Ghost War (10 page)

“What the hell language is that?” Ben asked.

Hunter had a hard time believing it. “It’s Arabic,” he replied. “A very old dialect. Goes way back.”

“What’s it say?” Frost wanted to know. “Can you read it?”

Hunter could, but just barely. “It
is
a dispersement order,” he said slowly. “Not many instructions. Just some coordinates for a rendezvous point of some kind.”

“So they all might be heading to one place, just like we thought,” Ben said.

“Looks that way,” Hunter replied, quickly taking down the English translation of the longitude and latitude points.

“Any idea where those points are, Hawk?” Kurjan asked.

Hunter closed his eyes and thought for a moment. He conjured up a vision of a world map in his head, calculating over from known longitude/latitude points. He had the answer in less than ten seconds.

“Damn,” he whispered. “I don’t believe it….”

Ben was practically shaking him by now.

“Where the hell is it, Hawk?” he asked. “Where the hell are the battleships going?”

Hunter looked up at them. “Believe it or not,” he said. “I think they’re heading for Vietnam….”

The next day

I
T WAS UNUSUALLY FOGGY
over Edwards.

General Jones and Yaz were sitting in a HumVee at the side of the longest runway, their eyes straining to see through the unseasonal mist.

“Of all the damn days to be fogged-in,” Jones said, his voice uncharacteristically gravelly. “Whoever heard of fog in the desert.”

Yaz could only shrug. He certainly didn’t know. He was Navy man—oceans, he knew about. Not deserts.

He looked out on the line of C-5s, all of which were in some degree of disassembly. The weather was so bad, Jones had reluctantly called a halt to all flight testing, a critical delay in the timetable for getting more of the converted Galaxy transports over to the South Pacific.

But there was one airplane he had allowed to take off, almost sixteen hours before. They were now anxiously waiting for this airplane’s return.

“What time are we at?” Jones asked.

Yaz checked his chronometer. “I’ve got 1100 hours on the dot, sir.”

Jones began fidgeting with his long-extinguished pipe.

“They were due back here forty-five minutes ago,” he half-muttered. “God, if we lose them—and that plane—then we might as well …”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. Suddenly the foggy morning air was reverberating with sound and vibration. Instantly the two sensations combined into one mighty roar, made by a machine unlike any in the world. It stung their ears as it streaked overhead, still unseen.

They both let out a breath of relief. “They’re here,” Jones finally exhaled.

Within seconds, the portable lights lining the runway snapped on. The roar went overhead once again, and then got lower in tone. It was coming in for a landing.

They watched as the fog at the far end of the runway suddenly turned bright pink, then bright orange, and then finally deep red. A second later, a sleek black form burst through the colored mist. It touched down not five seconds later, and was soon streaking by Jones and Yaz.

“A good landing,” Jones declared. “Good pilots.”

It was an SR-71 Blackbird, the near-hypersonic spy plane operated by the famous brother-team of Sky High Spies, Inc. The airplane was capable of speeds close to 2500 mph or more, and could fly nearly eighteen miles high. It had just returned from a flight which took it halfway around the world, literally.

The Blackbird slowed to a crawl with the help of three deployed parachutes, and then taxied over to where Jones and Yaz were waiting.

A ground crew appeared and began servicing the strange airplane even before it rolled to a stop. The double canopy soon popped open and two white-suited pilots climbed out.

Jones and Yaz walked over to greet them. They were Jeff and George Kephart, the Sky High Spies themselves.

“How’d it go, guys?” Jones asked, shaking hands with them.

Brother Jeff pulled off his helmet. “Bumpy the whole way over and back,” he reported. “But we’ve got a lot of stuff on the cameras. Lot of activity down there.”

Brother George had already retrieved one of the Blackbird’s video cannisters. He walked over to the small group, holding the large cassette like it was made of gold.

“Let’s grab a brew and take a look,” he suggested.

Twenty minutes later they were sitting in the main ops room, a large-screen TV/VCR unit set up and running.

Beers were dispensed, and sandwiches brought on. The Kepharts were still in their flight suits, wolfing down roast beef spuckies, drowned with gulps of cold suds.

Yaz inserted the primary videotape and fast-forwarded it through a series of color bars. Finally the screen went from black to white to black again.

Then it turned a familiar shade of green.

Before them was an extreme altitude shot of a crooked-elbow coastline. It filled Jones with an instant foreboding. Of them all, he was the only one who had actually fought in Vietnam.

“We’ve got the old DMZ at the top bar,” Brother George explained between bites. “Old Saigon at the bottom.”

Both Jones and Yaz were astonished. It appeared as if the entire country was in flames.

“We counted at least twenty major battles going on down there,” Brother Jeff told them. “And a lot of little ones. Mostly on the coast. The smoke alone is immense. We’ve got some infrared stuff, too. It helps on the close-in stuff.”

They watched the entire 25-minute tape, the Brothers explaining various points of interest as the footage documented their six overflights over what used to be South Vietnam. It was evident that just about the entire country was under attack.

A second tape was brought in, and this showed the so-called “close-in” stuff. It depicted roads absolutely packed with military equipment—tanks, APCs, troop trucks, mobile artillery. From highways, to smaller roads, to little more than widened paths, there were traffic jams of weapons and troops, all of it looking brand-new, all of it heading south.

“This would almost be comical, if it wasn’t so serious,” Jones said, more than once. “I feel like I’m looking through a time machine.”

“You’d think they’d finally leave that poor country alone,” Yaz said. “It’s had more than its share of this kind of thing.”

Jones finally wiped his weary eyes. “Well, this confirms Hawk’s information,” he said, referring to the burst message he’d received from the Expeditionary Force 36 hours before. The information culled from the Cult battleship’s safe prompted his sending the Sky High Spies on their photo run over Southeast Asia, and particularly Vietnam.

Now it was quite evident that the country was on the verge of total war—again.

“Who the hell would be fighting over there these days?” Yaz asked.

Jones just shook his head. “I know they finally found oil and gas offshore,” he said. “Not that that makes much difference. There was little more than rice and rubber there in the sixties. We lost fifty thousand guys fighting for it.”

He shook his head again. “What a waste …” he said, his voice trailing off.

“Well, someone’s got a whole lot of problems over there now,” Brother Jeff said.

“And if the Cult battleships are heading there, you can be sure they’re on the side of the aggressors,” Yaz added.

Jones nodded in glum agreement. “The question is, what can we do about it? We’ve only got a third of our force deployed in the area. And this looks like a country that needs about a half a million men—again.”

Yaz just shook his head and looked at the General.

“There’s an underdog over there, somewhere,” he said. “With the Cult on its way, you can be sure it’s their allies who are doing all the stomping. It’s not really our style just to sit back and watch someone get pummeled.”

Jones nodded. “So we
are
the world’s policemen, again?”

The three other men just stared back at him.

“We’re Americans,” Yaz finally said. “That’s all we can be …”

Jones looked over at the younger man. There were actually tears forming in the corner of his eyes.

“OK,” he said, after a while. “Get Hawk on the radio.”

They were playing baseball when the call came in.

The diamond set up by the Free Canadians was first rate—complete with sod for grass, old parachute packs for bases, and hard sand for base paths. A tourney was in full swing, one team representing each of the nine C-5s versus a like number of squads made up from the Canadian engineers.

As it turned out, the
Bozo
crew had won their round-robin with a 3-0 record, and was playing the Canadian Molson Muscles for the championship. It was 7-7 in the ninth inning, with extra innings looming when Ben hit a double. Then with Hunter at the plate, the radiophone inside
NJ104
began buzzing.

The game was stopped while Hunter took the call. He emerged after twenty minutes and asked that the American crews assemble. With the several hundred men of the First American Airborne Expeditionary Force standing before him, Hunter announced that Jones was sending them into action. Based on the information found inside the Cult battleship safe, and subsequent recon done by the Sky High Spies, Jones had ordered them to deploy to South Vietnam, assess the current situation, and, if possible, help any democratic forces there with their common defense. More of the C-5 fleet would follow as they became ready.

It took a few moments for the news to sink in. The assembled troopers just stood there, not talking, not stunned, not surprised—just simply considering what lay ahead of them.

Finally, someone simply said: “We’re going back to Vietnam.”

That’s when it hit home. They
were
going back. Back to a land that had known literally thousands of years of war. Back to a land where many foreigners had died, fighting for ill-defined goals. Back to a land where more than 55,000 Americans were killed, heroes all in a war that was mismanaged from the top, to say the least.

Back to a land of ghosts.

They were gone less than two hours later.

All nine C-5s rose into the air, formed up and as one headed west, leaving the Canadians and several ferry pilots behind. The Galaxys would refuel twice en route, both times courtesy of free-lance aerial tankers working out of Australia. Then it would be on to Vietnam, specifically the base at Da Nang, which according to the Blackbird’s recon photos appeared to be in the hands of the country’s defenders.

After that, it would be a matter of improvising.

Over the South China Sea

I
T WAS ABOUT AN
hour after their second aerial refueling when they began getting the strange radio signals.

Hunter was at the controls of
Bozo
as usual; Ben was in the copilot’s seat. They were about ninety minutes out from the coast of South Vietnam, two hours from Da Nang. They could see an enormous storm forming way off on the southern horizon, its dark clouds and swirling winds indicating it was probably part of a larger monsoon.

They were working out alternative approaches should they be unable to avoid the storm when the gunship’s radio officer came up and tapped Hunter on the shoulder.

“Just picked up some very weird transmissions, Hawk,” he told him.

“Weird like how?”

The radio officer screwed up his face. “Better come and listen for yourself.”

Hunter turned control of
Bozo
over to Ben and made his way back to the mid-flight deck where the long-range radio gear was kept.

He put on one of the many sets of headphones and settled down to listen. It didn’t take long for him to hear what the radio officer was talking about.

The airwaves were absolutely jammed with radio transmissions. There were voices of men, women, even children. Some were shouting, some screaming, some even crying. Some were live, some were obviously recorded. There were even some in morse code.

But they were all saying the same thing: “Save us …”

“They’re on every frequency, every band,” the radio officer told Hunter. “All across the dial. Some are shortwave, some long, some are coming over AM radio; others FM. Some are bursts. Some are clean. Some are scrambled. I’m sure we’d pick up sat-coms too if we could.”

“But it’s the same message over and over?” Hunter asked.

The radioman nodded. “Same thing.”

“And the points of origin?”

The radioman grimaced slightly. “As far as we can tell, they’re all being broadcast from along the coast of South Vietnam.”

The words reverberated around Hunter’s ears for a few seconds.

“I’ll be damned. Are you sure?”

The man nodded. “Checked it up and down, four times …”

Hunter thought it over for a moment. First, the tens of thousands of disturbing satellite-bounce messages, along with the hidden “Victor is Alive” addition. And now this.

“What the hell do you make of it?” he asked the radio officer.

The man just shrugged. “I think a lot of people are in a lot of trouble.”

They seemed to have come out of nowhere.

It was an hour after the cacophony of SOS messages were first heard. Hunter was back in the pilot’s seat, catching a rare nap while Ben watched things from the copilot slot.

Suddenly Hunter was wide awake, his body vibrating from head to toe.

“
What’s our position?
” he asked Ben urgently.

“We’re about a half hour out from the coastline,” Ben quickly reported.

Hunter was up and looking out the side window. Below him was the
JAWS
plane, beside them was
NJ104.
Way out to the south he could see Crunch’s three-ship group. Directly below him, were the Football City troop ships.

About thirty-five miles dead ahead was the nasty storm roaring up from the southwest.

Hunter was on the fleet general radio in an instant.

“Close up!
Close up!
” he was yelling, all radio protocol forgotten. “Close up the formation …”

Ben was unquestioningly following Hunter’s urgent request. He put the big gunship into a left side bank, following
JAWS
and
NJ104
as they too moved towards Crunch’s center group.