Return of Sky Ghost (11 page)

He quickly stopped, laid down his rifle, and hastily began to restring his boots.

When he looked up again, he found himself staring into the eyes of one of his colleagues.

It was Sergeant Pedro Petro, one of the company’s cooks and a friend of Aswalo. But in the microsecond that Aswalo recognized his old chum, he also knew something was very, very wrong. Pedro’s eyes were staring at him unblinkingly and his head was cocked in such a way as to look very unnatural. A moment later, Aswalo knew why: It was Pedro’s severed head he was looking at.

It was tied through the ears with hemp twine and looped around the neck of the man who was standing over him, watching him tie his boots. This man was wearing Pedro’s severed head like a ghoulish necklace, even though Aswalo had spoken with Pedro not five minutes before he’d disappeared.

Aswalo tried to cry out, but even then he knew it was useless. This person standing over him, he was a native—just like the one who was leading them up this mountain of hell. But his face was painted with bloody red liquid. And his eyes were fierce and burning. He had a double-barrel machine gun in one hand and a huge machete in the other. And he was looking down at Aswalo like a hunter looks down on a calf before slaughter.

In his last seconds on earth, Aswalo saw another strange thing. It was a gallery of faces staring out at him from the bush. Same blood-painted faces, with the heads of his friends hanging around their necks. Same fierce look in their eyes.

We should never have come here,
Aswalo thought as the machete came down on his neck.
We should have all just stayed home
….

There was real trouble now, Ganganez could taste it in the air. The men at the rear of his column were running toward the safety of the middle, thus bunching the majority of his force in a small clearing about halfway up the side of the mountain. Despite his efforts, both yelling into his radio and at the top of his lungs, Ganganez could not calm his men down. Something awful was happening at the rear of the column. Unseen, unheard, but terrifying enough to make his highly trained soldiers panic.

Ganganez looked up ahead of him, at the trail as it left the small clearing, and saw the native guide Xaxmax standing on a tree stump, waving at him. The native was tipping his hat and laughing, too. Ganganez raised his pistol and fired twice at the man—obviously he’d led them into this trap. But the bullets missed the grinning native by a mile.

Ganganez directed his men to shoot at the gap-toothed man too, and they did. But somehow the man was able to dance his way out of the line of fire. Now more soldiers were firing at him, but the native continued his dance and managed to dodge the fusillade being directed at him.

By this time the column of panicky soldiers was flowing into the clearing, accordionlike, dangerously bunching up in clumps of ten or more. Ganganez turned his attention away from the native and back to his men. He began screaming at them again, ordering them to go back down the trail so they all wouldn’t be so woefully exposed. But no one was listening to him. And no one was going back down that trail either. That was very evident now.

The gunfire aimed at the native, the sounds of the panicky 600-plus men pouring into the clearing, and the sound of Ganganez’s own voice drowned out another, deeper, more ominous sound riding on the wind.

It was the groan of sixteen jet engines, flying very high, but coming down very, very fast.

The gunship arrived overhead at precisely 1100 hours.

It had been airborne for ninety minutes, circling very high above Xwo mountain, tracking the progress of the ascent of the Night Brigade via its long-range monitoring array.

The timing of this aerial operation had to be exact for several reasons. It would have been a mistake to attack the Night Brigade while they were still in the village below. Thousands of years of heritage were represented by the Intez settlement and it simply could not be destroyed. Besides, an attack on the ground would have given the Brigade a means of escape.

But up here, halfway up the mountain, they had nowhere to go.

Taking out fifty of the Argentine soldiers at the rear of the column had been a ritualistic exercise more than anything else. It was the Intez way to instill fear into their enemies before destroying them. Lopping off the column’s tail had certainly filled that bill.

It had also served to drive the rest of the column into the open area known as Axaz, or “flat place, halfway up.”

This was the only place on the mountain trail in which the gunship would have a clear shot at the column. It was here that the airplane—and its forty-four high-powered guns—would do their bloody work.

The pilots of the aircraft got a message from the control hut on top of Xwo at 1110 hours. The native chief, Xaxmax, was clear of the enemy column. The Axaz plain was now a free-fire zone. The controllers were giving total fire control over to the big airplane’s pilots. They in turn radioed back to their small army of gunners in the hold of the aerial giant: Load weapons and get ready for action.

The airplane itself was rather frightening just to look at. It was nearly 300 feet long, with an enormous wingspan. Sixteen engines adorned its wings. All of them jets, all of them spewing thick, gray exhaust and emitting a scream that sounded like a thousand people crying at once.

There were more than 600 soldiers caught on the Axaz Plain. They saw the airplane, saw its muzzles, saw that they were, in effect, trapped before its gun sights.

The engines screamed as the airplane dipped down closer to them. Many men simply stood frozen and looked at it.

The fusillade came two seconds later. Thirty-eight triple-barreled machine guns, two small howitzers, and four 20-mm cannons all fired at once. Some of the soldiers pitifully turned their rifles toward the flying monster, but that was immensely futile. The stream of gunfire hit the field like a wave on a beach. In ten seconds, half of the soldiers simply ceased to exist.

The airplane pulled up, its size so immense it seemed impossible for it to fly, and came back around again. Those soldiers not already killed or horribly wounded were still frozen in place. Or at least most of them were. One man had just a little bit more of his wits about him. It was Colonel Ganganez. He’d somehow escaped the initial barrage and was watching the airplane come around again.

A fleeting notion went through his mind. In this moment of tragedy, he should be with his troops, he thought.

But he quickly dismissed that notion.

Screw his men—he wanted to live. Just before the airplane’s guns opened up again, Colonel Ganganez turned around and began crashing through the jungle.

With the cries of his men ringing in his ears, he simply ran away.

Back in New Lima, a flight of SuperZeroes from the 1029th Battle Squadron was taking off.

They’d been dispatched by General Wakisaki to aid in the Night Brigade’s destruction of the secret enemy base on Xwo Mountain. The problem was, the pilots weren’t sure where Xwo Mountain was exactly. They were aware of the Night Brigade’s general vicinity, about 250 miles north of New Lima, and they were fairly certain of which mountain range Ganganez and his men were now scaling. It would just be a matter of the Brigade marking their position with smoke for the pilots to determine the correct combat area. After that, the plan called for a combined land-air attack on the secret mountaintop base. One, two, three, and out, a very easy operation. So easy, the pilots, Japanese officers all, expected to be back at their home field by noon.

The SuperZeroes were fierce airplanes. Jet-powered yet retaining many of the innovative and lightweight characteristics of the old Mitsubishi Zero, these aircraft carried six machine guns, plus twin cannons—and up to five tons of bombs. The SuperZero pilots were as famous as their airplanes. In the Imperial Japanese scheme of things, they were regarded as highly skilled, combat-hardened, and absolutely without mercy for their opponents. They were known to unforgivingly strafe the wreckage of planes they’d downed, always making sure the pilots were dead. They routinely bombed villages that were miles from any military activity, seemingly for the sport of it. Their favorite pastime was strafing hospitals and orphanages. It was said that no flight of the SuperZeroes went up without detailed maps of all the enemy hospitals and orphanages that would be within their day’s area of operations.

There were eight planes on this mission. They were flying in two flights of four. They foresaw bombing the secret air base first, then coming back and strafing whatever helpless enemy troops they could find on the ground. The only opposition they could think of possibly encountering was small arms fire, or at most, a cannon or two. Neither fazed the SuperZero pilots. Their planes were heavily armored on the bellies, wings, and tails. While a well-placed cannon shell might put a nasty dent in the body, machine gun bullets usually just bounced off.

The flight up from New Lima took but twenty minutes, the SuperZeroes bumping up their double-reaction fuel-burners and streaking to the combat area at nearly 600 knots. Soon after arriving they spotted a column of smoke rising up from a mountain located deep inside the range. This particular mountain was about 8,000 feet high; the smoke was coming from a spot about halfway up. This was obviously the marker being sent up from brigade ground troops.

Or so they thought.

The airplanes lowered their speed and went down to 5,000 feet. If they assumed this was the target mountain, then they assumed the secret air base was at its summit. The flight leaders told their men to fuse their ordnance and begin to line up for initial bombing runs.

But the pilots saw something that was fairly odd. There was another smoke plume rising up from the side of the mountain. And another. And another. This signaling method was a little extreme by the Night Brigade. A simple smoke flare would have done the job. The pilots
knew
something was wrong, so they stopped their bomb fusings and prepared their machine guns and cannons instead.

As they drew closer to the mountain, they found their intuition proved correct. There was a battle raging on a flattened-out piece of terrain 4,000 feet up the side of the mountain. It appeared the Night Brigade had run into some trouble. No problem. The ’Zero pilots simply test-fired their weapons and reconfigured their formation from prebombing to ground support.

But as the planes got closer, they beheld an even more confusing situation. It appeared as if one section of the mountain had been literally blown away. A huge smoking crater was the source of the large plume of smoke spotted by the pilots. Many parts of the jungle were on fire as well, causing the other half dozen smoke trails. People could be seen on the ground—but were they Brigade troops or enemy soldiers, or both? It was impossible to tell from the ’Zero pilots’ point of view exactly who they’d be shooting at.

But this was not a big deal for the fliers. They wouldn’t really have to change their plans all that much. The SuperZeroes would just go in shooting.

They would leave it to the Night Brigade soldiers to sort out the bodies afterward.

Colonel Ganganez was hiding.

He was laying low in a tuft of snake grass, so called because of its long, slimy appearance. Before him was the horribly scorched plain of Axaz. It looked like a scene from hell. Fire. Smoke. Bodies. Pieces of bodies. The occasional cry on the wind.

The gunship had circled for just three minutes and had left a hole in the ground bigger than a soccer field. The fusillade had perforated anything within that area, and Ganganez’s men couldn’t have made a more convenient target for the aerial slaughter. As their commander, he had made a blunder of enormous proportions in leading them up the mountain in the first place.

But life was strange, and the cosmos stranger. Though it seemed impossible to him now, somehow, some way, some of Ganganez’s men had actually lived through the three minutes of horror.

He could see some of them now through the snake grass. A few were trying to crawl into the bush, some were attempting to help others. Many were horribly burned. Many were missing arms and legs. One man was actually dragging his shorn-off leg behind him. Still others were lying still, occasionally twitching among the dying fires and thickening smoke. These people wouldn’t be going anywhere.

Beyond all this, Ganganez spotted a larger clutch of men gathered on the periphery of the huge, smoldering crater. These soldiers, maybe fifty in all, seemed less injured than the rest. They even appeared to be regrouping a bit, finding weapons and checking their mechanisms.

Ganganez could hear them. First one voice. Then two, then many. They were calling for someone. He listened harder, his heart pounding. They were calling out a name.
His
name.

“Colonel? Colonel Ganganez! We are here….”

The soldiers had spotted him, were waving to him, even laughing at the fact that they were still alive, that they had somehow managed to avoid getting killed in the gunship’s attack.

Ganganez’s spirits soared. He still had an army!

But then, as he began waving back, he saw from the trees behind his men gangs of painted natives with huge machetes emerging. They began overwhelming this small pack of laughing, waving soldiers, stabbing them, or chopping at them as calmly as a man chopped a tree. Ganganez’s men were just standing there! They were not fighting back. They were not running away. Some even calmly sat down and waited for the approaching natives, almost as if they’d been expecting them to come and slice their throats.

Not one scream, not one cry came up, as the soldiers simply submitted to being killed. Ganganez’s head was about to explode. The scene was so grotesquely sheeplike, Ganganez vomited all over himself. What madness of war would make men act like this? If there was ever any time they needed his leadership, it was now.

But Ganganez stayed frozen. He was not moving, not one iota. He couldn’t. He was petrified with fear so thick, he could taste it. For the first time in his military career, his ruthlessness was no help to him whatsoever. Even worse, he realized it was just a matter of time before these natives found him too.