Ghost War (33 page)

No, the question was: Did he really want to kill the pilot?

Something deep inside him was telling him not to—he didn’t know why, but he’d always relied on his extraordinary perception before. Now was not the time to begin doubting it.

He waited for another full minute. Now the plane was about two miles due west of him, and beginning its long bank back towards the south. He was amazed—it was an exact recreation of the flight the day before, and according to Crunch, the path it had taken every day for the past two weeks.

But now, even as the pink airplane grew larger in his sights, Hunter’s inner voice was telling him that valuable things might be contained inside the ancient jet. He was puzzled by this feeling, not that he was getting it at all—but
why
he was getting it. He suddenly felt like a hunter aiming a rifle at a magnificent golden eagle. One squeeze of the trigger and the rare creature would be gone forever.

The plane was now less than a mile away, and coming closer to him by the second. He tightened his grip on the M-16, keeping the pink fuselage dead center in his telescope. His inner psyche was flashing like crazy. It was a feeling unlike he’d ever felt before. He had to follow what it was telling him—and see what the consequences brought.

The jet was about 800 feet away when he squeezed the trigger. A long stream of tracer bullets streaked across the sky in a perfectly projected arc. Within two seconds, they found their mark, tearing through the pink jet at mid-fuselage and perforating it all the way back to the tailplane.

The jet predictably banked up, and ran right into the thick of his second burst, ripping apart its left side engine, and destroying the right-wing’s control surfaces. It then began to slide to the left, exposing its cockpit to Hunter’s gunsight—but he didn’t continue firing. Instead he eased off the trigger.

The jet began smoking heavily and started to go down. He watched anxiously as it first dipped, then briefly rose again, then nosed down for good.

He was up on the edge of the cliff now, watching as it went right by him, both wings aflame. The plane hit the wet marsh a few seconds later, bounced up and then pancaked back down onto a nearby canal. Its momentum carried it across the narrow waterway and up onto the far bank. It was here it finally came to rest about a quarter of a mile away from him.

Before he knew it, he was running again. Down the hill, and across the marsh, heading for the downed airplane.

Two members of the Li-Chi Chi also saw the airplane go down.

They were at a lookout position on the far western edge of the plateau, placed there by Crunch to watch Hunter’s one-man shoot-down mission and provide backup if necessary.

As soon as the airplane was hit, they made a quick call back to the base camp and then slid down the embankment and ran across the marsh. They got there just as Hunter did, and using the butts of their rifles, they helped him bust through the jet’s canopy.

The airplane was nearly engulfed in flames by the time the hole in the glass was large enough to yank the pilot out. Hunter had to crawl into the blazing cockpit to unstrap the unconscious flyer; the two women fighters held tight to his legs, all the while fending off the flames as they totally consumed the wings and moved towards the forward fuel tanks.

The smoke inside the shattered cockpit proved to be Hunter’s worst foe, but after several anxious seconds, he was able to cut through the safety straps and free the pilot. On his call, the women fighters yanked on his legs and Hunter and the pilot both came tumbling out. The women pulled them away from the flames, but they were startled to see Hunter scramble back towards the airplane, and once again dive head first through the hole in the shattered cockpit.

Before they could run to him, he was back out again, a large black, smoking box searing his hands.

He dove for a nearby ditch just a half second before the Me-262 exploded. When the fuel tanks finally lit off, it blew the jet’s frame more than thirty feet into the air. All that came down were smoking pieces and sparks.

By the time the women fighters reached Hunter, he was already on his feet, examining the still-smoldering black box even as he was cooling off his burnt hands in a nearby marsh pool.

He looked up at them and surprised them with a smile.

“That was close,” he said.

By the time Crunch and his Li-Chi Chi guards reached the crash site, Hunter and the two women fighters were marching the pink plane’s pilot back towards the plateau.

Hunter ran up to him, the strange black box in his hands.

“Ever see one of these?” he asked Crunch. “I ripped it out of the 262’s cockpit.”

Crunch studied the box. It was about a foot square, six inches deep. It had a series of multicolored wires running out of its back—or was that the front? Other than that it seemed to be nondescript in every way.

“Some kind of autopilot?” Crunch guessed.

“Very close,” Hunter told him excitedly. “It
is
a guidance system. But it was not originally designed for an aircraft. I think it’s supposed to be on an ICBM.”

Crunch stared at him and then back at the black box.

“You’re kidding.”

Hunter shook his head. “It looks like it might be part of a targeting system, probably used by a subsurface launched weapon.”

Crunch looked back up at him. “Sub-launched?” he said, “You mean like in Fire Bats?”

Hunter nodded. The
Fire Bats
were the nuclear-armed subs that were known to roam the Pacific like moving pieces in a huge blackmail game. They were first used by the Fourth Reich, the cult of Super-Nazis who overran most of the American continent a year before, only to be run back out by the United American forces. At least one Fire Bats was sunk around that time; two others were on station off the Pacific American coast, working under orders of the Asian Mercenary Cult, and providing a nuclear umbrella for the Cult’s occupation forces. When the Cult pulled out of California for the titanic battle at Pearl Harbor, the pair of mysterious nuclear-armed subs disappeared again. Their whereabouts at the moment was unknown.

“You think this is from one of the Fire Bats?” Crunch asked.

“Could be,” Hunter answered, turning the strange black box over in his singed hands. “Could
very well
be.”

Crunch scratched his head. “But what the hell is a nuke missile guidance system doing on that old jet bucket?”

Hunter just shrugged. “I can’t wait to find out. I’ll bet it will be a shocker when we do.”

But they were both in for a more immediate surprise. One of the Li-Chi Chi guards was suddenly tugging on Crunch’s sleeve. She whispered something into his ear and Hunter watched a puzzled look wash over Crunch’s face.

“You’re kidding?” he asked the woman in broken Cantonese.

She vigorously shook her head no, pointing to the pilot.

Two other women fighters held the still-helmeted pilot up straight. A fourth woman put her hand inside the pilot’s flight suit and violently ripped it open.

Both Hunter and Crunch were astonished. Beneath the flight suit was a thin T-shirt and beneath that was a pair of breasts. They were small, young, pert—but breasts nevertheless.

They couldn’t believe it: the pilot of the strange Me-262 was a woman.

Six hours later

Hunter was stumped.

He looked around the small communal hut, and suddenly nothing was making any sense. In one corner was the pilot of the destroyed Me-262. She was a woman, or more accurately, a girl. Probably no more than fifteen, sixteen at the most, and either Asian or Polynesian. She was absolutely terrified, shaking, possibly in a state of shock.

Just how she came to be flying the decades-old airplane, he had no idea. She couldn’t speak English, and no one on the plateau could speak whatever language she seemed to speak in between the torrents of tears.

Resting on a small wooden table in the other corner was the strange black box he’d ripped out of the burning airplane. He had removed one of its top covers and peering inside confirmed that it was indeed a guidance system for a ballistic missile, most probably one that was nuclear-tipped, and fired from below the surface of the water.

In the third corner was Crunch. Half-asleep, half-fondling a pair of his favorite Li-Chi Chi. There was some connection to the three, and to the Me-262 jet that was still smoldering down on the marshes.

Crunch had seen the strange Me-262 months ago while on his recon flight prior to the pivotal battle against the Cult at Pearl Harbor. But he had told Hunter that at the time, it was definitely a man flying the jet and it was not painted in garish pink. At the time, Crunch had been overflying some deserted South Pacific islands, and the Me-262, being of somewhat limited range, could have conceivably been heading for one of them, such as Tarawa, Kiribati, or maybe all the way to Fiji. If that was the case, that would explain the girl pilot’s apparent Polynesian origin.

But what the hell was she doing flying the plane? And why was she here, now, in Vietnam, on the verge of a huge conflict, flying the same pattern, over and over? And carrying a fairly sophisticated piece of guidance equipment with her to boot?

Hunter closed his eyes and tried to dredge up some psychic prowess to help him put the puzzle together. He recalled the great axiom of Sherlock Holmes: If one eliminates the impossible, then what remains, no matter how improbable must contain the truth—or something like that.

So it came down to a basic question: How is it that a girl barely old enough to know better is flying an old Nazi-designed jet over Vietnam on the same flight pattern day after day, with a ICBM targeting device hooked up to the flight controls?

Hunter concentrated. Eyes closed, falling into a trancelike state, he began to hear voices. There were many as usual, but one stood out above the cacophony. It was the one that kept saying:
Just twist it around, dummy….

Hunter opened his eyes slowly. Twist it around? What did that mean? Girl flying airplane with ICBM guidance box aboard? Airplane flying girl with ICBM guidance box aboard?

No—wait a minute … How about: ICBM guidance box flying airplane with girl aboard.

Hunter was up in a shot—that might be it!

He quickly grabbed the black box and began ripping it apart in earnest. The first level was already unscrewed, it came off in a snap. The second level had no less than twenty-four tiny screws to be undone; it took him about a minute to do so. This level contained the black box’s memory circuits. A quick glance told him they’d been rearranged recently; that was a good sign.

He went into the third layer, which looked like a nightmare of semiconductors, all crossbred and out of sync; more evidence that the box had been realigned recently, and not by any real genius.

He finally made it down to the fourth and final layer and it was here that he found the proof for his “twist it” theory. The actual guidance system itself—that part of the black box which sent signals to the key components of an ICBM’s guidance apertures—had been recast big time. More than two thirds of the conducting units had been disconnected altogether, as had the computer terminal ducts. This was definitely the work of someone who was trading down in the world. They didn’t want the box to guide anything as complex as an underwater ICBM; rather they wanted to dummy-it-up and fly nothing more than a simple, old airplane.

He sat back down in his corner and stared at the disassembled box. They wanted the airplane to fly somewhere, with the girl as a passenger. She could no more pilot the airplane than any schoolkid could. She was just along for the ride. But why? And where was she going?

The ritualistic daily flights up and around the Delta—what was the point of that? It wasn’t for recon purposes, or prestrike stuff. Just going around and around—didn’t make much sense, unless … He looked back at the black box’s important fourth layer. Was there a chance that maybe the person rewiring the thing screwed up a connection? If they had, that might send the plane’s controls into a constant circling pattern as the box’s commands simply began repeating themselves.

He carefully scanned the fourth layer looking for any evidence of a semiconductor not sitting right or a connection not quite nailed down to a conducting point. To his dismay, everything looked properly connected, haphazard as it might be. Then he studied the third layer, the memory part of the box. Right away he noticed there was indeed not one, but two connectors that hadn’t been fused correctly. They were laying bare as a baby’s bum, their triangular plugs just begging to be coupled.

That was it—the black box had a case of Alzheimer’s. Because of a bad circuit connection, it couldn’t make up its mind what to do at any given moment—so it had just gone in circles.

Hunter closed his eyes again. He could just see the airplane taking off from a base down south—maybe even near the Cult battleship port of Son Tay—flying north, and coming around and back to the base again. The people at the base, for some reason compelled to launch the airplane day after day (now, that was a ritual!), saw it return each day, its flight another failure.

And if they had allowed it to go on long enough, the Me-262 would have kept flying the same nonsensical pattern everyday, until it was too old to get airborne—or until someone shot it down.

It was a nice tidy theory, but it didn’t answer three big questions: Why was the airplane rigged in the first place? Where would it go if the memory circuits had been fused correctly. And why was the girl on board?

Hunter opened his eyes. There was one person who knew the answers to those questions—and many more. And lucky for him, she was sitting right across the room.

It took more than seven hours before Hunter found a combination of languages with which he could communicate with the young girl.

As it turned out, she spoke a little Japanese, a little Korean, a trace of French, and a smattering of Bogonese—an obscure dialect favored by some of the more remote tribes on Borneo. Using these four tongues and a good deal of sign language, Hunter was finally able to get the skeleton of her story.