War of the Sun (15 page)

Oddly it was only then that Lieutenant Fatungi knew without any doubt that he had made the
wrong
decision. In the world of the Asian Mercenary Cult, misguided honor
was
more important than solid battlefield intelligence.

As the guards marched Fatungi deeper and deeper down the twisting and turning passageways, the disgraced pilot had to summon what little strength he had left to keep from vomiting out of sheer terror. No one brought to the lower compartments of the secret mountain base ever returned alive. Fatungi was certain that this too would be his fate.

After twenty minutes, they finally reached the end of what Fatungi supposed was the base’s deepest passageway. Before them were two massive oak doors, each with obscured numbers carved into them. Fatungi’s breeches were soaked with urine by this time, so great was his terror. He was sure he had only seconds to live.

But then he got a surprise. After knocking twice, the two guards quickly left, leaving Fatungi alone. Oddly, he could smell something cooking on the other side of the massive doors.

Then he heard a woman’s voice call out: “Come in, please.”

Totally confused, Fatungi opened the oak doors and was astonished to find not a vast death chamber but a spare, well-lit, elaborately-appointed apartment. A young woman in a sheer silk dressing gown was standing in the middle of the room, smiling and bowing to him.

She was beautiful. Small, with delicate features, she had the most amazing long red hair.

Fatungi was suddenly very embarrassed about his soiled pants.

“Please don’t worry about that,” she reassured him. “I understand it happens to everyone. Please take off your clothes. I have just arrived here myself, but I think I have something over here you can wear.”

The woman walked over to a small closet and retrieved a man’s red silk dressing gown. Walking back toward Fatungi, she stopped briefly in front of a small shrine. In the center of this flower-laden altar was a tiny photograph of someone Fatungi could not make out.

The woman bowed twice and then stared for a long time at the photograph, seemingly caught by the stare of the eyes of its subject.

Meanwhile, Fatungi had quickly stripped off his clothes and was now standing totally naked. Though he was still baffled by the sudden turn of events, his appreciation of the woman’s beauty, hinted at through her sheer silken dressing grown, was becoming more and more apparent.

The woman knelt briefly, then rose from the altar and turned toward Fatungi. This time there was a faraway look in her eyes.

“I hope you don’t mind the smell,” she said, motioning toward a small portable stove. “I’m cooking a small meal. Will you join me in dinner? Do you like liver?”

Fatungi was terribly confused now. Dinner? Liver? But he was smart enough to say yes.

Or so he thought.

The woman smiled, beckoning the naked pilot toward her. With that, she pulled a long, razor-sharp carving knife from her gown and plunged it deep into Fatungi, just above his pubic bone. Lifting it up through his stomach, and then all the way up to his ribcage, she had expertly gutted him before he even realized what was happening.

“Bon appetit,”
she hissed in his ear.

Washington, D.C.

T
HE YOUNG OFFICER HESITATED
once before knocking twice on the door simply marked “Commander.”

“Come on in,” came the casual reply.

The officer went in and found General Jones behind his desk as usual, buried in paperwork.

“Got a very unusual message from Task Force, sir,” the officer said. “It’s been decoded, checked, and double-checked. It’s legit. It’s got to be …”

Jones looked up over the piles of documents, his well-chewed unlit pipe in his teeth. “Well, what’s it say?”

The young officer bit his lip for a second.

“It says they’ve stopped,” he told Jones.

Jones’s glasses nearly fell off his face. “They’ve stopped? Stopped for what?”

The officer passed the yellow cable paper to the commander in chief.

It read: “
URGENT … REQUEST THAT ALL MEMBERS OF THE TASK FORCE COME TO AN IMMEDIATE STOP. ALL CAPTAINS TO MEET ON USS
FITZGERALD
IN THIRTY MINUTES
.”

General David Jones dropped the intercepted radio message on the desk and then looked up at the officer.

“What the hell is going on out there?” he asked.

The small boat was being violently tossed in the swelling fifteen-foot seas.

Wolf stood in the prow of the launch, his black cape snapping behind him, sea spray soaking his mask. Off in the distance, he could make out the launches of the two accompanying supply ships, the USS
Cohen
and the USS
Tennyson,
making headway through the rough water toward the
Fitzgerald.

The choppy seas and the howling wind made the trip to the aircraft carrier a twenty-minute affair. Finally arriving, Wolf alighted onto the carrier’s bow access ramp, where two of the
Fitzgerald’s
staff officers were waiting for him. They escorted him through the various decks and up to a small conference room located next to the carrier’s Combat Information Center.

The captains of the
Cohen
and
Tennyson
were already present when Wolf walked in, as were Yaz, Toomey, and Ben Wa. The weariness of the past mission and the critical nature of the present situation were apparent on all their faces. Wolf knew they wondered if the same was true with him. Was his face as worried and lined with concern as theirs? But he was also confident that none of them had a clue as to what was going on behind his mask. And no one would dare ask. That was the whole point of his strange garb.

Wolf took a seat and politely refused a cup of coffee. That’s when Yaz stood up, a prepared set of notes in hand.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “I appreciate your efforts in coming aboard on such a short notice and under these conditions. However, I felt that this matter was so grave we had to handle it face-to-face. In light of the impending storm, I will be brief.

“As you know, Hunter left on a reconnaissance flight last night. He has not returned. He hasn’t responded to any radio signals, and he has not been spotted on any of our long-range radar screens.

“I’ve kept the Task Force almost at a dead crawl for the past few hours, and finally ordered it to stop approximately one hour ago. I gave these orders simply hoping that Hunter would catch up with us—but that hasn’t happened. Frankly, gentlemen, I fear the worst.”

No one stirred. Although everyone in the room was aware of the situation, it was still grim to hear it presented in such a sobering way.

“As commander of this Task Force,” Yaz continued, “my obligations are clear. My orders call for the speediest, safest return of our men and these ships to friendly waters. But …”

Suddenly Yaz’s voice began to crack. Still he pressed on.

“But … I am also Hawk’s friend. I know what he’d do if it were me still out there.”

Yaz cleared his throat; his voice was close to breaking completely. “The USS
Fitzgerald
will remain at these coordinates for another two hours. That will be ninety minutes past Hunter’s fuel range. If the current climatic conditions persist, that will also put us directly in the path of the approaching typhoon.

“I fully understand the obligations you men have to your ships and crew. Therefore, I am ordering you to continue on course, at full speed.”

At that moment, Wolf stood up.

“Captain,” he said in a deep Norse accent, “I refuse.”

Yaz stared at the imposing costumed figure for a moment. “There’s not really a question to this,” he told him. “The safety of your crew is …”

“My crew agrees with me,” Wolf interrupted. “They know, as I do, that should Hunter make it back to the vicinity of our present position and have to ditch, it is very unlikely that you could retrieve him. On the other hand, we have many launches and other lifesaving means. It would increase Hunter’s chances of survival dramatically.”

Before Yaz could say another word, the captains of the
Cohen
and
Tennyson
also stood.

“We will wait, too,” the top officer of the
Tennyson
said, speaking for the both of them. “Everyone aboard our ships owes something to Hunter somewhere along the line. There’s no way we’re going to leave when there’s still a chance he’ll make it back.”

Yaz felt as if the lump in his throat had swelled to the size of a basketball.

“As you wish, gentlemen,” was just about all he could say. “And thank you …”

At that moment, the carrier did a deep roll, a fair indication that the storm outside was growing even worse.

“You’d best be getting back to your ships,” Yaz told them.

At that moment, there was a quick rap at the door and a midshipman hastily stepped inside. He walked quickly over to Yaz.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, his voice slightly betraying a tone of hope. “You’re needed on the bridge. Radar reports something is heading this way.”

H
UNTER WAS OUT OF
gas.

His fuel gauge had blinked empty about twenty minutes before; the ’XLs on-board emergency flight-maintain systems had been clicking off one by one ever since.

He wasn’t so much flying now as gliding. Shortly after his quick recon of Okinawa, he’d climbed to an eye-watering 82,000 feet, beyond what would normally be considered safe operating parameters for the F-16XL. This forty-five-second ascent had burned up about two-thirds of his remaining fuel, but he knew it was a necessary expenditure of what was his most vital resource. He was so far away from the
Fitzgerald
his only hope was to get as high as possible as quickly as possible. After that the only question would be whether the wind currents and his piloting ability were enough to get him at least close to the Task Force.

He knew it was a long shot at best—one of the longest he’d ever faced. Piloting a shot-up airplane was a snap compared to trying to coax one home on an empty fuel tank. After all, there was only so far you could go.

Finding the carrier was not a problem. In fact, he knew exactly where the
Fitzgerald
was. Before snapping off, his radar had picked up the carrier and the three other Task Force ships right where he’d hoped they’d be: at his absolute bingo point. The fact that they had waited for him caused a proud ringing in his heart, and to his lips came the line from an old, sad sweet song.

“You did not desert me, my brothers in arms,”
he thought.

But though in many ways they were endangering their lives just to save his, even under the best of circumstances, reaching the carrier was not even his biggest problem. Setting down in one piece would be. He was flying completely unpowered—one shot at a landing was all he would have. There’d be no opportunity to bolt, fly around, and try again. If he was off by one fraction of a degree, he’d wind up bouncing the ’XL off the deck. Then he’d have to do a split-second eject and his beloved plane would end up lying on the ocean floor. And maybe him along with it.

Still, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. After all, there was that typhoon brewing below him.

Hunter had been wrestling the sidestick with both hands for the past ten minutes. Every warning buzzer and light was going off on his display. But then he finally began to feel the tug of the typhoon’s swirling winds. Now came the biggest part of his dangerous, yet simple plan. With nothing but momentum and glide power, he had little choice but to get sucked up into the maelstrom, using the ferocity of its winds to propel him forward and downward and, hopefully, toward the Task Force’s current position.

He entered the vortex and was now flying blind—his visibility was absolute zero. The black clouds around him made it seem like night, and the torrents of rain only added to the unnerving descent into darkness. Buffeted by severe gusts of wind, the ’XL was rattling from every bolt and screw as it spiraled downward into the angry 100-mile-wide swirl.

Hunter was too busy fighting the controls to be more than passingly concerned about his situation. Yet he couldn’t help but notice that the angry swirl of the typhoon looked exactly like a black hole, sucking up everything in sight and hurling it into the abyss. This made him think of a graduate thesis a friend had written back in his school days at MIT, it had advanced the notion that at the seemingly-bottomless end of an authentic black hole lay Hell itself.

I wonder if he was right,
he thought.

Down he plummeted, almost straight down, losing altitude at a rate of a thousand feet every few seconds. He was falling so fast into the darkness he felt almost weightless. The plane was almost totally out of power. His cockpit displays were all but extinguished. His altimeter clicked off at 38,000 feet; his airspeed indicator died at 35,000. And still, he could see nothing below him but thick, black, swirling clouds.

By 28,000 feet he was down to one last auxilliary generator which was producing just enough electricity to keep the control stick operating and little else. Oddly, the twin cameras in his nose clicked on at 24,500, their self-contained microprocessors ordering them to run off the last of their film and video and then shut down completely.

Hunter smiled ruefully at this last bit of electrical glitch theater. Not many pilots were lucky enough to have what could be their final plunge caught by the movie cameras.

When he passed through 19,000 feet, only the cameras, his radar, and what was left of the control stick functions were working. He stripped off his oxygen mask; no matter what happened, there was enough air inside the cockpit for the last few seconds of this flight.

Besides, what he needed now wasn’t air; it was light.

It was readily apparent as he passed down through 15,000 feet that he would need more than a little luck to pull off this stunt. The blurred and fading images of the carrier on his lookdown radar weren’t so good—they showed the large target riding about ten miles south from the wall of the storm, but the exact location was far from precise. Yet the same black clouds that were enveloping him were also blanketing the carrier in almost total darkness. In order to eye it in, Hunter needed at least a momentary glimpse of the flattop; only then could he put the near-lifeless ’XL on its proper glide path.