Tomorrow War (26 page)

Viktor looked over at the man he’d just comforted and saw that he had not died at all, but was now resting rather comfortably, his fever suddenly gone, a weak smile cracking his bloated lips.

“We are in the business of selling men for war,” the officer said. “And in this business, every body counts. You’re certainly an odd one. But we believe you might be more valuable to us alive than dead. We need a healer.”

The officer pointed to Viktor.

“Take him out of chains,” he snapped to the other two. “Clean him up. Put him in a uniform. We now have our medic.”

Outside Kabul Downs

H
AWK HUNTER—AKA THE
Wingman, aka The Sky Ghost—hadn’t slept in three days.

That was normal these days. Hunter had always viewed sleep as an annoyance. An unnecessary break in the action movie that was his life. Sleep interfered. It was lost time. Missing hours that one could never get back. He’d trained himself long before to exist on coffee and catnaps for as long as three weeks or more. In fact, at these times, he found his instincts heightened, more acute.

But there was something more to it than that. There was one indisputable fact about sleep, especially during times of intense conflict: Hunter knew that eventually his enemies would have to go to sleep. And when they did, that would give him another advantage. In combat, some times that’s usually all that was needed to succeed.

Now he was downing a massive cup of coffee, no cream, eight teaspoons of sugar. It was very early in the morning. The sun would be up in thirty minutes. He was standing just outside a makeshift airplane hangar at Red Base One, a flat piece of grassy plain that served as the airfield for six squadrons of the Red Air Corps’ prop-drive fighters.

Three dozen of these biplanes were warming up on the field now. This was the Red Force dawn patrol, getting ready to take off.

Hunter had been flying for the Reds for three weeks and in that time he’d fallen in love with the Red Force biplane. It looked like an ancient Sopwith Camel on steroids, but in reality it was altogether a different airplane.

It was designed like a fine classic automobile. Hunter had learned the Red Forces had built these airplanes at an old auto-assembly plant about fifty miles south of Kabul Downs, in a place called Xanana.

The biplane—officially known as the SuperCamel—had a rugged, finely tuned twelve-cylinder 3,200-horsepower engine with an unbelievable kick to it. The wings were sturdy and well wired, as was the fuselage. This gave the airplane a great degree of maneuverability.

Then there was the cannon.

One airplane from where Hunter was really from was called the A-10 Thunderbolt II. It was a ground-support aircraft, not very fast, but durable and able to withstand lots of punishment. It was built around a huge cannon called the GAU-8 Avenger.

This was in a similar style with the SuperCamel. The cannon inside the crimson biplane and it ammunition belt took up most of the fuselage. Just like the A-10, the SuperCamel was really a cannon with an airplane wrapped around it. That appealed to Hunter.

He was about halfway through his coffee now and rereading a map of this day’s Blue Force disbursements. Not much had changed around the defense perimeter of the city. The Blues were just as strong as the day before, despite the huge Red Army raid, which had gotten inside the city twenty-four hours earlier.

A photo snapped of the two Blue Force airfields just a half hour earlier showed they’d be launching three squadrons, as well, this morning. Again, in the air both sides would be evenly matched.

He finished his coffee and folded the map and took a deep breath of the cool morning air.

It was time to get flying.

Hunter adjusted his leather flying cap, checked his parachute straps, and then walked out to his airplane. The rest of the squadron members were already inside their aircraft, warming the precise engines, filling the morning air with a rumbling so low, it actually shook the ground.

He reached his airplane and climbed in. Two ground-crew members helped strap him in. They handed him a last-minute weather report. The skies would remain clear and the winds would be negligible. Just the kind of atmospherics Hunter liked.

He gunned his engine and heard it growl back in fine form. He checked his cannon’s diagnostic. The weapon was at full power. He checked his ammo load. It was boasting twelve hundred rounds for his disposal.

That, and a full tank of gas, was all he needed.

He saw a bright flash of red light come from the base control tower. It blinked three times, paused, then blinked twice more. This was a signal indicating that the Blue Force dawn patrol was just taking off. Once again the morning would start with a bang.

Hunter knew deep inside that in another life he had come up against a variety of aerial opponents and had bested them all. Even here in this strange world, he’d fought against German jet fighters, buzz bombs, and rocket planes, as well as the Japanese SuperZero.

But of all those opponents, he’d never come up against anything like the Blue Forces SuperSpad.

It was such an odd little airplane. Its overall appearance and design came directly from the Spad World War One fighter. This aircraft was about twice the size of the original Spad, was heavily armored and, like the SuperCamel, was made of metal and not wood. But the strangest thing about it was its power plant. It carried a double-reaction jet engine.

Now this was strange because the engine in the Super-Spad was made for an airplane at least twice its size. But the Blues, by being surrounded, had only one engine design they could make and only one airframe available, and while they did not exactly match the resulting airplane, it could fly, it could carry weapons aloft, and in the end, that’s all you really want.

Just as Hunter’s SuperCamel was built around its big gun, the SuperSpad was built around its big engine. It also carried four machine guns and a good supply of ammo, which made for a classic matchup. A fast, lightly armed jet airplane against a slower, heavily armed prop-driven one.

However, the Blue pilots were a tad better than the Red fliers, and so in the course of the first year of the war, the Blues had dominated the skies. That is until Hunter arrived on the scene.

But in any kind of combat, the victor always needs some kind of advantage over the eventual loser. And it took awhile before Hunter pinpointed exactly what the weakness of the SuperSpad was. But when he did, it turned the tide of the battle in the air.

Hunter knew the double-reaction engine was usually a sturdy piece of machinery, able to take some punishment and keep on working. But there was a weak link in its design. It was in the double-reaction chamber itself, where the two chemicals mixed together to provide the reaction. There was a valve that regulated the chemical mixing, called the primary-flow valve.

The first time Hunter got into an air tangle with the Blues—three weeks ago—he’d lured a SuperSpad over Red lines and then shot him down. He had the carcass of the SuperSpad hauled back to Red Base One, where he dissected it.

To no surprise, he found that the critical flow valve was located at the very bottom of the SuperSpad’s fuselage on the right side. Like everything else on the SuperSpad, it was jammed tight inside the relatively narrow fuselage.

Hunter knew that a cannon shot or two in that location would be all that was needed to down a SuperSpad “super quick.”

He passed this information along to Red Air Force high command, and that’s when Hunter, who up to that time had just been a guy who could fly who happened to have been rescued by the pilot-strapped Red Forces on a raid inside the city, began getting noticed. He was activated as provisional major in the Red Air Corps the next day and had been flying full-time ever since.

It was important that the Reds did not give away their secret of how they could destroy the SuperSpads with minimum effort. The word went out to the Red pilots to engage the Blues in pairs. While one shot at the enemy target in the normal way—out of the sun or even head-on—the wingman would sneak underneath the Blue plane and put a string of cannon shells into its Achilles’ heel. The tactic worked right away, and the air battle had turned to the Reds’ advantage.

The Blues still hadn’t figured it out.

Hunter’s engine finally reached its proper RPMs, and everything else on his crowded but simple control panel was still green. He spoke to the tower and received his final clearance for takeoff. Another day of combat was about to begin.

He was in the process of popping his brakes when he saw an odd hunched-over figure in a long trench coat and a battle helmet stumbling toward him.

It was Y.

Hunter killed his engine and allowed the OSS agent to approach. He knew Y was going through a bad time. He’d heard about the travails he and the rest of the searchers on the rescue mission had gone through, including how Y had taken to alcohol suddenly at the beginning of the trip, and now, just couldn’t seem to shake it.

Hunter had yet to have any kind of lengthy talk with Y since the OSS man arrived in the Red camp. They had exchanged a few words the night before, but Y quickly retired to his tent, where he’d spent most of the night drinking other people’s rum rations.

Hunter felt terrible about this. Y was his friend—both here and Back There. To see him in such bad shape was like a punch in the stomach. Hunter could empathize with him, though—Crabb and Zoltan had briefed him on how Y’s problems only increased when he lost Emma, the brief love of his life. Crabb and Zoltan had assured him that Emma was one of the world’s great beauties and a very sweet girl to boot, and there was no doubt Y was taking it very hard.

Beautiful? Sweet? But gone?

Yes, Hunter had felt that type of pain before.

Now as Y approached, he was waving his hands, indicating that Hunter should shut down his engine and that he wanted to talk. The fact that the engine was already shut down and Y didn’t know it, spoke volumes about just how bad his condition was getting.

“We have to talk,” Y said, finally arriving at the airplane and leaning against its side. He looked up at Hunter, and the Wingman winced. Y was a mess. His eyes were horribly bloodshot, his face was tired and drawn. He was pale and looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, even though just the opposite was true.

“What do you need?” Hunter asked him. “Just name it.”

“I have to … ask you something,” Y said.

“Shoot,” Hunter said, encouraging him.

“You know now the details of how we got here,” Y began. “How we wound up stealing an aircraft carrier, one that needed tugboats to move it. Then we reached the place in Vietnam where you left the airplane in the cave and there was a major battle going on there. Then we found out you took a train, threw a lot of weapons on it, and drove it straight through the badlands of Asia.”

Yaz paused a moment.

“Those things, and a lot of other little things,” he went on, “I don’t know … When they were happening, I felt very, very strange. Like they all seemed familiar to me—like I had either done them myself or someone else had done them and told me about it. Or, maybe like, I had read about them in some books somewhere—except they were happening to me or people that I knew. What do you make of all that?”

Hunter just stared back at his friend. He’d been fully briefed by Zoltan, Crabb, and the Jones boys on what they’d gone through trying to find him after the super-bombing. And like Y, those events
did
seem to have an eerily familiar ring to him. Even the Jones boys looked familiar to him the first time he set eyes on them, as did Kurjan, the Red Force intelligence man.

But why?

All he could theorize was that these things had in some way happened to him Back There. This was a fascinating if unsettling theory. Not only were there many parallel universes, but events in each might be similar, but not exact. Like Y, Hunter had suffered from a weird sense of déjà vu since arriving in this strange world. It was Zoltan who told him a year ago—back in Iceland during the war against Germany—that it was best he didn’t think about such things too deeply. This was advice Hunter had found hard to take at first, but successful for his mental well-being in the long run.

He now told Y the same thing.

“You know I’m not from here,” he said to the OSS man. “I just got to believe that back where I did come from, I did some of these things, and now, here, I’m reliving these adventures in just a slightly distorted way. Parallel events. Parallel lives. That seems to be the way it is.”

Y thought about this for a moment, then his eyes brightened.

“So what you’re saying, then, is that maybe, if I was to somehow get to where you originally came from, there is a chance that maybe …”

His voice trailed off.

“Maybe what?” Hunter asked.

“That maybe, Emma is there, too?” Y finally blurted out. “That maybe I can find her again?”

The words hit Hunter like bullets to the brain. If someone lost their love in one world, could they simply go to another world and “find” her again? Hunter felt his chest tighten, his hands balled into fists. He didn’t want to address this topic; he didn’t even want to think about it, because either way, in his case, the reply was too painful.

So he just shook his head.

“I don’t know, Yaz,” he said finally. “I just don’t know.”

With that, Hunter reached down to start his engine again. But Y started banging once more on the side of the airplane.

“Just one more thing, then,” he asked, back to slurring his words. “How did you know to come
here?
What happened after you dropped the bomb? I have to know. That’s why they sent me after you in the first place.”

Again Y’s words hit him like a string of bullets in the gut. Why did Hunter come here to far-off Afghanistan instead of turning for home after the superbomber survived the titanic blast?

There was no way he could explain it to anyone because he didn’t quite understand it himself.

He decided to tell Y only the basics.

“A ghost told me to come here,” he said truthfully. “And I think the rest should be … well, classified, until we get to another place that’s more secure.”