Ghost War (42 page)

The fact that it was abandoned before his forces even reached the front gate didn’t bother him anymore. The enemy was cowardly—it was as simple as that. He had recognized the tidal wave of Assass’s force early on, and had simply left.

However, he
did
find it unusual that all of the city’s civilians were gone, too.

Suddenly he heard a high-pitched sound above the hustle and bustle below him. He looked up and just barely caught glimpse of an aircraft flying extremely high over the city. It looked like a rocketship, its red, white and blue paint scheme gleaming in the setting sun. In a word, it looked
beautiful.

“Someday,” Assass thought, “I want to get one of those.”

Da Nang Air Base

One hour later

It was a very nervous JT who hit the play button on the battered VCR.

“This is where the rubber meets the road,” he said to the others gathered around him in the base’s small, underground operations room. “If we fucked up, we’ll know in a few minutes.”

Hunter, Ben, Frost, and ZZ were crammed into the ops room along with JT. They waited anxiously as the front end of Hunter’s recon videotape started to play on the small color TV monitor. It showed, in sequence, the battles on the north, west and south edges of the air base’s perimeter. These elicited applause from those gathered.

Then the scene shifted to a bird’s eye view of Da Nang city.

Through a light cloud cover they could see the city was absolutely filled with enemy troops. They appeared to be searching every building, even as their heavy weapons, such as towed artillery and mobile Katy launchers, were pouring into the walled city. The activity left no doubt that the Minx controlled the entire square mile of urban area.

Instantly a whoop went up in the ops room.

“We’ve got them right where we want them …” JT said triumphantly.

Everyone in the room agreed.

“But now,” JT added soberly, “comes the hard part.”

Ten miles offshore

Crunch was lighting his third cigar of the day when the radiophone started buzzing.

He picked up the receiver and heard a crackling burst of static.

Then Hunter’s voice came on.

“Fourth quarter,” the slightly echoing message began. “Third and goal. We’re on the eight yard line. One minute to go in the game. Pass play.”

With that the radiophone clicked off.

Crunch hastily wrote down the message and then looked around the bridge of the battleship.

“Where the hell is that ‘general quarters’ button?”

The dozen or so Omani sailors on the bridge with him immediately recognized his concern. They could speak very little English, and Crunch—pressed into service as the ship’s commander—could speak no Omani. But he didn’t really have to.

They only had one big job to do.

An Omani lieutenant stepped forward and hit the general quarters button. Instantly the entire battleship was reverberating with a high-pitch klaxon, calling the 300 or so Omani sailors to their battle stations. The message they’ve been waiting to hear for nearly two days had finally come.

Crunch showed the Omani officer the crudely decoded message. They were actually simple coordinates: Four, three, eight, one and the word “Pass” indicating zero. Crunch and the Omani checked the numbers against a specially drawn map and then double-checked them.

“It is clear,” the Omani said.

Crunch puffed twice on his cigar and then nodded.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s get cracking.”

Ten minutes later, Crunch was on the railing next to the bridge, high-powered binoculars in hand.

Off in the distance—more than ten miles away—he could see the twinkling of lights coming from Da Nang city. He could also see red streaks of light rising above the walled fortress, the result of Minx celebrating soldiers firing their weapons into the air.

He shifted his binoculars slightly north of the city and saw plumes of smoke rising from Da Nang air base. There were still explosions going off all around the perimeter of the sprawling base, but as far as he could tell, the defensive forces were successfully holding their own against the would-be Minx invaders.

And that was exactly all they wanted to do.

Three Omani officers appeared on the deck next to Crunch. Between them, they could muster up a passing semblance of English.

“Weapons are ready,” one told him.

“Range is set,” said another. “Shells are fused.”

“Nothing on radar,” said the third. “We have yet to be detected.”

Crunch looked at his watch. It was one minute to 2100 hours. He checked the ship’s position. They were cruising at five knots, heading north, maintaining a ten mile distance offshore. He did a quick mental check, making sure he’d crossed every
T
and dotted every
I
.

Then he turned back to the Omanis. “OK, boys,” he said. “Let’s open them up.”

Not five seconds later, the three guns on the battleship’s forward turret erupted in a trio of flames and smoke. The huge, 50,000-ton ship shuddered as three, massive, one-ton shells left the sixteen-inch barrels and screamed away into the night.

Crunch fixed his spyglasses back on the lights of Da Nang just in time to see the three high-explosive shells hit right in the center of the city. The explosions were so quick and so bright, they actually hurt Crunch’s eyes. He blinked, and when he refocused he saw three huge fireballs rising above the city.

“Hit ’em again!” he cried out.

A moment later, the trio of guns on the second turret fired, shaking the ship again, and delivering three more one-ton shells to the middle of Da Nang. Crunch kept his eyes open this time and saw the shells hit, raising three identical fiery mushrooms above the city.

“Again!” he yelled.

Now the rear turret erupted, sending three more shells into the enemy-held city.

“Again!”

The forward turret fired again.

“Again!”

The second turret fired.

“Again!”

The third turret erupted.

Now all Crunch could see through his binoculars were fireballs and smoke. Crunch imagined what it was like inside the walls. At least 30,000 troops. Total confusion, panic, fire, smoke. No escape.

Death.

He grimaced and wiped his weary eyes. He was quite nearly tired of this combat stuff. Very tired of all the killing. He promised himself a good long drunk when all this was over.

Then he put the spyglasses up to his eyes once more.

“Fire again!” he cried.

Inside the Jersey Tunnel

Geraci’s ears were ringing.

He looked around the well-lit tubular concrete shelter and saw not one person who wasn’t holding his or her ears. Small cascades of dust and mortar were falling from the newly poured ceiling. Geraci winced at each one—he knew every support, every stud, every metal beam in the place.

And if just one of them broke…

He didn’t want to think about it, so he put his hands up to his ears, too. One hundred feet above them and too damn close by, the city of Da Nang was undergoing a fierce bombardment. He imagined he could hear the screams, the cries of panic and pain, the sound of death itself all around him. But at the same time he realized this was impossible simply because the sound of the massive sixteen-inch gun explosions were so loud, so violent on the eardrums, it was clinically impossible to hear anything else.

He looked up and saw his closest officers—Matus, Cerbasi, McCaffrey and Palma—all sitting nearby, scrunched in between various-uniformed mercenaries and the odd civilian, who more often than not was a hooker or some form of bar room girl. With each crash of a high-explosive shell outside, they all grimaced and shook their heads—but he also noticed something else. Between blasts, they were all smiling. But why? Relief that the previous shell had not come crashing through the ceiling? Satisfaction at the thought that the brutal Minx were finally getting their well-deserved comeuppance? Or was it a mixture of both? A kind of whistling in the dark. He wasn’t sure. But strangely enough, he soon found himself smiling after each shell crash—and then it hit him. They were in a well-protected bunker, theoretically out of harm’s way, where just a few weeks before, they’d been scraping the sides of a battered, very fucked-up airplane, withstanding massive Minx mortar barrages, and fighting off blood-curdling human wave assaults.

Now he knew the reasons for the smiles. These guys had cheated death so many times, death was no longer interested in playing the game. They had won. They were nearly invincible.

Hunter, JT and Ben were also holding their ears.

They all witnessed some massive bombardments before, but nothing like this.

They were holed up inside one of the concrete aircraft repartments, watching through binoculars the systematic destruction of Da Nang city. With each barrage of shells from the captured Cult battleship, it seemed like another piece of the city died. They correctly presumed that thousands of Minx soldiers, unprepared for such an onslaught, were dying too. Even if their commanders had ordered them into the cellars of the buildings within the city, there was no way anyone could escape the massive bombardment.

And even though the Minx troops surrounding the base itself were still shelling, it was now much more sporadic and untargeted; almost as if they too were in awe of the hell and fire their comrades were going through.

There was a row of radios and radiophones next to them in the bunker, and with these Hunter, JT, and Ben were keeping in close contact with the people inside the Jersey Tunnel, the front line commanders of perimeter defense forces and Crunch on board the captured Minx battleship.

From every perspective it was evident that the enemy was being slaughtered—and with it, the city of Da Nang was slowly but surely disappearing from the map.

Aboard Battleship 57

The girl named Ala was also holding her ears.

The rumble and crash of the huge guns going off just two levels up and one over from her stateroom was so frightening and intense, she could not keep her teeth from chattering.

How had she come to this? By what devil had she changed from the simple island girl on Fiji, to this, a passenger on this massive warship, confused and terrified?

She pressed her hands closer to her ears and tried to think about her parents. How were they? Were they still alive? Or had the madman Soho killed them? There was no way she could know—or would ever know.

She began crying. All this fighting, all this warmaking—it made no sense to her. She no longer had any idea of time; the long stop and go journey in the pink airplane had taken care of that. And though the strangers under whose care she was presently seemed human enough, there was no way she could ascertain their intentions.

She felt then like a
poo-wa pow-wa
, a small piece in a game favored by her people which the players moved and tugged constantly as a way of seeking to defeat their opponents.

Another barrage caused her to scream out in pure fear—it was so loud, two of her Li-Chi Chi bodyguards burst into her stateroom just to make sure she was all right.

She quickly dismissed them—she wanted to suffer alone. The only regret she had was not telling them—or anyone else—that every time she closed her eyes, she saw the face of a man that looked like Satan himself.

T
HE BATTLESHIP DIDN’T STOP
firing until first light the next morning.

Finally, after a one, last nine-gun barrage, the cannons fell silent. It was 0645 hours.

Geraci was the first one out of the southern end of the Jersey Tunnel. He emerged, his M-16 up and ready—but he quickly realized he wouldn’t need his weapon.

There was nothing left. No buildings, no streets, no trees. Certainly no people. He was stunned. The massive bombardment have leveled every thing within a square mile. He couldn’t see anything that was more than four feet high. Even stranger, there were no bodies—or at least none that could be seen out in the open. They too had been baked by the hellish temperatures and then snuffed to dust by the shelling.

Other members of the 104th and the civilians began emerging from the shelter. To a person, each stared out at the utter destruction, jaw agape, eyes nonbelieving. Just about everyone was of the same mind. The desolate landscape looked as if a nuclear bomb had hit it.

More than 5,000 people had spent the night in the Jersey Tunnel and now they were pouring out of the shelter. Within minutes a Huey helicopter appeared overhead and landed where the city square used to be. Hunter climbed out, followed by JT, Ben and Crunch.

They walked over to Geraci and shook hands.

“Everyone made it, OK?” JT asked him.

Geraci nodded. “Everything held together,” he replied. Then, looking around him: “Thank God.”

“Quiet morning, isn’t it?” Hunter asked him.

Geraci took a moment to listen. All he could hear was the wind whistling through the rubble and the sounds of waves on the beach a short distance away. There was no gunfire, no mortar tubes popping, no artillery. No action at all around the massive air base nearby.

“They take their toys and go home?” Geraci asked the Wingman.

Hunter just shrugged. “Seems like it,” he replied, looking back towards the heavy jungle to the west. “We did a dawn recon, couldn’t see a soul down there. Nothing on infrared, nothing on the Jason module.”

Geraci stared at the desolate vacant lot that a day before had been the city of Da Nang.

“Can’t say I blame them,” he observed quietly.

At that moment, Hunter felt a tug on his arm. It was Ben, motioning past the stream of civilians walking out of the Tunnel to a lone figure walking down what used to be a street. It was Crunch.

“Wonder what he’s thinking,” Ben said to Hunter.

Hunter walked over to his old friend. He’d been absolutely quiet during the chopper ride in from the battleship.

“I’m going to have to tell Jonesie to break out the medals,” Hunter told Crunch. “You deserve at least a dozen or so.”

Crunch just shook his head. “Not me,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “Not for this.”