Ghost War (43 page)

Hunter put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “It’s war, Crunchie,” he said. “It was either them or us.”

Crunch just stared straight ahead. “You know, Hawk” he began, “when I landed on Xmas way back when all this started, I couldn’t imagine what kind of person would actually be responsible for that. Just total absolute destruction. I just couldn’t imagine anyone living with it—having known that they were responsible for snuffing out the lives of so many people.”

Then he turned and looked Hunter in the eye. “And now, the devil has become me.”

Hunter began to reply something, but stopped himself. There really wasn’t much that could be said.

Crunch started walking away, down the shattered roadway, looking at what the guns under his control had wrought.

“I should have stayed down in the Delta,” Hunter heard him say.

Da Nang Air Base

One hour later

As always, it was Hunter who saw it first.

He was deep in work at the base ops room, studying the video shot not thirty minutes before by video cameras attached to a pod on Ben’s F-20. The latest footage confirmed what the previous recon flights had discovered: the Minx units formerly attacking Da Nang air base had withdrawn, and were now in flight down old Route 7, heading no doubt for sanctuaries deep in the jungle.

The massive battleship attack had accomplished its twin purpose: it had destroyed one Minx army and had sent the other packing, its members no doubt concluding that no wage was worth facing certain screaming death from the skies, as their comrades inside Da Nang city had.

Hunter had just switched off the VCR/TV combo when he felt a slight vibration run through his body.

He checked his watch. It was straight up 1200 hours.

“Right on time,” he thought.

He walked out of the ops building and onto the vast tarmac. The base was already getting back to some kind of normalcy. Repair crews were patching the far runways, the fire brigade finally snuffing out the several inconsequential fires started by the Minx shelling. Though intense, the enemy attack had failed to damage any vital piece of equipment on the base. All of the aircraft—from the trio of Football City Galaxys to the F-20s—had survived in their concrete shelters. Even more important, there were few casualties among the defending forces, and most of those were minor.

Shielding his eyes, Hunter stared up into the brilliantly lit blue sky and immediately spotted a small speck coming in from the east. The speck grew quickly, a testament to its high speed, and soon was fairly distinguishable: a long snout, swept cranked wings, twin tail fins. The trademark dull black color. There was only one plane known on Earth like it.

It was the SR-71 Blackbird, the hyperfast, high-flying recon plane operated by the Sky High Spies, Inc.

There was a crowd of 100 or so gathered by the time the SR-71 came in for a landing. The Blackbird’s ramjets engine emitted such a scream, many were forced to block their ears, so high-pitched was the distinctive whine.

The airplane rolled up to a stop right next to the crowd, its engines winding down. The twin canopy popped open and the two pilots climbed out. It was the Kephart Brothers, Jeff and George, the proprietors of Sky High Spies, Inc. They’d flown over from Edwards to do a high-altitude sweep of South Vietnam the day after the Minx offensive.

Bulked up in the high-altitude, spacesuit-looking outfits, they waddled over and shook hands briskly with Hunter.

“Nice place,” Brother Jeff deadpanned, looking around the airbase and then over at the smoldering crater that was once Da Nang city. “But it looks like we missed the big party.”

Hunter just nodded. “Did you ever,” he replied.

Brother George produced a video cassette.

“Well, there’s plenty more going on,” he said grimly.

They hurried to the ops room where they were joined by Ben, JT, Frost and Geraci. Quickly inserting the videotape into the VCR/TV combo, within seconds the screen was filled with the crooked green shape of South Vietnam. Everyone in the room grew absolutely silent. The country’s outline was barely visible, so intense was the smoke and fire. In fact, to Hunter, it appeared as if the whole country was on fire.

“When we did our first mission a few weeks back,” Brother Jeff began, “we didn’t believe it could get much worse. But obviously, it has.”

The video rolled on, showing close-ups of such places as Cam Ranh Bay, Hue, Quang Ngai, and New Saigon. Each illustrated in the most graphic terms that incredibly intense battles were raging just about everywhere to the south of them. In fact, only the quick shot of the Da Nang area itself showed any semblance of peace.

“It was same up and down the coast,” Brother George told them. “These Minx guys are everywhere. Troops moving, on foot or in trucks. Mobile guns. Tanks. Towed artillery. If you count them, you’ll see there are more than three hundred big guns—81s up to big 120s—just around New Saigon alone. They’re just pounding whoever the hell is defending that place. Same is true at all the major coastal cities. No wonder we were getting all those Maydays.”

Hunter felt his spirits sag to an all-time low. They had all been so caught up in their own survival, they had had no time to even ponder the situation in the rest of the country. Now it was quite apparent that it was all very grim.

As always, JT spoke for them.

“Jessuzz, we’ve been breaking our asses here,” he began, his voice bitter, “just to save our own necks. But looking at this, it all amounts to a pee hole in the snow. We were just lucky. We can’t beat these guys. They’re overrunning the other ninety-five percent of the country.”

No one argued with him. As the videotape rolled on, it displayed with sickening accuracy, a country that was in its death throes.

“And once they get finished down there,” JT concluded, “they’ll all be back up here. And no matter what the hell we throw at them, it will never be enough.”

The Kephart Brothers looked at each other and grimaced. It was up to Brother Jeff to deliver another slice of very bad news.

“There’s more,” he said simply, hitting the fast-forward control.

Within seconds, the fuzzy green shape of Vietnam dissolved, and soon the screen turned cloudy blue. The spy pilot returned the tape to normal speed and those gathered saw the new sequence was of the ocean from about ten miles up.

“We shot this about five hundred miles out from Cam Ranh Bay,” Brother George began. “We started picking up microwave emissions and figured we’d check it out before coming in.”

The room fell absolutely silent as they watched the scene’s thin cloud cover clear away. Then an audible gasp went up. The screen clearly showed a group of ships sailing in three distinct lines.

“Damn,” Hunter whispered. “The battleships.”

Both Kepharts nodded grimly. “There’s at least twenty of them,” George said. “They appear to be under full steam, sailing due west.”

“… and heading right for us,” Ben half-whispered.

JT flung his coffee cup against the far wall.

“That’s the ball game,” he said, teeth clenched. “It means we went through all this
for nothing
.”

Even Hunter had to agree. Staring out the window at the huge airbase, he couldn’t help but think he’d been transported back in time, that his own recent past crazily mirrored the American effort in Vietnam in the 1960s. First, an encirclement by the shadowy enemy, saved only by a narrow escape. Then the deceptive beauty of the Delta, that, like the rest of the country, hid unspeakable horrors committed by the most unlikeliest of soldiers—the Li Chi-Chi. Finally, the art of destroying a city in order to save it. And now, evidence of more enemy on the way—unchecked, uncheckable. And more enemy meant more fighting, more war, more death.

What was it about this place?
It was a green jungle masked as black hole, sucking in more and more lives. And for what? Rice paddies? Oil?

He closed his eyes and tried to call on his psychic resources to provide him some clue, some little shred of truth in the whole bloody mess. Suddenly he found himself staring into a pair of vacant eyes. They were so lacking in life they were nearly white. That’s when he realized they belonged to a ghost—the spirit of the Marine who had chosen to visit him in the foxhole back at Khe Sanh.

And what the ghost had told him then, suddenly made a lot of sense right now.
Don’t make the same mistake again. Don’t go about the thing the wrong way. Get to the heart of the matter!

That’s when it hit him. Get to the heart of the matter!

He suddenly had a plan.

The next day

E
VEN AT THE HEIGHT
of the Minx attack, the air base at Da Nang had not been as busy as this.

There were four C-5s lined up on the main runways—the trio of Football City Special Forces Galaxys plus
Triple X.
The Football City planes were packed with paratroops;
Triple X
was bristling with weapons copped from the defense perimeter around Da Nang air base.

The past twenty-four hours had been spent on the radio with the commanders of the various defense forces in other parts of South Vietnam. To a man, they confirmed what the Sky High Spies recon video had shown: every major city on the coast was under tremendous attack; every major city was on the verge of being overrun by the Minx.

In all of the conversations, the United American officers in Da Nang had one message to their besieged colleagues: Hang on. Help is on the way.

Now each of the Football City planes was heading for a paradrop over a separate location—one to New Saigon, one to Cam Ranh Bay and one to Quang Ngai. The insertion of the three hundred elite paratroopers at each of these key locations would help the desperate defenders hold on just a little longer.

By the same token,
Triple X
meanwhile was heading for Na Trang, where it would lend critically needed air support for the encircled mercenary troops there.

Behind the four Galaxys was the trio of F-20 Tiger-sharks, with Ben, Frost and JT at their controls. Their wings heavy with bombs, their cannons fresh with ammunition, the F-20s were heading for air strikes against smaller cities along the coast that had already been overrun by the Minx.

Waiting patiently at the end of this impressive line of aircraft was the SR-71 Blackbird. At its controls was Hawk Hunter.

Unlike the others, Hunter’s mission this fateful day was to gather intelligence—information that he needed if his latest in a series of bold plans was ever going to work.

He was piloting the Blackbird alone—the mission he was undertaking was much too risky to endanger the lives of the Kephart Brothers, although they both insisted that one of them should go along, at the very least to work the spy plane’s cameras.

But Hunter politely refused. All he asked for was use of their unique airplane, with a half-serious promise of full compensation if it was damaged or destroyed. Finally, they agreed.

At exactly 0700 hours, the Football City planes took off. Climbing slowly into the crystal clear morning sky, the gigantic airships formed up and slowly turned southward, their holds full of anxious, determined paratroopers.

Triple X
was airborne a minute later, its fuselage absolutely bristling with weapons, from Gatlings up to light artillery pieces, shades of the old
Bozo
and
Nozo
gunships.

The F-20s went next. Their targets being hardened Minx positions, there was no need for them to carry anything other than big 1,000-pound GP bombs. Each Tigershark had four strapped to its wings.

Finally, it was Hunter’s turn.

He’d flown the SR-71 on several occasions back when he was helping the Brothers Kephart reconstruct it after it was found hidden away in a hangar in Old Mexico. It was a very unique airplane, to say the least. With its awesome power and climbing ability, it was quite capable of reaching the edge of space—thus the need for the bulky space-suit and helmet. It could also fly at three, or four, or even
five
times the speed of sound, depending on load and fuel capacity. This mind-boggling performance was due to both the SR-71’s pair of ramjet-adapted engines which Hunter and the Kepharts had souped up to 40,000 pounds of thrust each, and the airplane’s titanium body which was light, yet capable of handling the high temperatures of near-hypersonic speed.

Possibly the most unusual thing about the airplane—at least from Hunter’s present point of view—was that it was unarmed. The SR-71 couldn’t carry a bomb or a cannon, nor would its baroque design allow for any weapons’ adaptation.

No—the Blackbird sole weapon was its speed.

And that’s exactly what Hunter would need where he was going.

It began as a slow day for the radar operators at the Dong Ha air base.

Usually the radarmen would run a drill around dawn every morning, to keep their senses sharp as well as check out their sophisticated airborne early warning equipment.

But there was no drill today—the radarmen and the pilots and mechanics for the squadron of 18 MiG-25 Foxbats also stationed at the base were in the middle of a work stoppage. They hadn’t been paid in nearly two months now, and while their paymasters battled it out with the finance officers at Minx High Command in Hanoi, the base personnel had agreed not to perform any duty until the dispute was settled.

This was not the first time that High Command had screwed the men stationed at Dong Ha on their monthly payouts. Like many employers, the Viet Minx were long on demanding hard work and short on getting the checks in the mail. And everyone knew the reason for this latest indignation: with the big offensive now on in the south, CapCom was forcing the Minx High Command to concentrate its monetary resources there, and thereby stiffing its units in the north.

So there’d be little work done at Dong Ha today. Instead, the base personnel were gathered in the mess hall where a craps game was underway. Gambling was the common diversion whenever a pay dispute was happening at Dong Ha, though because there was a shortage of cash around the base, most of the players were betting with IOUs.