Tomorrow War (35 page)

Of the three, the Irishman seemed to Zoltan to be the most likely one to spill his guts. But Fitz wasn’t biting. He was too busy with his binoculars, watching the mass of Blue troops still in position near that bloody bridge.

“I’ve been told that whatever happened during the superbombing mission is classified, and should remain that way,” he replied coldly.

But Crabb wasn’t going to let it go at that. They had the Grim Reaper breathing down their necks. It hardly seemed the time for hiding behind military niceties, such as suddenly classified operations.

“Listen, we came halfway around the world looking for you guys,” Crabb said heatedly. “And we might not get out of this hellhole alive. So don’t you think we deserve to know what went down?”

Fitz just shrugged and kept looking through his spyglass.

“What can I tell you then?” he finally replied. “It was rough—
very
rough. Especially on Hunter—”

“And that’s all we’re saying,” JT interrupted with emphasis. “So just button your flaps, OK?”

Crabb took offense to that line.

“Hey,
dude,
we risked our lives to find you guys,” he snapped back at JT. “Don’t forget that …”

“Calm down!” Ben yelled, turning on Zoltan and Crabb. “What the fuck else do you want to know? Fitz is right. It was really rough on Hawk. He was a changed guy after it was over. We all wanted to go home—you think we didn’t? But Hawk said something else was up. Something he
had
to pursue. He couldn’t explain it. He didn’t even know what it was about. But we took a vote and it was unanimous. We decided to come with him. What would you have done?”

There was another long silence.

“The same thing, I’m sure,” Zoltan finally said. It was odd but he was not picking up any bad vibes from the three men. This indicated to him that whatever secrets they were holding, were buried very deeply in their psyches. Either that, or they knew very little of what happened to Hunter at all.

There was another long silence among them.

“So where do you think Hunter’s gone now?” Zoltan asked Fitz.

The Irishman finally took his eyes from the binoculars and looked at the psychic.

“I have no idea,” he answered gloomily.

“Think he’s coming back?” Zoltan asked.

That’s when JT came flying across the trench at the psychic. Punches were thrown, but none landed. Ben and Fitz stopped JT. Crabb grabbed ahold of Zoltan.

“Jeesuzz, settle down everybody!” Fitz cried. “We’ve got enough bloody problems without fighting amongst ourselves.”

That’s when Fitz got very quiet.

“Look, I really don’t know Hawk that well,” he said softly. “I mean, I
feel
like I know him—but I really don’t. But he certainly changed that day after we dropped the bomb. He’d had a communion with a spirit, or something. After that, he was just focused on this one thing. This thing that he didn’t even know fully himself. It was like he expected something to be here when we arrived. Something or someone that would make sense out of the crazy life he seemed to be leading. Whatever it was, he didn’t tell me—he didn’t tell anyone. But whatever it was, it was driving him hard. And it brought us here. To this hellhole. That’s all we know really ….”

A very long silence. Nothing but the wind was crying.

“You said he changed,” Crabb said at last. “Was it enough for him to just leave us here to die?”

JT had to be held down again—but Fitz was just shaking his head.

“I don’t know,” the Irishman said. “Once you get mixed up with ghosts …”

He let his voice trail off for a moment.

“It’s him telling us to surrender,” Fitz began again slowly. “That’s what bothers me. I hate to say it, but it makes me think that maybe—”

At that point Kurjan leapt into the trench interrupting Fitz’s somber speech. The Red Force intell man was holding a handful of photos—long-range recon pics.

“Ready for some more bad news?” he asked gloomily.

“No,” JT replied angrily.

Fitz and Zoltan looked at the recon photos. It showed more advance Black Army troops were flooding into the area and were slowly encircling what was left of the Red southern front.

“We gave orders to everyone out on the flanks to just get out of their way,” Kurjan said. “But us, the ones who are here—we got no way out. We’re stuck and they’re coming fast.”

Fitz spit angrily.

“This quiet is driving me nuts,” he said, putting the spyglass back up and zeroing in on the thousands of Blue troops just a mile or so away. “We’ve given up. What are they waiting for?”

He got his answer not two seconds later.

It came at first like the sound of the wind screaming. Then the air itself actually began to shake.

They all looked off to the south and were astonished to see that the sky was suddenly full with large, dark forms. They weren’t airplanes—that much was certain. But they were flying machines and they were black and they were heading right for them.

“My God!” Kurjan cried. “Are those …
Beaters?”

They were. More commonly known as Octocopters, Beaters were ungainly, gigantic eight-rotor flying contraptions the size of a small airliner. Once in flight, Beaters always looked like they were waging a losing war against the laws of aerodynamics. They flew, but just barely. Their engines were usually belching smoke and sometimes flames. They were noisy, slow, and always seemed to be on the verge of plowing in.

They could also carry as many as one thousand troops each. And judging by the way these Beaters were flying—under 75 mph and very close to the ground—they all seemed extremely overloaded. It was obvious they belonged to the Black Army.

“Beaters?” Fitz said over and over, not quite believing it. “That worm Sluggo never said anything to us about Beaters.”

“Jeesuz, are they coming for us?” Ben wondered with no little nervousness in his voice.

They had that answer just a few seconds later when the first line of the monstrous helicopters flew over their position—and kept on going. They slowed a bit just over the bloody bridge and began setting down about a quarter mile behind the Blue Army Line.

Almost immediately the sound of gunfire could be heard.

“Son of a bitch!” JT yelled. “That asshole Sluggo was right about one thing: the Blacks are just going right over us—and putting it to the blue bloods.”

It seemed strange, but it was apparently true. In seconds the air above them was filled with tracer fire from Blue Army AAA guns. It was not aimed at Red base, but at the oncoming Black Army Beaters.

“Jeesuz, how
weird
is this?” Kurjan yelled.

“They can kick ass on each other all they want,” Crabb shouted back. “But what does this mean for us?”

Suddenly Fitz was standing up in the trench, his huge double-barrel machine gun up on his shoulder.

“I say, let’s find out!” he cried.

With that, a second line of Beaters roared overhead. Fitz took aim on one of them and let loose a long double stream of tracer bullets. He immediately scored hits up and down the closest Beater, now just one hundred feet above them. There was a series of small explosions, followed by a much larger one.

Fitz had just enough time to yell: “Hit the deck!” The next second the huge helicopter went down and crashed at the end of the base’s main runway.

There was a tremendous explosion. The ground shook beneath their feet once again. They looked up to see a big copter become engulfed in flames.

“Christ!” Crabb yelled. “This is unbelievable.”

But suddenly Kurjan and Fitz were up and running toward the crash site.

“Where the hell are they going?” Zoltan yelled.

“Just watch and learn, swami!” JT shouted back at him.

Baffled, Zoltan and Crabb followed the two men as they began crawling into the wreckage, emerging soon afterward with one of the aircraft’s occupants dragging behind them.

Crabb jumped up and helped Kurjan and Fitz pull the Black Army soldier into the trench. He was badly hurt. His black uniform was stained with blood and oil from the crash. Kurjan stuck a canteen against the man’s lips and began pouring. Then he sat him up and gave him the once-over.

“This guy ain’t no run-of-the-mill mercenary,” Kurjan declared, examining the man’s uniform and equipment “He’s a Special Forces type. Part of a shock-troop unit, I’d say.”

“That means they’re going for something inside the city, something they need to capture before their main forces arrive,” Fitz said. “But what could it be?”

“Let’s ask him,” Kurjan said.

He slapped the man awake. The soldier was semiconscious and in great pain. But he seemed aware that his life had been saved, at least temporarily.

“What was your target?” Kurjan asked him. “Where were you going?”

The man just laughed at him, causing a bloody gush from his mouth and nose. “Like I should tell you for nothing?” he replied in German. “Give me some morphine and I’ll tell you all.”

Fitz was in no mood to haggle. He drew his field knife and pressed against the man’s pulsating jugular.

“Where were you going?” he asked him sternly.

The man immediately began freaking out. It took all five of them to hold him down. Finally he collapsed, took a deep breath, and started talking.

“There is a place … deep inside the city,” he began. “A central command post … it is deep underground … impossible to bomb from the air …. We were to overtake it. It is the key to this battle we were told …. When we heard you Reds had surrendered, it forced us to make our move. We
had
to get the central command of the Blues. Those were our orders.”

The man laughed again, more blood gushed from him.

“Ah, but my friends, you have simply saved me from dying later rather than sooner,” he said through bloody lips. “And for this, I thank you.”

With that, the man fell over, dead.

Fitz and Kurjan pushed him out of the trench and then slumped back down again.

“Well, at least we know Hawk was right about one thing,” Ben said. “That central command post was the key to this whole fucking war!”

“Looking back on it,” Kurjan said, “maybe we should have tried to find it and take it out ourselves.”

“You mean do a ground raid?” Fitz asked.

“That would have been the only way,” Kurjan replied. “Hawk himself said the place was too hard for anything we had to bomb it with. Even the HellJets—cool as they are—probably wouldn’t have put a dent in it.”

Fitz just nodded sadly. “Hawk said he believed the station was at least two hundred feet underground—and concrete reinforced. Though I don’t know how he knew that, I’m sure he was right.”

“Well, we’re really fucked now then,” JT said bitterly. “Whether it’s the Blues or the Blacks, whoever has control of that place by the end of the day will stomp us for good. They’ll be using us for target practice. What’s left of us …”

JT’s harsh words seemed to be cruelly prophetic because a moment later artillery shells began raining down on Red Base One—from two directions.

“God, how screwy is this?” Fitz yelled and they all went down for cover. “The Blacks are fighting the Blues, the Blues are fighting the Blacks, and they’re
both
throwing shells at us!”

“We’ll need a miracle to get out of this,” Crabb said. “And I mean a
real
miracle …”

But just as those words were coming out of Crabb’s mouth, they were blotted out by the sound of another tremendous scream.

High above them, they saw the colossal outline of an airplane.

Kurjan nearly fainted dead away. This was the largest flying thing he could have ever imagined. It looked like a battleship with wings. It was so monstrous, it seemed to take up all of the sky.

“Holy Lazarus!” Kurjan yelled.
“What the hell is that?”

No one in the trench could even speak. But they all knew exactly what it was.

It was the B-2000 superbomber.

“Well, at least we know where the hell Hunter went!” JT bellowed.

There was no doubt that Hunter was behind the controls of the colossal bomber. Apparently he’d rushed back to Kwai and was somehow able to lift the giant off the ground and return to the scene—all in the space of just a few hours.

But now that he was here with the flying battleship, what was he planning on doing with it?

“Just how many superbombs was that thing carrying?” Zoltan cried out.

“If he drops one here,” Crabb added, “Jeesuzz, the whole country will sink!”

“Relax,” Fitz told them. “There was only one bomb like that.”

He turned to JT and Ben, and asked under his breath: “Right?”

They both shrugged. They had no idea.

But any notion they had that Hunter might be on a long-range bombing run was dispelled by another sudden turn of events. As streams of antiaircraft fire began rising up from the city aimed at the huge airplane, the super-bomber suddenly shifted downward. They saw the bursts of flame erupt from its multitude of engines, indicating their double-burners had been lit. The additional speed was apparent right away. The huge airplane started diving at about twenty thousand feet. In seconds, it was going more than Mach 2 and heading straight down to a point somewhere in Kabul Downs.

It hit two seconds later ….

What happened next was so intense, those who witnessed it would have their psyches scarred for the rest of their lives.

The huge bomber hit with the speed of a meteorite zooming in from outer space. Those watching at Red Base One hit the dirt immediately—but that did no good. The ground shook mightily for two full minutes, small cracks in its surface appeared everywhere. Unlike the massive artillery barrage, this was a
real
earthquake. This impact was so intense, the dust that rose from the crash immediately became superheated. In seconds a gigantic thunderstorm broke out, with lightning so intense, it burned the retinas of anyone who dared to look at it.

Even before the ground stopped shaking, it was apparent what had happened: Hunter had slammed the big jet into the Blue Forces subterranean central command station.

The Blue artillery barrage stopped immediately.

Those in the forward trench stood up and just stared at the city and the giant lightning-packed cloud rising above it. It looked like a scene from Hell.