Return of Sky Ghost (13 page)

Finally they reached the village where the Brigade had jumped off. Here he remet the native chief who had so completely fooled him.

Xaxmax.

In his hut there were representatives from all the tribes who had suffered the Night Brigade’s rampage during their search for the secret base.

With each face, Ganganez sank deeper into his malaise. Yet he was still too far gone to feel anything deeply, like guilt or responsibility.

“You have committed great crimes against our families and our lands,” Xaxmax told him. “However, we will not kill you. We will give you the gift of life back, something your people did not give to us.”

Ganganez let out a long sigh of relief.

“Thank you,” he whispered, knowing he’d just dodged a very big bullet. “Please, tell me. What can I do for you?”

The natives all looked at each other, and several had to fight off a smile.

“What can you do for us?” Xaxmax asked. “You can deliver a message back to your gods.”

One week later

High General Wakisaki had just woken up when he heard the pounding at his door.

He ordered the two young girls out of his bed and padded over to answer the door himself. He was badly hung-over. This was the sixth day of a sake binge that had begun the day he’d received word that the Night Brigade had been wiped out on some unknown mountain northeast of New Lima. Several search parties had been sent out to look for them. None of them had returned either.

Wakisaki opened the door to find three of his highest officers looking back at him. They were pale. Wakisaki felt a chill go through him.

“How bad will this news be if you’ve come to tell me yourselves?” he asked them.

“You must come with us,” one of the officers replied, absolutely petrified.

Wakisaki didn’t protest. He was the highest military man in the Occupation Forces, yet he was going to obey, simply because he knew that what waited for him transcended military protocol.

They took the elevator down to the lobby of the headquarters building. Here a squad of dirty, dusty soldiers awaited. They were Peruvians, the last search party that had been sent out to look for the Night Brigade.

They had found something.

There was a stretcher in the middle of the lobby and on it was the body of a man. It was very bloody, but somehow this person was still alive.

Wakisaki just stared down at this figure. It was a human being—but just barely.

This man had no hands, no feet. His ears had been cut off, his eyes had been gouged out, his nose had been sewn shut. His tongue was gone, and bloody spittle was drooling from his lips. A bloody stain around his groin told of other things that had been removed as well.

“What is the meaning of this?” Wakisaki finally burst out.

One of the Peruvian officers stepped forward.

“It is an
espectro vivo,
sir,” he said. “A man who cannot speak, or hear, or see, or walk, or touch, or smell. The natives of the highlands used to do this to the last enemy soldier they could find—as a way of telling the other side who won the war. But that was thousands of years ago, back in the days of the Nazcas.”

Wakisaki looked back down at the pathetic figure, twitching on the stretcher. In all his years as a combat man, he’d never seen anything quite so disturbing.

“But …” the High General began to stutter. “Who is it?”

The Peruvian took a step closer to Wakisaki and said something so low, only the High General could hear it.

“It is Colonel Ganganez, sir,” he whispered. “Of the Night Brigade.”

West Falkland Island

T
HE STORM HAD GROWN
during the night.

The wind was whipping in from the south pole at nearly eighty knots. It was blowing so hard, the heavy snow accompanying it was moving sideways. As a result, very little of it was reaching the ground on West Falkland Island.

The fishing boats at Summer Point were in, of course. Their crews had known this storm was coming for three days just by sniffing the air. The small fleet was now in safe harbor, its crews warm and dry inside Government Hall.

Up the road a mile, the crews inside the squadron of SuperChieftain tanks ringing the small farmhouse were trying their best to stay warm as well. Running their vehicles’ small double-reaction engines on low kept the heat fairly consistent. Still, the howl of the wind outside their tanks seemed to bring an even deeper chill.

Inside the small farmhouse, the man and woman were asleep. But in the secret laboratory sixteen levels below the house, amazing things were happening.

The elevator leading up into the farmhouse arrived at the top floor at exactly midnight. A scientist stepped out, turned on his flashlight, walked through the door facing him, then through the closet and finally into the living room. All the lights were turned off and the wind was howling madly outside. The scientist felt for all the world like a burglar, an intruder on sacred ground. But he tiptoed softly into the couple’s bedroom nevertheless and gently nudged the man awake.

“Sir, we have found something,” he told the man. “You must come and see it.”

The man needed no further prompting. He quickly put on his trousers and his bathrobe and boots. Quietly closing the door behind him so as not to wake his wife, he followed the scientist to the elevator and rode the sixteen floors down into the cold Earth.

One minute later they were inside the hidden lab itself. Five other scientists were inside the separate glass-enclosed room, standing around the operating table. As always, the scientists were dressed in long blue gowns and wearing rubber gloves and surgical masks.

But the patient laying on a white sheet on the table before them was not a human being. It was an atomic bomb.

At present it was in six different pieces.

The bomb’s background—and how it got to be here—was so secret even the man from the farmhouse didn’t know the exact order of events. This he did know: Right before the end of the recent war with Germany, an American agent was dropped into the Rhineland and somehow managed to steal six atomic weapons from the Germans. Five of these bombs had been dropped by the U.S. on occupied Europe shortly thereafter, wiping out the core of the German military hierarchy, and thus ending the war.

This was the sixth bomb. It had been transported back to the United States and after much examination, was sent down here, to this very secret place in the South Atlantic. A place where all the strange things—and strange people—in this particular world eventually seemed to wind up.

The scientists had been studying the sixth bomb for nearly a year now. The U.S. government had sent it here because no one in the regular U.S. military knew exactly how it worked. Nuclear power was a totally alien aspect in this world. In this place of huge airplanes, huge tanks, huge ships, the double-reaction process provided the power by fusing two atoms together and draining off the residue energy.

This bomb though, this queer thing, seemed to work on the exact opposite principal: It gathered energy by splitting an individual atom down the middle, not by combining the bodies of two.

The scientists had seen aerial recon photos of the destruction the first five bombs had done in Europe. Each bomb blast was exactly twenty times greater than one of the double-reaction warheads used by the Germans to destroy Paris in late 1997. Just who was responsible for building the six atomic bombs—or rather who was the person who
instructed
German scientists in how to build the bombs—was not known to them. The rumors were that he was dead.

All that was left of his handiwork now was this last remaining bomb. After nearly a year, the scientists were aware of its basic principles. But being scientists in this extremely inquisitive world, they’d set about not just to dissect it and duplicate it, but to make it larger. To increase its power. To make it bigger.

On this night, with a storm raging full gale overhead, they believed they had reached that goal.

Now the man from the farmhouse put on his own surgical gown and radiation protection suit and went into the glass-enclosed room.

The bomb’s warhead was being examined via manipulator in a transparent safe box. What the group of scientists had done was to saturate the warhead with trillions of “mute-quakes,” the passive castoffs of the double-reaction process. It was hoped these odd little things would attach themselves to the uranium atoms inside the nuclear warhead, increasing their charge while not perceptibly increasing their mass.

This idea came from a separate experiment the scientists had conducted a month earlier. They had set off a minuscule atomic explosion by splitting a mute-quake clustered atom. The result was an explosion, which had been expected to be the size of a firecracker, blowing apart a reinforced steel and lead chamber. Since then the scientists had been trying to figure out just exactly how many times larger that explosion had been compared to one using a uranium atom that had not been reinforced.

In other words, how much bigger, how much more powerful would this atomic cluster bomb be?

This stormy night they had reached that conclusion finally, and that’s why they’d summoned the man.

He now read the data spitting out of the Main/AC computer and at first was convinced it was a misprint.

“Gentlemen, this report must be in error,” he said, rereading the report. “You must mean that we’ve made the bomb
three
times more powerful than before—not
three hundred
times.”

The scientists looked back at him, their faces all weighted by the same worried expression.

“No sir,” one finally said. “That is no misprint. This bomb, clustered with mute-quakes, is now three hundred times more powerful than those dropped in Europe.”

The man was stunned. He just stared at the scientists, then at the bomb, then back up at the scientists again. Three looked like they wanted to laugh; the other three like they wanted to cry. The man felt exactly in between.

The significance of what they’d just discovered here was slowly sinking in.

Before them was a single bomb that could, quite literally, blow up a sizable part of the planet.

“God help us,” the man heard himself whispering. “God help us all.”

Xwo Mountain

Northeast Peru

Two months later

T
HE CRIPPLED B-24/52 HAD
two engines on fire when it came in.

Its pilots had expertly slipped through the massive LSD screen even though their steering program was down to just forty percent and the landing gears were knocked out.

They had no choice but to bounce the plane in on its belly. It skidded and screeched its way along the hidden base’s longest runway, leaving small pieces of fuselage and wing and a lot of dust and smoke in its wake.

It sounded bad, looked worse, but finally the gigantic airplane came to a halt. The crash crews were quickly on hand, hosing it down, but there was little danger of fire now. The pilots had long ago disengaged their double-reaction power units and had glided the big bomber in, using momentum, gravity, and then a final burst from its wingtip-mounted rocket-assists to reach home.

The rear doors were opened and the twenty-three-man crew staggered out. Some had cuts and bruises, one had a broken leg. But they were all alive, and that’s what counted up here.

The crumpled bomber was hauled off the runway to allow the next-in-line B-24/52 to come in. There were six more behind it and they were bunching up high over Xwo Mountain. The planes were returning from bombing runs over southern Peru and northern Chile. Twelve bombers had gone out—twelve had come back. Two had been shot up badly: this one and the first to come home. They were good examples of the increased Japanese reliance on antiaircraft flak, especially low-area stuff. The bombers had been facing clouds of it for the past eight weeks.

The battle for Xwo Mountain, and its result, had changed the face of the Japanese occupation of South America. The Nipponese Occupation Army was still in control of the continent; there was no doubt about that. But the bombers atop of Xwo had forced the Asian invaders to devote many of their precious resources to defense: air defense, fighter protection, AA sites, bomb shelters, and the million other things one side must do when its enemy is attacking it from the air.

Stopping the momentum of the Japanese conquest of South America had been the intent of the hidden base all along—and the people here had accomplished their mission. But the price also had a direct result: The flak over the target cities was now thicker, the home-defense fighters were more numerous, and many key enemy installations were being moved underground, making some previously available targets somewhat scarce.

But if they were the victims of their own success, it did little to bother the pilots and crews of the hidden air base. The important thing for them was that even though the Japanese knew the location of the base, since the battle down on the plain of Axaz, no further attempt had been made to destroy it. No Japanese pilot would fly anywhere near it for fear they’d be shot down. No Japanese or home troops dared approach it on the ground, for fear they’d be beheaded, or eaten alive, or worse.

For the first intention all along had been to spook the Japanese, and in that, the people at the hidden base had succeeded grandly. Things were tougher over the target areas, but the bombers were able to come and go from their base with virtual impunity.

The losses to increased enemy fighter activity had been surprisingly small in the past two months, but that had little to do with luck, or spooking the Japanese.

Rather it was the fighter escorts the bombers relied on now whenever they went up for a mission.

There were a total of thirteen escort fighters at the Xwo base. Twelve of them were Mustang-5s, an enormous combination of two airplanes, the P-51 Mustang and the F-86 Sabre jet. The Mustang-5 was a formidable weapon. It had the distinctive nose, fuselage, and tail of the famous P-51, but shared the air intake, the swept-back wing, and the cockpit of the equally famous F-86. More important, it combined the best handling and aerial combat characteristics of both classic airplanes, plus it could hit Mach 2.5 while carrying 1500 pounds of ordnance and featured no less than four machine guns and one huge cannon for firepower.