Sky Ghost (4 page)

The destroyer sailed past the construction bays and up to berthing for the completed carriers. From somewhere back in the deepest part of his skull, Hunter knew what a World War II aircraft carrier
should
look like. Small, narrow, wooden deck.

But the ships being built here were at least fifty times that length. These megacarriers really were “floating cites.” They were forty or more decks high, and at least three quarters of a mile long. Each one had three landing and takeoff areas on its vast deck: one at the bow, one at the stern, and a third on an immense island hanging off port side. This overhang alone was larger than a WW II flattop.

One ship was so near complete, it already had its airplanes on board. Hunter saw at least 500 small, swift-looking little fighters of indeterminate origin cluttering the rear deck, while several dozen larger airplanes were crowded on the bow. And still, this behemoth had room on its upper deck for several sets of 16-inch guns, huge weapons more at home on battleships!

The
Louis St. Louis
finally pulled into a tiny berth on the other side of a gigantic oiling station. It took the crew just a few minutes to secure the ship and cool down the double-reaction engines. Then they lowered the gangway and some disappeared into the night. Those who remained onboard were secured to quarters.

Hunter was led off the ship about 30 minutes later, under the care of Zal, the XO. Waiting for them at the bottom of the gangway was a car that looked more like an airplane. It had huge fins in the back, a monstrous grill in the front, tons of chrome all around, and thick whitewall tires. Yet as flashy as it was, its obvious function was that of a military vehicle, right down to the dull green paint and the white star emblazoned on its side doors.

Hunter was put in the backseat with Zal. A pair of plainclothes Sea Police were up front.

They left the Navy yard and drove for about 20 minutes along a very crowded military highway. The terrain around them could only be described as “urban-beach.” Sand dunes and scrub trees were everywhere—as were hundreds of military buildings, supply dumps, and endless rows of multistory Quonset huts.

They finally reached their destination: an air base called Otis Air Corps Field. It was an enormous facility, heavily guarded, with many rows of barbed wire surrounding it Something flashed through Hunter’s mind as they passed through the gate. It was almost as if he’d been here before, but he couldn’t remember when—or how.

It took them another 20 minutes and about 14 miles to cross the base. Finally the car arrived at a large red brick building which sat astride the base’s longest runway, a 40,000-foot giant. Hunter was hustled out of the car and brought to an office on the sixth floor. The name on the door read:
SPECIAL PERSONNEL ASSESSMENT BOARD—NO ADMITTANCE
.

Commander Zal and the Sea Police led him into the empty office. There was a table with three chairs on one side facing a single chair on the other. There was a window at the other end of the room. Its shades were down, but light streaming in through the partially open panels painted the far wall with eerie, meticulous stripes.

Behind the table, dominating one corner, was a huge computer. It looked like it had been built back in the Stone Age. It was bigger and bulkier than the one in Captain Wolf’s stateroom. It was pockmarked with blinking lights and switches and buttons and no less than half a dozen reel-to-reel magnetic tape spools. It looked like a prop out of a bad sci-fi movie, just like everything else here. A silver nameplate identified it as a “Main/AC-100.”

Outside the window, Hunter could hear aircraft taking off. He caught himself trying to determine how many engines each plane had, and whether they were prop, turbo-prop, or jet-driven. But actually what he heard most was a combination of all three sounds, a cacophony that was very confusing to his senses for some reason.

Hunter took a seat. The door at the other end of the dark office opened and three Army officers came in. Two lieutenants and a captain. All three were much too old to be in uniform. The captain was at least 65; the looies not much younger. Despite their relatively low rank, their chests were full of fruit salad—ribbons, pins, and patches. The decorations said they’d been fighting this war for a very long time. They were accompanied by a stenographer who appeared older than they.

Zal handed them a brief report and saluted casually. Then he turned to Hunter.

“Have you ever been to Pittsburgh?” he asked him.

Hunter had to think for a moment. “Do they manufacture a lot of diamonds there these days?” he asked, not really knowing why.

Zal just laughed and shook his head. “No, pal, they don’t,” he said.

Then Zal reached over and shook Hunter’s hand. “Well, good luck, friend,” he said.

“Yes, thanks for saving me,” Hunter replied.

But it was too late; Zal had already gone out the door.

The three elderly officers read the report silently; the lieutenants relied on their thick reading glasses to get them through; the captain needed the aid of a huge magnifying glass. Hunter watched each man’s eyebrows arch and fall with every paragraph. It seemed to take them forever to finish the three-page document, all three were too busy shaking their heads, mumbling, and then losing their place.

The captain was the first to finish. He signaled this by adjusting the enormous hearing aid hanging off his left ear. His name was Pegg. He’d been an Army officer for 55 years.

“You know something? You just plain look different to me,” he said to Hunter. “Though I can’t exactly put my finger on just why or how that is.”

“You look different to me, too,” Hunter said.

“What was that?” Pegg asked him, holding his hand by his good ear.

Hunter repeated his statement and added: “You all sound different too.”

At this point, the stenographer began pounding away. Only then did Hunter notice her machine was plugged directly into the antique computer.

Then, for the next two hours, he and the three elderly officers went through the whole thing again. The events surrounding his being found at sea. His debriefing by Wolf. His uniform. His haircut. He wasn’t allowed to ask any questions and it frequently took the elderly officers several minutes to ask theirs. All the while, the stenographer was inputting their conversation verbatim into the huge computer.

Even as he told the story as best he knew it, Hunter found his troubled mind wandering all over the place. What was going to happen here? Would the three officers find him in need of psychiatric evaluation? Or medical attention? A few days of sleep would probably do him a load of good, whether it be in a loony bin or a hospital.

True, the food might not be to his liking, but he could live with that until his head cleared enough for him to figure out exactly what he was going to do.

At the far end of the room, opposite the shuttered window, there was a large piece of plate glass that looked like a mirror. And that it was—but it was a two-way mirror.

On the other side, sitting in a tiny office adjacent to the Assessment Board room and hidden from view, were three other men.

They were all dressed exactly the same: black suit, white shirt, dark blue tie. This was their uniform. They were very high-ranking intelligence agents. They were so high up in the spy world in fact, security dictated they be known simply by their code names: X, Y, and Z. They worked for the OSS.

The three agents were much younger that the trio of elderly officers on the Assessment Board. The three senior men were actually a front for the OSS agents, and had been at this facility for years. At just about the same time the
Louis St. Louis
had been ordered back to the Cape, the three agents had been contacted by Atlantic War Command and asked to “monitor” the interrogation of the man who’d been found so mysteriously floating in the middle of the ocean. They’d flown a rocketplane shuttle up from New York City and arrived at Otis two hours before Hunter was finally brought in.

Now, as they watched the interview grind on, the three agents were in various phases of interest. On the one hand, they agreed it was unusual to find someone alive floating in the middle of the ocean, and to have that person unable to recall how they got there or from whence they came. On the other hand, the agents had seen just about everything in the last 10 years of The War. Few things surprised them any more.

What’s more, the war itself was nearly over. The American Forces had been battering Germany on all fronts for the past six months. Germany was low on manpower, steel, oil, food, and munitions. Their equipment was obsolete by five years or more. They had reverted to horses to move even the most important items. Meanwhile, America’s might was evident just by riding up the coast from New York to Massachusetts. There were no less than 24 Navy bases just in that stretch of coastline. And they equaled only about one-tenth of America’s naval forces at the moment. And all that didn’t count the Army and the Air Corps.

So the war was almost won, and the three OSS agents were tired of it and certainly didn’t want to latch on to something that might endanger their early-out muster plans once the conflict was through.

It was for these reasons that Agents X, Y, and Z sat behind the two-way mirror listening to Hunter’s questioning, each with only a half ear open.

But, on another level, it
was
mildly fascinating, especially to X and Z. This person Hunter really knew how to spin a tale—that was obvious. But only one thing mattered to them: was he a German spy or not? Was he someone the Huns wanted to infiltrate into the country at the last minute, before the war was over? They’d been told to expect some last-minute high jinks as the fighting drew to a close. In the 58 years of war there had been no less than seven cease-fires and five armistice signings, all of them against Germany’s favor, all of them eventually broken by the German high command. But historically the Germans had let off several big bangs before succumbing. This time probably wouldn’t be any different.

But what if this Hunter guy was not a spy—what was he then? And how
did
he come to be floating out in the ocean?

“We could have them call in a psychic evaluation officer,” X suggested to Z as the old men continued asking Hunter the same tired questions over and over again.

“You mean hook him up?” Z replied. “Hmm, that might prove interesting. Or at least entertaining. Anything to get us out of here quicker.”

X opened a small microphone in front of him. It was patched through the huge computer and into Captain Pegg’s hearing aid.

“Call for a psychic eval officer,” X said blandly into the microphone. They watched as Captain Pegg jumped a little, startled by the confidential message that had suddenly popped into his bad ear.

“And get us some more coffee too,” the agent added.

The phone rang just once in the billet of Captain Raphael Zoltan.

He wasn’t really asleep. He was simply dozing the night away, as he usually did. Zoltan didn’t like to sleep, not for long stretches of time anyway. He found it wasteful, and maybe a little too close to the death state for his liking.

The phone call was from the Special Personnel Assessment office; the thinly-disguised OSS interrogation room located about four miles away, up on the northern edge of the air base. Zoltan had heard some OSS agents had been spotted arriving at Otis earlier in the day. Flying in on a noisy rocketplane shuttle was not the way to make your presence unknown. But Zoltan could understand. With the war winding down, everyone was loosening up a little. Even the guys known to some as “America’s Gestapo.”

Zoltan was asked to come up to the Assessment Board office to examine a subject. Zoltan had heard the rumors too about a mysterious man picked up floating in the sea earlier in the day; the scuttlebutt said he was a highly trained German saboteur feigning amnesia. If that was the case, Zoltan would be able to crack him like an egg.

He got up, got dressed, and packed his equipment bag. A tall thin man in his forties, with slicked-back hair and a pencil-thin mustache, Zoltan’s official title was “Psychic Evaluation Officer, First Class.” As such it was his job to administer a combination of tests to suspected saboteurs or traitors essentially to get the truth out of them. He mainly did this with a device that was part hypnosis machine, part lie detector. It was called simply the Truth-O-Meter. A suspect would be hooked up to the machine and told to look at the glowing ball that appeared on a small TV screen. This would lull them into a hypnotic state.

Once under, Zoltan would give the subject a lie detector test. From this, he could tell whether what a subject said under hypnosis was a recounting of actual events, a coherent jumble the mind had put together for other psychological reasons, or a set of fabrications.

And if that didn’t work, well, Zoltan had other ways of determining what was truth. For instance, he was the only U.S. military officer allowed to carry a crystal ball.

He lugged his bag out of the barracks, being careful not to shatter his collection of crystal globes. His SkyScooter had about an eighth of a tank of fuel in it. Would that be enough to make it the four miles he needed to fly to the north end of the base? Zoltan closed his eyes and put his right forefinger to his brow. Did he have enough butane-2 to push his little flea four miles? The answer came back to him as no.

So he threw his equipment bag over his shoulder and started walking.

The sky was clear, the stars were out and the moon was rising. The base was very quiet tonight; he could almost hear people packing their bags, so soon did everyone think they’d be going home.

He passed a line of CB-319s, gigantic “Flying Boxcar” cargo planes that doubled as coastal patrol bombers. They looked like they hadn’t flown in months, which was probably close to the truth. Regular coastal patrols had been phased out months ago. There hadn’t been a missile-firing U-boat attack on the eastern seaboard in twice as long, so the patrols had been discontinued. Now the big Boxcars looked all dressed up with nowhere to go.

He crossed over one inactive runway and reached the main strip. Here a line of Navy Pogos was gleaming in the moonlight. They looked like they hadn’t flown in as long as the Boxcars, even though Zoltan knew at least a couple of Pogos bounced off from Otis everyday, just so the pilots could get their required flight time in before the anticipated Muster-Out Day.