Return of Sky Ghost (25 page)

The agents showed their ID badges to everyone, then came face to face with the man in the middle.

“Coach Geraci?” one asked. “May we have a word with you please?”

Hit Team Five was slightly late in finding their subjects.

The contact point was in the isolated foothills near Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the ride out had been a long, dusty, dirty affair for the OSS men. When the agents finally did arrive, they were certain they were at the wrong place.

It was not a bar or a suburban house or a college harem or a football team locker room. It was a monastery—out in the middle of nowhere.

The agents checked back with Y that they were indeed at the right location, and he confirmed that they were. They got out of the vehicle, went through the main gate, and quickly spotted a room in the courtyard from which a faint light was coming.

They knocked on the door and were greeted by a nun, young, fresh-faced, but heavily garbed in a white habit.

The agents had a few words with her, apologizing for the late hour. She led them into the main dining room. Here a small group of monks was just beginning a late meal. They all looked up—again a look of bafflement on their faces.

Oddly, the monks were wearing name tags: Brother Miller. Brother Snyder. Brother Higgens. Brother Maas.

The agents walked over to the monk sitting at the end of the table. They flashed their ID cards.

But the monk spoke before they could. “I am Brother Jim Cook,” he said. “May I help you with something?”

Y had been privy to a confidential information message concerning the subject of Hit Team 6.

For whatever reason, the Main/AC was expecting the sixth person to be the hardest to track down, the hardest to contact, and possibly the hardest to convince of what his country expected him to do.

Finding him did turn out to be a bitch. It took all of forty-eight hours, which was forty-seven hours and fifty-five seconds longer than it took to locate all of the other contacts combined. The sixth man was finally tracked down to a small military outpost in the wilds of the Florida Keys. It was a reserve naval station, a place that was always on the cusp of deactivation. It held a complement of exactly sixteen men.

The station had a seaplane—a small, two-engine recon thing—and the man the OSS men had to track down was its pilot.

They found him in the operations hut, writing a report and drinking a huge cup of mud-black coffee.

The agents walked in and took stock of their subject. Back at the Area 52 command hut, Y was doing the same.

The man was in his mid thirties, with slightly graying hair. His face was red, his nose redder. He was, as they would say, a fireplug of a man. But, in his defense, there was an air of slight sophistication about his face.

He was rugged, tough, and obviously very strong. Yet he smiled broadly when the agents appeared. There was no look of confusion or befuddlement here. This man
knew
something.

As Y watched, the agents introduced themselves, pulling out their ID cards and then showing them to the subject.

But the man barely read their names.

“How strange is this?” he asked, a slight brogue in his voice. “I dreamed this would happen and now it is.”

“Sir?” one agents replied.

“You’re OSS, I know,” the man continued. “And your computer selected me as one of a bunch of people for a secret project. Right?”

The agents were startled, so much so, one looked directly into the insta-camera and shrugged. Y was fairly astonished too. How could the strange little man possibly know this, unless he was telling the truth and
actually
did dream it?

He stood up and began packing his bag—that’s how ready he was to go.

Finally Y just sent the agents a voice message. “He’s so willing, looks like you will have no problems at all.”

The agents on the other end agreed. Then one turned to the man and said, “For the record sir? Your name is …”

The subject smiled again and then looked directly into the camera.

“Mike Fitzgerald,” he replied.

H
UNTER ARRIVED AT HIS
first coordinate less than twenty minutes after receiving his orders.

His grid map indicated he was over a point in Argentina called Punta Norte. It was a coastal city, thick with cargo ships and tankers bringing in supplies for the Occupation Forces. Someday soon, he imagined, it would feel the sting of an American firebombing.

It was now 0530 hours, and way off in the distance Hunter could see the beginnings of the new dawn.

He punched his present location into the in-flight system and waited while the MVP agreed with his selection. Then he made a long turn to the east, set his throttles to supercruise, and felt the
Stiletto
accelerate smoothly through the clean air.

The ocean horizon stretched out before him now, and he detected no less than six storms within his visual range. To his right, where the reaches of Antarctica could be found, a large white blizzard was in full blow. To his left, whipping off the coast of Uruguay, a tropical storm was beginning to stir. But the largest disturbance of all was right in front of him. It was an enormous tempest, black and gray clouds twirling in a counterclockwise motion, like a slow-motion tornado, tearing off the Argentine coast and heading east, out to sea.

Hunter checked his coordinates with the MVP and they came back as OK. He wondered, briefly, what the Z-3/15’s characteristics would be in bad weather. The plane was built to carve through clean high air with the greatest of ease. How would its needle shape, short wings, and enormous fuel tanks take to the bad atmospherics? He decided to find out.

He reduced speed to barely Mach 1 and took a long, deep breath of oxygen. The storm clouds were topping 55,000 feet—he held at about 53,000 and dove in.

There was a little buffeting, and his needle nose began oscillating slightly. But Hunter simply pushed the throttles ahead a notch and everything smoothed out. He took another deep breath of Big O in celebration. This airplane was simply amazing …

Suddenly, everything began shaking again.

Hunter immediately checked the aircraft’s instrumentation. The cockpit of the Z-3/15 was an elegant array of buttons, push pads, and switches. At the moment, all of them were lit and normal. This proved one thing: It wasn’t the airplane that was shaking. It was him.

He checked the MVP. Maybe this vibe was a prelude to some kind of wacky message coming in from the mother-hen Main/AC?

But no. The MVP was clear.

Whatever was making him shake was local. He scanned the skies above and to the sides—maybe there were some unfriendly fighters lurking in this soup? If any enemy aircraft were close by and he had to fight them, he would at least see what the
Stiletto
could do in a shoot-out. But both his radar screens were clear: the one installed in the aircraft and the more efficient and accurate one located between his temple lobes.

So why the shakes?
he wondered.

Purely on instinct, he began to dive. Through the thick clouds, through the swirling winds, through the rain itself. The needle-nose airplane was down from 55-angels to barely a mile high in less than twenty seconds.

That’s when he saw them.

Warships. A small fleet of them. Right below him. Two destroyers and two cruisers, escorting six cargo ships. There was no guessing here; these cargo humpers were troop carriers. Leading the fleet was an aircraft carrier. Not one of the mammoth subs that Japan had recently used in its conquests, or a megacarrier of the type the U.S. Navy favored. This was medium-sized for this world, and thus, odd in its own way. But still it could carry at least 200 aircraft.

Just who these ships belonged to seemed very apparent. All of them were flying the huge red ball flag of the Japanese Occupation forces. No wonder his entire body was vibrating.

But worst of all was the direction of these enemy warships.

Like the storm, they were heading east.

Right toward the Falklands.

There were two working airports on the Falkland Islands.

One was at Stanley, the capital. It had a 6,500-foot runway, capable of handling small fighters and cargo airplanes. Neither made any regular trips there however.

The larger airport was actually a somnambulant RAF base located at McReady Bay on the northwestern tip of East Falkland.

This base boasted no less than seven runways, two of them 20,000-foot giants capable of handling just about any plane flying, save the latest supermonsters. McReady had been built in 1983 during the war with Germany to interdict German supply routes coming around Cape Horn. When the war switched phases and all action left the area, the base was all but mothballed. The maritime and defensive airplanes were moved out, and now the base supported a single C-330 Hercules S&R plane, a few prop observation planes, and an ancient Beater.

The base did not even have an operational early warning system. No base emergency alarm, no long-range threat radar. Its entire defensive package was made up of exactly two 188-mm triple-barreled flak guns.

For the two dozen people assigned to the base and those citizens living in the village of Hampton nearby, the first warning that anything was wrong came from three miles across Falkland Sound. It was a coded message sent by a detachment of the Special Tank Services commandos which were in charge of protecting the small farmhouse on the hill near Summer Point.

Their mobile attack-threat radar had detected an unknown aerial force heading east toward the Falklands. This urgent message had been sent at exactly 0600 hours. But by the time the people at the McReady Air Base received the message, decoded it, understood it, asked for confirmation, and then decoded
that
message, it was too late.

Fighter-bombers bearing the red ball markings of the Nipponese Occupation Army had already appeared overhead.

Two and a half miles away, across the sound which separated East and West Falkland, the detachment of STS soldiers who had sent the warning message were perched on a high cliff which looked out on the water and East Falkland itself.

They were inside the huge armored vehicle known as the Roamer. From this high ground, they could clearly see McReady air base and the enemy planes that were now circling overhead.

It was these soldiers who first realized something bad was on the way. On a security patrol around the tip of West Falkland, a routine drill performed as part of their protection duties for the farmhouse on the hill, the soldiers had set up their mobile long-range aerial threat and surface-radar array. The exercise was performed more to test the equipment than anything else. The STS commandos had been astonished when they had turned on their screens and seen a ten-ship task force heading right for them.

The ships and their size indicated they were not friendlies. One of the vessels was an aircraft carrier of medium size and as they watched on their radar screens, this ship had commenced launching airplanes. Most of those attack planes were now circling above McReady Air Field.

There were seven STS soldiers inside the Roamer, which was a kind of half tank, half personnel carrier that came equipped with many warning devices and communications equipment. Thirty-five feet long, fifteen feet wide, and weighing in at twenty-five tons, the Roamer also had a small but lethal antiaircraft weapon on board. It was a guided rocket array which could launch up to sixteen small, semi-maneuverable HE projectiles at an airplane, hoping that one or more of the rockets would hit something. It was the shotgun approach to antiaircraft artillery.

The problem was that the rocket array could only be effective inside a three mile range—the Roamer’s current position was two and a half miles away from McReady, nearly at the edge of the AA weapons envelope. The STS men would have to pick their targets very carefully, and be fully prepared not to hit a thing.

They had already messaged back to the farmhouse, of course, and the tank crews back there were at that moment going into high alert mode one. This meant the threat to the farmhouse and the facility below was at the highest point possible. The orders back from the STS commanders was for the Roamer crew to aid the defenders of McReady air field in any way they could, even if the sky was about to fall in on them. Gaining this vantage point at Point Curly and studying the situation was the first part of the Roamer crew’s carrying out of this order.

By the time the sun broke the far, stormy horizon, the full enemy aerial force had arrived over McReady. The aircraft were of two types. Roughly half of the fifty airplanes were SuperKate attack craft. Large two-man jet bombers, these planes had been instrumental in the sneak attack on Panama almost a year earlier. Each plane was weighed down with eight 2,000-pound Hiki bombs known for their building-busting as well as their runway-cratering capabilities.

The other two dozen airplanes were SuperZeroes, the powerful, highly maneuverable jet fighter of choice of the Nipponese Occupation Forces.

There was another airplane out there as well—bigger than the others, and slower too. It was a multiengined affair, a unique aircraft known for its ultra-long range, its relatively lightweight construction, and its bug-eyed appearance. It was orbiting out to sea, about twenty-five miles north of McReady. Out of visual range and for the most part flying below radar, the STS commandos could only guess what its purpose was.

Once the attacking forces were set, the SuperKates began to dive on McReady. Screaming down from a height of 15,000 feet, they dove in pairs, their first target the base’s second-longest runway.

The first pair swept in, laying their 2,000-pound bombs in a line across the field’s north-to-northwest runway, a 9,000-foot strip. The bombs hit hard and exploded like a line of gigantic fireworks. The plumes of smoke, flame, and concrete went straight up in the air, nearly clipping the tails of both attacking airplanes—that’s how precise these pilots were.

As the second pair of SuperKates came down, their bombs heading for the same runway, the base’s defenders finally opened up. The two AA guns, one located at each end of the base, began valiantly firing away at the attack planes. But it was a rather pathetic sight. The air was filled with swirling aircraft, bombs were falling, engines screaming, and in the middle of it all was the rather weak
pop-pop-pop
of the two small, antiquated AA guns.