Skyfire (32 page)

At that moment, he realized that the sardine-eaters had fucked up royally.

With not a single antiaircraft weapon at their disposal, the Norsemen were like ducks before cannons. Suddenly he wished he was back in his dirty, damp Bucharest apartment.

He stood helpless, frozen to the spot, as the second pair of jets bore down on him. There was no honor in getting killed for him; he didn't believe a whit about the Viking gods and myths and all that

dying-brave-will-get-you-to-heaven bullshit. Yet he didn't have time to dive for cover or jump back into the water.

So he grabbed one of the Norsemen and pulled him around as a shield against the approaching wave of cannon

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fire. They stiffigpecPbriefly as the startled man realized what Keasiceau was doing. But in another second a string of shells ripped up one side of the startled Norseman's body, their impact being so great that they knocked Keasiceau off his feet and into the shallow water, his hands still gripping the Norseman.

The two jets were gone in a flash, continuing their brutally effective strafing run down the beach. Though he was covered with blood and bits of bone, Keasiceau let out a quick breath, confident that he survived the barrage. With not much effort, the mercenary managed to lift the torn-apart body of the Norseman off him, rolling the corpse into a retreating wave.

"Sucker ..." Keasiceau murmured as he watched the hapless human shield drift away. All around him were shot up Norsemen, some painfully dying, others instantly dead.

"You're all suckers. . ." Keasiceau thought aloud.

Still laid out on his back, Keasiceau attempted to wash the dead man's blood from his own chest and abdomen. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his midsection. Looking down, he was horrified to see a spurt of blood gush from his stomach. His blood.

Panic-stricken, he started splashing salt water onto the wound, but this only served to increase his rapidly developing pain tenfold. Reaching down to the area near his belly button, he attempted to stop the flow of blood, but instead he felt a sharp object sticking into his gut just below his ribs.

With one last dying yank, he was able to pull out the object that had fatally torn apart his stomach and lower intestine.

It was the dead Norseman's knife.

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Hunter yanked back on the controls of the Harrier and banked out over the water.

He and Carson had just expended close to their limit of ammunition during the miles-long, nonstop strafing run. Now they were turning back around to fly over the invasion beach once again, this time to drop their cluster bombs.

In the grim task of planning what ordnance to use first, it had been decided that in the initial beach run, cannon fire would inflict the most casualties just when the Norsemen were alighting from their landing craft. Only when they had all landed, and were more or less established on the beach, would the CBU's be dropped to their greatest effectiveness.

Now, as Hunter and Carson completed then-long, wide-out loop and once again bore down on the invaders, both pilots could see the destruction that they and the following pair of attack jets had wrought. The beach was literally covered with bodies and the water closest to the shore stained with blood.

Hunter felt like a hammer had hit him in the stomach. Like the majority of professional warriors, he took no pleasure in killing. He had never fired a gun or unleashed a weapon unless it was for good purpose-self-defense or the self-defense of friends and country. And this, he kept telling himself, was no different.

Yet never before had he gone up against such an ill-prepared enemy.

So it was with reluctant quickness that he lined up the 285

nose of the Harrier with the center of the beach and fingered the jumpjet's weapons-control panel. Up ahead, just a mile away, his extraordinary eyesight spotted a large group of Norsemen that for some reason were clumped together out in the open. Within the span of three quick seconds, Hunter lowered his altitude a hundred twenty-five feet, adjusted his speed to four hundred knots, and put two of his CBU's into predrop mode.

Five seconds and a deep gulp of oxygen later, he pulled the weapons-release lever and felt the corresponding jerk in his wings as two cluster bombs detached from their weapons points and fell toward the beach.

The man in charge of the group of Norsemen gathered in the middle of the beach was named Even Piki.

A distant cousin to the great Verden himself, Piki was one of the highest-ranking clan members of the surviving Finnbogi clan to go ashore during the invasion. Known for his absolute love of battle and bloodletting, Piki also fancied himself as a divinely inspired battle tactician; a self-infatuation that would prove him fatal, as it turned out.

Piki's landing craft had just made it to shore when the four jet airplanes streaked by, strafing the beach and slaughtering the vanguard of the Norse troops. As the four airplanes banked out over the sea for a second run, a brilliant idea popped into Piki's mind. Urging his men to follow him up to the center of the beach itself, he ordered them to bunch together and stand between one of the pair of black scars that had been left behind by the strafing jets.

Piki's reasoning, altered immeasurably by his consumption of two flasks of myx during the trip to shore, was along the lines of lightning never striking the same spot twice. With not enough time to make it to the beach wall or back to the waterline, Piki believed that if he and his men stood where the enemy airplanes had already strafed, they'd be safe.

With no perception of what to do should enemy aircraft 286

attack them, Piki's men simply followed his orders like sheep. More than one hundred and fifty of them in all, they immediately linked arms and stood together, defiantly growling and yelling as the two enemy planes roared in on them.

The two CBU's exploded fifteen feet directly above the middle of this group, the oddly shaped black bombs arriving so quickly that few of the Finnbogis even saw them fall from the Harrier's wings. It was the CBU's function to blow down, raining a blizzard of fiery, white-hot, highspeed metal on anyone unlucky enough to be caught below. Victims were not so much blown away as they were shredded to pieces.

For Piki's group of hapless Norsemen, death had been instantaneous.

Twenty-five miles to the south of Jacksonville, Mike Fitzgerald was leading a flight of four A-4 Skyhawks over a section of the coastline known as Vilano Banks.

Unlike the smooth white beaches of the Floridian shoreline to the north and south, Vilano Banks was rocky and craggy with coral. It met the Atlantic Ocean with a series of defiant jetties and reefs. The rough terrain had not deterred the Norsemen from landing there, however. Just a few miles inland at a place called Boskins River, there was a string of shopping malls and apartment complexes. Both were favorite targets for the rampaging invaders.

While a modern strategist would have dismissed Vilano Banks as a landing spot in his first breath, plotting instead to land at a more convenient place and approach the target from there, to the Norse way of thinking, it was illogical not to land troops on the small rocky beaches and coral reefs. After all, the target was close by. All their troops would have to do was paddle their way safely around the razor-sharp, poisonous coral reef shallows, negotiate the hazardous shoreline territory once they came ashore, scale the medium-sized cliffs, then march three and three-quar-287

ter miles to the target-all during in the fading light of dusk.

But while the cracked and jutting coastline of Vilano Banks presented a challenge to the Norsemen, it actually provided a grim opportunity for Mike Fitzgerald's flight of Skyhawks. Smooth terrains such as beaches were made for cluster bombs, the wide, unobstructed spaces allowing the thousands of shards of deadly burning metal to disperse in the most effective killing pattern.

Conversely, rough, irregular landscapes like Vilano Banks were gruesomely perfect for another, some said, more terrifying weapon.

That weapon was napalm.

Fitzgerald shot ahead of the other three planes in his flight and brought his Skyhawk down to a heart-stopping altitude of fifty feet. Below him, the rocks and shallow pools of Vilano Banks were crawling with Norsemen, each one struggling to get ahead of the other, to make it to the bottom of the dirty green cliffs, to scale the damn things and get on to the target.

TUrning the Skyhawk slightly on its left wing, Fitzgerald tried to estimate the number of enemy troops landing at Vilano, but the sheer volume of invaders, plus the waning light, made even an approximate count impossible.

For his part, he guessed more than two thousand raiders had already landed, with dozens of additional landing crafts streaming toward the shore along a two-mile stretch.

His quick reconnaissance completed, Fitzgerald pulled up and to the right, quickly rejoining the other three A-4's.

"Safeties off," he called into his helmet microphone.

Three rapid fire acknowledgments burst through his headphones.

"On my lead," Fitzgerald continued. "Going in at a hundred above mean. Pull out to the left. Watch the cliffs. . ."

With enviable precision, the four A-4s broke up into a single line and turned back over Vilano Banks. Fitzgerald went in first, swooping low past the shore's highest peak and unleashing two ghastly-looking all-black napalm cannisters. The bombs hit in a one-two pattern right at the 288

base of the cliff, splattering a blue-orange wash of flaming gasoline jelly over dozens of Norsemen who had just now decided to run for cover.

Fitzgerald's wingman came in next, virtually duplicating his flight leader's pattern and depositing two napalm cannisters about fifty feet from the base of the cliff and covering a natural jetty where men Norsemen had sought cover.

Skyhawks #3 and #4 came in seconds later, dropping their deadly payloads and pulling up quickly to avoid flying into the huge black smoke clouds left over from Fitzgerald and his wingman's bombings.

By the time #4 had cleared the area, Fitzgerald was back again, dropping two more fiery bombs right on a clustering of enemy landing craft. His wingman did the same thing, while the other pair of A-4's concentrated on those Norsemen who were still wading through the reef shallows.

On and on it went, the four Skyhawks methodically incinerating the Norsemen trapped now in the flaming hell of Vilano Banks. When their bombs were expended, the pilots strafed the blazing beaches and the cliffsides. But after a few passes, Fitzgerald knew that further violence would not be necessary.

Vilano Banks was now two miles of blazing, smoking holocaust that was generating so much heat, it was actually affecting the air currents over the target. No one anywhere within a half mile of the inferno would live to tell about it.

So with two curt orders, Fitzgerald called his men off and told them to return to base to rearm. Then he dipped his wing and flew over the fires once again, catching an unwanted glimpse of the hundreds of burning bodies below him.

"This is not war," he whispered to himself bitterly.

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Wolf adjusted his binoculars to his masked face, dialed the lenses to their greatest power, and trained them on the southern horizon.

The first thing he saw was smoke, a long, thin column of ashen gray rising above the waterline just where it met the shore. Squinting as best he could, he was able to make out a tongue of flame in the midst of the soot. Then he saw several puffs of red fire appear in quick succession along the horizon.

Then he saw more smoke-thick columns of it now, some black, some gray, most dirty white. Then more flames, more explosions.

"All ahead, three-quarter speed," he said calmly into his helmet's microphone.

"Battle station roll off now ..."

For the next minute he heard the crisp, reassuring replies of his officers as they quickly reported that every member of the crew was in the proper battle station and ready.

"What's our exact position?" he asked his navigation officer, who was standing right next to him.

The NO glanced down at a small TV screen on the panel in front of him.

"Six miles off shore, twelve miles north of Jacksonville Beach," he replied.

"Speed is up to twenty-two knots.. ."

Wolf checked his watch and did some quick calculations.

"That would give us an ETA in battle area in about sixteen minutes, wouldn't you say?"

The NO did some quick figuring of his own and nodded.

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"Not much more than that, sir," he replied.

Wolf handed the binoculars to his executive officer.

"The bridge is all yours," he told the man, readjusting his mask and putting on his battle helmet.

Wolf was out of the bridge like a shot, moving quickly down the passageway and into the Combat Information Center. The room that had been practically closed and shuttered before Hunter's visit to the New Jersey was now alive and bustling with technicians, all of them still learning the vast array of weapons and navigation systems in the CIC.

Wolf immediately walked over to the room's largest, most elaborate TV screen.

"The RPV is approaching its first coordinate now, sir," one of the three techs sitting before the screen said.

"Punch it up . . ."

A frenzy of button-pushing ensued, and within ten seconds the big TV was illuminated with a crisp picture being transmitted by the RPV's video camera of the Jacksonville shoreline.

Even in black and white, the absolute horror of what was happening on the beach was evident to everyone in the CIC. The sands of Jacksonville Beach were littered with thousands of dead and dying Norsemen. The foam of the waves was red with their blood. Landing craft were still arriving and invaders were still scrambling up onto the land, but the United American attack jets were bombing and strafing the shoreline at ten-second intervals.

Even from its slow, cruising vantage point some hundred yards off the shore itself, the RPV's telephoto TV lens was able to pick up the graphic effects of each cluster bomb hit and cannon run.