” Johnson, the African-American officer who was
de facto
commander of the United American ground forces. Bobby Crockett and Jesse Tyler, better known as the Cobra Brothers, the fierce two-man Texan attack helicopter team who were not really brothers, but brothers-in-law.

There was one particular face missing, though.

Mike Fitzgerald, a longtime member of this inner circle, was dead—heroically killed in the last minutes of the Battle of
Fuhrerstadt.
Hunter missed the crazy but dignified Irishman terribly. Of them all, Fitz might have been his best friend. Now he was gone.

Another part of the team was also not there, but for happier circumstances. Captain “Crunch” O’Malley, the F-4X Phantom jet jockey who at one time led a team of freelance fighter-bombers known as the Ace Wrecking Crew, was currently back on the East Coast, reorganizing what was left of the United American Air Force.

Finally the reunion was complete and Hunter took his seat next to Jones. The room got very quiet. Almost everyone around the big table had arrived just hours before Hunter, so they, too, were unaware of why the emergency conference had been called.

In fact, only Jones knew the full reason for the hastily-called meeting.

The general let a few moments of tense silence pass before he spoke.

“The reason we are here,” he began starkly, yet matter-of-factly, “is that there’s been a new development regarding the
Fire Bats
subs the Cult have operating in the Pacific.”

The Cult.
Just the words themselves were enough to make Hunter’s fists ball up in anger. Known officially as the “Combined Greater East Asian Warrior Society,” the quasireligious, completely-fanatical, more-aptly-nicknamed “Asian Mercenary Cult” was one half of the Second Axis, the notorious alliance which had invaded the American continent nearly a year before. And although the other half of the Second Axis, the Fourth Reich Super-Nazis, had been defeated by the United Americans at the pivotal battle of
Fuhrerstadt,
the Cult still held most of the American territory west of the Rockies.

Though smaller, the Asian Mercenary Cult was in many ways an adversary more dangerous than the defeated Super-Nazis. Not only did they have nearly fifty divisions occupying the American West Coast, the Cult also had nuclear missiles aboard two high-tech
Fire Bats
submarines which were sailing somewhere deep in the Pacific. Because of these missiles, a kind of enforced standoff had come about. The United Americans couldn’t readily attack the Cult forces as long as the Asian’s “doomsday weapons” remained operational. If backed into a corner by the resurging Americans, the Cult would, no doubt, make good on their oft-made threat to immediately launch their nukes at the West Coast in a sort of ultimate kamikaze attack.

At the same time, the Cult was nowhere powerful enough to expand their ill-gotten occupied territory eastward. With the fascist European allies routed, they had no choice but to keep their forces in place and bide their time enslaving millions of Americans.

It was a tense situation, perhaps best compared to the “phony war” between Nazi Germany and France and England in early months of what would become World War Two.

It was also a very unpredictable situation for one large reason: the man in charge of the Cult.

His name was Hashi Pushi, and he was a very strange character indeed. Considered a “living god” to the Cult members, he was also widely rumored to be psychologically unstable in the extreme. Mysterious and elusive, Hashi Pushi was believed never in his life to have left Japan. Indeed, some intelligence reports said he never left his headquarters, which were located in the heart of Tokyo itself. Yet his far-flung mercenary armies had taken control of most of the Pacific rim, as well as the American West Coast.

By just about all reports, Hashi Pushi was quite literally insane. Reportedly a heavy drug user, he believed himself to be no less than a reincarnated samurai warrior. It was well known that he frequently issued bizarre orders based on “visions” which came to him almost daily. Some could be judged as pieces of sound military doctrine. Others were as crazy as their creator. One story had it that Hashi Pushi once commanded one hundred of his top military aides to commit ritual suicide simply because he supposedly had learned in a vision that they had entertained disloyal thoughts. An enormous and elaborate ceremony was arranged, and at its height, the hundred officers performed a mass
seppuku,
disemboweling themselves with their own swords. A huge dinner was then served, followed by a two-day orgy.

This was typical of the Cult’s fanatical devotion to Hashi Pushi.

The American plan, up until now, had been to gradually rebuild the United American Army, while painstakingly trying to track the pair of Fire Bats subs. When the time was right, the UA would launch a massive air and land attack against the occupying Cult forces, at the same time ambushing both enemy subs at the precise moment. It was an operation that everyone knew would take time, patience, and extensive planning. It would also result in many, many casualties.

Now it appeared that that plan had gone awry.

“We’ve received information that the Cult is preparing to launch a first strike,” Jones continued slowly and carefully, his tone grim.

Another somber silence descended on the room as the weight of Jones’s words sank in.

“We know this because one of the POWs captured in
Fuhrerstadt
turned out to be a liaison officer with the Cult,” Jones continued. “Under interrogation, he told us that just before the Reich was defeated, word had come from Tokyo that Hashi Pushi had ordered his occupying troops to prepare for a ‘nuclear action,’ as he put it. Specifically, the orders dealt with plans to have the target city looted before it was destroyed.”

“What
is
the target?” Ben Wa asked.

“We don’t know,” Jones replied. “It could be any one of ten places, from San Diego up to Seattle. And that’s the problem. Even the high Cult officers probably don’t know. The real target will supposedly come in another of Pushi’s visions.”

“This is not good,” Frost said with classic understatement. “He could secretly give the order at any time. It would take only a few hours for his whacked-out troops to strip the target city clean of anything of value. And then …”

“That’s the problem in a nutshell,” Jones said. “That’s why we had to get together earlier than we anticipated.”

The grim silence never left the room completely.

“Does this mean we have to take out those subs much sooner than we expected?” Toomey asked.

“Too risky,” Jones replied, shaking his head. “Those two subs are constantly on the move. They are always hundreds of miles from each other, sailing in completely random patterns. It would take us at least several days to pinpoint just one of them. And attempt a successful attack. And when we did, that would give the second one plenty of time to launch.”

It was a well-studied catch-22.

“We simply can’t take the chance of forcing their hand,” Jones continued soberly. “With all the civilians on the coast in jeopardy, if we gamble and lose, they’re the ones who’ll go up in smoke.”

Toomey gripped the table tightly, his voice rising. “But General, some of them are definitely gonna fry for sure if we
don’t
take the chance.”