Skyfire Page 18

  Crunch gave the men a quick lookover and then signaled two UA troopers who were still waiting inside the C-5. The soldiers signaled back and soon were carefully carrying a large steel case down the C-5’s ramp.

  “One million is all he wanted, eh?” Crunch asked Elvis as the two soldiers laid the cash box at their feet.

  “I offered him two if he told us where he got the jet,” Elvis replied. “But he wanted no part of it.”

  “Weird,” Crunch said.

  Elvis put his fingers to his mouth and let out a long whistle. With that, Zim emerged from the cab of one of the trailer trucks and walked forward, his entourage of goons following behind like baby ducks.

  Crunch instinctively pushed the safety off his sidearm. “Let’s just hope these guys don’t suspect we’ve got five million more sitting back in the plane,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Elvis told him. “Mister Zim isn’t concerned about money right now. Something else is on his mind.”

  The businessman walked up and without a word pointed to the cash box. Immediately, two of his bodyguards opened the box and started counting out the gold bars inside.

  Two minutes and two grunts later, Zim nodded and slammed the box shut with his foot.

  “I’m happy to see that you pay your debts in full and on time,” he said to Crunch and Elvis.

  “Yeah, big deal,” Elvis told him. “Now just get your guys cracking and do your part …”

  Zim snapped his fingers and was holding a lit cigarette a mere five seconds later.

  “There has been one alteration to our deal,” he said sinisterly.

  Crunch immediately laid his hand on his enormous .357 Magnum sidearm, at the same time nodding to the officer in charge of the UA troopers guarding the airplane.

  “What the hell do you mean?” Elvis challenged the man. “You can’t go changing the deal now …”

  Zim flicked away his barely smoked cigarette and then closed his eyes for a moment.

  “It is a simple request,” he said in a low voice. “I want no more money, or anything of yours that is valuable. All I ask is that you take me and six of my men back to the mainland with you.”

  The request stunned both Crunch and Elvis.

  It was Crunch who started shaking his head first.

  “No way, pal,” he said. “We ain’t no taxi service and that’s not part of the deal. Besides, you don’t want to go there. There’s big trouble back on the mainland. Very big trouble on the East Coast. In fact, we wouldn’t even be out here screwing around with you at all except our boss told us to.”

  Zim was becoming very nervous now. Years spent cultivating an image of cool and cunning was lost in a few seconds’ time. It was apparent that he wanted nothing better but to get the hell out of Hawaii, and quick.

  “I’ll cut the price of the airplane,” he said suddenly, his gold teeth somehow losing some of the gleam. “You can have it for a half million if you take us.”

  Crunch had never stopped shaking his head.

  “A quarter of a million,” Zim said desperately.

  Elvis held his hand up at this point. “Hold it,” he said. “What the hell is going on? Why do you want to get out of here so damn quick? You just about own Honolulu …”

  Zim shook his head sadly. “I will have nothing in a very short time,” he said. “Nothing will be left …”

  Crunch and Elvis just looked at each other.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Elvis asked the man.

  It took the frightened businessman five minutes to explain it all, Crunch and Elvis listening with a mixture of astonishment and outright disbelief.

  Less than a half hour later, the huge airplane was lifting off from the airport’s longest runway, the twenty-three crates containing the disassembled F-16 safely packed inside along with Zim and his six bodyguards.

  Elvis’s F-4X Phantom took off shortly afterward.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  THE SUNLIGHT WAS FADING fast as Elvis flew the powerful F-4X up to twenty-five thousand feet.

  Leveling off, he looked to the east and saw the glint of silver that was the huge C-5, heading at full throttle back toward the mainland. He knew that a squadron of F-5’s from the Republic of California Air Force would meet the C-5 at about the halfway point and escort them the rest of the way from there. It was the best that could be done under the circumstances.

  He, too, would have liked nothing better but to trail the Galaxy back to LA, but he had another mission to perform, one that was as critical as it was last minute.

  He shook his head and took a long, deep breath of oxygen.

  The last five weeks had been among the strangest of his life. One moment he was training a new crop of United American fighter pilots up in Boston, and the next heading to Hawaii, a satchel of classified papers under his arm and a book of codes in his pocket.

  Thus began the mission to recover Hunter’s F-16.

  Jones’s intelligence operatives had been searching for the missing jet ever since the battle up in the Canadian Rockies. A special squad of the Guardians was spotted carting the aircraft away during the early rounds of fighting, escaping amid the natural confusion of warfare. Jones’s spies were on the trail of these people forty-eight hours later.

  The unlikely group carried the aircraft on a specially made tractor trailer truck that was adapted to off-road driving. Moving only at night, they made it to Vancouver, Jones’s agents just an hour behind.

  That’s when the airplane and the Guardians simply disappeared.

  Jones’s men spent the next month combing Vancouver for clues, and their hard work paid off when they questioned a man who built packing boxes down on the city’s docks. He had been paid an exorbitant amount of money to construct a total of twenty-three wooden boxes of various sizes and shapes. When the agents saw the crude pencil drawings the man had made by hand, they added up the boxes’ total displacement and estimated weight capacity. The total equaled 13,959 pounds, the exact weight of an empty F-16.

  Using this tip, the agents then tracked the twenty-three crates to Juneau, where they were bought by a local hoodlum, who once again seemed to have become very wealthy very quickly. Gambling with some heavy rollers one night, this man offered the twenty-three crates as collateral on a big bet. He lost, and the cargo became the property of a Japanese gangster who had slipped an ace into his hand and won the pot with a royal flush.

  The Japanese gangster eventually moved on to Honolulu, where he in turn lost the crates to the Hawaiian military officer who was better at cheating at poker than he.

  At this point, General Jones called Elvis in and gave him the assignment to go to Hawaii and try to locate the disassembled plane. By the time Elvis made it to Honolulu, the crates had become the possession of a well-known Hawaiian crime boss, who, it was said, planned to sell it in pieces. This gangster was later found floating near the Pearl Harbor monument, the apparent loser in an argument over drugs.

  The trail suddenly gone cold, Elvis contacted Jones and asked what to do. By this time the crisis on the East Coast was getting worse by the day, and experienced pilots like Elvis were soon going to be very much in need. However, Jones told him to stay in Hawaii and try to pick up the scent again.

  These orders underscored the importance of the airplane to the country’s postwar national heritage. The F-16 was as well known now as Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and the Enola Gay. But Elvis also knew that Jones’s reasons were more personal than that.

  The Commander-in-Chief of the United American Armed Forces rightly figured that because the airplane had been stolen from Hunter while he was fighting with the UAAF against the white supremacist armies of the American Southwest, then it was only right that the UAAF do everything in its power to retrieve it. Besides the obvious moral victory in recovering the airplane, the sly Jones knew the gesture would certainly not be lost on a loyal soldier like Hunter.

  So Jones had told Elvis to stay in ’Lulu and ask questions
and Elvis did just that for two weeks before finding out that the famous airplane had been won in yet another poker game by an individual who turned out to be Zim, the businessman.

  Just as quickly, the word on the streets was that the airplane—all twenty-three crates of it—would be sold to the highest bidder.

  Elvis immediately radioed Jones, and soon Crunch was driving the big C-5 to Honolulu to deliver whatever money Elvis might need and hopefully carry the airplane back to the mainland.

  So now this piece of business was done. The nervous businessman had gotten his one million dollars in gold and his free ride out of the Islands …

  But not before he had told Elvis and Crunch an incredible story, so incredible that at the beginning they suspected Zim was actually planning an elaborate hoax.

  Then they thought he was just plain crazy. Finally he had convinced them not only that he was dead serious but that his tale carried with it such a dire threat to continental America that both Elvis and Crunch knew that they couldn’t take any chances. So they agreed to carry him away from Hawaii, knowing that if his story proved true, then he would be just the first of thousands of people who would soon attempt to flee the islands.

  Elvis checked his position and fuel load and then turned the F-4X due west, right into the bath of red that was the setting sun. Besides carrying extra-large external fuel tanks, the long-range Phantom was also equipped with several recon cameras. It was only through experience and foresight that Elvis had arranged to have these devices loaded on before he left California for the trip to Hawaii.

  Now, as he gazed into the setting sun through his heavily tinted helmet visor, he wondered if the impending disaster that Zim warned about actually lay out beyond the horizon. Or was he just carrying out some enormous joke.

  Only time and a lot of miles would tell.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Aboard the USS New Jersey

  HUNTER TOOK ANOTHER SIP from the leather-covered goblet and winced slightly as the bitter lager made its way down his throat.

  The barely picked-over remains of the meal in front of him made him long for Dominique’s cooking—or even his own. Never had he tasted food so bland, so poorly cooked, or so frigging salty.

  Still, he had eaten it—or, more accurately, he had moved the bits of potatoes, cabbage, and practically raw fish back and forth from one side of his plate to the other, while taking only the smallest judicious bites and thus giving the appearance of enjoying the meal.

  It was necessary to be polite—of this he was sure. The other men around the table had attacked their chow with unmannered ferociousness, which led Hunter to suspect that this was, in fact, a special occasion, that possibly by his presence a more sumptuous repast had been laid on and the men were taking full advantage of it.

  Or maybe they just didn’t mind eating slop. But if this was the case, it would still be one of the least unusual things about them.

  The first few minutes after landing on the battleship had been riveting and uneasy. After all, the ship had just fired on him, and he had come quite close to launching an antiship missile into its bridge. The fact that the captain—the man everyone simply called Wolf—wore a matinee-idol mask only added to the strangeness of the moment.

  Still, Wolf immediately requested that he join him and his officers for his noon meal, and this before Hunter could even fully explain how he had come to discover the battleship by following the RPV.

  But by that time, it almost seemed not to matter. Despite the man’s disguise, Hunter could almost see a definable psychic aura surrounding the mysterious Wolf. His own strong power of the sixth sense was telling him that this man also possessed intuitive powers. So it was almost as if the ship’s captain already knew why Hunter had come.

  He was led to the huge dining room that served as the officers’ mess. Already there was Wolf’s staff of fifteen officers, each one of them wearing a strange, almost comic-book-style navy uniform. After a few goblets full of the bitter ale were dispensed with, the lousy food had been laid on. Through it all Hunter searched in vain for a way to politely question Wolf and his men about what they were doing sailing around in a US Navy battleship, about their connection with the men controlling the RPV, and, most of all, what the hell was the story with Wolf’s mask.

  But the first few minutes of the meal found the conversation dominated by the other officers. Talking in Norwegian, only bits and pieces of which Hunter could understand, they discussed the weather mostly. When will it change, will it be severe, will it get more placid the farther south they sailed. Through it all, Wolf simply ate and nodded, like a man who was patiently hearing the same story over for the hundredth time.

  It was only after the first course of the meal—consisting of watery soup that featured little more than a random carrot floating through it—was finished that Wolf turned to Hunter and spoke directly to him.

  “You realize that many of my men consider you somewhat of a saint,” Wolf told him in an almost off-hand way. “You saw how they reacted when you first landed.”

  Hunter had indeed, and this, too, had added to the strange air that surrounded him as soon as he landed on the battleship.

  No sooner had he climbed down from the Harrier and met Wolf when a crowd of crewmen had gathered a respectable distance away, dressed in uniforms only slightly less bizarre than their officers. At first these men were simply pointing at him, and a few even waved. But as Hunter was walking toward the officers’ mess, the crowd of sailors—now numbering a couple of hundred—did an odd thing. They gave him a round of applause.

  This in itself was not all that unusual. Hunter had long ago resigned himself to the fact that he was a celebrity. Without an iota of encouragement on his part, his face had become recognizable across America and Canada before the Big War. As the youngest pilot ever selected to fly the space shuttle, he had made the cover of both Time and Newsweek in the same week, and his mug had been flooded across TV screens from network news broadcasts to the glut of tabloid TV shows that had been popular at the time.

  If anything, his celebrity status had grown in the postwar era, overflowing into the tricky area of legend and myth. He had been at the vanguard of many high-profile missions during the desperate period to rid the American continent of its enemies, and the revived electronic media had dug his picture out of various files and thrown it back up on the screen with each victory.

  In the past two years it had gotten to the point where he couldn’t go anywhere in North America without being recognized, a definite hazard when the work he was conducting called for him to operate undercover.

  Yet these men on the ship who recognized him right away were not Americans or Canadians. They were non-English-speaking Europeans, most of them, and they had hardly been exposed to the drumbeat of the American media.

  But as Wolf would explain to him, these men recognized Hunter for a different reason: they had been in action with him before.

  “In the Suez,” Wolf said simply. “Against Viktor …”

  The mere mention of the name caused Hunter to involuntarily freeze up. Several years before, Hunter had tracked the maniacal super-terrorist known as Viktor to Suez where the madman was planning on invading the eastern Mediterranean with a huge army. A similarly enormous mercenary force—known as the Modern Knights—had been assembled on ships in England and Spain and charged with thwarting Viktor’s plans. However, key to the successful engagement of Viktor’s armies was a scheme to launch a series of preemptive air strikes against his legions as they moved up the Suez Canal and thus delay them long enough for the Modern Knights to reach the area.

  This holding action was assigned to a band of intrepid British officers who, after hiring several disparate mercenary groups and buying some fighter aircraft, eventually towed a disabled American aircraft carrier to the northern mouth of the Suez Canal, where it served as a platform for the crucial air strikes against the terrorist’s army.

  Through a series of wild coincidences,
Hunter had been “recruited” by the Englishmen for this adventure and wound up being the man in charge of the overall air operations for the mission.

  One of the mercenary groups hired by the British was a small fleet of Norwegian frigates—eighteen in all—which provided escort for the big carrier and the tugs that did the actual pushing and pulling. In the series of first clashes against Viktor’s armies, the Norwegians had served extremely well, taking heavy casualties in the process. Those who survived linked up with the Modern Knights and played an important role in the subsequent defeat of invaders.

  “I knew of this campaign very well,” Wolf told Hunter between bites of the tepid, oily fish. “When I set out to man this ship, I wanted good men, men who had been through the Jaws of Hell and had lived to tell about it.

  “Many of the Suez survivors had made their way back to Norway and they were greeted as heroes there. I spent months tracking down every one of them I could find. Now, of the fifteen hundred men on board, four hundred of them fought with you against Viktor. Many of them are surprised to find you’re still alive.”

  “I’ve run into that problem before,” Hunter replied.

  Eventually, the dishes were cleared away and another round of lager doled out. Instinctively knowing that their part of the meeting was over, the rest of Wolf’s officers slowly drifted out of the dining room. Soon, it was just Hunter and the masked man facing each other at opposite ends of the long wooden table.

  “Save your breath,” Wolf told him just as Hunter was about to open his mouth to ask the first of a hundred questions. “I’ll try to explain some of it to you.”

  “First of all, as you might have guessed, this is the old New Jersey …”

  The USS New Jersey. The last Hunter had heard of the ship, it had been rushed out of mothballs for the fifth time and was patrolling the Persian Gulf when the Big War broke out. One of just four battleships the US Navy had refurbished and deployed, Hunter had just assumed that the vessel—like many of America’s capital warships—had either been sunk during the hostilities or scuttled after the armistice.