Skyfire Read online

  “We’re here,” he said simply to his second officer.

  Rapidly and silently the news passed among the men.

  “Find a dry place,” the second officer called back down the line. “Cover up, check your equipment, and then chow pack number two.”

  Within a few minutes, all of the men had settled in for the evening, thankful to be at the end of the tortuous fifty-mile trek into the barren territory, yet anxious for morning to come so they could get on with the mission.

  Johnson and his second officer crawled under the overhanging branches of a particularly large northern pine, and with a half dozen other troopers, shared a cold meal. The evening was growing chilly, but a campfire was out of the question. This mission had to be secret, silent, and, at least until tomorrow morning, invisible.

  “Hard to say just how well protected this place is,” the second officer said, scanning the castle with his infrared NightScope binoculars between bites of cold Spam. “I see AA gun lights, and LED’s from some SAM’s, but they’ve got a lot of places to hide things up there.”

  He passed the NightScope glasses to Johnson. “Recon is tough in the mountains,” he said with the comfortable tone of experience. “But according to St. Louie’s spook’s estimates, there shouldn’t be more than about five hundred troops up there right now.”

  The St. Louie Johnson referred to was Louie St. Louie, the flamboyant leader of Football City (formerly St. Louis) who, besides running the largest gambling empire in the Western Hemisphere, also operated its the largest intelligence network.

  At the request of General David Jones, commander of the United American Provisional Government, St. Louie had assigned some of his top agents to track down Duke Devillian, leader of the Knights of the Burning Cross, the racist terrorist organization that had tried to halt the cross-country mission of the Freedom Express. Following the United Americans’ victory in the pivotal Grand Canyon battle, Devillian had been shot down over Death Valley—by Hawk Hunter himself no less—but somehow escaped what seemed to be certain death.

  St. Louie’s operatives also had been searching for another threat to the newly emerging American republic—the woman named Elizabeth Sandlake. Incredibly bright as well as beautiful, Sandlake’s mind had been forever twisted during the last days of her brutal captivity at the hands of the vicious Canal Nazis of the Twisted Cross.

  Hunter had rescued her, and eventually defeated the neo-Nazi thugs who had used her in their plot to seize control of a world in turmoil. But Elizabeth Sandlake was never the same. She had spent too many months immersed in evil to ever return to normal. The lust for power was contagious and she had caught it. Soon afterward she had set out on her own bizarre quest to overthrow the government of America and turn the country into an all-woman aristocracy, with herself as nothing less than its queen.

  She convinced herself that the first step in this strange plan was the assassination of the traitorous ex-vice president. She came very close to completing this act, firing six bullets into the man minutes after he’d been convicted of high treason against the American people.

  Captured, tried, and convicted herself, Sandlake was considered so dangerous and such a threat to escape that she was sentenced to serve her life sentence aboard a series of flying prisons.

  Somehow she managed to commandeer one of them and escape. It was that plane that now sat mysteriously in the middle of a field on the other side of the mountain.

  When all the leads were put together, it was particularly ironic that St. Louie’s intelligence operatives traced both Devillian and Sandlake to the same spot: this fortress lodged on the side of the mountain here in the wilds of western Canada.

  But as far as irony went, this was only the beginning.

  As a personal favor, Hawk Hunter had asked St. Louie to also find a trail that would lead him back to Dominique, and St. Louie obliged. But even the top intelligence experts at Football City were spooked when the twisted trail in search of Hunter’s paramour eventually wound up at this same, desolate mountain outpost.

  As the first orange-and-yellow streaks of dawn began to edge the blackness away from the eastern horizon, the hundred and twenty men of Catfish Johnson’s Blue Force expertly linked up with the eighty-five Free Canadians of Frost’s Red Force and together they resumed their silent advance toward the base of the mountain.

  Meanwhile, seventy miles to the east, on a flat Alberta prairie, the early-morning calm was shattered by the roar of a dozen jet fighters, their engines shrieking like banshees, screaming for takeoff.

  It was a diverse collection of aircraft: two F-104 Starfighters, two F-4 Phantom fighters, four F-106 Delta Darts, four F-105X Super Thunderchiefs. Not one of the airplanes was newer than thirty-five years, and two of the Thunderchiefs were closing in on the half-century mark.

  Still, age notwithstanding, the dozen jet fighters represented a formidable force, a fact that said as much about the pilots as the quality (or lack of it) of jet aircraft in postwar America.

  There were also two OH-1 support helicopters—code-named Seasprays—taking off nearby. One runway over, a KC-135 in-flight refueling ship lifted off in a roar of dirty exhaust.

  There was one other aircraft, sitting by itself on the far side of the makeshift airfield. At a bare-ass eleven years old, the plane was just a pup compared to the geezers warming up a half an airfield away. But that was the least of the differences between this solitary aircraft and the rest of the patchwork squadron. For this plane could not only fly conventionally, it could also fly straight up and straight down. It could stop in midair, go backward and land in about twenty feet of clear space.

  This airplane was a souped-up AV-8BE Harrier jump-jet. The pilot standing next to it was Major Hawk Hunter.

  The AV-8BE was a two-seat version of the famous British VTOL attack jet that was later built in the USA for the Marines. Hunter had extensively modified the extra large flight compartment, and normally the rear part of the cockpit was jam-packed with his personally designed advanced flight and weapons systems avionics.

  But now all of this clutter had been cleared away to make room for a passenger. It was Hunter’s plan to be alone in that cockpit when he joined the assault on the mountainside castle.

  But he didn’t plan to leave alone.

  Confident but anxious, Hunter ran his hands through his longish blond hair. There always was a certain amount of nerves before any military operation, but he couldn’t remember ever being this jumpy. Sleep had been impossible the night before and the night before that. Instead, he passed the hours by going over the plan of attack from beginning to end, following it through, hundreds of times in his mind.

  The key was timing. The air strike had to take place just as the combined American and Canadian assault force was beginning their ascent of the mountain. For the first several critical minutes, the assault force would be exposed as they climbed toward the fortress; their survival would depend entirely on the effectiveness of their air cover.

  As he watched, the two Seaspray helicopters lifted off and turned westward. The two copters were piloted by his friends, the highly renowned Cobra brothers. Not really brothers, pilots Jesse Tyler and Bobby Crockett and their gunners Max Baxter and John-Boy Hobbs had gained both their fame and their nickname by flying deadly UH-I Cobra gunships.

  For today’s mission, Tyler and Company were leaving their familiar Cobras behind in favor of the Seasprays, and there was one very important reason for this: the Seasprays were almost totally silent.

  Using these remarkable birds to their fullest advantage, the Cobra brothers hoped to get within a few hundred yards of the castle before they were noticed, thus maintaining the element of surprise until the last possible minute.

  If their luck held, the Cobras would fly close in to the castle and launch the cannisters that were piled in the rear of each Seaspray. Those cannisters were filled with a powdery compound that when mixed with an accelerant became a unique crowd-control gas known as SX-551. In laym
an’s terms it would probably be called “knockout gas.”

  According to St. Louie’s spies, many of the soldiers holding the mountainside fortress were women. Enemies or not, the United American and Canadian commanders didn’t relish the idea of killing a castle full of females. So they decided to try the knockout gas, which also increased their chances of capturing Devillian and Sandlake alive, as well as the many other notorious criminals known to be hiding in the castle.

  But the strike force knew they wouldn’t be able just to put everyone to sleep and waltz into the fortress unchallenged. St. Louie’s spies also uncovered evidence that a sizeable group of incorporated mercenaries—known as the Guardians, Inc.—had joined the castle forces. The Guardians called themselves soldiers for hire but really were just killers for hire. Their ranks were of full cutthroats, murderers and Busted Wings, grounded air pirates who just couldn’t get wanton killing-for-money out of their systems.

  So in addition to the nonlethal knockout gas, the United American aircraft were packing plenty of deadly firepower as well. Both Seasprays were bristling with machine guns, and all of the fighters in the raiding party were equipped with air-to-surface missiles and nose cannons.

  For their part, the ground troops were heavily armed with high-powered assault rifles of various designs, HE grenades, and even a few small rocket launchers.

  Each soldier was also carrying a gas mask.

  The two Seasprays vanished over the horizon and then ten tense, uneventful minutes passed. Finally, at exactly 0615, the Starfighters gunned their engines and rolled into position for takeoff. Piloting them were J.T. Twomey and Ben Wa, two of Hunter’s closest friends. They had flown with him in the Thunderbirds before the Big War, and had served at his side throughout the United Americans’ struggle to reclaim their continent. After Hunter, they were probably the most skilled fighter pilots in America.

  Following the Starfighters into the sky were the two F-4’s, also carrying some of Hunter’s friends: the fighter team known as the Ace Wrecking Company, commanded by the bold and colorful Captain “Crunch” O’Malley and his partner, the somewhat enigmatic pilot known as Elvis Q. The rest of the pilots were volunteers from the UA’s various air squadrons.

  Within the preplanned time frame of exactly ninety-two seconds, all of the fighters were airborne. Hunter watched as the last Thunderchief disappeared in the western sky. Slowly, he climbed into the Harrier. He still had several minutes to kill and he knew they would pass slowly. For this unusual plan called for the raid on the castle to be underway before he arrived.

  Chapter Three

  AT THE BASE OF the mountain, still hidden in the edge of the forest, the soldiers of the combined assault force anxiously scanned the skies to the east for the first sign of the Seasprays. It was 0645.

  Suddenly, the two helicopters appeared, not out on the horizon but directly overhead.

  “Damn, they are quiet,” Frost whispered to Johnson. “I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “Let’s hope our friends up there in the castle don’t, either,” Johnson replied grimly.

  Tyler and Crockett maneuvered the two choppers closer to the mountain fortress, going into a near hover just a couple of hundred feet away from the castle’s front gates.

  Suddenly the silence of the early morning was shattered by a burst of gunfire.

  A dozen soldiers had instantly materialized along the front ramparts of the castle, their weapons blazing. In a second, both Tyler and Crockett could tell that these soldiers definitely were men. And worse, many of them were wearing gas masks.

  The Cobra brothers immediately opened fire with their belly-mounted two-inch rocket launchers and then swerved sharply to the right and away from the enemy gunfire.

  The fight was on.

  By now the wave of attacking jet aircraft, having just refueled in air, arrived on the scene. Realizing that the Seasprays’ initial approach had been repulsed, Ben Wa and Twomey, leading the air strike in their creaking F-104’s, dove straight for the castle’s front wall. The heavy cannon fire of the Starfighters sent the blocking squad of Guardians scurrying for cover.

  As JT and Ben Wa circled around for another pass, the F-4’s of the Ace Wrecking Company roared in and sent two more barrages of cannon fire slicing into the castle. At least a hundred Guardians soldiers, about half of them wearing gas masks, had now appeared on the battlements of the fortress and were filling the sky with AA fire in a desperate attempt to hold off the attackers.

  The rest of the United Americans’ aerial attack force roared into view. But suddenly the skies were filled with streaking AA fire as well as a rain of small but deadly shoulder-launched SAM’s. Then a wave of Hind helicopters emerged from hidden shelters on the far side of the mountain. While they were no match for the heavily armed jet fighters, the Hinds were able to dart in and out of the AA fire and send harassment fire up at the air strike, gaining precious moments until help could arrive.

  And that help came, in the form of a dozen Phantom jets being piloted by air pirates in the employ of the Guardians. The Americans saw them coming and, as planned, half turned in their direction, missiles ready.

  The battle now fully joined, the troops at the base of the mountain started their dangerous ascent. They edged their way up to the castle—slowly, painfully, but thankfully free of any resistance. Already the first part of the assault plan was working: The hired guardians of the fortress were far too occupied with the attacking jets to concern themselves with a ground attack, too.

  Meanwhile, Tyler and Crockett ducked under the dogfights raging above them and brought the Seasprays streaking right over the castle, just a few feet above the walls. With considerable aplomb, they began firing cannisters of knockout gas inside the towering walls of the mountain fortress.

  Not everybody down there can be wearing a mask, Tyler thought as he watched one cannister smash into one of the castle’s turrets and begin to spill its powerful gas.

  And he was right. Inside the castle, dozens of soldiers—both men and women—began to stumble and fall to the ground, unconscious, as the SX-555 gas started to spread.

  The forces led by Frost and Johnson had reached the gates of the castle by now. Immediately a sharp firefight erupted between the invaders and the hired guns guarding the fortress. Several hundred feet above, the Cobras were now free to tangle with the Hind gunships. A thousand feet above them, the United American jets were battling it out with the Guardian Phantoms. Within the course of only a few minutes, the mountain sky, which had been bathed in the gentle pink of early morning, had turned red with the flames of war.

  And out of that bloodred sky, a lone airplane appeared, and headed straight for the heart of the holocaust.

  Hawk Hunter was about to join the battle.

  Chapter Four

  HUNTER COUNTED FIFTEEN ENEMY Phantoms taking part in the swirling dogfight above the castle.

  “Nine against fifteen?” he whispered as he watched the nine true fighters in the United Americans air contingent tangle with the F-4’s. “Can they hold them?”

  The United Americans had expected air opposition—it was known that the Guardians had hired out free-lance air pirates based at a heavily fortified air strip nearby. But to strike the base before attacking the castle would have tipped the Americans’ hand. So the hard decision had been made to deal with the enemy air force after it arrived on the scene.

  Normally, Hunter would have armed everything on board and hurtled himself into the high-speed jet shootout twisting barely a mile above the castle. Actually it took a lot of willpower to prevent his instincts from doing just that. Instead, he was flashing in toward the castle at treetop height, far below the spectacular dogfight.

  The truth was, mixing it up in a furball was not part of his mission. Nor was providing ground support, SAM suppression, or weapons targeting. No, he had only one mission this day, dictated in writing by the United American Commander in Chief himself, General Dave Jones.

  That mission was
to rescue Dominique.

  When word first arrived—via St. Louie’s spies—that Dominique was being held prisoner in the same location that Duke Devillian, Elizabeth Sandlake, and God-knows-how-many other wanted criminals and terrorists were using as refuge, Jones knew that the plan to invade the castle and arrest the notorious characters had just taken a very bizarre and complicated twist. As a student of history and as a commander of an entire nation’s armed forces, he knew that military planners frequently had to put sentimentality aside when making tough decisions. Few important military victories came cheap, in resources or in lives. When the truth was uncovered about the castle, the stark-cold reality of it was this: the possibility of catching so many dangerous criminals in one place at one time was too great for both the Americans and the Free Canadians to pass up just because Hunter’s celebrity girlfriend was locked inside.

  So, from a military point of view, the castle had to be attacked.

  Yet such an operation—especially one that counted on air power as such a crucial component—would be much more complicated and costly without Hunter’s expertise in planning a prestrike execution. No one doubted that the attempt to capture the fortress would be intense and bloody. But Jones could not order Hunter to take part in a military action that could prove so violent it might quite possibly kill Dominique.

  So Jones slyly did the right thing. Declaring that Dominique would be “a valuable asset” in any treason trial against Devillian and Elizabeth Sandlake (because, Jones explained, she could place the criminals at the scene of the crime, so to speak), the general made it Hunter’s special mission to rescue this valuable witness—at all costs.

  With complete determination—and a grim wink of the eye—Hunter had accepted the mission.

  Now hoping that JT, Ben, Crunch, and the others could keep the situation in the air under control, Hunter put the Harrier into a shallow dive, heading straight for the castle.

  On the ground, the elite troops led by Johnson and Frost had broken through the front gate and were locked in close combat with the hired guards of the fortress. The knockout gas had eliminated some of the resistance, but hundreds of gas-mask-equipped soldiers remained, determined—by gold or insanity or both—to defend every inch of the fortress with their lives.