Final Storm (4 page)

“
We are Americans
,” he said in a strong, clear voice. “And we are bringing you back to stand trial for the crimes you committed against your own people.”

No sooner had Hunter made his pronouncement when the two other men began chewing furiously. Before any of the Rangers could stop them, each man had broken the seal on the tiny black pill they had routinely kept in their mouths. The pills contained a deadly poison and immediately both men began choking on their own blood. One gurgled something in German and pitched forward, hitting the table with a loud
whap!
The other simply slumped in his chair, his eyes grotesquely rolling up into his head. Both were dead in a matter of seconds.

In a flash, Hunter leaped across the table and jammed the butt of his M-16 into the traitor’s mouth. A moment later, Humdingo was beside him, forcing the traitor’s jaws open and preventing him from chomping down on a suicide pill of his own.

A strange, almost comical 15-second struggle ensued until Hunter was able to literally rip the poison capsule from the man’s mouth.

“It’s not going to be that easy,” Hunter yelled at the man. “In fact, I’ll personally guarantee that you still have a long life ahead of you.”

Their prisoner was now absolutely terrified, so much so he started babbling: “Where … who … what are you doing in those robes?”

“We’re taking you back to a place you used to know,” Hunter snarled at him. “Back to America.”

Hunter gave a signal and two of the Rangers rushed up to bind and gag the traitor with strong duct tape. Then, just as the group started to make their way down the silent corridor back to the grisly lobby area, one of the Rangers left to guard the lobby called out to Hunter.

“We’ve got company, Hawk …” the man said, motioning him to the foyer’s huge window.

Hunter ran up to the window and took a quick look down.

Coming up the road he counted four BMPs, two T-72 tanks and at least a dozen troop trucks.

“There’s always someone who wants to crash the party,” he said.

Then, running awkwardly but swiftly in the long white robes, he and the rest of the strike force headed for the stairs.

By the time JT had brought the Osprey into a hover over the skyscraper, the skies had cleared and the entire strike force was out on the building’s roof, looking absolutely bizarre in their long white body sheets.

Already, the Rangers were firing down the 20 stories at the enemy troops below. Suddenly there was a large
whump!
and smoke and flames immediately began pouring out of the first three stories of the building. Toomey would learn later that the Rangers had placed several delayed-reaction bombs onto the skyscraper’s elevators and then sent the lifts down to the bottom three floors.

Still many New Order troops were rushing into the building, while others were stomping up the open stairway on the building’s east side. Another explosion went off—this time on the fourth floor—blowing out just about all the windows on the bottom half dozen floors.

Meanwhile the two enemy tanks had taken up positions in the parking lot and their gunners were trying to raise their muzzles high enough to shoot at the Rangers on the roof. Another enemy squad fired a rocket-propelled grenade from the parking lot up toward the roof, but the round fell short by about 15 feet, smashing into the side of the structure with a great burst of fiery smoke and plaster.

All the while Toomey felt that he was watching some kind of odd war movie. The plan called for him
not
to provide covering fire for the strike force, as one stray bullet was enough to screw up the Osprey’s delicate wing hinges, and therefore wreck the Americans’ only means of escape. So, too high for the New Order soldiers to hit him, he hovered out of harm’s way and waited.

But not for long …

Just as another RPG round was fired off the side of the building, the Osprey’s radio suddenly came to life: “JT! JT! Can you hear me, pal?”

“Loud and clear Hawk,” Toomey quickly replied. “You guys ready to go home?”

“More than ready,” came the answer from Hunter’s walkie-talkie. “Bring that wagon down here.”

“On my way.”

Then, with the speed of a runaway elevator, JT put the Osprey into a gut-wrenching descent. The four Rangers manning the airplane’s gun stations nearly hit the roof, so acute was the aircraft’s “vertical translation.”

By this time the first wave of New Order troops had nearly reached the top of the building’s stairway. Clustered together and pressed hard up against the building, these soldiers were in a furious gunfight with a handful of Rangers just a few feet away. To make matters worse, one of the tanks in the parking lot—its muzzle close to ideal elevation—was now ricocheting cannon shots off the very edge of the roof.

A near-to-the-mark tank shell blasted away the corner of the roofs concrete railing just as the Osprey touched down. The powerful grinding sound of the VTOL’s engines and the hurricane-force winds its huge propellers caused added to the already chaotic mixture of rifle shots and heavy weapons fire.

Humdingo, who had been carrying the traitor over his shoulder the whole time, now unceremoniously dumped the man into the open passage of the aircraft and climbed aboard himself. At the same moment, Hunter was running around the roof pulling the small knots of Rangers back from their positions to urge them toward the aircraft.

Half of the 20 Rangers were inside the Osprey when the enemy soldiers finally broke through and gained access to the roof. On Hunter’s yell, the remaining Rangers flattened out, and the side gunners on the aircraft opened up on the New Order hirelings with their big twin-fifty machine guns.

Momentarily stunned, the enemy fell back long enough for the rest of the white-robed Rangers to scramble aboard the airplane.

As usual, Hunter was the last one to climb aboard.

“Go! Go! Go!” he was screaming even before he was halfway through the cabin door. Hearing his command, JT immediately gunned the big engines and the Osprey shot up at a speed as nauseating as its earlier rapid descent.

Straight up it climbed, up into the heavens, until the enemy troops on the roof and on the ground below could see it no longer.

Two weeks later

“H
AVE YOU EVER BEEN
hypnotized before, Major Hunter?”

Hunter shifted around uneasily in his chair. It was a rare occasion when he felt he actually
needed
a drink.

But this was one of them.

“Major? Did you hear the question?”

Hunter quickly looked around the bare room and then up into the face of the attractive woman sitting next to him.

“No, I’ve never been hypnotized before,” he said finally. “At least, not that I can remember.”

The woman laughed. She was about forty and was a doctor—of psychology, yet. This made him uneasy.

His eyes darted around the room once again. It was dark, with only two lamps and they were being serviced by dim bulbs. On the large wooden table next to his chair there was a bank of tape recorders, one of which was already turning. Along with the doctor’s chair and his own, there was nothing else in the room.

The place gave him the creeps. Located deep within the bowels of the old CIA headquarters near Washington DC; it looked like an old “rubber hose” interrogation room from a 1930s cops and robbers movie.

“Is this really necessary?” Hunter asked, not the first time.

The traitor had been in their custody for fourteen days now, ten of which had been devoted to his interrogation. Being held under heavy guard in a former US Federal holding building nearby, the ex-VP had also been allowed to prepare for his trial, which was scheduled to commence in another week. A squad of lawyers from “neutral” Finland was given permission to fly to Washington and help the turncoat prepare his defense.

In the meantime, a number of principals in the United American Army Command Staff were scheduled to begin giving trial depositions—Hunter included. Just about everyone close to the trial knew that it would be won or lost based on the strength of testimony about the traitor’s most grievous crime: his part in the starting of World War III. As such, the most detailed information about the war was necessary for the US prosecutors to present at the trial.

Still, Hunter was apprehensive about the whole procedure.

“It seems like there’s a million other things I should be doing,” he told the woman doctor.

Like making sure his F-16 was still in flying condition. Or like getting some long overdue R&R. Or like trying to find his lost love, the beautiful Dominique.

“I believe this exercise is
very
necessary,” the doctor told him. “For you, as well as for the others.

“Your testimony will be the key element in this trial. We can’t expect you or the others to have total recall of the events leading up to the traitor’s crimes. That’s why this session, and the others, will be crucial in presenting our case and assuring that the traitor pays for his crimes.”

Hunter had heard the explanation many times before, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He hated thinking about the fact that someone was going to be tinkering with his brain—his psyche. His very private subconscious.

“Listen, doctor,” he said in one last valiant stab at an alternative. “Why not let me just lock myself up somewhere and I’ll write it all down? The whole thing … The day the war started. The transit to Europe. The war itself. What happened afterward. It isn’t likely I’ve forgotten any of it.”

She straightened out her short skirt and picked up a clipboard.

“You have probably forgotten more than you realize,” she said. “This has been the case with the others. Mr. Toomey. Mr. Wa. The Soviet pilots …

“As you know, I’m entering all of these recollections into a computer—a Gray supercomputer. With its highly advanced word processing software, the computer will be able to interconnect all of your testimonies into a single document. It really will be quite unique. A ‘white paper’ they used to call it, though I prefer to think of it as a ‘computerized epic,’ if you will. But then again, I’m a romantic …

“In any case, when the computer has done its work, I believe we’ll have an excellent perspective on what happened back then.”

Hunter shook his head and muttered a curse under his breath.

“Whatever happened to the old judge and jury type trial?” he asked. “Just put me on the witness stand and give me an hour. I’ll convict the SOB myself.”

The doctor lit a small cigar and seductively blew out a long stream of smoke.

“Major, you know that General Jones and the Command Staff have approved of this method of trial,” she said. “So have the trial justices. If the traitor is to be punished for his crimes, it is absolutely necessary that he get a fair hearing. Generations from now, people will look back on how we handled this. We cannot be perceived as a lynch mob, dealing with a criminal via brutish Old West justice. It is an important cornerstone to the reconstruction of our country that we afford him every opportunity within the American judicial system.”

Hunter shook his head again. “Including going out and hiring some smart-ass Finnish lawyers for him? Do you know what the Finns did to us after the war was over?
They’re
the ones who destroyed all of our military equipment.”

“I know that, Major,” the doctor cooed to him. “And if we are going to win this case, we’re going to have to beat the best. That is why this computerized deposition is important.”

Hunter let out a long breath of resignation. He knew she was right.

“And there’s another reason for this,” she continued, her hand lightly touching his shoulder. “This document will, in effect, serve as a history of what happened. It will be written as almost an ‘oral history.’ The reasons we chose this style of writing are too numerous to explain now; suffice to say that we will go into a lot more detail once the trial starts. But I suspect that you, Major Hunter, will play a very large role in this story. I’d like to think of it as the first chapter of the Second American Epic. Years from now the American people will greatly appreciate what we are doing here. You do want to be a part of that, Major, don’t you?”

Hunter shifted uneasily in the chair again.

“I guess … I mean, sure I do …” he said finally.

She smiled again. “OK, now that’s the spirit,” she said, her voice positively oozing sensuality.

She touched him again, this time on the back of his neck.

“Now,” she said, in a voice barely above a whisper. “Just close your eyes and relax …”

The next thing Hunter knew, the pretty woman doctor was massaging his shoulders.

“… that’s when I met Dominique,” he heard himself saying. “It was a little farmhouse in northern France, near the shore and I had …”

“That’s all right, Major,” the doctor told him, gently squeezing his shoulders. “We’ve got enough information now.”

He shook his head, blinked his eyes open and was instantly aware of a dull throb in his jaw. It was as if he had been chewing gum non-stop for hours. The first thing he noticed was the doctor’s ashtray was overflowing with crushed out cigar butts.

“But we just started,” he said, slightly unsure of himself. “Didn’t we?”

The doctor laughed and lit a tiny cigar. “We’ve been at it for twelve hours, Major,” she said, reaching over to switch off the tape recorders. “You broke the record by more than five hours.”

Hunter reached up to massage his sore jaw. He felt groggy, woozy, as if he had just come out of a sodium pentothal daze with some of his teeth missing.

“I … I was talking about Dominique,” he said, more to himself than to the doctor.

She nodded slowly, her eyes tightening in a slightly suspicious squint.

“You gave me everything I needed to know about the war,” the doctor told him. “Your memory is incredibly complete and detailed. I find it fascinating, to be perfectly honest. In fact, I am sure now that the computer will build its text around your testimony, using the recollections of the others simply to fill in the blanks.

“In other words, Major, you’re going to be a modern-day Ulysses. You’ll be the hero of our story. And when it’s over, you’ll be even more famous than you are now.”