Ghost War (28 page)

Twang retrieved his battered binoculars and focused on the tail end of the airplane. He could see many soldiers and officers—but no enemy soldiers. How was this possible?

Suddenly one of the black uniformed officers pointed to the massive sandbag protector the enemy had built around the second airplane, the one they had towed down the runway what seemed like ages before. In a flash, the mass of mystery soldiers was attacking the huge structure, tossing aside its sandbags and ripping tin sheets from its roof.

Twang felt his heart sink once again. Obviously the Americans were hiding inside the sandbag bunker, and now that they were found out, they would be slaughtered.

But he found that he, like the thousands of attacking soldiers, was in for another enormous surprise.

It took but a few minutes for the soldiers to disassemble the sand and tin structure—and when they did they discovered there was nothing inside. No Americans, no Legionnaires, no mercenaries.

No airplane.

At that moment, Twang realized that his previous theory had been correct after all. The Americans must have been magicians! Not only had they and their allies simply disappeared, they were able to make the other huge airplane disappear as well!

Suddenly Twang heard the ungodliest sound ever to reach his ears. It was a tearing of metal, an ear-splitting explosion and the most frightening of screams—all mixed together. The screech was so loud, it actually stung his eyeballs. It echoed throughout the valley, bouncing off the surrounding hills and coming back again, like a huge wave.

The thousands of soldiers heard it too—and many collapsed to the knees, covering their ears in panic and fright.

Suddenly all eyes turned to the small, unopposing mountain at the southern end of the base. Twang felt his jaw drop.
It was moving.
The side of the mountain was literally opening up in a burst of smoke and fire.

Twang’s mind was racing now. Was this a volcano? An explosion?
A nuclear bomb?

That’s when he saw the gleam of metal—it was reflecting perfectly off the rising sun, shining into his eyes. Suddenly it was moving—
moving
right out of the side of the mountain. Twang just shook his head. Was this real?

The gleam of metal slowly emerged from the side of the mountain and finally the glare moved out of his eyes. That’s when he saw it fully for the first time.

It was an airplane—but it was unlike any airplane he’d ever seen.

It was held upright by no less than a dozen sets of thick rubber wheels under its fuselage and wings. It was small, as compared to the behemoth American aircraft that had landed at the base, and yet it retained some of the characteristics of those planes too. It had a long high snout, but with twice as many cockpit windows. Its body was but a tenth as long as the huge jets, yet the fuselage was just as chubby. Its wings were much shorter too, but they were literally lined with what appeared to be engines—some of them jets, other smoking old propellers. Twang counted them and came up with four engines on each wing, no two of them looking exactly alike. The whole airplane was covered with wires, chains, tubes, and in some cases, even thick rope. There were so many strange appendages hanging off it, it looked like it would burst and break apart at any moment.

But it didn’t.

The unearthly scream—or at least part of it—was being caused by the disparate group of smoking, unmuffled engines. Another contributing factor was the roar of gunfire coming from the strange aircraft. Like its predecessors, this airplane was armed to the teeth. Indeed there were weapons poking out of dozens of portholes and glass canopy blisters.

No sooner had the airplane moved out of the side of the mountain when all of these guns opened up at once. They were now pouring fire into the mass of soldiers surrounding the circus-colored airplane. There was instant panic. Soldiers were suddenly running everywhere again, jumping into trenches, hiding in craters, crawling over each other to get behind some piece of the broken circus airplane or the sandbag protectors they’d just torn down. The air once again was filled with tracer fire, all of it coming from the strange airplane as it moved along the dirt, gaining speed and heading for the littered runway.

It reached the end of the tarmac and there it stopped and waited for one long moment, its guns blazing, absolutely vaporizing hundreds of the black-uniformed soldiers, along with the circus-colored airplane. Twang felt another knife in his heart. He had become attached to the strangely colored airplane; like its crew, it had gone through so much. Now it was being shredded by the fire from the Americans themselves. The irony hit Twang right in the gut. Apparently only the Americans were allowed to destroy what they had created in the first place. Oddly this cemented everything Twang had ever heard about them.

Suddenly there was one long crashing roar and the strange airplane began moving again. Slowly at first, then picking up speed, the bizarre aircraft went streaking down the runway, right past him, right past the thousands of shocked black-uniformed soldiers, right past the strange, battered airplane and the empty sandbagged bunker. It was so close to Twang he could read the words painted in large sloppy letters on the side of its fuselage:
Big Plan
—
Bozo Two.
He could plainly see a man in a pilot’s suit and a lightning-flash crash helmet working the controls inside the huge bubble-type forward flight compartment. He could also see dozens of faces pressed against the airplane’s haphazardly placed windows looking out—Americans, Legionnaires, mercenaries. Nearly all of them were smiling.

And never once did their guns stop firing. The streaks of tracer bullets, artillery shells and launched grenades poured out of both sides of the airplane, causing a noise so loud that Twang’s ears began bleeding.

It continued to gain speed as it rolled down the runway, away from the attackers, away from the burning circus airplane, away from Twang’s spider hole.

Then, to the amazement of all, there was a great burst of flame and smoke, and the plane lifted off the ground and slowly climbed into the air. Twang couldn’t believe his eyes. It was almost scary to see such a strange machine actually fly.

But fly it did. Up and over the hills. Into the low clouds. Climbing. Flying.

Escaping …

T
HE SIXTEEN-MAN LONG-RANGE PATROL
was two hours from base when they found the airplane.

Their four-vehicle HumVee column came to a stop near the edge of a vast rice paddy. There was smoke rising above the treetops in the jungle beyond.

Leaving one Hummer behind for cover, the three remaining vehicles splashed their way across the paddy, their top gunners at the ready. They made the jungle and used a mule path to draw closer to the smoke.

They spotted it a few minutes later.

It was lying at about a forty-degree angle and a small clearing in the middle of the woods. The soldiers weren’t quite sure what it was when they first saw it. It was obviously an aircraft of some kind—but nothing that was even remotely familiar to them. There were different kinds of engines, different kinds of landing gears, canopies of glass all over its fuselage, a lot of the important gear lashed down with chains, heavy rope and thick wire. It was what they once called a “Rube Goldberg”; a mind-boggling slapdash of metal, pulleys and wires, forming a machine that had no right being allowed in the air.

But here it was and it was obvious it had flown in from someplace, the clearing being completely surrounded by jungle.

Two Hummers unloaded their troops and a total of eight men approached the strange machine. It was still smoking heavily—it probably hadn’t been down but an hour, the soldiers figured.

They walked right up to it, and touched it, just to make sure it was real.

That’s when they heard about a hundred weapons snap off their safeties.

The soldiers were stunned. They suddenly realized they were surrounded by more than 100 armed men. These men were all wearing different uniforms, carrying different weapons. They were all different colors. But there was one thing everyone of them had in common.

They were all smiling.

One of the men stepped forward. He was tall, skinny, with a long scar running down the right side of his face.

“I am Zouvette!” he declared. “Third Company, Third Division, Fifty Corps of the French Foreign Legion.”

The soldiers were astonished. The man looked like he’d just walked off the screen of a bad 1930s movie. They turned and saw the fourth Hummer was surrounded by a smaller group of armed men. Somehow the armed gang had got the drop on them without making a sound.

The combination of the strange airplane and the hundred grinning faces made it slightly difficult for the soldiers to take the situation all that seriously.

“
Who the hell are you guys?
” one of them asked.

That’s when one man moved out from the back of the crowd and walked up to the soldiers. He was wearing a mud-caked flight suit and a battered crash helmet.

“We are from the First American Airborne Expeditionary Force,” he said, evenly.

The soldiers all stared back at him wearing identical expressions of puzzled amazement.

“The lost guys?” one of the soldiers said.

Hunter paused for a moment to consider that one. Then he asked: “Where are we?”

“Twenty klicks north of a place called Da Nang,” came the reply.

A second later all guns were lowered. A sudden cheer went up from the armed men.
They had made it!

The man in the crash helmet shook each soldier’s hand.

“Take us to your leader,” he said.

The road leading up to Da Nang city was so dusty, the HumVee driver had to keep his windshields wipers on.

Crammed into the back seat of the first vehicle were Hunter, Ben and Frost, his leg and hand wounds quickly on the mend. After ascertaining the city was under very friendly control, it was agreed they’d accompany the soldiers to Da Nang, while Geraci and Zouvette stayed with the rest of the escapees.

It took about an hour to get to the outskirts of Da Nang, and the closer they got the more astounded Hunter became. In all his years of combat, he couldn’t remember seeing so many weapons packed into so little space. There were literally hundreds of large artillery pieces—American M-198s 150-mm cannons mostly—ringing the edge of the city’s perimeter. There had to be hundreds of machine gun-posts scattered around too, sporting everything from big M-60s to Belgium-made M-249s to land-mounted GAU-8 Gatling guns. There were bunkers thick with rocket-launchers, recoilless rifles, AA-guns with their barrels leveled, grenade launchers, flame-throwers, and on and on and on.

And it didn’t stop at the outer defense perimeter. After passing forests of concertina wires, they reached the mud and concrete wall of the city itself, finding more artillery, more machine posts, more leveled AA-guns.

And troops.

There seemed to be soldiers everywhere. All of different uniforms, different nationalities, different colors. Hunter knew many were mercenaries—but at the same time, he was sure that they all weren’t here just for the money. A good mercenary could get good work anywhere on war-torn planet Earth, certainly in places more glamorous than hot and smelly Vietnam.

Yet, here they were.

Why?

Was it because most of them must have believed there was actually something worth fighting for in the godforsaken place.

The jeep roared through the heavily armed gate, and headed for the center of the city. Some quick calculations told Hunter that Da Nang’s current configuration was probably a mile and a half square, laid out in a slightly oblong shape. He figured there were at least 30,000 men under arms inside the city and around its defense perimeters, and a fifty as many civilians.

Most of these noncombatants were young women; the city was devoid of young kids and seniors, as it should be for a place where combat was so likely. Still it was jam-packed with bar rooms, gambling dens, and cat houses, the obvious places of employment of many of the young women.

They finally reached their destination, the provisional headquarters building for the huge army-in-waiting. The place looked eerily like the Alamo; it was a dirty white, sandblasted limestone throwback to the French Colonial days. It was heavily fortified, with several perimeters of re-enforced barbed wire ringing gun posts and concrete barriers. More than fifty different flags were whipping in the hot dusty breeze from its ramparts.

The Hummer drove past the guards and into a small parking area which fronted the southside main entrance. Hunter, Ben and Frost climbed out and were escorted through the main door and into a huge hallway. Inside, the place looked like a movie set left over from
Casablanca
—slow whirling fans, bistro tables and chairs, and a long well-stocked bar. No surprise, the saloon was bustling with off-duty soldiers.

They were met by a young black officer with a Jamaican accent who led them up a marble spiraling staircase. At the top was a short hallway and a large oak door marked “City Command HQ.” The young officer opened the door for them, saluted and left.

They peered inside. The room was large, brightly lit and cluttered with books, weapons, radios, and empty liquor bottles. It was also pleasantly air-conditioned. There was a large desk at its center. The man occupying the high-backed leather chair behind the desk had his feet up on the open top drawer, right next to the plaque that read:

Commander-in-Chief.

He was grinning broadly.

Hunter walked in, threw his helmet on a nearby couch and then wearily slumped down next to it.

“We can’t leave you alone for a minute, can we?” he asked the man relaxing behind the desk.

The man frowned with perfect mock seriousness. “‘I saw my duty, and I did it.’”

It was JT. The last time they’d seen him, he had been behind the controls of the great gunship,
Nozo
, diving into the typhoon to escape the MiGs.

Now, he looked strange, from the braided, black camo uniform to the gold bars on the collar. The name plate reading “Commander” was hanging off his left breast pocket as if it weighed a ton or more. Yet he just couldn’t suppress his lopsided smile.