Ghost War (7 page)

And one more thing: its one-time prominence as a top secret American air base.

They called it “Clark Kent” because sometimes aircraft flight-listed to land at other Pacific or Far East bases would take on a secret identity and be diverted to the small, single airstrip island. This was especially true if the aircraft were slated for black op missions or carrying cargo that, for whatever reason, had to remain secret. The base was originally built to conduct secret atomic bomb drop tests in the early 1950s. Later on, in the mid-1960s, it was where the United States kept a substantial number of nuclear weapons, earmarked for use on North Vietnam, should the word ever come down to do so. In the later years, it served as a stopover point for SR-71 Blackbird recon jets that regularly cruised the skies above China, Vietnam, North Korea, and much later, the industrial heart of postmodern Japan.

The base on Adora Atoll had laid abandoned for many years—that was, until a pair of Free Canadian C-141F Starlifters landed there a week before. Contained within these two long-range airplanes was a special unit of Canadian engineers. Their task: get the secret base up and running for the imminent arrival of a force of very large aircraft.

The Canadians worked day and night to do so. Their main project—to extend the runway of the atoll an additional 1000 feet—was accomplished twenty-four hours ahead of schedule. Smaller but no less important assignments—such as installing temporary fuel tanks, reviving a sea water desalination plant, and retooling a small gas turbine to provide electrical power—were also completed on or before deadline.

In fact, the Canadians were putting the finishing touches on, of all things, a baseball field when the first radio report came in. Suddenly, all thoughts of the baseball diamond were dropped. The transitting force they’d been waiting for were now only a hundred miles away and coming fast.

It was
Bozo
that came in first; Hunter’s expert touch at the controls put the extended runway to its first test and proved it was a job well done.

One by one, the other great Galaxy airships descended on the base, each setting down nimbly, drag chutes extended, engines screaming in reverse, strange colors displaying proud aerial individuality.

It took but three minutes, twenty seconds for all nine C-5s to touch down and taxi in. Their engines whining down, their cargo doors open, their crews disgorged, the first leg of a very long journey had come to a successful conclusion.

Hunter was greeted by the friendly Canadians, and he praised them for their efforts and obvious top-notch workmanship. They in turn challenged the Americans to a round of baseball games, to be played on the newly built diamond. Hunter quickly accepted.

Then he went to the Canadians’ recently constructed radio shack and sent a microwave burst message back to Edwards, clear on the other side of the globe.

The scrambled message simply read: “The First American Airborne Expeditionary Force has landed …”

Two days later

T
WO HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN
miles to the southwest of Adora Atoll, Bobby “Wallybee” Fletcher was sitting in a blind near the shoreline of a long, boomerang-shaped island, known simply as Boho.

It was a perfect location, for he had a commanding view of a narrow but deep strait that ran through the nearby archipelago of small deserted islands. On and off for three weeks, and now for the past twenty-hours straight, he had hardly budged, despite the swarms of mosquitos that seem to cover every square inch of his exposed skin.

He was waiting.

Fletcher was a coastwatcher, and like his father, and his father’s father, he was one of the best. Regardless of the dangers or the isolation or the loneliness that came with the territory, Wallybee was able to draw on his enormous reserves of patience, the patience needed to sit through the worst kind of weather, severe hunger, thirst, bugs, and hours of boredom, simply to do his job.

And now this patience was about to pay off.

He heard it first, a kind of sloshing noise, slightly punctuated by a low mechanical throbbing. He took another long pull on the jug of New Zealand moonshine he kept handy to sharpen his senses, and then peered into the inky blackness of the moonless night.

The noise grew louder and louder until it was almost on top of him. In the black night, Fletcher could see a gigantic shadow passing by, like a great black cloud. He instantly knew it was what he had been waiting for all this time. The size of the phosphorescent wake spreading out after it passed was confirmation enough.

Fletcher opened up the wooden carrying case that shielded his World-War-II-vintage radio and quickly plugged in the antenna that stretched between two nearby tall trees. Then he rigged the power line from the battery to the generator and to the axle of a rusty, rear-wheel-less bicycle mounted on a stationary platform. For the next fifteen minutes, he sat on the tattered seat and pedaled furiously, building up electricity. After a quick voltage test, he set the transmitter to the frequency of the day, tapped out a short coded message on the sending key, and waited until he received the return verification signal from the place he knew only as “Clark Kent.” Then, as quickly as he had set up his gear, he broke it down, camouflaged it among the vegetation, and disappeared into the night.

Dawn

T
HE LONE, GRAY BATTLESHIP
sliced through the deep South Pacific waters, heading southwest. Its engines running at full steam, it was on its way to rendezvous with the remainder of the Asian Mercenary Cult fleet cruising off of Luzon. If all went well, they would join the fleet within forty-eight hours.

The warship was two days out from its last port of call, a small South Pacific tropical island that was once a favorite tourist spot.

Typically, the battleship had left the island in flames.

Met at the dock by the beautiful women of the island, the crew had eagerly accepted the flower leis offered to them. Once ashore, the 1,242-man crew drank every drop of alcohol it could find. And then they went berserk.

First, they looted everything that wasn’t tied down, and what they couldn’t carry, they simply destroyed. Then they embarked on a killing frenzy that went on all through the night and all the next day. They eventually hunted down and slaughtered every living soul on the island including the elderly, the young, and even infants. Only the beautiful women were spared, but just long enough to be gang-raped and then killed. By dusk that next night, when the crew had finally staggered back to the ship after twenty-four hours of uncontrollable blood lust, they’d murdered more than 10,000 people. Then, with the crew on board, the vessel’s nine massive 16-inch guns opened up, splitting the black night with their long, white-hot flames.

Every square foot of the island was obliterated, the great explosions throwing tons of dirt and rubble hundreds of feet into the air and creating craters more than a half mile across. Fires erupted everywhere, and burned wildly out of control. The heat generated was so intense that even steel was vaporized. By the time the battleship sailed away, nothing was left standing on the island, nothing was left alive. For the next day at sea, the crew could admire their handiwork: a huge, thick column of black smoke could be clearly seen rising from below the horizon behind them.

Junior Radio Officer Oka Ueno did not remember much of the raid. The booze and the drugs had flowed so freely through the entire rampage, he’d quickly lapsed into an alcoholic blackout. But he knew that if there was a hell, he surely had a place reserved. For when he finally woke up the morning after, he discovered that his uniform was encrusted with blood, caked brain matter and dried semen. His shipmates later told him that of them all, he’d done the most raping, the most killing. His officers went so far as to commend him for his actions.

Now, this early morning, as one reward for his butchery, Ueno was given the honor of raising the ship’s colors and insignia of the Asian Mercenary fleet high up the battleship’s mast.

But he would have much rather stayed in his bunk. Even two days later, he was still suffering from the worst hangover of his life.

As he crawled into his dress whites, preparing for this honor, he had to suppress the urge to vomit. And he was not alone. Groping his way up from his quarters onto the deck, he passed the assembled ceremonial guard and saw that each sailor’s face was also a pale sea-green. Though they were doing their best to remain rigid and in close order, they too couldn’t wait for this ceremony to be over so they could suffer in peace.

In the hot morning sun, Ueno clumsily fumbled with the masthead’s clips and rope, finally attaching the Cult insignia of the three red dots on a field of white to the line. Then he slowly raised the huge flag to the sound of the ship’s bugle blowing morning reveille. Each note played drilled deeper and deeper into Ueno’s rotting brain, and between the broiling sun and the constant pitching and yawning of the ship, he was convinced that he would lose control of his stomach soon. He prayed that the ceremony would be over quickly.

As his eyes followed the flag on its way up the mast, the bright sunlight caused scores of tiny black dots to bounce around his bloodshot retinas. This was typical of people in severe postinebriated state. But no matter how often or how hard he blinked, two dots, two tiny little specks that seemed to be out near the southeast horizon, would not go away. From the combination of his overwhelming feeling of nausea and his confused alcohol-soaked state, Ueno couldn’t be sure whether or not the two specks were even there.

But he was soon to find out that they were indeed quite real.

At long last, the flag raising ceremony was completed, and the order to dismiss the crew was finally given. The ranks gladly broke, but Ensign Ueno glanced back in the direction of the two dots. They were still there, but now, not only did they seem to be getting bigger, they appeared to be heading directly towards the ship. Ueno noticed that the rest of the crew had also seen them off in the distance. They too remained on deck, curious to see what they were. As they all watched, the two specks continued to grow in size as well as climb rapidly. Within a minute, they were directly overhead. An anxious ripple shot through those on deck as the two gleaming specks went into a lazy orbit high above the battleship.

The captain was alerted, and he was quickly out on the bridge’s gangway staring up at the circling objects through his high-powered binoculars.

Then they began to spiral down.

First one, then the other, seemed to be falling toward the ship. The crew lining the rails were spellbound. They had never seen anything like this before. At that moment, the captain cried out in warning—the ship was about to be attacked. But Ueno didn’t hear him. Unable to control his nausea anymore, he had fallen to his knees, clutching his stomach, his body now racked by the dry heaves. In the distance, he thought he could hear the klaxons of the great battleship begin to scream in warning. And through this din, he also thought he heard the tone-deaf bugler try to blurt an off-key call to battle stations, though he couldn’t be quite sure.

But when he finally raised his eyes back up to the sky, he saw the objects were now the two biggest airplanes he had ever seen. Their bodies wide, the engines screaming, their wings stretched out, they looked like the twin angels of death.

The Cult’s battleship was exactly where Wallybee the coastwatcher had said it would be.

The ferry pilot of the C-5 named
Nozo
had located it quickly. Now as he put his massive, gunship into a long wide spiral downward, he swiftly went through the prefiring checklist with each of the aircraft’s twenty-one gunners and their ammunition control men. The pilot’s voice was level, patient, and firm, like that of a surgeon about to perform a major operation. The responses from the crew members were equally professional.

“Forward firing generators to On …” the pilot calmly ordered. Twenty-one separate affirmative responses came back.

“Video screen antiinterference mode secured.”

“Check!”

“Power drift stabilizers to on.”

“Check!”

“Ammunition engage light lit.”

“Check!”

The highly trained crew of the gleaming chrome and silver
Nozo
were men of precision. They moved about the antiseptic hold of the Galaxy as if they were performing in precise choreography to the strains of a world-renowned symphony. Each had a specific task to do, and each was responsible for a part of the loading, targeting, or firing of one of the 21 GE GAU-8/A 30 mm cannons that lined the port side of the cavernous Galaxy transport-turned-gunship. There was no unnecessary chatter, no unnecessary movement. The men methodically went through their lengthy preattack check-offs, dressed in their neat, freshly pressed white coveralls, and speaking in turn through microphones imbedded in the hooded air/gas filters that covered their heads.

“Crew to attack positions,” the pilot ordered through the
Nozo
intercom while continuing to turn the huge plane in the steep, leftward bank high above the Cult battleship. Instantly, twenty-one shutters—nine forward of the wing, twelve behind it—snapped open.

“Weapons ready …” the pilot called out. Immediately the Avenger cannons, hooked on to miles of ammunition belts loaded with depleted uranium shells, deployed out the twenty-one gun ports.

“All positions ready,” the flight chief called forward to the cockpit.

“All positions, stand by,” the pilot replied.

He checked and then double-checked the massive airplane’s position. It was now 1,100 feet above the battleship, drifting slightly to the south to match the enemy vessel’s speed.

He nodded to his copilot and together they pushed down on the control column. Suddenly the big plane was dropping rapidly—down to 1,000 feet, then 900, then 800 … its engines in full scream, its wings banked left at almost an 80-degree angle, the Galaxy seemed to be falling out of the sky.

When it reached 350 feet, the pilot yelled to the copilot and together they pulled the plane out of the harrowing spiral. They were now at optimum attack altitude.