“You can’t start exterminating people,” she told him.
Only now was he able to take his medication. He grabbed two pills from his desk drawer and gulped them down with a quick swig of water.
“Did you hear me?” she said. “You can’t just start killing hundreds of people for no reason.”
Close to exasperation, Zmeya finally just looked up at her wearily. “Why not?”
“Because it’s not right,” she replied emphatically. “It’s a crime against humanity.”
He just waved her away. “Everything I do is a crime against humanity. That’s my fucking job description.”
He was a mess. Between what had happened in Russkiy-NYC and his troubles with her, he hadn’t been able to sleep in three nights.
“You truly are a horrible person,” Dominique hissed at him.
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” he fired back at her.
“There’s a big difference between horrible and powerful,” she said, her voice dripping with derision.
“Then I suggest you get that knife of yours out again,” he replied, gulping down two more pills, “and use it to stab me in the back, right now. Because Moscow cannot and will not ever make a distinction between those two terms. Not until the planet is theirs. That’s why I’m here. I’m the one who can make it happen.”
Chapter Twenty-One
May 7
The two Free Canadian F-101 Voodoo fighters arrived over Smuggler’s Notch, Vermont, at 0400 hours. Right on time.
Seconds later, their long-range radars picked up a blip coming from the south.
Both pilots lowered their night-vision goggles and immediately sighted the faint but growing orb of green light heading in their direction.
“Worm with Wings, contact,” the lead pilot reported back to his base in Montreal.
The two fighters continued circling a spot right over the isolated mountain.
They would wait here and let the small plane come to them.
Hunter saw the flare from the Voodoos’ engines right away.
“Time to go,” he said. He checked that he had everything he needed: M-16, .357 Magnum, Bowie knife, two-way radio, night-vision goggles.
“About one minute,” the Worm said, reading his crude terrain-guidance radar screen. “Better get packing.”
It turned out that the numbers runner had been right: His four-seat aircraft—it was a rare DK-ZAG—was battered. But with Hunter’s help and using spare parts crafted by the base’s civilian techs, it had been made airworthy again in just two hours. The quick flight up from New Jersey to Vermont had been uneventful.
Hunter was determined to keep it that way.
“You know those are my friends in those jets,” he told the Worm. “One wrong move, and they will make life very difficult for you. They won’t have to shoot you down to make you pay. It’ll be more like a cat playing with a mouse. Get what I’m saying?”
The Worm gulped. “That’s the last thing I need.”
“Don’t worry, Mister Wingman,” the Trashman said from the backseat. “I’ll keep an eye on him for you. I’ll even fly the plane myself if I have to.”
Hunter rolled his eyes. He turned to the third passenger—the beautiful girl he’d rescued from 30 Rock.
He’d never gotten a chance to talk to her after landing at the secret base. Too many things had had to be done, and as it was, they’d had to wake her from a deep sleep to make this journey. Plus, the old ZAG plane was so loud, conversation had been nearly impossible during the flight.
Seeing her now in the very dim light of the plane’s interior, he realized, in some ways, she really did resemble Dominique. The face, the body, a certain kind of aura—these were similarities. But in other ways, this girl was totally different. Younger, but also worldlier, as if she had street smarts, if that was possible these days. The adventure they’d shared in 30 Rock’s penthouse just a few hours ago had not been for the faint of heart, yet she’d never wavered. Even though many strange things had happened in those six minutes, she’d rolled like a trained special-ops soldier, seemingly knowing what had to be done, which way to go, all the precisely right things to do.
He found that interesting.
She was smiling now, lighting up the plane.
“Can I trust you to keep these two in line?” he asked her.
She nodded. “No problems there.”
“And remember,” Hunter told her. “When you land, make sure they take you to Colonel Frost right away. He’ll look after you.”
“Thank you,” she whispered and touched his hand for a moment.
“Thirty seconds,” the Worm said. “Six thousand and descending. …”
Hunter did one more check of his equipment. All was okay.
“Twenty seconds and you’ll be close enough,” the Worm said. “Fifty-five hundred feet.”
Hunter began to open his side door.
“Don’t forget to flap your wings,” the Trashman told him.
Hunter fist-bumped the Worm as a way of thanking him, then did the same with the weapons dealer. He wished them both good luck.
“Fifteen seconds,” the Worm said. “We’re at five-Angels. …”
Hunter went to shake hands with the girl, when suddenly she was between the seats, pulling his face toward hers. She kissed him hard, her tongue going halfway down his throat.
It seemed to last forever, and suddenly he felt like he was on fire.
Then the Worm said, “Five seconds. …”
Hunter gently broke away from her and caught his breath. He saw her smile one more time.
Then he thought to ask her, “By the way, what’s your name?”
She smiled even wider. “That’s top secret. …”
With that, the Worm gently pushed him out the open door.
Hunter did indeed started flapping his arms, but only as a way to get upright for an instant, long enough to pull the ripcord on his parachute.
The Worm’s plane flew on. Hunter watched it disappear into the night as his chute was opening, the two fighter jets slowing to their lowest possible speed and going into a lazy eight pattern in order to escort the plane back to Canada, 110 miles to the north.
But for a moment, Hunter also thought he saw the blonde looking back and waving to him, her hand a green blur in the world of night vision.
That was one amazing smooch, he thought as he slowly drifted down to his hidden base.
* * *
There was nothing like Hunter’s F-16XL.
It was a super-variation of the famous F-16 Fighting Falcon, the hot-shit fighter plane that, along with F-15 Eagles and Navy F-14s and F-18s, had helped badly beat the Russians over the battlefields of Europe during World War III.
Yet the XL was different from all of them.
While it had a typical F-16’s fuselage—mostly—its wings were of the cranked-arrow design. Arrowhead would have been a better description, because that’s exactly what the superplane looked like going through the air—that is, if you were quick enough to catch it. This was difficult to do because with its killer engine pumping out an astounding sixty-five thousand pounds of thrust on afterburner, seeing the F-16XL in flight over head would usually be via the briefest of glimpses, less than the blink of an eye.
It was also heavily armed. In addition to having eighteen under-wing hard points on which to carry as much as twenty-five thousand pounds of bombs, Hunter’s XL also had six M61 cannons sticking out of its nose. Not machine guns, these were cannons, so powerful that one round, or certainly two, could take out a tank. They were devastating against aerial targets.
It required a lot of extra power to bring a half dozen of these huge weapons into the air along with all their ammunition. But Hunter’s designs, and his own sweat and elbow grease, had pulled off the engine’s modification sh
ortly after America was broken up.
Because the XL was such a rare airplane, Hunter knew he had to keep it hidden at all costs. He’d secreted it away at this tiny airfield, which he’d discovered two years after the end of the Big War. It had become his home away from home, a place he’d used when he was running secret ops or just wanted to lay low for a while.
Isolated, hard to see from the ground and the air, it was not unlike Dozer’s camp in the Pine Barrens.
Except for the ghosts.
Hunter manipulated his parachute lines and began moving almost horizontally.
He’d jumped from the plane a half mile east of his secret base—he didn’t want anyone to see exactly where it was. Only when he spotted an unusual circular arrangement of sugar maple trees among some slightly larger beech trees did he start to descend. It was literally an exercise in trying to find the forest for the trees. Like a lot of strange things Hunter had encountered in his strange life, the base was hidden in plain sight.
He glided for a few more moments over the forest, then, once in position, let the air out of his chute and down he went.
He hit the wet ground boots up and rolled a few times, getting momentarily entangled in the chute. Fighting his way out of the silk, he got to his feet.
His M-16 up and ready, he rotated 360 degrees, making sure everything was as it should be here. There was just a small hangar, a work shack, and a runway, all of it looking as if it had been abandoned long ago. The place hadn’t changed in the week or so since he’d left.
So far, so good.
He walked over to the small camouflaged hangar, punched in the code, and the door slowly opened. His F-16XL was inside. It looked more like a race car than a fighter plane. A prewar Ferrari, maybe, and a far, far cry from his clown plane.
He walked around it, running his hand over its sleek lines, checking for anything out of the ordinary. But everything was A-OK.
He spent the next two hours fueling the superjet, loading in the ammo for the six-pack of cannons, and packing his high-altitude recon camera. He worked as quickly as he could while still doing the job right.
Because even though he seemed to be in a place where everything happened quickly—they’d firebombed the MMZ not even five hours ago—every second still counted.
The sun finally came up, ending his long night.
He started his steam generator to build up pressure in the base’s catapult. This was the only way the XL could take off from the base—shot into the sky like a naval jet being catapulted off an aircraft carrier. His means of landing was similar to carrier operations as well—at the other end of the runway, he had four arrester hooks.
But now as he taxied the airplane out to hook it up to the catapult, he wondered if he’d ever return to this place again. He knew what awaited him, not just out over the Atlantic, but in New York City, where, even after the barrel-bomb raid, there were still sixty-five thousand Russian soldiers and nine thousand NKVD madmen. How were they going to handle that?
That’s why he had a deep dark feeling that this would be the last time he’d ever see his private airbase. And that’s why he’d left the rest of his fortune in silver inside the hangar with instructions that, on his demise, whoever should find it should spend it on a good time.
After hooking up the plane to the catapult and locking up the base again, he climbed back into the cockpit, strapped himself in, and, via remote control, hit the catapult fire button. An instant later, he was rocketing down the short runway on full afterburner. A few seconds later, he yanked back on the controls, pulled the plane back on its tail, and went straight up for five miles.
Then he leveled off, pointed the nose of the plane toward the Atlantic, and hit the throttles.
He was gone in the blink of an eye.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Searching for Convoy 56 was Hunter’s main objective—but he had a secondary mission before making his way to sea.
Climbing to a nose-bleed height of seventy-five thousand feet, he headed southeast after leaving Vermont. Within minutes, he was approaching Russkiy-NYC. Storm clouds blanketed the area and it was raining everywhere, but these were not factors at the moment. He activated his long-range, ground-imaging ALCN-6 recon camera, turned to a course that would put him right over Midtown, and started shooting video.
He was able to bring up a visual representation of Midtown on his control panel’s main VRC screen. From this height, the MMZ looked like one deep, smoldering black hole with several twisting, tentacle-like paths of destruction leading to the East River.
He keyed in on 30 Rock. It was still standing, but looked hollowed out by fire and was still smoking heavily. Most pleasing, though, he could see streams of civilians leaving the city. The Triborough and the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridges were packed with them, all heading east. The same for the George Washington Bridge on the West Side; both levels were crowded with refugees heading into New Jersey. Many boats were in the Hudson and the East Rivers, as well, carrying people away from Manhattan. It was obvious the Russians were in such disarray there were no attempts to stop the exodus.
That was all he needed to see. No matter what happened in the next few hours, the 7CAV’s attack on the MMZ had been a success. The epicenter of Moscow’s military establishment in America was no more and thousands of New York’s citizens had been freed.
Bull Dozer had wanted to make the occupiers hurt and to send a message to Moscow. Both missions had been accomplished.
Hunter was over the stormy Atlantic just a few moments later.
His F-16XL super plane was lugging two enormous under-wing gas tanks. Added to its full internal and reserve tanks, this gave him about six hours of fast, fueled flight.
Six hours sounded like a long time—but searching for a target at sea was one of the most time-consuming missions in aviation. Even in daylight, with clear visibility, and long-range forward-looking radar—and even when the pilot had a fair idea where the target was located—a lot of times, it was a matter of hit or miss, and many times, miss. Even from 75-Angels, the ocean looked huge, and the movement of its surface tended to hide things. Bad weather just made it worse.
Hunter knew he’d need every last drop of gas for this mission, which brought up a disturbing question. He was in contact with Dozer back in his spy tower in the Pine Barrens. Both of their radio sets had scrambler buttons, allowing them to talk without worrying that the Russians could hear them. Communication was not the problem.
The problem was that Hunter might reach his bingo point—that being the moment where he would have to turn around and return to land before he ran out of gas—without having found Convoy 56. He and Dozer had discussed it already, but Hunter knew, if the situation arose, he’d have few options. Locating the convoy was of the utmost importance now. If he had to keep flying and use up all of his gas to find the mystery ships and radio their location and type back to Dozer—and then go into the drink—then so be it.
At least if it happened that way, he would have died—for real this time—for a good cause.
For his country. His homeland in any universe.
America.
His plan was to fly out past Long Island Sound to a point about fifty miles off Nantucket and then start moving due east.
He’d calculated the date and time at which the secret document inside the red pouch had been transmitted and when Convoy 56 was expected in New York Harbor, and then he’d just counted backward. If the ships were traveling at twenty knots, and were due in New York at noon the following day, then they should be within seven hundred miles of New York Harbor and would show up somewhere within the search box he was planning. But if he was off by just a few minutes or a few miles, he’d miss the ships completely and possibly wind up crashing—and drowning—at sea for nothing.
This was the part of the hero business he never liked.
He reached his
vector point five minutes after getting feet wet, and remaining at 75,000-Angels, pointed east. It was now 0600 hours, and while the day had brightened, the weather raged on, which only made his task more difficult. His FLIR imager—basically an infrared camera with a telescopic lens—could see through clouds, but the thicker the soup, the blurrier the reading. He’d have to pay very close attention to the imager’s screen to avoid missing anything.
But this also gave him lots of time to think—another problem. It had all happened so freaking fast. One moment, he’d been in Dominique’s suite atop 30 Rock, seconds away from catching up to her, then, suddenly, he’d been back at the Pine Barrens, then up in Vermont—and now he was out here, in his Ferrari jet, the minutes ticking away before he might have to give it all up and splash in. It was like this universe was stuck in fifth gear and still accelerating.
Where did Zmeya’s helicopter go? That was the road not taken for him. Had he chased it, he would have been much closer to rescuing his girlfriend than he was now. Yet he might have shot it down—and it bothered him that the thought that she might be on the copter had never crossed his mind.
But every long conversation he’d had with himself about Dominique always came back to the same question: Was she a princess or a prisoner? It was more likely that she was a captive than a collaborator, at least the Dominique he remembered. But maybe he wasn’t dealing with the woman he knew.
Round and round it went, each rumination hurting a little more than the one before. And he still didn’t know. And the way this mission was looking, there was a good chance he’d never know.
Maybe I did fall into the wrong universe, he thought over and over. Maybe I’m not supposed to be here. …
He flew on for more than two hours and didn’t see as much as a rowboat.
There was no commercial traffic on the North Atlantic these days; from Maine to Scandinavia, it was basically a Russian lake.
The Russians held sway in many other places around the world. Addendums in the Convoy 56 papers indicated places from which the Okupatsi could draw resources. If mountain soldiers were needed, a brigade or two from the Russian Alpine Corps, currently stationed in Switzerland, would be sent to the new world. Need someone to fight in the desert, the Corps Commander for the Middle East could spare a few thousand men. Need urban warfighters? A division from the Russian’s Sixth Berlin Army would do a tour across the pond.
Battle for America Page 15
