Attack on Area 51 (2 page)

Still, they were all thinking the same thing:
Could it really be him?

The medics reached the hospital’s intensive-care emergency unit and wheeled the gurney inside.

A group of doctors was waiting. They were experts in treating combat wounds from working on Football City soldiers hurt in the city’s numerous low-level military actions. Once known as St. Louis, Missouri, Football City was now surrounded by enemies. Fragmented states, criminal enclaves, and outlaw territories formed its borders. Firefights were a daily occurrence. The most seriously wounded soldiers were taken to this ICEU.

But as heroic as those soldiers were, none had created the buzz this patient was generating.

The ICEU doctors began working on him, dousing his spacesuit with water and cutting away the chest area. At that moment, a man in an all-white military uniform arrived. Louis St. Louis, military commander of Football City, was tall, had a shock of gray hair and a ruddy complexion.

He approached the gurney just as the mystery man’s helmet was finally lifted off. St. Louis saw the man’s face—and suddenly had to sit down. Even the hard-line military doctors gasped in astonishment.

St. Louis looked up at them. “Am I dreaming this?”

One doctor replied, “If you are, then we all are …”

The doctors went back to work. Shocking though his presence was, the man in the spacesuit was still seriously injured and needed attention immediately.

The assisting nurses couldn’t help themselves. They stole glances over their shoulders at the anxious group of coworkers waiting on the other side of the ICEU’s glass wall.

Finally one nurse mouthed the words everyone on the other side of the glass wanted to hear: “It’s
really
him …”

News traveled quickly. Through the hospital, then over to the adjacent military base, and, from there, to the city streets beyond.

Within minutes, a crowd was gathering outside the hospital. They’d heard it was nothing short of a miracle. That a man lying in the hospital’s ICEU was none other than the long-lost savior of the American continent … Hawk Hunter.

But this was impossible.

The Wingman had been dead for years.

H
AWK HUNTER WAS LAST SEEN
more than a decade ago, climbing aboard a Zon spacecraft, the crude Russian version of America’s space shuttle.

Blasting off into outer space, his mission was to track down the super criminal Viktor, who was reportedly holed up in orbit, using the old Russian Mir space station as his base. Just about everything bad that had happened to America since the Big War could be laid at Viktor’s cloven feet, which was why people considered him to be Satan incarnate. Hunter had fought him many times before and had hoped the trip to space would be their final battle.

In the midst of this pursuit, a giant comet was spotted heading toward Earth. Moments before humanity would have been obliterated, Hunter took the Zon and waylaid the comet by detonating a trail of nuclear mines in its path. Though he saved the planet, Hunter was killed in mid-space by the massive explosion.

Or, so everyone thought.

To say Hunter, dead or alive, was an American hero was a vast understatement.

He’d attained icon status in the dark days following World War III, a vicious conflict the United States had won on the European battlefield, only to be undermined by the traitorous US vice president, who, proving to be a Russian mole, took down the nation’s ballistic missile–defense system just long enough for Russian ICBMs to obliterate the middle of the American heartland.

Though his country was beaten and defenseless, Hunter was able to put together a military force called the United Americans, and eventually won back the homeland from an assortment of enemies, including Russians, neo-Nazis, and Asian warrior cults, as well as armies of homegrown fascists, many of whom had infiltrated America’s National Guard.

It had been a remarkable achievement for a man regarded by friend and foe alike as the best fighter pilot who’d ever lived. It was well known that Hunter didn’t just fly airplanes; he became one with them. His brain overrode their flight computers; his arms and legs became their ailerons and elevators. He could fly higher and faster than any man alive—and in battle he was absolutely fearless. In the old days, any fighter pilot who shot down five enemy airplanes was considered an ace. Hunter had shot down
hundreds
of enemy airplanes. The skill and bravery he showed in aerial combat was also displayed on the ground, as he proved to be a superb tactician and military strategist.

He was also known to be extremely lucky. So when he climbed into the Zon spacecraft ten years ago, many were sure he’d simply return to Earth shortly afterward with the super-criminal Viktor in tow.

Later, when it was thought that Hunter had died sacrificing himself to save the planet, no one was surprised.

Once Hunter went missing, the American continent quickly reverted back to the dark old days following World War III.

In his absence, the country’s old enemies surged back into action, starting a string of small wars that eventually raged from coast to coast. Once again, these battles broke up United America into a collection of fractured states and warring territories, nearly all of them supported by hostile foreign powers.

Football City had suffered badly in this downturn. Named for the nonstop football game that had been played there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, solely for the purposes of gambling, it had once been considered a shining example of rebirth in postwar America. Now it was a dark, dirty, and depressing place. Crime was rampant. Security was nonexistent. And due to the huge payments it was forking over to one of its particularly belligerent neighbors as “protection money,” the city was also quite broke. Those same words could be used to describe America as well.

This was why people were so excited by the rumors that Hunter was alive and suddenly back in Football City.

But was that really what was happening? Football City’s top military intelligence officers were on their way to the hospital. The number one question they wanted answered was: Who
is
this person lying in the ICEU?

If it really was Hunter, where had he been all this time?

And if it wasn’t him, who was it?

D
ESPITE THE RAIN,
the crowd grew larger around the Football City military hospital as the night wore on.

Word had continued to spread rapidly, causing more and more people to venture out of their homes and into the sodden darkness to the base to see if what everyone was saying was true.

Because most of the streetlights in Football City didn’t work anymore, the crowd had started fires in old trashcans. They lit candles and kept them sheltered from the rain, creating a watery glow that could be seen for miles. They waited for any sign that the person lying in a room on the top floor of the hospital was really their long-lost hero.

The atmosphere inside the ICEU had grown more expectant as well. The military doctors had brought the mystery man’s pulse back up to an acceptable rate. His heart was stabilized; his oxygen levels had risen. While he had dozens of wounds and burns all over his body, none seemed life threatening, and many had been treated.

Still, the ICEU doctors had called for a combat burns surgeon to check over the patient before they completely cut away his bulky space suit.

In the meantime, Football City’s top military intelligence people had arrived and were studying the man as best they could. Six feet tall; ruggedly handsome; blond, rock-star hair; deep-blue eyes—he certainly
looked
like Hawk Hunter. And there was no doubt he’d arrived in a spacecraft that looked a lot like the Zon, although all that was left of it were bits of burnt dust and metal.

But could this be a ruse of some kind? A fake Hunter sent by an enemy for some reason? Anything was possible these dark days. But again, Football City was a mere shadow of its former self. It was combat-weary and being bled dry. Why would one of its enemies attempt such an elaborate hoax? And to what end?

All of this would be settled if the man could talk, but he still hadn’t regained consciousness. This puzzled the doctors. None of his vital signs indicated a coma, nor was there any outward evidence that he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury.

He just wasn’t conscious—almost as if he was asleep. Or more accurately, in a very deep sleep.

As the doctors were moving their mystery patient to the CAT-scan room to check his brain functions, he suddenly came to life, sitting up on the gurney, startling doctors and nurses alike.

His eyes were wide open, his face full of color. He was looking around, appearing more befuddled than frightened by his surroundings and all the people around him.

Then something came over him. Those who were there would later say it was almost a glow from his head to his feet. His eyes became so intense his irises turned dark. He clenched his fists with so much force he reopened the wounds on his hands, at the same time displaying muscular arms through his ripped space suit. He appeared to be over his confusion.

Suddenly, he seemed to know
exactly
where he was and what was going on—and what he had to do.

Military Commander Louis St. Louis had just arrived back on the scene. Now the mystery man looked him straight in the eye, maybe because St. Louis was the only face in the crowd he recognized, and said in a calm voice, “Something … is coming.”

With that, the man jumped off the gurney, retrieved his battered helmet resting underneath, and put it back on. When two of the doctors tried to stop him, he gently but firmly resisted their efforts. There were also a dozen soldiers in the hallway looking on. Many of them remembered Hunter from years before; some had even fought alongside him. They simply froze in place.

What was he doing?

The answer came an instant later when Football City’s air-raid sirens started going off. Some were so close by that their wailing shook the walls of the hospital.

The man in the space suit cocked his ear skyward, then looked back at St. Louis, and said, “See what I mean?”

Then he began running. Down the hall, into a stairwell, down the stairs. Knocked back to reality, the doctors started yelling at the soldiers: “Go get him!”

But the man was too quick for them. Down ten flights of stairs in a flash, he burst out of an exit door, which put him on the tarmac of Football City’s main air base.

He started running again, heading for a handful of jet fighters parked near the base’s main runway. The planes made up the bulk of Football City’s ragged air corps. Each was more than three quarters of a century old.

In the distance, the air raid sirens continued to bellow. The city’s scramble pilots, those few fliers who were on call twenty-four hours a day, valiantly trying to defend the city from its frequent air raids, were running out to the airplanes as well. The pilots saw the mystery man sprint past them, still dressed in his half-burned flight suit and battered crash helmet. In the murky darkness, they didn’t know who he was. They watched, dumbfounded as he reached one of the airplanes and climbed in.

He quickly started the jet fighter’s engine, and without taking time to let it warm up or to acclimate himself to the cockpit, the man popped the brakes and the elderly warplane moved down the runway.

As the scramble pilots looked on in amazement, the jet fighter rolled right past them and, with a burst of fire from its tail, took off into the stormy night.

The formation of twelve heavy bombers heading for Football City had taken off from a base just forty miles away.

They belonged to a criminal group known as the 10
^th
Street Crew. A coalition of armed gangs that made money enforcing extortion payments, the Crew took its orders from the Red Army Mafia (RAM), the giant organized-crime family that controlled Detroit.

Football City had been paying RAM 50 percent of the city’s meager income per month just on the promise that they would not invade. Whenever that payment was late, which was often, RAM called in the 10
^th
Street Crew to do their thing.

The pilots of those dozen bombers were all mercenaries, flyboys for hire, in the employ of the 10
^th
Street Crew. Assigned to do a dumb-bomb drop on Football City’s already battered harbor, many had flown that mission before, with virtual impunity—and there was nothing Football City could do about it.

Just as the formation of bombers appeared on the horizon, though, the storm clouds that had blanketed Football City seemingly for forever began to clear away.

Suddenly, stars could be seen above the city—and, flying in chevrons of three, their navigation lights burning brightly, the oncoming bombers could be seen too.

They made an odd collection. Six were old Russian-built Backfire bombers; two were Tu-95 Bears, also Russian built. There was a trio of extremely old French-built Mirage bombers, and one very out-of-place, British-built, delta-winged Vulcan bomber.

However old they were, many of the bombers stayed on auto-pilot during their bomb runs because the raids over Football City were so uneventful. Football City’s antiaircraft batteries were so antiquated and so few in number, they didn’t pose any kind of threat to the mercenary airmen.

And not once since these bombing missions began had Football City employed any kind of defensive fighter strategy that the bomber pilots had to worry about. The bombers were all supersonic or close to it. The old Football City air fleet flew only subsonic planes. By the time Football City’s fighters could get started up, get in the air, and then in a position to attack, the bombers would already have dropped their loads and would be heading back home at high speed.

Since the clouds had cleared away (miraculously, some would later say), hundreds of people on the ground had a near-perfect view of what happened next.

All those people gathered outside the air base fence, plus dozens more inside the gloomy Football City military headquarters nearby, all the security personnel throughout the facility, and even the doctors from the hospital who were now standing on its roof saw the same thing: the bombers approaching from one direction and the lone jet fighter piloted by the mystery man approaching from the other.