Sky Ghost (16 page)

“No sir,” he said. “I just wanted to say…well, good luck up there.”

With that, he banged Hunter twice on the helmet and disappeared.

Hunter fired the Mustang’s engine and the thing came to life with surprising verve. He did a weapons check. His four machine guns were full, and the cannon was packing the same 25 shells. He did a fuel check: his main fuel tanks were full, and he was carrying three drop tanks with 500 gallons each. He switched on the homing TV, it came right to life too. He hit the radio check switch. It came back green.

Then he hit the heater switch—and the same old cold air came blowing in.

“That didn’t last long,” he murmured.

He taxied and took off without incident, once again tapping the enormous fighter into the air with a touch of the brakes.

It was a very cloudy day. Hunter climbed as fast as he could, hoping that increased engine use would heat the plane up, but it was no soap. The heater was blowing air even colder than before. Finally he just gave up and switched the damn thing off.

He passed up through Angels-22 and finally broke through the soup.

He keyed the homing TV and was soon locked on a solid beam. The circle got tight, the screen came alive, and he was soon looking at long lines of contrails cutting across the deep blue morning sky. The sun was reflecting off the lines of frozen ice crystal, giving them an oddly warming hue. Hunter shivered when he saw this. It reminded him of just how cold he really was.

He laid on the throttle and the double-reaction engine kicked in response. He rose to 32,000 feet, the g-forces rippling his face and invigorating his body. He had the bombers in visual range within a minute.

This was not the 999th from the day before. These airplanes were from the unfortunately numbered 13th Heavy Bombardment Squadron.

They were flying enormous aircraft, larger than the B-24/52s from Hunter’s previous mission. He took a moment to study these airplanes and again, saw an example of the odd aeronautical Darwinism at work.

As with most combat aircraft he’d seen here in this strange world, these looked to be a combination of two airplanes, memories of which were allowed to leak out of the back of his skull. These planes were very long and thin. They had enormous wingspans with six contra-rotating props on each side, back-mounted, pusher-style, along with a set of four jet engines way out on the tips. In this way the plane resembled what Hunter remembered as the B-36 Peacemaker.

But the snout of the aircraft was tiered and had an arsenal of weapons sticking out of it. So did the fuselage, which looked very thick and rugged and was lousy with machine gun stations. The flight deck, the canopy, the dozens of gun blisters, the high tail, and even the partially retracted landing gear were all reminiscent of a plane Hunter recalled as the B-17 Flying Something-or-Other.

So these were B-17/36s. Even his swiss-cheese brain knew that was another very bizarre combination.

He called up to the flight leader, and unlike the day before, he received a very crisp response on the first try.

“This is Section Leader Tango One,” a very official-sounding voice responded. “I read you, Cover.”

He and Hunter exchanged a flurry of information on headings, weather changes, heights, emergency frequencies, and so on. For the first time since this whole bad dream had commenced, Hunter found himself authentically impressed. He hit the throttle bar again and zoomed up to meet the column of B-l7/36s.

For some reason, he felt the adherence to military protocol, and the confident no-nonsense tone to be very reassuring. Why was this? Had he been a hardass back in his previous military career? A by-the-book kind of guy?

He didn’t know.

He reached the head of the column and moved up parallel to the flight leader.

These airplanes was very spit and polished, none of them bore the garish nose paintings of the day before. Nor were they painted in the dull blue polar camouflage of the group, the ill-fated 999th. These planes looked like they just rolled off the factory assembly line. They were bright, shiny, reflective metal.

The pilot of the first ship gave Hunter a friendly salute, which he returned. All of the faces looking out at him now were clean and neatly dressed. No beards and booze here.

Normally, Hunter’s instincts told him, for the 132 bombers in this flight at least a couple dozen fighters would be riding shotgun. They would normally take up positions about 5000 feet above the group, riding lead, flanks, and rear.

But there were no two dozen airplanes to guard this column. It was just Hunter. For this reason, he chose to take a position about a half mile ahead of the column at only a slightly higher altitude. Like the scout in front of the cavalry column, leading the way.

Though he was just as cold and just as confused as the day before, he did feel different today. The esprit de corps of this bomber group was goosing him into a better frame of mind.

That’s another reason he took the lead point. If anyone was going to take a shot at them, they’d have to take a shot at him first.

That’s the way he wanted it to be.

They reached the approaches to the North Channel exactly two hours later.

The weather had been cooperative and the skies friendly. No surprise with this group, everything was exactly on schedule.

To Hunter’s left, Scotland, still foggy in the early morning sun. To his right, northern Ireland, covered in clouds and raining as usual. Still, it did look emeraldlike this morning, and not at all uninviting. Hunter wondered for a moment if he was Irish, or of Irish parents maybe.

In the same thought he hoped the Irish were on the right side of this war against Germany. He knew that Eire was occupied, but just how much resistance were the Sods putting up against their perpetual enemy’s enemy? He didn’t know.

Twenty minutes later, their target came in sight. The Isle of Man was a substantial chunk of land in the northern part of the Irish Sea.

The target, a double-reaction power station, provided juice to nearly all of Occupied Britain and Ireland. To knock it out or even damage it would put the Germans in the dark, at least for a while anyway.

In any case, it beat bombing an already bombed-out city like Manchester.

Hunter keyed in on the bombing group’s interplane frequency and heard a symphony of crisp orders and responses. The group was tightening up, proper prebomb etiquette. The gun crews were testing their weapons, again, another routine item on the checklist. Various things involved in bomb-dropping itself—bay doors, fusing systems, gyros, and of course bombsights—were being checked in a very methodical, professional way.

There was a whole new feeling running through Hunter right now. These guys of the 13th had pride, man. They were ready to do the job, come what may. And he was sure they had to be astute enough to know that it would probably get rough over the target, especially with exactly one fighter plane riding cover.

Hunter knew he had to do everything in his power to help protect them.

Everything…

It happened about two minutes later.

Hunter was checking his own fuel load, at the same time watching a fuzzy yet discernible picture of the Isle of Man on his homing TV. As he understood it, the earliest warning they could get of fighter opposition would be from the “Homer.” The camera would pick up a large number of rising indications, run a crude memory check on them, radio this data back to the Circle and if the Main/AC computer back there caught on, it would positively ID them as unfriendlies. All this took a while, needed 100-percent electronic and atmospheric cooperation and the Main/AC couldn’t be too busy when the call from the group came in. The problem was every Main/AC everywhere was always too busy because everyone seemed to rely on them, or were tied to them slavishly.

This is what had happened the mission before—and why the Natter attack had been such a surprise.

And this is what happened today.

But in the end it didn’t matter—Hunter detected the swarm of enemy aircraft even before some of them left the ground.

It all started when his body began shaking.

It was so intense at first, he thought something was wrong with the Mustang-5. His eyes flash-scanned the control panel and saw no red or blinking lights. He pushed the systems diagnostic button and everything appeared green. Only then did he realize he was shaking and not the airplane.

The feeling was not a new one, just a forgotten one.

The tingling at the end of the fingertips. The buzzing at the base of the skull. Eyes suddenly looking in all directions at once. It was an intensity rivaling that of his first time airborne in the Pogo—but definitely with a very different vibe.

Trouble is coming,
a voice was saying crisp and clear in his head, even more so than the voices of the 13th Bombardment pilots.
Do something about it…

The next thing he knew, Hunter was diving.

He’d slammed the nose of the Mustang-5 down to the floor and now he could see the northern coast of the Isle of Man coming up at him very, very fast.

And up ahead, about 45 degrees in his field of vision, he saw them.

At first he would have sworn they were a flock of birds, and in a way, they were. They were just heads and wings really, white, almost reflective. They were not trailing any smoke, any exhaust or flames at all. They looked, for want of a better word, graceful. And they weren’t the particularly ungraceful Natters.

What were they then?

Hunter increased power even as he was passing through Mach 1 in a dive. These things were swooping up towards the bombers and he was moving so fast and had dove on them so unexpectedly, they hadn’t seen him yet.

He keyed his homing TV and got a split-second bead on one of them close-up. The German Iron Cross was painted on its wings. And there were serial numbers on its very short tail. And he could see a bubble-type canopy at the very front of the snout. And underneath each one, he saw a load of antiaircraft rockets.

And suddenly the name just popped into his head. These things were Horton flying wings.

Hunter’s breath caught in his throat—not so much upon the realization that a swarm of weird deadly interceptors was rising up to attack the bomber group, as that something his psyche had warned him so early that they were coming.

How could that have happened? It was the same feeling which had caused him to look down at the two U-boats that day, and he supposed, that got him through the knife fight with the Natters the day before. But never had he had the feeling this intense—not in this place anyway.

But the feeling was more than just an early warning system—this vibe had given him an outstanding advantage that every pilot wanted more than anything else if he was about to get into a dogfight.

He’d seen the enemy—and they hadn’t seen him.

The Horton flying wings were designated Ho-IXX. They were built of tubular aluminum, and their wings were sturdy plywood. This gave them a swiftness never before seen in a German interceptor, another example of the great leap forward in the Reich lately.

They were powered by two massive BMW-Juno 5000 engines, double reheat monsters that made up nearly 60 percent of the strange aircraft’s weight. These made the planes extremely powerful and maneuverable.

But to cut down the weight even further, the aircraft’s small cabin wasn’t pressurized. Instead the pilot wore a pressurized suit and a helmet that really was out of a sci-fi movie. Again the extra lightness gave the little wing a measure of grace.

But there was a problem. The German flying wings were interceptors—platforms from which missiles could be fired into a bomber stream with great accuracy. But there was a difference between interceptors and fighters. Fighters could do what interceptors could do—shoot at bombers. But the fighters could also dogfight, due to their weapons. Usually interceptors could not.

And this day, in this world, the Horton wings were purely interceptors.

And the Mustang-5 was a fighter.

Hunter kept on diving, way down, right to the deck. He streaked across the beach on the northern tip of the island, turned the big plane over and then started climbing again.

Now he had three advantages. He was behind the enemy, they didn’t see him and his plane was a better fighter than theirs.

It was odd because the Hortens were flying in a long chevron formation, almost mimicking the shape of their wings themselves. Hunter could see their strategy as clear as day. They would rise up into the bomber stream—knowing the bombers would have to be going very slow while going into their bombing runs—and start flooding it with their antiaircraft rockets.

It was also obvious the Germans had brought the wings in to specifically defend the power plant on the Isle of Man.

Hunter could just barely see the bomber stream coming into view now. He was so low, and the sun was so bright, that spotting them was a little difficult. He increased throttle and began to climb. The 12 wings were laid out for him in perfect fashion.

He climbed more, sneaking up on them—3000 feet, 4000, 4500…

Still they were completely unaware of him. The bombers he figured must be at 22-Angels by now, their bombing altitude. Clouds had moved in. They were hiding the bomb group! Excellent!

Hunter opened up at exactly 5000 feet. His four guns screamed streaks across the sky. For whatever reason the plane was overloaded with tracer bullets—and he found it a great, if familiar aid. His first barrage tore into the first pair of wings.

And that’s where Hunter found his fourth advantage: like the Natters, the Horten wings were loaded with a very volatile rocket fuel known as S/W-Stoff. Hunter knew it was highly flammable because all it took was a few hits and the first wing just disintegrated, even quicker than a Natter.

He tore into the second one, then a third one. They too blew up immediately. He turned and knocked off a fourth wing. It too went up like a matchstick. But this is the last one he would take by surprise. By now the rest of the Horton group saw him and began evasive action.

With the precision of an aerobatics team, they broke into a starburst. Each one turning over in an opposite direction from the others.