Freedom Express (32 page)

"This is where the hard part begins for those guys," Hunter said. "We will have wasted a lot of time and effort if we tell them to be at the right place at the wrong time."

Finally the subject of the Skinhead Squadron came up, and this too was discussed only in the briefest terms. "We'll know by noon whether this gamble has paid off," Hunter told them. "And then we've got to find some kind of a medal to pin on Mike Crossbow."

"Amen to that," Fitz said. "How he can stay hidden up on that mesa all this time is spooky."

"It's that Indian know-how," Hunter said. "Sometimes I wish I had a little of it myself." Just then, the scrambler started churning out a new message. And even before he read it, Hunter's sixth sense was telling him it was
really
bad news.

Fitz retrieved the scroll of teletype, read it quickly and swore. "Oh, God, I don't believe this."

"What is it?" Tyler asked. Fitzgerald read the message again and then turned to Hunter.

"I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, Hawker,"

he said. "But someone has stolen your F-16." It was true. A scrambled phone call to Jones sadly confirmed that the hangar at Andrews AFB where Hunter had left his F-16XL after

transferring its avionics to the Harrier had been broken into and the precious jet stolen.

"I'm afraid I can't add much more than the initial report, Hawk," the general told him over the scramble phone. "It happened two days ago. The morning guards reported for duty and found your airplane gone and two sentries missing. It's like they vanished into thin air."

Hunter still could not quite believe the news.

"Just like that?" he asked. "It must have been an inside job."

"We don't think so," Jones replied. "The DC militia has always been top-notch,so there's no real reason to suspect they'd change now. As far as we can tell, the thieves kidnapped the guards when they took the airplane."

"But how did they get it out of there?" Hunter asked. "They certainly didn't fly it out."

"No, not exactly," Jones answered. "We think they actually used a flatbed truck with a mobile crane. A vehicle like that was spotted near the base just before dawn that day. Then later on, a cargo plane pilot coming in from Toronto reported that he saw a Sky Crane chopper hauling something heavy about a hundred miles north of Bethesda. It was painted in wild colors-green and blue stripes, like a lumber carrier-and it was carrying something wrapped in white tarp. The cargo pilot says the shape could have been that of a small jet. This pilot just assumed it was one of our copters until he heard about your plane being clipped."

Hunter was simply stunned. "It must have been a pretty elaborate operation if they had a Sky Crane," he said, referring to the massive heavy-lift helicopter. "I mean, I haven't seen more than two of those birds in five years. They're pretty rare items."

"I agree," Jones replied. "And we're doing everything we can to track it down. I've got every guy I can spare out there looking for it. I can't promise anything, but we'll try like hell to find it."

"Thanks, General," Hunter said, his now all-too-familiar voice choking up slightly. "I'll appreciate anything you can do."

The rest of the day passed by with an eerie serenity. The train was traveling at the slowest possible speed again, heading out of New Mexico and into Arizona.

And with every mile it got closer to the impending clash with Devillian.

There had been a piece of good news around noon. Scouts from the detachment of Bad River's troop that was keeping the mesa under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance radioed in that they'd seen twelve F-4's take off from the mesa top around mid-morning with no indication of hostile fire coming from the reluctant allies left back on the fortress itself. Hunter replied that the Piutes should get a message to Crossbow that now that his mission was done, it was time for him to leave the mesa top for good.

The Wingman spent the rest of the day busying himself with duties on the train, trying his best not to think about what had happened to his F-16. It was only when night had fallen and he had a few moments that the real shock of his loss began to set in.

He had climbed up on top of his railway car and let the breeze from the slow-moving train cool him. The moon was rising fast, its glow lighting up the desert with a warm orange shine.

Yet he was in no mood to appreciate the landscape's undeniable beauty.

His period of denial slowly dissipating, he felt the pain of such a huge part of his life being ripped away. It both enraged and saddened him that something so important and precious to him as his F-16 was now in the hands of thieves. And for what purpose?

Would the perpetrators ask for a ransom? If they did, he would pay it, get the aircraft back and then hunt them down like dogs.

Actually he knew this was just wishful thinking; he should be so lucky that the whole business was just a case of

plane-napping. Maybe the thieves would cut the plane up, or sell it, or simply destroy it. He tried his best to shake these thoughts away; they were just too painful for his soul to bear.

Now looking down at the Harrier, lashed as it was to the platform car in front of him, he felt a little comfort that the brains of the F-16-the avionics and so on-were safe aboard the jumpjet. But it was a cold reprieve; the F-16 was more than just a bunch of gizmos attached to a fuselage and wing and powered by an engine. It was greater than the sum of its parts. It was an entity unto itself.

It was part of him.

His melancholy was broken by the sound of someone climbing up the ladder to the roof.

"Hawk? Are you up there?"

It was Diamond.

He helped her up the last few steps, and she settled down next to him.

"It's really beautiful up here," she said, snuggling closer to him. "I feel like we're a couple of hobos."

He nodded, somewhat sadly. "I wish all I had to do was ride the rails," he said.

She touched his hand lightly. "I heard about your

airplane," she said. "I've never seen it, but you were talking about it in your sleep a few nights ago."

He was not surprised that he had been dreaming about the F-16 -along with everything else.

"I spent a lot of time in that airplane," he said. "It's carried me just about everywhere, and I've been damn lucky with it. Now, to just have it swiped like that . . ." his voice trailed off.

She pulled even closer to him, and he put his arm around her. She was a very sweet girl, and in just the few days they'd been together, she'd put up with a lot: the attacks on the train, the crazy forty-eight hours of his out-of-this-world

meditation, the uncertainty of their fate. She seemed to roll with it all though, showing an amazing ability to adapt to the strangest situations.

Through it all, she was never less than upbeat, confident, even optimistic. In a way, he felt himself falling for her.

He pulled her even closer and was about to kiss her when he felt a damnable familiar feeling run up his spine.

"
Quick
, climb down," he told her, leading her to the ladder.

"But what's the matter?"

"Trouble's coming" was all he said. "And it's coming fast."

He saw them just about a minute later. First one speck of red light appeared on the southern horizon. Then there were two.

Then three. Then a dozen.

"Hinds . . ."he heard himself whisper.

By this time, the men on board were scrambling to their battle stations reacting to his called-out warning as well as the Express's own radar systems. The train was traveling through a long, low desert valley, with no bends or curves for at least twenty miles. Nor were there any tunnels or forests in which the train could seek shelter.

Hunter was inside the warmed-up Harrier within the next minute, and airborne a minute after that. By this time, the enemy choppers had reached the train and were circling it at about three thousand feet, much like Old West movie Indians would circle a bunch of wagons. Hunter instantly banked toward the line of orbiting gunships and dove through them with his guns blazing.

One chopper immediately exploded, and another suffered

serious damage from his initial barrage. But at the same time, six of the choppers dove straight for the train. Obviously the Hind pilots' battle plans were to split their force; six would provide fodder for Hunter while the other six strafed the train.

Hunter laid a Sidewinder into yet another copter when he heard Fitz's distinctive brogue come through his headphones.

"Clear the area, Hawk," the Irishman yelled. "You've got ten seconds."

Hunter quickly acknowledged the request and booted the

jumpjet forward at top speed. He didn't question why Fitz had requested he break off the engagement; he already knew why.

Leveling out the Harrier at 4500 feet about two miles off the train's starboard, he began to count off "three . . . two

. . . one-"

Suddenly the night sky above the train lit up like a massive Fourth of July fireworks display. Streaks of bright yellow light shot off from eight of the railway cars, entrapping the buzzing Hinds in a fiery web. Hunter forced himself to smile; at last he was seeing exactly what the train could do, or at least part of it.

He knew that in the ten seconds prior to the pyrotechnics, the train's on-board air defense systems had clicked on. Using radar and infrared detectors to assess the threat, the computers had ordered eight of the train's sixteen SAM cars to arm, lock on to the Hinds and launch.

And launch they did.

No less than four dozen S-2 SAMs screamed up from the

railway cars, in seconds obliterating the half dozen attacking Hinds, some of which suffered as many as ten direct hits. Another smaller, but more accurate barrage was launched four seconds later. This one caught the four remaining enemy choppers that were supposed to be harassing Hunter.

In a matter of twenty-two seconds, it was over. All ten Hinds were destroyed, leaving ten individual flaming wrecks on flat desert on either side of the slowly moving train.

It was a display that gave even a veteran like Hunter pause.

In the previous enemy aerial attacks, the confined spaces of the mountains and forests had prevented the air defense computers from formulating such an awesome fusillade of SAMs.

But in the wide-open spaces, the system had performed to perfection.

As the train increased speed and disappeared into the

night, Hunter swept over the wrecks of the Hinds, double checking that there were no survivors.

Then, just as he was about to head back for the train to land, his inner sense told him to proceed farther up the track instead, that something would be found there.

He had relied too long on his instincts to question them; besides, since his strange meditative period had ended, his instincts seemed to have come back in line. So, after radioing his intentions back to Fitz, he throttled up and sped ahead of the
Freedom Express
. At a point about twenty miles from the train, his sixth sense began buzzing once again. There was something below, in the narrow pass that carried the tracks between two bare desert hills. It was not a threat; the
feeling
was telling him something different.

He put the AV-8 into a hover and set it down about fifty yards from the pass. Retrieving his M-16 and his infrared NightScope goggles, he double-timed it to the tracks and then carefully walked into the pass itself.

Something happened here
, his senses were telling him.

He slowed his pace a little as he reached the middle of the pass, scanning its sheer walls with the infrared glasses.

He saw nothing until he turned the slight bend in the

tracks.

An instant later, he found what he was looking for. There were 24 of them in all. They were hanging from ten separate gallows, their rickety remains flowing gently in the light desert night breeze. They were skeletons rather than bodies, and each one had a dagger sticking out of its ribcage.

"So this is how far they got," he whispered. "Their nightmare ended here."

There was little sense in inspecting the corpses. He didn't need a close-up look to know that he'd just discovered the remains of the Modern Pioneers.

Los Angeles

Nick "Red" Banner, LA's leading newsman, had just finished eating his dinner in his plush apartment's dining room when he heard the first air raid siren go off.

Like just about everyone else in the city, the KOAS-TV

anchorman thought the alarms had gone off either by mistake or as part of some kind of a test. Unconcerned, Banner poured himself a brandy, switched his telephone back to ON and settled in front of his large screen TV, intent on watching a videotape of his broadcast earlier that day.

He had just started the replay when his phone rang. Taking a sip of brandy, he answered it in his deep, affected anchorman voice.

"Nick Banner here . . ."

"For Christ's sake, Nick!" the man's voice on the other end screamed. "Where the hell you been?"

He immediately recognized the voice of his boss, KOAS

station manager, Wild Bill Austin.

"I've been right here," Banner answered quickly. "With your goddamn phone switched off?" Austin raged. "You know that's against company policy."