Skyfire (11 page)

"Did you actually get a close look at any of them?" Hunter asked.

The men all shrugged. "It was hard to," one of them said. "They were dressed all in black and they moved real quick, like they had done this sort of thing before. But they were wearing funny-looking helmets. And those bugles! Jeesuz, it was like every other guy was blowing his lungs out on one of those things."

"Well, it's damn quiet in there now," Hunter said, first eyeing the town and then the huge, smoldering crater. "I say we go back in and take a look."

The four of them rechecked their weapons and then cautiously moved back into the village.

It didn't take them long to reconnoiter the devastated seaport.

There wasn't much left to see. The raiders were long gone and just about every building had been burned to the ground. Anything of any consequential value-cars, trucks, fishing boats, even the village's ice-making machine-had been destroyed. Fortunately, the body count was low. Hunter and the troopers came across only a half dozen corpses during the grim search, all of them civilians.

After thirty minutes or so, Hunter's small group arrived at the town's beach.

Several more militia units were already there, as were about a dozen injured civilians. A militia unit officer was also on hand, directing his troopers to go out on the outskirts of the village and find any civilians who might be hiding in the fields and dunes.

This officer recognized Hunter immediately, and after a brief discussion, showed him the only piece of evidence that could be found as to how the raiders had arrived and departed so quickly. Bringing him to a section of the beach that was bracketed by two breakwater jetties, he pointed to the dozens of bootprints that led in and out of the crashing surf. It was the exact copy of what the investigators up in Nova Scotia had reported.

"Yet no landing ships were sighted?" Hunter asked the militia commander.

"Not a one" was the reply. "Even now, if they had 95

been landed and picked up by troopship, we'd be able to see them."

Hunter scanned the quickly darkening ocean and saw nothing. No lights, no silhouettes on the horizon. Nothing.

He quickly told the officer about the RPV and the projectile that had decimated the force of men he'd seen running up the sand dune.

"We saw it, too," the officer replied, adding that a squad of soldiers dispatched to the scene came back to report that nothing-not even a bone or a piece of clothing-was left of the attackers.

"Whoever fired that shot did us a favor, whether they had intended to or not,"

the officer concluded. "It killed one of their parties and scattered the rest of them, I'd say. The problem is, there are probably dozens of these raiders still running around out in the woods beyond town."

Once again, Hunter gazed out to sea. The projectile, whatever it was, must have been fired from a ship out beyond the horizon, its aim obviously guided by the RPV. Yet there weren't many guns afloat that could fire such a shell with such devastating accuracy at such a long distance.

And the question remained: Was it fired by a friend or foe?

Just then, a militia corporal ran up and reported that a medi-vac helicopter was on its way down from the United American Army fort at Plymouth. The officer told the man to round up as many troopers as he could to help get the wounded civilians ready for evacuation.

Hunter and the officer then pitched in loading the more seriously wounded civilians onto stretchers. Within ten minutes, the medi-vac chopper-actually a large, CH-47 Chinook-had set down on the beach. The loading of the wounded began immediately.

A UA Army officer emerged from the chopper and

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quickly sought out the militia commander. Hunter had just finished helping load a burn victim onto the Chinook when he joined the two men.

"This is not an isolated attack," the officer was telling the militia commander. "You've got to get your men organized and set up a perimeter around the village, or what's left of it."

Hunter quickly introduced himself. "Are you saying there was another attack like this somewhere?" he asked the man.

The UA officer removed his helmet and wiped his forehead of grime and perspiration.

"There's been as many as twenty-five attacks," he said grimly. "All along this edge of the Cape. Provincetown. Truro. Wellfleet. North Eastham. All hit, some of them worse than this, if you can believe it. We've also got calls that Chatham and Harwich to the south got it, too. It's a full-scale assault.

They're pulling hit-and-runs on the bigger towns. But there are a lot of reports of these people-whoever the hell they are-roaming the countryside, killing, raping, looting. And they seem to be moving to the south. That's why you've got to get a defense organized here."

But Hunter did not hear the man's last sentence.

He was too busy running. Through the smoldering village, past the bodies, up and over the bridge, and to his Corvette.

All the while his insides were turning inside out. He had made a terrible assumption-that the attack on Nauset Harbor had been a single, isolated action. Now that he knew it hadn't been, visions of his worst fears were flashing before his eyes.

Within seconds of reaching his car, he was screaming back down the turnpike, roaring at full speed back toward his farm on Nauset Heights.

*

Randy Montserrat was dying.

Blood was flowing so freely from the cuts on his wrists and ankles that it had soaked the pile of leaves and pine needles below his feet.

It took much effort for him to raise his head and look over at his wife, Tanya, who was tied to a pine tree about ten feet away from him. The small pool of blood around her feet was also growing. Tears welled up in his eyes as he saw that she was no longer moving.

He let out a muffled scream and once again tried in vain to snap the ropes that were holding him to his tree. But it was no use: the armed men who had so barbari-cally beat and slashed him and Tanya had lashed them to the trees with binds too strong to break. Now Randy, robust for his age of sixty-two, felt the last of his strength leaving him.

He was sure his spirit and soul would soon follow.

Death would bring one respite: He would not have to endure the memory of the nightmare he and Tanya had suffered in the past two hours. The men had come to their isolated beach cottage just as the sun was setting. Without warning they burst in on him, beat both of them, and then proceeded to ransack the house.

After finding little of value-both Randy and Tanya were artists and thus had very little in the way of material goods-the men dragged them out of the house and torched it. Then they marched them up into these woods and tied them to the trees, slashing their wrists and ankles as their final dastardly act.

The men left soon afterward, laughing and growling, almost like they'd become intoxicated by their acts. Through it all, only one of the men spoke. He was a huge bear of a man who was wearing a long black cape in addition to his black uniform.

He had barked to Randy and Tanya in a thick un-American accent that, instead of being killed right away, they were being left to bleed to death in the woods. The

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reason was the men wanted to "leave a gift" for the animals. Randy had gotten the implication right away. There were a half dozen types of animals in the Cape woods-foxes, badgers, even a few wild dogs-that would be attracted to the area by the smell of blood. Undoubtedly, soon after that, the animals would devour them.

Randy let out another howl, this one in hope that both he and his beloved wife would die soon, before the animals came.

He knew only a miracle could save them now.

It was a loud, rumbling noise that brought Randy out of unconsciousness.

Through bleary, blood-soaked eyes, he saw an angel.

"Can you speak?" the man asked him.

Randy looked down at his bleeding hands and realized for the first time that they were no longer bound. Nor were his feet. Instead, he was leaning against the tree, the crumbling bark and pine sap sticking to his blood-soaked body.

"We were ... we were attacked," he managed to mumble, before falling to his knees in exhaustion.

The loss of blood was obviously making him hallucinate, he thought. Either that or he was already dead. Just a minute before, he felt that he was seconds from death in the deserted woods. Now, just a few feet away from him, there was a white sports car, its headlights shining, its engine rumbling, and this man who had cut the ropes from the tree.

"Who are you?" Randy asked the man, who was now kneeling over him.

"That's not important" was the reply.

"My wife ... ?"

"She's still alive," the man said.

Randy looked to his left and saw Tanya, lying close 99

by, dirty and bruised but obviously breathing.

The man moved quickly to bandage Randy's wounds, all the time working by the light of the sports car's headlamps.

"You're going to be OK," the man told him. "You both lost some blood, but the cuts weren't deep. Whoever did this to you wanted you to bleed slowly."

"But how could you possibly have found us?" Randy asked, consciously feeling some of his strength return. "You certainly didn't hear me screaming, did you?"

"That's not important, either," Hunter replied.

He had no ready answer. He had been tearing along the turnpike when his extraordinary intuition began flashing with great intensity. He had learned long before never to question this powerful sixth sense of his, no matter how critical the situation might be. So, even at the moment when his one and only thought was to get back to Nauset Heights as quickly as possible, he nevertheless followed the impulse that was telling him to go slow along the deserted roadway, to look for something wrong. Driving from side to side in order to shine his powerful headlights into the woods, he found the couple just a minute later, about fifty feet off the edge of the road.

Now bandaged and revived, he loaded the two into his car and screeched out of the woods. He turned south, back to the town, but as luck would have it, a militia troop truck was making its way toward him.

A quick flick of his lights stopped the driver, and soon Randy and lanya were turned over to the militiamen for transport back to the town.

Before being loaded into the truck, Randy grasped Hunter's hand, and with a firm grip and deathly sincerity said: "Someday, I'll will pay you back for saving our lives."

Hunter did not reply. He simply got back into his car and roared away.

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*

He searched the farmhouse three times, the barn and other buildings twice. He even ran through the fields, and up to the cliff, and down to the west beach.

But he found nothing. Dominique and Yaz were gone.

There were no outward signs of a struggle, but Yaz's rifle had been left behind. There was no blood anywhere, nor did the footprints in the sandy clay of his front yard look too unusual. Yet the raiders had been there; they had left a calling card. A black steel, three-foot axe had been embedded into the house's front door.

It was two hours before Hunter stopped searching and half collapsed onto the steps of his front porch. He held his head in his hands and came as close to tears as he had in a long time.

His precious, beautiful Domrm'que was gone . . .

Had he chosen not to go to the village, would he have prevented this? Had he chosen not to help the children or stay with the militiamen, or help load the wounded onto the Chinook, would he have arrived back to the farm in time?

If he hadn't had listened to his accursed sixth senst and found the couple in the woods, would he havt saved Dominique and Yaz?

It was the last question that burned inside him-burned a torrid flame that ignited something deep within his soul, something that he thought had been finally laid to rest.

The world had not changed just because he had "re tired" to the farm. If anything, it had become more in sane. How many times had he fooled himself intc thinking that with time, things would evolve and civiliza tion would return? If anything, things were deteriorat ing-and fast.

He had simply chosen to hide away from the evils oi 101

the world. But now the demons had found him. They had tracked him down and had invaded his homestead-the last island of sanity left on earth. They had taken away the only woman he had ever loved, to meet God-knows-what fate.

And all because his damned sixth sense had prevented him from returning in time.

One hour later, as the full moon reached its zenith, the ground around Nauset Heights began to shake.

The small field animals that lived under the barn and the cats who lived in its hayloft all scampered for safety, so great was the rumbling.

Within seconds, the entire top of the cliff was enveloped in a cloud of hot-burning smoke. The convulsions of the earth intensified as an ear-splitting scream shot out from the cliff and traveled down the hill and into the salt marshes below.

In a second, the scream turned into a high-pitched roar, so loud that many of the windows in the farmhouse shattered from the vibration. Then there was flame, and more smoke, and the roar got louder and louder until finally it could get no more terrifying.

At that instant, the small, rotting wooden structure in the middle of the hayfield burst apart in fury as the gleaming, powerful shape of the AV-8B

Harrier jumpjet exploded upward.

It rose about a hundred feet above the farm, lingered in a hover for several moments, and then, in a great burst of angry jet flame and exhaust, rocketed away to the south.

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The commander of the Long Island Self-Defens Forces lowered his NightScope binoculars and checke< his watch.

It was 2345 hours-fifteen minutes to midnight, an< then six long hours to dawn. What would happen be tween now and sunrise was anybody's guess. But as th commander looked down the line of his troops-most o them were working furiously to reinforce the tree-and rubble barricade that stretched for nearly a half mil along the beach-he couldn't help but wonder ho\ many of them would be alive to see the sun come up.