Target: Point Zero (38 page)

That all these airplanes, and the men within them, were now enemies of the United American cause was simply a matter of economics. The Cult was involved in the bizarre activities on Lolita, and anyone in their employ became an enemy of the United Americans. Wa could not help but feel some pity for the mercs who had thrown in with the ruthless Cult. That was the trouble with being a pay-check soldier—it really didn’t make any difference which side you were on.

“Hope you all got paid in advance,” he muttered.

The vanguard of his C-5 force was now about twenty-two miles out from Lolita. The standard formation had changed slightly since they’d left Da Nang. The gunships and missile planes were up front, the troopers, nav planes and refuelers were hanging back. Everyone was flying way down on the deck—Wa’s C-5 was barely seven hundred fifty feet off the top of the waves. The missile ships were actually fifty feet below and behind him.

At twenty miles out, one of the other shooters launched another spread of Phoenix missiles. Six of them left the underwing on the missile ship on Wa’s left, each one trailing a trademark cloud of orange-white smoke in its wake. Not thirty seconds later, Wa could see six nearly simultaneous puffs of flame explode over the barren, oddly flat Lolita Island. Six more kills, all of them right on the money.

But this meant there were still some fifty-odd enemy airplanes to deal with.

At nineteen miles out, the air weapons warning buzzer went off in Wa’s cockpit—being unfamiliar with the C-5’s layout, it took him a few moments to figure out what was happening. But then it became very clear: some of the fighters that had been circling Lolita had finally wised up. They’d broken away from their suicidal orbital pattern and were now heading right for the oncoming force of C-5s. Warplanes like Tornados, Jaguars and Q-5s would normally make short work of the relatively slow, leviathan Galaxys—and the sight of thirty of them heading towards Lolita must have made for an inviting sight, a “target-rich environment” in military speak.

But of course, that was the whole idea.

Flying two and a half miles above the lead C-5s, JT Toomey was also squirming in his seat.

He, too, had been quickly rushed into service just moments after landing in Da Nang from the code-cracking trip to Tommy Island. While Wa had run to one of the C-5s as soon as the alert was sounded, Toomey had headed for the part of Da Nang field that housed the UAAF’s fighter squadrons. But unlike the Galaxy units, which were always in need of a pilot or two, just about all the fighters were claimed by the time JT arrived on the scene. As a result, he found himself strapping into the last of the UA’s current auxiliaries, the ancient triangle-winged curiosity known as the F-106 Delta Dart.

To say the ’106 was old was like saying the South China Sea was a pond. This model, dredged from an air museum somewhere in South America, was more elderly than Toomey’s father. It was big, heavy, lopsided to a factor of five degrees and ran damn hot at altitude. But it was a jet fighter nevertheless, with a full cannon load in its nose and two racks of unguided missiles under its wings. Toomey had gone into battle with much less.

Flying in chevrons of three each all around him were the UA’s most potent air unit—the famous F-20 Tiger-sharks of the Football City Air Force. As far as firepower, maneuverability, endurance and just pure speed, it would be hard to beat an F-20. Trouble was, there were only twelve of them, and the hodge-podge of secondary UA warplanes only numbered a dozen and a half more.

According to JT’s rudimentary air defense radar, there were more than fifty enemy airplanes coming right at the combined United American force, putting the UA at a clear two-to-one disadvantage as far as the fighters went. Troublesome if not impossible odds.

But there was little Toomey or anyone else could do about that now. They were just a minute or two away from a battle royale. He reached down and began clicking on his weapons systems even as the first line of Tornados began diving onto the advancing C-5s.

Toomey took in two long breaths of oxygen and then on his signal dove out of the sun along with five of the Tigersharks.

“
This
will be very interesting,” he murmured to himself.

The first wave of Tornados hit the C-5s just as the F-20s appeared out of the sun.

Ben Wa was too busy grappling with the controls of the big Galaxy gunship to breathe a sigh of relief when the Tigersharks showed up—suckering in the enemy warplanes was one thing; actually avoiding them until the F-20s could spring their surprise was another.

The plan was for the C-5 gunships to break through the furball enveloping the F-20s and the opposing fighters and get in close to Lolita. But the scene in front of them almost defied description. The sky was literally filled with jet fighters, twisting, turning, diving, climbing. Anyone who had a cannon was firing it—there were so many tracers crisscrossing in front of Wa’s eyes, their hypnotic effect disoriented him for a few moments. He shook away this illusion and jammed his airplane’s throttles ahead to full max power.

A Tornado flashed right past his nose, its cannon sending streams of fire towards the gunship off to Wa’s right. A Q-5 appeared just below him, its pilot pulling out of a murderous power dive, his sights set on the same Galaxy. Wa immediately screamed into his intercom, and not two seconds later, the twenty-one massive GE GAU-8/A thirty-mm cannons in his gunship’s hold came alive in full mechanical computer-controlled power. They simply vaporized both enemy airplanes, sending out an incredible eleven-thousand cannon rounds in a two-second burst.

Now Wa and his line of gunships pressed on, through the sky raining smoking airplanes, wreckage and, in some cases, horribly falling bodies. It took all of thirty seconds to finally clear the incredible dogfight—the longest half minute of Wa’s life. But when it was over, he was still in one piece and so were the other six gunships.

Lolita was just five miles away from them now—the slab of an island was cloaked in smoke and flames; no less than eighteen aircraft lay burning on its hard surface or in the shallow waters offshore. There were many troops in evidence on the island, too; Cult soldiers, Rat mercs scrambling around, looking for cover in a place that had virtually none. Wa did a quick sweep of the land mass with his weapons detection system looking for any substantial AA threat—there was none. One of the other gunships did the same for the pair of Cult battleships anchored offshore. They did have Sea Dart antiaircraft systems onboard, but none of them had gone red—at least, not yet.

Three miles out now, and Wa gave the call back to his gun crews to get ready. Of the twenty-one guns sticking out of the left side of the massive gunship, each one was capable of spitting out four thousand rounds a minute; the computer-controlled firing system for all this took as much power as two of the Galaxy’s engines. The ammunition belts alone for the twenty-one guns were literally miles long. A five-second burst could cover an area equal to three football fields with at least one cannon round exploding every six inches.

Two miles out and Wa got the call from the back that all systems were green. Through the left side of his headphones he heard one of the other gunship commanders call out that the Sea Dart AA missiles on the two Cult battleships were warming up to yellow, the next step away from going red and being able to fire. Ben couldn’t worry about the naval AA threat at the moment. He had other things to do.

One mile out now. He could see the troops on Lolita diving wildly for defensive positions—they’d spotted the oncoming six pack of gunships and Wa could almost feel the terror gripping the enemy troops. They knew of the huge United American C-5 gunships; they knew what utter destruction they could deliver. And here they were, on a five square mile concrete island with no place to run, no place to hide.

At a half mile out, Wa sent a message back to the five other gunships, and as one, they began rising in altitude. His was the first one over the beach, making landfall above the island’s northwestern tip just as he reached the preordained firing altitude of thirty-five hundred feet. There was absolute panic below him now—there were probably two hundred fifty troops scrambling around, many were heading to the southern beaches, others were jumping into the shallows off to the east. Again, Wa could not help but feel a pang of conscience for these paid warriors; they’d simply signed on with the wrong side. Now they had to pay the price.

He called back to his gunmasters and told them to commence firing. A few seconds later, the flight compartment was filled with the strangely muted sound of the gunship’s weapons computers ordering the twenty-one individual cannons to fire. An instant later the whole airplane began shuddering, again a strangely muzzled vibration as the massive weapons began spitting out thousands of uranium-tipped cannon rounds.

There was nothing but smoke at first—probably the worst vantage point to see
Nozo’s
guns in action was up on the flight deck. The five-second burst seemed to last forever, but finally, the whirring sound stopped and the smoke cleared away. Wa craned his neck to the left—below him he could see several dozen enemy soldiers, lying broken and bloody on the hot concrete close by the huge orange cross; they were all dead, literally perforated by the cannon rounds. There were never any wounded soldiers after a gunship attack like this. Anyone caught within the firing zone died in the first few seconds of the surgical multicannon burst.

Wa pulled the C-5 back to level flight and increased throttle just as the second-in-line gunship opened up on an area south of the one
Nozo
had just pulverized. Wa pulled hard right, pressing the C-5’s nose back to the northwest. The gigantic dogfight was now stretched from one horizon to another. Wa’s mouth dropped open—it looked like something from a dream. Planes were streaking all across the sky, some firing their weapons, others in flames themselves. The contrails left by their smoking wreckage now crisscrossed the sky like a canvas from a madman’s fever.

But who was winning?

It was impossible for him to tell. Wa’s headphones were filled with a cacophony of sounds—excited radio calls between the outnumbered UA pilots, telling each other to watch out here, look out there, bogies closing from twelve o’clock, others coming out of the six…He heard screams, whoops, yelps of both pain and joy. Nearly one hundred jet airplanes were mixing it up—that had to be some kind of record. But numbers alone said the enemy still had the advantage over the United American aerial force. In the sounds bouncing around in his ears, Wa could hear a desperate edge in the intonations of the UA pilots.

Yet in among this chatter, mixed way down in this symphony of terror and men dying, Wa thought he heard another voice. A familiar one, echoing way off in the distance.

“Hang on!” this
ghostly voice was saying. “I’m on my way…”

Flailing wildly all over the crowded sky in his antique F-106, Toomey had heard the strange, disembodied voice, too, somehow discerning the six words in the racket pouring out of his headphones.

“Hang on. I’m on the way…”

Who the hell is that?
he wondered as he climbed on to the tail of an enemy Jaguar.

Just like every other time he’d been inside an ACM, this dogfight was passing before Toomey’s eyes in ultraslow motion. All types of warplanes were falling out of the sky around him. Tornados, Jags, F-20s, C-5s. Of all the aircraft involved in this titanic battle, the poor, stubby A-7s and the underpowered Q-9s were probably the worst suited; more of them were going down than anyone else.

The furball was so chaotic, so confusing, Toomey had no idea how many enemy planes he’d downed. He’d nailed at least two Tornados—they weren’t the best air combat fighters in close—and two Jags, the latest one now plummeting away from him, minus its tail and left wing. His F-106, heavy and sluggish, had taken about a dozen direct hits, mostly on its wingtips and tailcone. One advantage of tooling around in this ancient beast was that back in the fifties, when the Dart was born, they really knew how to screw the bolts on tight. The plane was nothing if not rugged—in fact, Toomey swore that in at least two cannon runs taken at him by a Tornado, the rounds actually bounced off his airplane’s thick skin.

Or at least it seemed that way.

A pair of F-20s went streaking by him now—to his dismay, both were heavily damaged and smoking, though they were still in the fight. Above him, he saw a UA Corsair simply evaporate in a combined barrage from three Tornados; below him, one of the C-5 missile shooters, caught in the middle of the knifefight without much leeway to fire its AA-weapons, had its left wing blown away by two Jags. It was going over, slowly, but irretrievably. A few seconds later the big plane impacted with a mighty crash into the already wreckage strewn sea, taking seventeen men down with it.

Toomey gritted his teeth and went after the Jags that had iced the big shooter, but deep in his gut, he could feel the tide was turning in favor of the enemy pilots simply because they had more airplanes.

Suddenly, things got a lot worse.

It came in a call from one of the C-5 early warning ships, a cousin to
Black Eyes
hiding way in the back. Its pilot was reporting yet another large aerial force heading for the battle out of the southwest. Preliminary indications showed at least four dozen fighter-size aircraft. They appeared to be one type of airplane—a sure indication of a merc force—and were cruising at three hundred fifty knots, a typical precombat speed.

As word of this new development flashed to all the UA aircraft, Toomey tried and failed to get the large aerial group on his dinky air defense radar set. But he didn’t need to see these newcomers to know that if they were indeed heading for this battle to fight on the side of the Cult and their allies, then the United American force
was
doomed—it was as simple as that.

At that precise moment, he heard those six words again:
Hang on. I’m on the way.

Whose voice was that?

Toomey couldn’t even hazard a guess at this point.