Skyfire (8 page)

Both Jones and Yaz felt a chill run through them.

"Christ, were there that many bodies burned into dust?" Yaz exclaimed.

Fitz slowly shook his head. "Undoubtably some were," he said. "But not such a high number. But there's more: According to the Army commander, apparently all of the people missing are women."

"Women?" Jones asked.

Fitz shrugged. "That's right: all the males-of all ages-in the village were killed," he said, referring once again to the telex. "And there were some women killed, too. But at least one hundred and eighty-seven people-all of them women between the ages of fourteen and thirty-six-are missing. Gone.

Vanished."

"Good God," Jones whispered bitterly. "What the hell happened up there?"

Fitz could only shake his head. "Either the raiders grouped all these women together and killed them somewhere else and their bodies just haven't been found. Or..."

"Or what?" Yaz wanted to know.

"Or. . ." Jones answered the question soberly. "The bastards took them all with them."

69

Nauset Heights, Three days later

"More chowder, Yaz?"

Yaz leaned back in his chair and briefly squeezed his expanding waistline.

"Maybe just a little," he replied, caving in without much of a fight. "It's so damn good, it's hard to resist . . ."

Dominique ladled out two heaping spoonfuls of the fish stew, then handed the pot to Hunter who doled out a third helping of his own.

Yaz reached for a hot roll and slapped a pat of butter on it. "God, I haven't eaten this good in years," he said.

"Neither have I," Hunter mumbled through a mouthful of the fish chowder.

"That's scrod you're eating by the way. Caught a bunch of them this morning out in the bay."

They were sitting in the comfortably rustic kitchen of the farmhouse Hunter and Dominique called home. Yaz had arrived earlier that afternoon, flown in by a United American Armed Forces helicopter that had met his airplane at the airport up in Boston. It seemed as if he and Hunter had been eating and drinking ever since.

Yaz's mission per Jones's orders was to brief his friend on the strange goings-on in Nova Scotia, as well as the piece of videotape from Plum Island.

It had been a tough decision for the Commander in Chief to make.

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More than eight months had passed since Hunter left active duty, and Jones had gone to great lengths to honor Hunter's desire for privacy.

Yet Hunter had greeted Yaz warmly on his arrival -they were friends, and it had been almost a year since they'd seen each other. However, at Hunter's insistence, Yaz had put off discussing the bad news until after dinner.

"Unless you're here to tell me about an impending nuclear attack, it can wait," Hunter had said to him shortly after Yaz stepped off the chopper.

So instead, Yaz had gotten a tour of the farm and the fields, plus a ride along the beach in Hunter's laughably rickety pickup truck.

But now, as the three of them finished their dinner meal, Yaz knew it was time to get on with his assignment.

Hunter caught the look in his eye, and reluctantly nodded.

"OK," he said, filling Yaz's glass with an after-dinner shot of brandy. "Let's have it. . ."

Yaz threw back the liquor to steel himself, then took the next fifteen minutes to detail what was known about the Yarmouth massacre. Through it all, Hunter listened without speaking, taking it all in between refills of brandy. Only Dominique, who pretended to busy herself by putting the finishing touches on a dessert of homemade apple pie, showed any reaction to the startling news, gasping at several points in the story.

By the time he got to the part about the "sea monster," Yaz had downed three glasses of brandy and was working on his second piece of pie.

Finally, Hunter spoke.

"Well, I knew it must have been something heavy duty for you to come all the way out here," he said. "What do Jonesie and the others make of all this?"

Yaz shook his head. "No one has come up with anything near a rational explantion," he said, finally pushing

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the pie plate away from him. "I mean, it was bad enough that whoever was responsible just utterly wiped out that village. But for them to disappear like that-walk back into the ocean?-and apparently take a hundred and eighty-seven women with them? It's just too bizarre ..."

"And the women who were taken were just between certain ages?" Dominique asked.

Yaz nodded grimly. "Between fourteen and thirty-six," he said. "And we all know there are white slavers running around the world. But I've never heard of any of them abducting more than five or six people at a time."

"Neither have I," Hunter said. "Usually, they're just hit-and-run scumbags who cant count past ten."

They retired to the back porch, where a pot of brandy-laced coffee was passed around. The fading light of the setting sun provided the customary spectacular sunset, with a slightly cool ocean breeze heralding the approach of another night.

"All this gloom from Nova Scotia almost makes your monster story seem funny by comparison," Hunter told Yaz. "Jones and Fitz must be going nuts."

"They've worn out the VCR watching the videotape," Yaz said. "And I don't blame them. I've seen it probably three dozen times, and each time, it looks like a frigging monster. A real one-solid, skin and all. His head just bobs up and down once and then boom! it disappears."

"Perhaps the famous monster finally escaped from Loch Ness?" Dominique said, brushing back her beautiful blond hah-as she sipped her coffee.

"That's what Jonesie said," Yaz replied with a laugh.

"Well, that monster he better stay the hell away from Nova Scotia," Hunter replied. "Sounds like whoever is on the loose up there would cut him up and eat him for breakfast."

Yaz took a hefty gulp of his own spiked coffee.

"Jones was back and forth on whether I should even come out here and tell you all this," he said to Hunter. "I mean, I'm the last one in the world who'd want to screw

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up your . .. well, your vacation. But. .."

Hunter held up his hand. "It's okay," he told Yaz.

Yaz nodded, but he could sense the disappointment in Hunter's voice. He felt like the guy who'd just crashed a birthday party, or more accurately, a honeymoon.

"Well, Jones figured you'd want to know," he went on. "He wrote it all up in a report that I have in my pack. Forty-two pages of it."

Hunter poured out three more cups of coffee.

"And?" he asked.

"And," Yaz replied somewhat sheepishly, "he thought that maybe you could read it over, help us figure it all out.. ."

Hunter immediately looked over at Dominique, who was staring right back at him. With just one glance, he read volumes in her eyes.

"Well, the problem is that we're trying to make this more than just a

'vacation,' Yaz," Hunter told him. "It's more like a retirement."

"I know," Yaz replied. "And Jones knows that, too. I realize you're out of the business, and I don't blame you. But there's just so many strange things going on . . ."

Hunter barely suppressed a laugh. "So what else is new?" he asked.

They sat in silence for several moments. Then Hunter took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"Okay, I'll make a deal with you," he said finally. "I'll read the report, roll it all over for a few days, and then let you know what comes out. How's that?"

Yaz could only shrug. "Well, that's great," he replied. "I mean I'm sure Jones didn't expect you to lead the charge, exactly."

"Well then, it's settled," Hunter said with a smile. "I'll be like an adviser.

A big-shot consultant. And of course, you'll have to stick around here for a while, you know, to help me sort it out."

Yaz looked up at him and scratched his head.

"Jesuzz, I don't know, Hawk," he said worriedly.

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"Jones thought I'd shoot out here and then go right back-either with or without you. He's expecting me back tomorrow."

Hunter cheerfully waved away Yaz's protests.

"When's the last time you took a few days off?" he asked his friend.

Yaz shook his head. "I can't remember back that far."

At that point, Hunter grinned and poured him another cup of coffee, thereby signaling that the debate was over.

Dominique reached over and placed her hand on Yaz's shoulder.

"Like it or not, Yaz," she said sweetly, "it looks like you're the one who's going to take a vacation . . ."

74

His name was Jack Stallion, and as he gazed out from his office atop the fifty-foot-high tower, he was reminded once again that he was a man with a lot of responsibilities.

Stretched before him, looking like a field of enormous tuna fish cans, were twelve huge fuel storage tanks, each one painted in a distinctive pearl white.

Contained in the tanks was more than one hundred-thousand gallons of a highly volatile kerosene product known as JP-8 to the experts, jet fuel to the layman.

As such, the dozen tanks of JP-8 represented the largest concentration of jet engine fuel in the northeast part of America.

Like many things in the first few years after the Big War, jet fuel had been at a premium. But as the country gradually recovered, reserves of the precious JP-8 grew, as did its use. The increase in jet flights from the East Coast to the West and vice versa-the massive air convoys now contained as many as seventy or eighty airplanes - demanded continuous production of the JP-8 at a half dozen refineries on the eastern seaboard. This one, located on the shore just north of Boston in a small city called Revere, was one of the largest because of its proximity to the Hub's huge airport.

And to a certain degree, Jack Stallion was the keeper of all this gas.

A man of ruddy Irish complexion and a shock of gray-white hair that went well with his last name, Stallion was in charge of the small army that guarded the fuel-tank storage

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area of the refinery. More than a hundred men were under his command, and their weaponry-ranging from NightScope-equipped M-16's to TOW antitank rockets, and even some small surface-to-air missiles-was judged to be more than enough to discourage any troublemakers from nosing around the sprawling hundred-fifty-acre waterfront facility.

Now, on this night, as Stallion looked out of the tower at the full moon rising above his little protectorate, he knew it was time to begin his quarter-hourly security check.

"Station One?" he routinely called into the microphone of his elaborate radio setup. "Report . . ."

"Station One, OK. . ." came the reply.

"Station Two?"

"Deuce is OK. . ."

"Station Three?"

"Trips is OK. . ."

On and on it went, each of the three-man outposts around the perimeter of the facility calling in that everything was quiet.

But still, Stallion felt uneasy. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but something in his craw was telling him everything wasn't as it should be.

Acting purely on instinct, Stallion quickly completed the security check and then sent out a general order for his troops to go up to a Yellow Alert, the middle stage of readiness.

His troopers - mostly veterans of the Big War as well as the more recent civil wars-knew better than to question their commander's order. Instead, reacting like a well-oiled machine, each outpost went to Yellow. All weapons were checked for ammunition load and all safeties were turned off. Each NightScope operator widened his range of field, and the reserve force of troopers back in the barracks quickly suited up and reenforced their assigned stations.

As it turned out, Stallion's action would be responsible for saving the lives of many of his soldiers.

The first sign of trouble appeared ten minutes later. The NightScope operator at Station Twenty-two was scan-76

ning a section of oily beach about an eighth of a mile from his position when he got a reading of two figures walking up from the water's edge. He immediately alerted the two other troopers in his pillbox, and one of them in turn radioed a quick report back to Stallion's tower command post.

As luck would have it, Station Twenty-two was the most isolated position on the facility's perimeter. Stuck out on the far eastern edge of the storage area, it looked out on a little-used shipping channel that at one time handled sizable oil tankers arriving from overseas. Now the channel was collared with tall bullrushes that somehow managed to live along the heavily polluted shoreline. It was in these weeds that the NightScope operator first saw the intruders.

No sooner had the warning call gone out to Stallion and the rest of the security force when the number of mysterious figures on NightScope increased to six, then eight, then twelve, then twenty. Stallion immediately bumped the whole facility up to Red Alert. Already a small force of twenty reserve troops were quietly making their way to the area, but Station Twenty-two's isolated location being what it was, they would not arrive for several minutes.

By that time, it would be too late.

The voice of the radio operator in Twenty-two took on an ever-increasing anxious tone as he radioed the situation back to Stallion.

"We have a reading on as many as thirty-six individuals approaching our position," Stallion heard the man say in a controlled but undeniably nervous whisper. "They are definitely armed."

Stallion had turned his own NightScope on the area by this time and he, too, could see the faint images of a crowd of figures walking up from the water's edge. Because of the volatility of their surroundings, the rules of engagement around the storage facility were stridently low-key and by the book. No one wanted any panic firing when just one or two bullets could light up one hundred-thousand gallons of explosive aviation fuel.

Still, Stallion knew that nothing less than a small army was 77

approaching his facility, and according to the rules, no prior warning had to be given to anyone acting in an aggressive manner around the area.

"We count more than fifty now. . ." the radio operator reported, his voice shaky and apprehensive. "Closest is just thirty-five yards from our position."