Sky Ghost (17 page)

This did not slow down Hunter though. He simply picked the two wings closest to him and dove on them. He hit one just as it was at the bottom of its loop. There was no explosion this time—Hunter drilled a barrage right into the cockpit and killed the pilot outright

He continued on through his own loop and wound up on the number two man’s tail. One quick barrage from his four guns tore off the plane’s tiny tail. It was enough to make him lose control. The pilot knew he was cooked and pulled his ejector seat. It worked—but it horribly cut his neck on the way out.

Hunter could see the blood spraying in all directions as the chute opened and the hapless pilot began to descend.

Now he had six left. They were scattered all over the sky—and all thoughts of going after the bombers were gone.

But suddenly and very unexpectedly Hunter began vibrating again. What was this? He turned and saw another swarm of aircraft coming up right at him. These weren’t graceful or elegant or anything even close to it. These airplanes were down and dirty motherfuckers—they looked it and they sounded it.

But again, what were they exactly?

They were very strange looking. Big, swept back wings, two- or three-man canopy. Wide bodies. Jet engines. This was a German hybrid: an Me-110 fighter-bomber and a Me-262 jet. Again, to Hunter, it looked like those two airplane designs had been melted down into one. Appropriately enough they were known as Me-666s.

They were coming on very fast and two were gluing themselves on Hunter’s tail.

Damn
—he’d fallen for something here. These fighters were protecting the interceptors, an odd but effective tactic.

And he’d made a huge mistake. He should have suspected the Isle of Man would be defended in depth. But it was too late to worry about that now.

In the next second, rockets were whooshing by him. And bullet streams. Not only did he have one of the beasts on his tail, but a wing had come around and got on his six o’clock as well.

Now what? As suddenly as the thought hit his brain, he began spinning. Around and around, the Mustang-5 was screeching back in protest but kept turning. For a moment, Hunter felt like he was back in the Pogo. Turning, twisting, and avoiding anything fired at him.

To the brutal turn he added a back-breaking climb. The bolts were coming apart as he pulled at least 8gs, way too much even for the rugged Mustang-5 to take. He kept spinning and climbing and like lions after the swift feet they tried to catch, the Me-666s gave up on him.

Hunter pulled back around, drenched in sweat, and somehow managed to throw a stream of slugs into the wing that had been pursuing him. It exploded.

But then he saw the Me-666s were rocketing past him and up to where the bombers should be.

Hunter felt a shiver go through him. Combined, the Horton wings and Me-666s would slaughter the 13th.

He couldn’t let it happen.

He pushed the throttle ahead, did an inverted loop—and began climbing…

If anyone had been there to see it, the next two minutes were a display of aeronautical ability like none ever seen in this place—this strange, but not-so-strange alternate universe.

Hunter quickly caught up with the remaining Me-666s, and splashed one with a 10-shot tracer barrage.

Then he turned up and under two more of the swift, mean-looking aircraft—they had rear guns, radar-controlled no doubt, and they started firing at Hunter, but neither scored hits. The Mustang-5 simply seemed to move out of the way at the split-second before any enemy shells could hit it.

It was a strange thing, almost eerie to see. The American jet jinking, jagging, ducking, spinning, going every which way except in the path of the enemy bullets.

All the while the Mustang’s guns were firing and shredding the tails off of a pair of still-ascending Me-666s. The two planes each lost a half a tail section. Both had no choice but to fall away.

Next the Mustang did a 180-degree loop that seemed impossibly tight, and impossibly g-straining. The big jet somehow turned inside the small swifter flying wings, nailing one with a long steady burst, then just catching the other with a quick short one. Either way, the result was the same. The wings were packed with fuel—rubbing two rocks together would have blown one of them up. Tracers were catastrophic.

The Mustang then rolled once again and kept climbing—up toward the clouds, again where the 13th Heavy Bombardment Squadron should be.

There were three Me-666s left, and two wings. The American airplane once again pulled hard gs, got on the tail of a Me-666, squeezed off what looked to be as few as 10 bullets from each gun—perfectly placed to rip the starboard wing off. The pilots bailed out even before the huge perforation in their fuselage caught fire.

The Mustang-5 pulled 8 gs backward now—winding up in a head-on with a flying wing. Two short bursts—the German pilot was dead. The wing beside him tried to break away. A dive and another close-in shot by the Mustang-5. After that, it was elemental. Sparks hit S/W-Stoff. Wing explodes.

Now there was just a pair of Me-666s left but even two could cause havoc in among the steely-eyed bombers of the 13th Heavy.

Hunter pulled incredible gs screeching out of his dive, somehow looped right up again, and a burst of his tracers which seemed to have the right amount of English on them. They went right through the pilot’s compartment, killing both.

That left only one.

Again, if there had been any witnesses to this most astonishing air combat—any who lived, that is—what they saw next would defy adequate description.

It was again an exercise in rather superhuman flying and optical illusions. For at one second it seemed as if the lone Me-666 was pulling away from the Mustang-5—just as a matter of the angle and being in the right place at the right time, it was far away from the rampaging American jet.

It might also have seemed not impossible that this lone German fighter could still plant an antiaircraft rocket barrage into the 13th Heavy Bombardment squadron and do catastrophic damage. Or the German plane could have easily just turned away and retired at its leisure. After losing every one of its colleagues, no air commandant would fault the last plane from leaving the field of battle, if just to tell the tale.

But whichever way the German pilots had decided to play it, they would never get to act, because in the blink of an eye, the Mustang-5 seemed to disappear from one space in the sky and reappear in another, this one looking right down the throat of the German attack plane.

Any witness might have argued whether there was a long burst from the Mustang, or a short burst, or even no burst of fire at all. Because it seemed as if the German airplane, in trying to get out of the way of the suddenly diving fighter, simply seemed to come apart in a flash of fire and smoke.

Not quite an explosion, not quite a disintegration either. The plane’s atoms just chose that moment to disassemble catastrophically, taking the atoms of both crew members with it.

And after that, the sky was suddenly empty again. Very empty.

Inside the cockpit of the Mustang-5, Hunter was not cold any longer.

He was sweating bullets. The canopy was fogged up from his exhalations, many of the dials and switches frozen in place from the continuous onslaught of g-forces.

He was sucking on his oxygen mask like he’d just run the marathon. But there was a grim satisfaction to his heavy breathing too. He’d done similar amazing flying things in another life—this he was sure of now. But that was really secondary to him at the moment.

What was foremost was he’d broken his neck, almost literally, and risked his life more than a dozen times inside of four and a half minutes to protect the 13th Heavy Bombardment Group from harm and allow them to perform their mission.

Too bad they weren’t around to appreciate the effort.

That was the hard, cold fact Hunter slowly came to as he searched the sky for the 132 gigantic bombers.

It was a useless endeavor for the first few moments. It seemed as if the squadron of bombers had vanished into thin air while he was battling in the cosmic dogfight.

Only by flying higher, up to 35-angels did Hunter finally spot them. Not going in over the target, as their mission called for. Nor had they all been shot down by yet another phantom squadron of German fighters.

No, the 13th Heavy Bombardment Squadron was now heading northwest, back out over the North Channel, making for the open spaces of the ocean and a return trip home.

That’s when it hit Hunter like a hammer on the head. For while he was breaking ass and elbow and risking life and limb to protect them, the 13th Heavy Bombardment Squadron, at first sight of the enemy interceptors, had turned tail and run away.

Three hours later, Hunter was slumped in a chair in the 2001st’s briefing room.

Payne was standing at the podium, the usual tortured look on his face. Behind him, the Main/AC was whirring softly.

“These are very serious accusations,” he was saying to Hunter.

“They are not accusations,” Hunter was firing back. “They are the facts. The truth. No room for interpretation. No need for it either.”

“You are claiming that an entire bomb group left the field of battle for no reason at all,” Payne said, trying to spin Hunter’s story a little.

But Hunter wasn’t buying it. He was cold, he was hungry, he was tired and he was very pissed. But he was not a fool.

“No—they had a reason,” he retorted. “They were cowards, they ran away.”

He slipped further down into his seat. He was beyond exhaustion now.

Payne was shaking his head—but not quite in disbelief. More in futility. Plus, he was hiding something. Hunter could feel it.

“And I’ll bet it isn’t the first time they’ve done it either,” Hunter continued wearily. “They looked to be in pretty tight formation as they were flying away from me.”

Payne tried again. “But you still have to admit that no one was on hand to verify your story,” he told Hunter.

That’s when Hunter lost it. Payne was either the war’s biggest pussy, or he was hiding something very big. Hunter flew out of his chair and made three threatening steps toward the officer.

“Do you actually think I’m making this up?” he challenged him.

Payne’s face turned red. “Do I really have to read you the book of etiquette, Flight Officer?”

Hunter’s anger entered another realm at that point. He was so mad, he actually calmed down.

“I’m reporting an act of major cowardice and you’re going to pull rank on me?” he asked Payne.

Payne just stared back at him.

“Shame on you,” Hunter said, grabbing his gear. “And if you want send the Air Cops to arrest me—for insubordination or whatever—then I’ll be in the OC, getting wrapped.”

With that, Hunter walked out of the briefing room, leaving Payne alone, staring out from the podium onto the empty auditorium.

T
HE NEXT DAY BROKE
cold and windy—but with no snow.

After making good on his promise to get drunk, Hunter ate some of the OC’s sucky stew and watched Colonel Crabb’s culture offering of the day, “Daughters of the Witch Queen.”

To Hunter it looked a lot like “Dance of Lolita Island,” but he was drunk, and really in no shape to play theater critic. So he sat there and watched and drank and added his applause to that of the bartender and a couple maintenance guys and Air Guards any time one of the girls lost all her clothing or when they completed a song together.

Once again, he couldn’t remember walking back to the barracks, opening the door, flopping on his bunk. But he did recall reading the note that was posted on the roster board—someone had slipped in and planted it there.

It said the regular morning briefing would be “rescheduled” to after the assigned bombing mission—a military dodge if there ever was one.

There was a mission assignment package waiting for him too and with drunken fingers he opened it, read that he was flying again at 0400 hours the next morning. Only then did he fall into unconsciousness.

That night he dreamed he was in a tropical jungle. There was a pyramid in a clearing and hundreds of natives were bowing around it. He was at the top of this pyramid, a headdress and mask over his head. The people were bowing to him, chanting to him. A beautiful girl and a monk were nearby. Even in his dream Hunter had to ask the inevitable question: was he some kind of Inca god in his former life?

He woke up, took a shower, drank some coffee, got dressed, and only then did he remember the briefing pack he’d read the night before.

He was flying cover for yet another bomber squadron this morning. They were the 3234th squadron, from Base Six of the Circle. The bombing raid was to be over a target not in Occupied England but Occupied Ireland. They were taking off in 30 minutes.

Hunter trudged out to the flight line. The Mustang-5 was waiting for him, apparently just as he left it.

But there was a surprise waiting for him. When he reached the airplane he discovered not just Dopey the maintenance guy hanging about, but two others, Sneezy and Sniffy. Between them they didn’t total 50 years old.

The access ladder was waiting for him this time too. And the jet was turned on, its engine already warming up. When Hunter did a quick walk around, the three kids followed him like a mother duck. Everything looked OK. The wings had even been deiced.

Hunter climbed up into the cockpit and Dopey helped him strap in, while his compatriots waited nearby, looks of anticipation on their pimply faces.

“Everything went to green on the diagnostic series this morning,” Dopey told him. “We also recalibrated the gun sights and greased the feeder links.”

Hunter just looked up at him. “Thanks, kid,” he said finally.

The kid strapped him in, hit him twice on the helmet with much enthusiasm, and then disappeared down the access ladder. But a second later he was back again.

“We fixed the heater, too,” he said before he saluted and disappeared again.

Hunter reached done and clicked on the heater switch. Sure enough, the cockpit was flooded with ultrawarm air.

Hunter returned the trio of salutes and then began taxiing. His new fan club actually waved good-bye.