Tomorrow War Read online

  “They were on fire,” the ghost went on, measuring each word carefully in that eerie, cold voice. “And some Japs were pouring cannon shells into the place they were burning the worst—so that’s when I stepped in ….”

  He paused. Y thought he could see his throat get thick again.

  “I just thought I’d help them out,” the ghost went on. “Just helping out some Joes. That’s all. And that’s how I got killed. While I was firing at these two Japs as they were pouring fire into your friends, one of them poured fire into me. Took out my starboard engine, my main reaction chamber and this chunk from my head. Three seconds. Thirteen cannon shells. That’s all it took. My life was over.”

  “You helped them,” Y finally managed to croak out. “Because of you, they got away?”

  The ghost just shrugged again.

  “I may have.”

  “They were still airborne, when … well, when you—”

  “When I was killed?” the ghost asked.

  Both Y and Crabb nodded.

  He paused again, staring at his hands, pulling on his fingers but not feeling a thing.

  “Yeah, they were still flying,” he said finally. “And the fire wasn’t so bad. And most of the Japs had been shot down or had turned tail. I lost them somewhere over Formosa, I guess. At fifty-five thousand feet.”

  One of the twins spoke up. “With a wingspan that big, and the speed they were going,” he said, “even if their engines went kaput then and there, they could have kept going for miles.”

  The ghost shook his head. “Their engines didn’t quit then,” he revealed. “Not all of them anyway. They stayed airborne for a long time after I got splashed.”

  Zoltan moved again on the floor, but Y kicked him and made him silent again.

  “So you know w-where … they w-went …” Y had begun to stutter. “W-where they went down?”

  The ghost paused for a long time and finally nodded.

  “Yeah, I do,” he said finally.

  Y was suddenly very anxious—but he was also happily drunk again.

  “Tell us where,” he said to the spirit.

  The ghost shook his head. “I can’t,” he said slowly, and barely above a whisper.

  One of the twins leaned forward. “Why not V-man,” he asked quietly. “Is it against the rules … of where you are?”

  The ghost just shook his head again.

  “No,” he said. “I just don’t know that name of the place where they finally set down. Some things ….” He started to rub his wound again but stopped. “Some things I can’t recall. Maybe because I wasn’t sure what they were in the first place.”

  That’s when Y reached inside his pants ankle-pocket and pulled out a 2-D map of Asia. He passed it down to Crabb, who pushed it on to the twins. One opened it and placed it in front of the ghost.

  The ghost stared at it for a very long time, then he finally rested his hand on a point at the very bottom of the map.

  “Here,” he said.

  Y tried to see the spot where the ghost was pointing, but in the low light it was impossible.

  “And what about the guys,” the other twin asked. “Did these Joes die in the crash?”

  The ghost looked up at him, and a perplexed look came across his ashen face.

  “I think so,” he said, but his voice was not sounding very certain. Still, Y felt his heart sink.

  “All of them?” he asked.

  The ghost nodded slowly. “Yes, I think so ….”

  Crabb leaned forward. “Are you sure?”

  The ghost closed his eyes, and Y imagined he was flying somewhere, looking down on some thick jungle, searching.

  “I really can’t say,” he said finally. “But can you imagine anyone surviving the crash of a plane that size that could go that fast?”

  It was a question no one else in the room could answer.

  So Y pressed him again.

  “Are they dead or not?” he asked, the brandy affecting his vocal cords. “Can’t you tell?”

  The ghost just stared up at him, mouthed the words “Fuck you,” and then in the next second, he was gone.

  It took a few moments for everyone to realize the ghost had vanished. There was no fading away, no slow dissolve into ethereal mist. One second he was there, the next he was gone.

  Y shook his head and felt like he’d been sitting in the little shack for an entire day and night. He definitely felt like he’d lost some time along the way.

  He finally stood up, just to make sure he was still functioning, and felt Zoltan grabbing at his leg. The psychic was coming to. Y and Crabb helped him to his feet. The twins were now up and moving, as well.

  Y walked over to the end of the table and looked at the map where the ghost had pointed. There was a small burn hole in the paper.

  Y picked it up, held it closer to his eyes. He felt his head start to spin. Why was this familiar to him?

  “Vietnam?” he whispered, looking at the map again.

  “They made it that far?” Crabb asked.

  Y did not answer. The twins walked out of the shack and he wanted to get out, too.

  They collected Zoltan, dragged him down to the water and fully revived him. By the time Y looked back at the shack, it was dark again. The wind was blowing and the sound of crashing waves had returned.

  He looked down at his hands and they were both shaking.

  “It must be a bitch to be dead,” Crabb was saying as he forced some brandy down Zoltan’s throat.

  Y could only nod in agreement. That was the lot of ghosts, he thought.

  They knew all the secrets of the universe—and still they could not be happy.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE SEAS WERE CALM the next morning.

  The aircraft carrier had spent the night anchored off the southern end of Iwo Jima, its protective ring of tugboats huddled around it as if for warmth. The huge Bro-Bird, still attached by six thick towlines, was riding the waves nearby. Utilizing the tiny squadron of easy-to-fly Bugs, the Unit 167 troopers had flown a continuous air picket around the strange collection of vessels all night, a small, mostly psychological stab at air defense.

  Those on board the ships need not have worried.

  The AirCats had put out the word that the carrier and its entourage should be left alone. Anyone who plied the skies around the lawless South Pacific would answer to them, should any harm come to the small American fleet. It was a warning even the toughest air thugs in the area heeded.

  No one ever wanted to tangle with the AirCats.

  It was now 0700 hours. Y was passed out in the carrier’s captain’s quarters when Zoltan and Crabb walked in.

  The psychic shook the OSS man awake as Crabb pushed the button to activate the room’s coffee warmer. The coffee was hot before Y finally came to. Three empty brandy bottles next to his bunk told how he’d finally managed to fall asleep after returning to the ship the night before.

  But that didn’t mean he’d slept peacefully.

  He sat up in a start and looked at the two men. Both gave him a mock salute.

  “’Morning skipper,” Zoltan said, looking around the sizable cabin. It was adorned with memorabilia from the Japanese Imperial Navy, including a large Rising Sun flag, a small incense candle altar, and a pair of suki swords crossed above the bunk. “Nice digs you have here.”

  Crabb began pouring coffee. “You’ll be happy to know that the crew has already painted over all signs and indications that this was once a Japanese ship—on the outside anyway,” he said, handing a cup of steaming coffee to Zoltan. “All of the Unit 167 guys are over here now, as well as a dozen technicians Bro culled from his crew. Between them, it shouldn’t be too hard keeping all the essential stuff running on board. Electrical generators, intercoms, water-pressure systems, and so on.”

  But Y wasn’t listening. He was holding his head in his hands.

  “Did it happen?” he asked woefully, wiping the drool from his lips. “Did we really talk to a gh—”


  Zoltan reached over and put his hand across Y’s slimy mouth.

  “Don’t say it,” he warned Y. “If you do, he might show up here on ship. Then we’ll never get rid of him.”

  “And then you’ll have to make the voyage unconscious,” Crabb needled Zoltan as he poured out a cup of coffee for Y.

  Zoltan looked pained at the comment.

  “Believe me,” he said. “We’ll have enough things to worry about without having a haunting onboard.”

  Y took the first few tentative sips of his coffee. Through the impending hangover, he tried to remember the long discussion they had had the night before, which was really just a few hours ago. What did they talk about?

  Slowly it began coming back to him.

  They were sailing to Vietnam. They would tow the carrier with the airplane and push it with the tugs, and if the seas were okay and the weather cooperated, they could make the Gulf of Tonkin within three or four days.

  Once there, they would find the exact area indicated by Vogel the ghost, and they would probably find the bodies of Hunter and the others.

  Then they could all go home.

  And finally put their own ghosts to rest.

  “What’s the matter?” Crabb was asking Y, barging in on his thoughts. “Not enough sugar?”

  Y shook himself out of his stupor.

  What else happened the night before? They landed back on the carrier around midnight. They held the planning mission. They agreed to sail to Vietnam. But what about air cover?

  “The AirCats will be coming aboard in about thirty minutes,” Zoltan was saying, checking his watch. “Will you be watching their arrival from the deck or the bridge?”

  Y just stared back up at him.

  “You’re asking that as if I’m the captain this tub,” he said.

  Zoltan and Crabb looked back at him quizzically.

  “Well, you are,” Crabb said finally. “Don’t you remember? Last night. You told us so, yourself. And we all agreed. We drank to it, in fact.”

  Y put his hand to his forehead and gave it a whack, and strangely, it seemed to jog something deep inside. A second later a thought bubble percolated up from somewhere deep in his cranium.

  Yes, they had decided that he would be the captain of the carrier, just as Bro would remain commander of the huge towing seaplane, and the Irishmen in the tugs would take orders from him. But that wasn’t what Y was confused about.

  What was frightening him was the nearly indescribable feeling way, way in the back of his head.

  Like all of this had happened to him before.

  Him? The captain of an aircraft carrier? One that was being moved by tugboats?

  This didn’t make any sense. It was like his reoccurring dream, but with much more detail. And no matter how he tried, he could not push the disturbing notion from his mind.

  “So?” Crabb asked him.

  Y looked up at him again. “So, what?”

  “So where are you going to watch the Cats come in?” he repeated. “The bridge or the deck?”

  Y shook his head again. “The AirCats?”

  Zoltan got down on one knee and looked deep into Y’s very bleary eyes.

  “You all right?” he asked him sincerely. “Besides being hungover, I mean?”

  Y just shook his head. “I … I don’t know.”

  Zoltan refilled his coffee cup.

  “The Cats are coming aboard, they’re going to ’Nam with us, to provide air cover,” he said. “You made the deal with them last night. They’re working for next to nothing. It was a deal we couldn’t pass up.”

  Y whacked his head again—and sure enough another thought bubbled up. Yes, he did recall the deal. The AirCats were itching for action and looking to get away from Iwo for a while. Tagging along on this bizarre expedition seemed to be just the thing for them. Plus they had a rooting interest now in finding out what happened to the B-2000’s crew. After all, that’s what their close friend Vogel was doing when he was killed. Now they were going to find out for him. It was like fulfilling a comrade’s last request.

  “Yes, I remember now,” Y said. “And I guess I’ll watch it from the bridge.”

  “The deck is better,” Zoltan said.

  “OK, the flight deck then,” Y said, slurping his coffee with a bit of agitation.

  Zoltan and Crabb took the hint.

  “OK, see you in thirty?” Crabb asked him as they opened the door to leave. “Will that give you enough time to finish?”

  Y looked up at them. They were both smiling at him ear to ear. But why?

  “Finish?” he asked them. “Finish what? My coffee?” He drained the cup and put it down on the table. Both men laughed at this. “Yeah, your coffee,” Zoltan said.

  “Good one,” Crabb said, turning out the cabin light. Then they both left, leaving Y in the dark, sitting on the edge of his bunk, more confused than ever. That’s when he felt the hand on his shoulder ….

  Y froze. His body turned to ice. He could not hear any thing. No wind, no sea, no sounds of breath ….

  He shot off the bed and hurled himself across the cabin. He began desperately searching for the light switch, his body shaking from head to toe.

  The lights finally came on and he saw a form moving on the bunk. In his panic he shut the light off again and then struggled to turn it back on. He surely didn’t want to be alone in the room with a ghost, and with the lights off.

  The lights came back on, and one scary moment later, Y realized this was not a ghost he was looking at.

  Rather, it was an angel …

  An earthly one.

  Beautiful hair. Beautiful face. Beautiful naked breasts.

  Her name was Emma.

  Y’s head began spinning again.

  “How? What?” he heard himself babbling.

  She just smiled back at him. “You didn’t forget everything, did you?” she asked him coyly.

  Y couldn’t take his eyes away from her. His alcohol intake was really starting to bother him.

  “No,” he finally blurted out. “I didn’t.”

  Then he crawled back in bed with her.

  “Not everything,” he lied.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE AIRCATS UNIT CONSISTED of three squadrons of twelve airplanes apiece.

  Thirty of the three dozen aircraft were literally F-38G2 “Lightning AirCats.” The big twin-engine, twin-tail jet fighter looked both antique and futuristic. Straight-winged but incredibly agile, oversized but astonishingly fast, it carried no less than a dozen cannons on its wings and nose, and boasted the ability to lug five thousand pounds of ordnance in its small bomb bay.

  The other six planes flown by the unit were known as B-6J3 “HellJets.” Technically this odd airplane was a medium bomber. It was three times the size of an AirCat and in some ways resembled the famous Mitchell B-25 bomber of another place. But instead of two propellers, the HellJet had four huge double-reaction engines slung beneath its wings. Each plane carried a crew of thirteen, had no less than nine gun turrets on its body, belly, nose, and tail, and could carry many pounds of bombs within its large internal bomb bay.

  The HellJet was the size of a small airliner, but oddly, one of its fortes was the long-lost art of dive-bombing. To be on the receiving end of a HellJet’s dive-bombing run was indeed a hellish experience—and usually, the last for the victim. In other places a dive-bomber’s objective was to get just one bomb on a target. The way to do this was simple: find the target, go into a dive, release your bomb, pull up, and let gravity do the rest. If you were good, the bomb would more or less fall straight down and nail your objective.

  The HellJet followed this same tactic, but on a much larger scale. Under the right conditions the stocky bomber was capable of carrying up to thirty thousand pounds of bombs, due mostly to its solid construction and its enormous double-reaction power plants. While the airplane could carry and drop this ordnance in the standard way—arrive near target, sight it, drop the load, and cross your fing
ers—the plane’s designers had built in an additional devilish element, which allowed the HellJet a second way to bomb something or someone into oblivion. The designers had worked a long trail of edge flaps into the HellJet’s wings. When deployed, they gave the huge airplane a degree of maneuverability while in a perilous dive—a plunge that usually started somewhere above 25,000 feet and reached high supersonic speeds on the way down. After this mind-bending drop, and once the bombs were let go, these edges were lifted slightly, giving the airplane the ability to pull out of what would normally be a fatal dive, hopefully in enough time to escape the blast effects of fifteen tons of high explosives hitting in a very concentrated area.

  This was heart-stopping, stomach-churning stuff, but the AirCat mercenary group had never been accused of being shy about tactics or strategies. Just the fact that the air group had six of these airplanes, and the will to use them, was usually enough to make any potential opponent think twice about running up against them.

  So it was with great anticipation that those gathered on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier awaited the air merc unit to come aboard.

  Zoltan and Crabb were there, as were most of the Unit 167 guys, tug crew members, and even some hookers. In fact, just about everyone connected with the mission had come out to see the unusual air unit’s arrival—except Y, who had fallen back to sleep.

  The scheduled time for the AirCats to come aboard was 0900 hours, and sure enough, at the stroke of nine bells, the sullen roar of an approaching aircraft could be heard.

  It was the lead/scout AirCat, a slightly larger version of the fighter bomber. The plane came out of the morning clouds, dropping very fast, heading for the end of the stationary carrier. The AirCat was really a huge airplane and the carrier was actually a smallish air platform. But the Cats were known for landing and taking off in tight places. So just as this first airplane went into its final approach at high speed, there was a blinding explosion. To the astonishment of all on deck, the sky just below the falling airplane was suddenly full of yellow fire.

  Those watching had to shield their eyes, so bright was this flash. But once the initial shock wore off, it became apparent that the airplane was not in trouble. This was, in fact, the standard procedure for AirCats landing in a confined area. The flash came as a result of six rocket bottles that had been lowered from underneath the AirCat scout plane’s wings.