Sky Ghost

by Maloney, Mack;

  Hunter killed the engine and waited for the access ladder to be placed. He waited and waited and waited. Then he wiped the fog from his cockpit glass and saw the maintenance kid driving away.

  Hunter just shook his weary head, popped the canopy, and climbed out on his own. He threw the puke bag into the wind and it disappeared in the gale. Then came a 10-minute trudge to the ops building. The bitter cold served him like a bucket of ice water in the face.

  He went to the briefing hut and found only Major Payne waiting inside.

  Payne barely acknowledged his presence as Hunter collapsed into the same chair in which he’d sat earlier this long day. The officer watched his wristwatch for 10 long minutes, again as if he expected more people to show up.

  But of course, no one did. At exactly 1000 hours, he stood up and addressed his audience of one. Reading from a single sheet of paper, he said:

  “I have been cleared to tell you that today’s operations against enemy-held territory have been deemed highly successful. More than seven targets were hit.”

  Then he finally looked at Hunter.

  “OK,” he said. “What did you see?”

  Hunter told him just about everything. The Natters. The destruction of so many bombers. The 999th’s brave second bombing run. The only thing he left out was the sight of the booze and the unkempt airmen.

  The officer took it all down. At the end of it, he just looked up. “That it?” he asked Hunter.

  “Yes,” Hunter replied, truthfully.

  “Had enough yet?”

  Hunter was surprised by the question.

  “No,” he heard himself say.

  “OK,” Payne said. “Same time tomorrow. Dismissed.”

  With that, Payne left the room.

  It took Hunter another 10 minutes of trudging through the blinding wind and snow to make it to the officers’ club.

  By the time he reached the front door, he was numb again. Nothing made sense here—well, not exactly anyway.

  He recalled reading somewhere, at some time, about the pressures that pilots during his version of World War II had felt after flying bombing mission after bombing mission and seeing their comrades shot out of the sky and then the destruction they were causing below.

  Many had to either block it all out completely or go nuts dwelling on it. Hunter was somewhat convinced that he was already nuts—living inside of some grand illusion. So he decided that he would have little trouble blocking it out. Plus, he was just too tired—and hungry and sober—to deal with it.

  That would soon change, he promised himself.

  With that one thought in mind, he went through the OC door.

  The place held a few more people this time, maintenance and logistics officers from what Hunter could see. Barely a head turned when he came in. He made his way to the bar, ordered a triple whiskey and the hot meal of the day. It was beef stew again; the bowl was the size of a small trough. He took the food and booze to the same corner table and began to feed.

  About halfway through his meal, the lights at one end of the hall dimmed. Someone came out and put a microphone on the small stage in front of him. A spotlight appeared, focused on the back wall, and then took on a red tint. The microphone squealed, then a tall, affable guy walked calmly out on the stage.

  “Welcome to today’s matinee performance,” he said into the mike in a deep tenor. “I’m Colonel Crabb…”

  The man’s announcement stopped Hunter in mid bite. Colonel Crabb? Why was that name familiar? He took a closer look at the man. He was in a uniform, but it didn’t look too regulation, even in this crazy place. It was a cross between an Air Corps colonel’s dress blues and a very tacky tuxedo.

  His hair too looked a little off the books. It was swept back and highly moussed. He was holding a conductor’s baton in one hand, a glass of something in the other.

  “We have a great card of entertainment for you today,” the Colonel said, as many of those in the chow hall moved their chairs closer to the stage. “The first number is called ‘Dance of the Fawns.’”

  There was polite applause from the crowd. It seemed like they were familiar with the piece.

  Hunter swigged his drink. ‘Dance of the Fawns?’ What the hell could this be?

  A small jazz band was assembled in the corner. On a cue from the Colonel’s baton, they struck up a 12-bar blues theme.

  Then the curtain opened to revealed a stage decorated with the tackiest sets possible. A cutout tree. A crayon-colored bush. Blue aluminum paper as a forest stream. Then four dancers tiptoed on to the stage. They were young, nubile teen-age girls. They were dressed in layers of silk and satin, and as the music struck up, they began dancing. There was little sense to the movements, little effort to keep in time. But the main objective of the dance was aimed at their disrobing. Bit by bit, the girls peeled off the layers of silk scarves and satin skirts, and soon they were simply naked.

  The band hit a flourish and the girls took a bow and pirouetted off the stage, to be replaced by four more. This quartet pranced out and began disrobing in exactly the same way.

  It went on like this for an hour. The audience was absolutely entranced. The girls were all beautiful, if dangerously young. The music was intoxicating. In the corner, occasionally accompanying the band on the congas, was Colonel Crabb. Lording over it all, one of the naked girls propped up on his lap, a smile of satisfaction creasing his face.

  He looked so familiar…

  He moved only after the lights dimmed, and the girls from the eighth dance left the stage. Marching up to the microphone, now with two young girls, one on each arm, he tapped the microphone and said: “And now a word from our sponsor.”

  At that point, a couch was brought up to the stage. Two more girls appeared, sat on the couch, slowly disrobed each other and engaged in 20 long minutes of sensual, highly erotic kissing and touching.

  At the end of the segment, the Colonel reappeared and held up a sign over the heads of the lip-locked girls.

  It read: Fly United…Airlines.

  The audience applauded, the girls left the stage, and Crabb announced the second interpretive ballet of the show: “The Eight Temptations of Lolita.”

  The audience applauded again. Hunter ordered another triple whiskey. The day’s events began slowly washing away.

  What a strange, strange place he’d found himself in…

  Chapter 15

  HUNTER STAYED IN THE officers’ club for many, many hours, getting drunk, watching Crabb’s “culture revue.”

  When he could no longer see straight, he stumbled to the 2001st officers’ barracks, selected the first bunk he came to, and fell asleep.

  Thankfully, he did not dream…

  He woke up the next day cold and sore. His stomach felt like it was turned inside out. He looked around the barracks—it was a long Quonset hut containing at least 200 beds—and found that it was indeed very empty.

  He located a coffee machine, made a pot, and drank half of it. Looking through the empty barracks, he saw each bed was made, corners tight. Each had a pilot’s cap placed squarely on the pillow and a pair of boots down at the foot. Hunter laid his hand on the bunk next to his. It was ice cold. Then he turned around to the bunk he’d slept in and saw a pilot’s cap on the floor and a pair of boots under the bed—just where he’d drunkenly thrown them the night before.

  A shiver went through him. He’d slept in the bed of a dead man.

  Thus began his second day in Hell.

  He found the shower, and stood underneath the spigot for 20 long minutes, waiting for warm water that never came. Then he dried off and returned to his bed. He found a storeroom, and from it he took a new package of clothes, from the thermal underwear on out. Everything was colored light green.

  He found a yellow duty roster that had been pinned to a board near the front door of the barracks. It was the daily assignment for the 2001st. It was long enough to hold at least 200 names. His was the only one on it.

  There was a
bomber mission taking off from one of the other Circle bases in less than an hour. He had to get briefed and get airborne to ride shotgun for them in less than 30 minutes.

  The last thing he noted was that his rank had been penciled in as that of a lowly flight officer. Hunter understood this to be somewhere way below second lieutenant and barely above sergeant.

  Though he wasn’t sure exactly what his rank had been in his previous life, he was sure it was higher than this.

  Payne was waiting for him once again in the big briefing room.

  It was empty, like before. Again the officer barely acknowledged Hunter’s presence. It was as if he himself would die just by setting eyes too long on Hunter. Maybe that was his experience, Hunter thought. Payne seemed like a good officer, stuck in the most gruesome position possible. Hunter looked at the gallery of dead pilots and wondered how many Payne had known personally.

  Probably all of them, he thought.

  They ran through a quick mission film—the target today was the city of Laxey Bay on the Isle of Man. One hundred and thirty-three bombers would attack a power plant on the island, one which supplied a lot of electricity via undersea cables for Occupied England and Ireland.

  Payne was as brief as he had been the day before. When the mission film was over, he looked about the room and then his eyes rested on Hunter, sitting in the same seat as the day before.

  “Any questions?” he asked.

  Hunter just shook his head no.

  What was the point?

  “OK, then,” Payne said. “Good luck…and good-bye.”

  With that, the briefing officer slowly walked off the stage, leaving Hunter with the distinct impression that Payne didn’t expect to see him alive again.

  Hunter walked back out into the snow and wind and cold again and was surprised to see that it was actually a little brighter this morning.

  It gave him an opportunity to see more of the base. There were 18 hangars in all, laid out in a box with streets running like latticework between them.

  Some of the hangars looked as if they’d been worked everyday until recently—tire tracks and oil-stained snow outside the now-locked doors being the clue. But there was a small group of aircraft barns at the rear of the place that didn’t look as if they’d been used in years. In front of one of them, the snowdrifts were as high as the hangar door itself.

  Hunter’s mind flashed a message for him: Something strange was sitting in one of those barns. Something that might turn out to be very helpful to him someday.

  The snow picked up again and all but short visibility became lost. Head down, Hunter fought the gale for another few minutes until he finally found the flight line.

  Only one plane had been dragged out onto the preflight area, of course. The same Mustang-5 he’d flown the day before.

  The same dopey maintenance kid was there too, eyes barely open, snot frozen to his nostrils. He looked at Hunter oddly as they met at the plane’s access ladder.

  “Going up again, huh?” he asked with a long, noisy sniff.

  Hunter ignored him. It was too cold to chat. He began his preflight walk-around.

  “I heard it was rough up there yesterday,” the kid persisted.

  Hunter was manually working the flaps, knocking pieces of ice from between the control surface hinges.

  “Is it ever any other way?” he replied to the kid, trying to nip the inane conversation in the bud.

  He completed the walk-around and then climbed up the access ladder. This time the kid came up the ladder and helped him strap in.

  “I’ve seen a lot come and go,” he said, sniffing and belting him at the same time.

  “Mostly go…” he added ominously.

  Hunter finally turned to him. “Hey kid, what is it with you? You want me to put you in my will? You want my boots or something?”

  The kid was startled. He wiped some of the frozen snot from his nose.

  “No sir,” he said. “I just wanted to say…well, good luck up there.”

  With that, he banged Hunter twice on the helmet and disappeared.

  Hunter fired the Mustang’s engine and the thing came to life with surprising verve. He did a weapons check. His four machine guns were full, and the cannon was packing the same 25 shells. He did a fuel check: his main fuel tanks were full, and he was carrying three drop tanks with 500 gallons each. He switched on the homing TV, it came right to life too. He hit the radio check switch. It came back green.

  Then he hit the heater switch—and the same old cold air came blowing in.

  “That didn’t last long,” he murmured.

  He taxied and took off without incident, once again tapping the enormous fighter into the air with a touch of the brakes.

  It was a very cloudy day. Hunter climbed as fast as he could, hoping that increased engine use would heat the plane up, but it was no soap. The heater was blowing air even colder than before. Finally he just gave up and switched the damn thing off.

  He passed up through Angels-22 and finally broke through the soup.

  He keyed the homing TV and was soon locked on a solid beam. The circle got tight, the screen came alive, and he was soon looking at long lines of contrails cutting across the deep blue morning sky. The sun was reflecting off the lines of frozen ice crystal, giving them an oddly warming hue. Hunter shivered when he saw this. It reminded him of just how cold he really was.

  He laid on the throttle and the double-reaction engine kicked in response. He rose to 32,000 feet, the g-forces rippling his face and invigorating his body. He had the bombers in visual range within a minute.

  This was not the 999th from the day before. These airplanes were from the unfortunately numbered 13th Heavy Bombardment Squadron.

  They were flying enormous aircraft, larger than the B-24/52s from Hunter’s previous mission. He took a moment to study these airplanes and again, saw an example of the odd aeronautical Darwinism at work.

  As with most combat aircraft he’d seen here in this strange world, these looked to be a combination of two airplanes, memories of which were allowed to leak out of the back of his skull. These planes were very long and thin. They had enormous wingspans with six contra-rotating props on each side, back-mounted, pusher-style, along with a set of four jet engines way out on the tips. In this way the plane resembled what Hunter remembered as the B-36 Peacemaker.

  But the snout of the aircraft was tiered and had an arsenal of weapons sticking out of it. So did the fuselage, which looked very thick and rugged and was lousy with machine gun stations. The flight deck, the canopy, the dozens of gun blisters, the high tail, and even the partially retracted landing gear were all reminiscent of a plane Hunter recalled as the B-17 Flying Something-or-Other.

  So these were B-17/36s. Even his swiss-cheese brain knew that was another very bizarre combination.

  He called up to the flight leader, and unlike the day before, he received a very crisp response on the first try.

  “This is Section Leader Tango One,” a very official-sounding voice responded. “I read you, Cover.”

  He and Hunter exchanged a flurry of information on headings, weather changes, heights, emergency frequencies, and so on. For the first time since this whole bad dream had commenced, Hunter found himself authentically impressed. He hit the throttle bar again and zoomed up to meet the column of B-l7/36s.

  For some reason, he felt the adherence to military protocol, and the confident no-nonsense tone to be very reassuring. Why was this? Had he been a hardass back in his previous military career? A by-the-book kind of guy?

  He didn’t know.

  He reached the head of the column and moved up parallel to the flight leader.

  These airplanes was very spit and polished, none of them bore the garish nose paintings of the day before. Nor were they painted in the dull blue polar camouflage of the group, the ill-fated 999th. These planes looked like they just rolled off the factory assembly line. They were bright, shiny, reflective metal.

  The pilot of
the first ship gave Hunter a friendly salute, which he returned. All of the faces looking out at him now were clean and neatly dressed. No beards and booze here.

  Normally, Hunter’s instincts told him, for the 132 bombers in this flight at least a couple dozen fighters would be riding shotgun. They would normally take up positions about 5000 feet above the group, riding lead, flanks, and rear.

  But there were no two dozen airplanes to guard this column. It was just Hunter. For this reason, he chose to take a position about a half mile ahead of the column at only a slightly higher altitude. Like the scout in front of the cavalry column, leading the way.

  Though he was just as cold and just as confused as the day before, he did feel different today. The esprit de corps of this bomber group was goosing him into a better frame of mind.

  That’s another reason he took the lead point. If anyone was going to take a shot at them, they’d have to take a shot at him first.

  That’s the way he wanted it to be.

  They reached the approaches to the North Channel exactly two hours later.

  The weather had been cooperative and the skies friendly. No surprise with this group, everything was exactly on schedule.

  To Hunter’s left, Scotland, still foggy in the early morning sun. To his right, northern Ireland, covered in clouds and raining as usual. Still, it did look emeraldlike this morning, and not at all uninviting. Hunter wondered for a moment if he was Irish, or of Irish parents maybe.

  In the same thought he hoped the Irish were on the right side of this war against Germany. He knew that Eire was occupied, but just how much resistance were the Sods putting up against their perpetual enemy’s enemy? He didn’t know.

  Twenty minutes later, their target came in sight. The Isle of Man was a substantial chunk of land in the northern part of the Irish Sea.

  The target, a double-reaction power station, provided juice to nearly all of Occupied Britain and Ireland. To knock it out or even damage it would put the Germans in the dark, at least for a while anyway.