Sky Ghost (3 page)

The man thought another few moments. “No, I am not,” he finally replied.

This sent Zal scratching his head.

“So you’re a member of the armed services,” he said. “And you are an American. But you are not a soldier of the United States?”

The man just nodded. “That’s right—I think.”

Zal kept on scratching. “Well, now I’m confused,” he said.

“Me too,” Wolf added.

He turned around in his chair to his computer. He popped the keyboard out, typed in a few quick notes on the interview and then pushed a button that would convert his words into an alpha-numeric language only the computer could understand. Basically he was asking the machine what he should do next.

The computer whirred and blinked and burped and blinked some more. Finally the answer came out on a long piece of ticker tape.

“Terminate interrogation,” it read. “Return to port immediately.”

Wolf showed the message to Zal, who nodded.

“Listen pal, we’ve got to stop this right here,” Wolf said. “We’ll be bringing you back with us. I have a feeling someone higher up the ladder will be very interested in you.”

The man just shrugged. “Do what you’ve got to do.”

Wolf nodded to Zal. “OK, get him fed. And keep him away from the crew. It will take us about four hours to get back into port.”

Zal tapped the stranger on the shoulder.

“Let’s go, pal,” he said.

The man stood up. He really was a strange-looking cat.

“Just one more question,” Wolf said. “How about your name? Do you remember that?”

The man thought for a moment, then he finally replied:

“Yes, I do. My name is Hawk Hunter.”

Wolf looked at Zal, who just shrugged.

“Never heard of you,” Wolf said.

Out at sea, on the edge of the Demon Zone, one man was still floating.

Up until a little while ago, two other people had been in the water with him. But one had been picked up by an ultraspeedy warship; the other by a floating iron castle.

The gray, speedy vessel looked like a destroyer—but it was sleeker than any destroyer he’d ever seen. And the iron castle looked too big, too cumbersome to even stay afloat.

But the airplane that had circled above him the whole time was the strangest thing of all. It was the biggest, slowest, oddest-looking airplane he’d ever seen.

But they were all gone now. The destroyer had left the area at incredible speed carrying away one guy, and the black floating castle had departed in slower fashion towards the south carrying another. And then the gigantic airplane had simply flown away, leaving him here, all alone.

He had a huge bump on his head and a long scrape on his left arm. He’d been bobbing in the water for more than an hour now, and he was getting damned cold. He wasn’t sure how he got here; his memory was very foggy. In fact, he couldn’t even remember his name.

But he was coherent enough to know he was in very dire circumstances. He looked in all directions and saw nothing but water. He could tell by the cloud formations there wasn’t any land mass for hundreds of miles. But what could he do?

He couldn’t last much longer like this. He had to do something.

So he looked up at the sun and determined which way was west.

And then he started swimming.

I
T WAS NOW LATE
afternoon.

Hawk Hunter was standing on the foredeck of the
Louis St. Louis,
taking in many deep breaths and slowly letting them out again. Two armed sailors were watching over him from nearby. He was sure to them he looked like someone who needed some fresh air. And a lot of it.

He didn’t know who he was. Or where he came from. Or how he got here. His name was Hawk Hunter, that was the only thing he was sure of. After that, it was all a jumble.

And he had no idea
where
he was. Sure, he was on a destroyer and he’d been picked up some 350 miles out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And the people on the ship were Americans and they seemed to be fighting a war against the Germans. And the captain of the destroyer had said it was 1997.

But this ship—it was so strange! And the German ship; it had been even more outlandish. And the airplane which had circled above him while he was in the water: it seemed too enormous to fly. But how would he know these things? How could he know something was strange, if he couldn’t remember anything to compare it to?

That was just it. His mind was not a total blank. Some things were coming naturally to him. He knew how to walk and talk and breathe. He knew he was American. He knew who the Germans were, what a destroyer should look like, and that the bigger the airplane, the harder it is to fly.

But what he was doing an hour before he found himself in the water? He didn’t know…

When the destroyer’s captain asked him if he fell right out of the sky, Hunter’s brain processed the question as if, yes, that’s
exactly
what had happened. He had fallen out of the sky and into the ocean. Not out of an airplane—just out of the clear blue sky. But how could that happen?

Again, he didn’t know.

He took another deep breath. His head felt full of stuff. Familiar things. People. Incidents. But for some reason he just couldn’t access these memories. He sniffed the sea air and prayed it would uncloud that part of his brain that was hiding all these things
and
the circumstances by which he found himself here, in this strange, but not-so-strange place.

Another deep breath. More questions. Who were those other two guys in the water with him? And exactly what kind of uniform
was
he wearing when he was picked up? And what about…

Stop!

Stop. Hunter took another deep breath and let it out slowly. Too many questions were flowing into his head and if his brain got overloaded, then he would blow a neuron fuse for sure. So take another breath, he told himself. Calm down. Be cool. This will all get figured out, somehow.

Maybe.

The ship’s captain had said they would make port in four hours; more than three and a half had passed by now.

It was getting dark. The little warship was whipping along the waves like it was a racing boat, so Hunter assumed they must be nearing the vessel’s home. But where was it? They were sailing northwest, at least by the moon and the stars. But Hunter couldn’t see land anywhere out on the horizon.

Finally, though, he sensed the engines begin to slow. In seconds they were going at two-thirds speed, as if they were approaching land. But again, where the hell was it? They seemed still to be out in the middle of the ocean.

But then his ears began to pick up things his eyes couldn’t. Noises. Motors running. Neon burning. People talking, yelling. Music playing. A big band sound—but louder. With echo. And reverb. Was that Tommy Dorsey? Through reverb? Really?

What happened next was simply astonishing to him. One moment they were moving in complete and utter darkness, the next they were sailing off a very bright, very noisy coastline.

What happened?

Hunter looked behind him and realized that the destroyer had just passed through a huge almost-invisible screen. It was at least a half mile high and was being held up by an endless series of slender poles set into pilings about a mile offshore. It was as if someone had put a big curtain along the entire coastline.

“You really are from another place, aren’t you?”

Hunter turned around. It was Commander Zal, the XO. He’d been watching him.

“I can tell just by the way you looked at the Big Screen,” Zal went on. “You’ve never seen anything like it before, have you?”

Hunter just shook his head.

“Nope. Never,” he said.

“It’s called an LSD,” Zal told him. “Stands for Light and Sound Dampener. It keeps all light, all radio signals, all TV signals from going out, but still lets everything in. Like a two-way mirror. This way the coastline doesn’t have to black out every time it gets dark. Everyone knows about them—they’ve been around for years. Look at this one. It stretches all the way up to Canada. And it’s getting very ratty. But it’s still holding up.”

“It’s amazing,” Hunter said. “Sort of…”

Now he saw plenty of lights. And heard plenty of noise. He could smell life, lots of it, on the shoreline not too far away. This place—it actually looked familiar to him. Tall buildings. Lots of bridges. A city screaming at the top of its lungs.

Then it hit him—they were right off the coast of New York City!

But wait a moment. This wasn’t exactly how he remembered it. The Manhattan skyline was still there—but the buildings were twice as tall and there were twice as many as he recalled. And the Empire State Building was still the tallest one around—and it was at least three times as high as he remembered it.

“They added to it in 1968 and then again in 1979, after the big air raid that year,” Zal told him. “You didn’t know that either, did you?”

Hunter just shook his head no.

Zal reached into his pocket and came out with a pack of Lucky Strikes. But these Luckies were laid out in a cardboard gold box—like fancy English cigarettes used to be. He lit a butt and then offered one to Hunter, who declined.

“You know what, pal?” Zal said. “Maybe you
are
an angel. Maybe you really did fall out of the sky.”

But Hunter did not really hear him. He was too busy looking at a heavily bomb-damaged Statue of Liberty.

“Great Air Raid of 1989,” the XO explained. “They ain’t going to fix it until the war’s all over. Which should be any day now. It’s been more of a resistance symbol these past few years—wrecked the way it is. Lots of people have painted it. Photographed it.”

They were passing a tremendous amount of naval activity now. Tugs. Ferries. Repair ships. Hunter soon realized New York Harbor was now one enormous naval base. And even though it was past sunset, the lights around it were so bright, it was lit up like a bright, sunny day.

There were at least 200 warships of all sizes tied up at various points around the harbor. At first, they all seemed very odd to Hunter in shape or design. Some were sleek and long, some were fat and stubby. Some were enormous, some seemed too small. Some were actually two ships linked in the middle as one, like a catamaran. Yet all the ships were covered stem-to-stern with a navy gray paint that seemed very familiar to Hunter. It was so strange. The ships all looked bizarre and different to him, yet perfectly normal at the same time.

“This war you are fighting,” Hunter finally turned and asked Zal. “What is it called exactly?”

The XO seemed stumped for a moment. He was a tall wiry guy, not really the poster-boy version of a naval officer.

“What’s it called?” he asked. “I don’t know, take your pick.” He began counting off on his fingers. “The Second Great War. The War. The Big War. The Fifty-Year War…”

“Fifty-Year War?” Hunter stopped him. “Why call it that? How long has it been going on?”

Zal stared back at him for a long moment.

“Man, you really have been someplace else.”

He took a step closer and pretended to yell into Hunter’s ear.

“It’s been going on for fifty years, Mack. That’s why…”

“So it started in 1947?” Hunter asked him.

Once again, the XO was caught off guard.

“Well, no,” he replied. “Actually, it started in 1939—Germany invaded Poland…”

“…on September 1st, right?” Hunter interrupted him.

“So, you remember that at least.”

“Jessuzz, I guess I do,” Hunter said anxiously. “Please go on.”

“Well,” Zal said. “The Hundred Years’ War between England and France lasted longer than a hundred years, right? I guess it’s the same kind of thing. Maybe they can call it the Fifty-Eight Years’ War once it’s over.”

But Hunter wanted to get this straight. “So, a war that started with Germany invading Poland in 1939 is still going on today?”

“That’s right, sport,” Zal replied.

The XO threw his cigarette away.

“And that’s really all I should say to you,” he went on. “I’ve got to get back to the bridge. We’ll be pulling in about forty minutes from now.”

He signaled the guards that he was returning Hunter to their care and began to walk away.

“Commander?” Hunter called after him. “One more question?”

“OK…shoot.”

“When this war first started, what did they call it then?”

Zal thought a moment. Then he shrugged.

“Well, back then,” he said, “they called it World War II.”

T
HEY KEPT SAILING.

Even at two-thirds speed, the destroyer was making at least 100 knots, an incredible speed for such a vessel.

Past New York Harbor. Up the coast of Connecticut, which was now an endless line of huge gun emplacements and military ports. Past Rhode Island, whose shoreline was nothing but oil depots and off-loading terminals. Past Block Island, now one huge airfield. Past Martha’s Vineyard—it was bristling with gigantic submarines, many of which had flight decks attached for launching and recovering aircraft.

And all of it looked different, yet familiar to Hunter at the same time.

Eventually the
Louis St. Louis
entered yet another busy Navy facility. This base was located in Buzzard’s Bay on the ass end of Cape Cod. Just like the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island, this part of the Cape was thick with naval activity. The destroyer passed by ships that were so enormous, Hunter couldn’t see their decks and thus couldn’t figure out what it was they did.

They passed a huge shipbuilding yard. Hunter didn’t have to wonder what they built here. They built aircraft carriers. It said so on a sign painted across an enormous two-towered crane. It read: “AmeriCorp Aircraft Carrier Division. Bigger Is Better.”

There was truth in that advertising. These aircraft carriers were gigantic.

What ships they were! There were at least 10 of them in various stages of construction. They were being assembled in sections on extremely high, raised docks. The network of steel surrounding these building platforms was frightening. There seemed to be clouds forming at the top of some of them, they were so high.