It was the damaged nose that was causing all this oscillation; in the thick, cold air, it was as aerodynamic as a mallet. The plane bounced a fourth time, but at that moment, it finally ran out of gas. It came down for good on the fifth bounce, then went into a wild spin. But somehow Hunter managed to keep all three of its wheels on the ground.
And that’s how he came to a stop—spinning. The emergency trucks were already rushing out toward him. Many of his squadron mates were running across the frozen tarmac too. Watching the drama from in front of the ops building, Payne threw his jeepster into gear and joined this mad rush. His vehicle was faster than the running men, faster even man the fire trucks. He was the first one to reach the crash site.
He found Hunter waiting for him.
His uniform was singed, his helmet gashed, his face painted with soot and snow, but he was alive, and in one piece.
The same could not be said for the Mustang-5. Fuselage scored, wheels collapsed, wings literally hanging off, and a nose that looked like a punch drunk fighter, the wind and snow would claim it before the base mechanics could.
The first thing Payne asked upon reaching him was: “Where in hell did you learn to fly like that?”
Hunter took off his helmet and washed his face with a handful of snow.
“I have no idea,” he told Payne truthfully.
Payne drove him at high speed back to the ops building. A doctor arrived, and after looking Hunter over, just shook his head and said, “Wow.” Then he departed.
Payne gave him a cup of coffee and together they sat in the empty ops room.
“So what the hell happened out there?” the officer asked him.
Hunter gave him a quick recounting of his battle with the huge airplane. Payne’s eyes got wider with every sentence.
“I got a good spot on the wreckage,” Hunter told him. “It came down right on the edge of the island. We’ve got to get out there and see what the hell it’s full off, and what it was doing way out here.”
Payne grimaced at Hunter’s plan but knew it would be necessary. “I already called for a Beater from 999th; it should be here in ten minutes.”
Hunter drained his coffee and got a refill. Finally, the cold was leaving his veins.
“I don’t like this,” Payne was saying. “They’ve never come out this far.”
Hunter dumped a half a cup of sugar into his coffee. He would need some energy for what was coming up.
“Not that we know of anyway,” he replied ruefully. “But we’ve been making a lot of noise lately. It was probably just a matter of time before they did something about us.”
Payne refilled his cup too.
“I’ve got a squad of the Air Guards ready to lift off with us. Do you think we’ll need them?”
Hunter thought for a moment, remembering the kids who’ d flown in with him that first horrible day. They hadn’t seen much action up here in the great frozen north, but Hunter had come to admire them for their tenacity, their willingness to help out, and their general goodwill.
He finally nodded. “Yes, we should definitely bring them. And someone else too…”
The Beater arrived 10 minutes later.
Hunter and Payne were waiting for it out on the main runway. The squad of Air Guards—10 men in all—were waiting too. Each was wearing the heaviest in polar combat-wear: Large hooded parka, thermal pants and boots, fur-lined helmet, and face goggles complete with radio and Boomer inputs. Hunter and Payne were dressed in similar PW gear as well.
The 13th member of this party looked very lost in his bulky outerwear, though.
Zoltan the Magnificent had never had to climb into one of these gorilla suits before, and he was swimming in it. He’d also never had to handle a weapon before, but one of the Air Guards had given him a mammoth M-25 semiautomatic battle rifle and a long belt of ammunition. The psychic looked very weighed down by all the necessities of this odd, upcoming mission.
Hunter wasn’t exactly sure why he wanted the swami to come with them. The man had been playing to sold-out audiences every night since the bombing campaign had begun, and had become a favorite of everyone on the base. Hunter and he had had many discussions in that time concerning Hunter’s rather odd background—something that no one else at the Circle Wing knew about. Not Payne, not Sarah. No one but Zoltan. In that time, he and the psychic had become friends.
Now his gut was telling him the psychic might come in handy on this strange mission and he’d stopped questioning his instinct a while ago. The psychic didn’t look happy about it though.
And who could blame him? As the Beater came in, its frightening set of rotors and flying surfaces and its immense size was enough to make anyone wince.
But the thing finally touched down and the gangway fell open and the Air Guards, Payne, and Hunter charged in. Zoltan was the last one up the ramp.
When no one was watching him, he made a quick sign of the cross.
It took them about half an hour to fly out to the crash site.
The perpetual storm grew worse as the Beater sloshed its way northeast. Hunter had flown over the crash site with the last fumes his Mustang had left, and had done a visual spot on it before limping the rest of the way to the base.
That had been more than an hour ago now, and with the way the snow was coming down, he was concerned the crash site would be covered over before they reached it.
But finally they were approaching a place called Krujebackn Harbor, a deserted stretch of shore line about 35 miles northeast of Dreamland base. Hunter had his nose pressed up against the Beater starboard observation blister, scanning the frozen land and ice-clogged water way. And then he saw it, just as he’d left it. The huge airplane cracked up on a rocky beach, only about half a foot of snow hiding it from above. Oddly, it seemed as if this place had been the plane’s destination all along.
Everyone on the Beater, from the flight crew to the Air Guards, was staring out at the crashed seajet, their mouths wide open with astonishment. Even in a world of big, bigger, and better, this airplane was a monster.
The Air Guards checked their weapons and prepared for what might be an opposed landing. Hunter estimated that there might be upwards of 150 people or even more on the airplane, judging from the faces he’d seen in the windows.
If any of them survived, would they still have the will to fight?
But as it turned out, there were no survivors of this crash.
The Beater set down with a bone-jarring thump and the Air Guards stormed down the gangway with admirable precision, weapons up, spreading out, ready for anything.
But it was quite clear quite quickly that everyone aboard the huge seaplane was dead. Those not killed outright in the crash had succumbed to the 30-below temperatures.
The wreckage, while scattered over a half mile, was actually in three large pieces. The wing had split in two, throwing the 28 engines in all directions. The tail of the aircraft was sitting in 10 feet of slushy water just off the beach. But the main compartment, the fuselage right up to the immense cockpit, was still more or less in one piece.
The Guardsmen surrounded the still, frozen wreckage, weapons ready. Hunter and Payne pried down a side gangplank, walked up and cautiously peaked inside.
Suddenly, a shock wave went through the frigid air.
From Zoltan’s point of view, standing a bit timidly at the bottom of the plank, it seemed as if Hunter had been hit by a bolt of lightning as soon as he looked inside the crumpled airplane. His body shook once from head to toe. Zoltan felt the shock wave too even though he was at least 15 feet away from the pilot.
Hunter’s reaction had been so severe, Zoltan found himself running up the gang plank, so sure was he that Hunter had been shot or electrocuted.
But when he reached him, Hunter was still among the living. He was breathing, his eyes were not rolled up to the back of his head. He was conscious.
He was, however, bordering on the verge of shock.
As it turned out, Payne was too
—but not for the same reason as Hunter. No, Payne’s mouth was hanging open because of what the compartment of the huge airplane contained.
There were some troops. Mountain troops from the elite Haussling Division. There was a half company or so and they had all either been crushed at the front of the compartment, or had died of exposure at other parts throughout.
But this was not the surprise. The surprise was the airplane was also filled with hay and about two dozen dead horses.
“Horses?” Payne was saying over and over again.
Zoltan looked in on this scene of grisly carnage and felt another psychic jolt go through him.
“Horses?” he parroted Payne’s mutterings.
He turned back to Hunter, who was still standing frozen in place at the doorway. The breath was coming out of his mouth and nostrils very, very slowly.
“Jessuzz, Hawk,” Zoltan said. “You OK? You look as if you’ve seen a gh…”
Zoltan knew better than to finish that sentence—but as it was, Hunter wasn’t listening to him anyway.
“This,” he was saying instead, surveying the compartment full of dead humans, dead horses, and bales of strewn hay, “this I have seen before…”
Zoltan looked at him as if he was cracking up. How could anyone have seen such an odd, grisly sight as this before?
Hunter was shaking his head. It seemed preposterous to him too. But from that place way in the back of his skull, the message he was getting loud and clear was that he’d seen something very similar to this bizarre scene some time back in that other place.
Payne was still oblivious to it all—only Hunter and Zoltan could feel the psychic disruption. The Air Exec, and now the Air Guards who were filtering in, were asking the same thing: Horses? Why would anyone want to fly all the way up here in such a large airplane under such dangerous conditions, just to bring a couple dozen horses into the middle of nowhere?
It didn’t make any sense.
Not at first anyhow.
Hunter somehow got his legs moving. He stepped into the compartment, gingerly made his way around the accumulated, flash-frozen gore and began crawling up to the cockpit.
It took some doing just to get to the front of the wreck, but when he reached it, he found he had to climb up no less than five stories around a spiral ladder to reach the flight deck.
Again, a feeling of eerieness came over him as he managed to squeeze himself through the wreckage to the front of the cockpit.
The pilots were still in their seats; four of them in all, killed on impact and already frozen solid. Hunter found himself staring in the eyes of the one he assumed was the aircraft commander.
Then, completely on impulse, he began chipping away at the man’s left breast pocket, intent on searching it. But what exactly did Hunter expect to find here? An ID of some kind? No, that was not important. The guy was a German pilot; that’s all he had to know. Perhaps he was carrying documents in that pocket, something that might unravel this mystery. But again, Hunter didn’t think that was the aim of this quest.
It seemed more personal than that…
Was he looking for a picture of a loved one? Was that it? Why would that interest Hunter? Why would he care what this guy’s widow and kids looked like? Well, maybe the picture wasn’t of the pilot’s loved one, but of someone in Hunter’s past. He stopped in mid chip, trying to make some sense of this thought. How weird was that? Why would a picture of someone close to Hunter be in this guy’s pocket?
He resumed chipping away at the ice and blood and finally was able to unclasp the button and get the flap open.
But the dead man’s pocket was empty.
A second later, he heard footsteps coming up towards him. It was Zoltan. He didn’t even have to say anything to the psychic, the man already knew.
“Is this familiar to you in some way too?” he asked Hunter.
Hunter just shook his head. “In some way, yes,” he replied.
They both studied the cockpit for a moment, Hunter bringing his senses back to the matter at hand.
Payne crawled up to join them. He was astonished at the height of the flight deck. “This is a real high-rise, isn’t it?” he commented.
“This is a seaplane,” Hunter was saying. “It was probably meant to land off the beach. Then I guess they intended to off-load the horses and the hay and…”
“Yeah, and what?” Payne asked for all of them.
“That’s a lot of hay for two dozen horses,” Hunter observed.
“So maybe there were more horses?” Payne continued the thread. “Brought here earlier, maybe still nearby?”
“If this was just a dropping-off point, where were they going?” Hunter asked.
“They went thataway,” Zoltan suddenly said.
Payne looked over at Hunter. “You mean he really does have psychic powers?”
But Zoltan was shaking his head. “No, look, you can see them, tracks in the snow, see?”
They pressed their noses against the glass and sure enough, from this height, it was obvious that a 10-foot-wide track had been made in the snow, leading away from the beach. From ground level it had all blended in with the frozen background. They would never have seen it if Hunter hadn’t crawled up to the fight deck in the first place.
Then came shouts from behind them. The Guards had found something too. Hunter and company made their way back to the gory hold. Among the broken bodies and the hay, the young soldiers had found another strange item: a gigantic roll of bright red fabric. It seemed like woven plastic. It was about 12 feet wide and the roll was big enough to contain thousands of feet of the stuff, maybe up to half a mile in length.
Again Hunter was nearly knocked off his feet.
“This,” he whispered loud enough only for Zoltan to hear, “This stuff, this tape. It’s familiar too.”
Zoltan just shook his head and did another quick sign of the cross.
“Well, you’ve finally done it, Hawk,” he said. “You’re finally giving me the creeps.”
The Beater had some trouble getting airborne as the wind and snow had intensified since they’d landed at the crash site. But somehow, the octocopter got about 100 feet of air underneath it and with all eyes pressed against its many observation bubbles, they began to follow the tracks in the snow.
They went on for miles. The tracks led them over hills, through frozen valleys, across icy streams, and over more snowcaps. The trail was littered with dead horses, some hacked to pieces, their frozen bodies and legs sticking up through the snow drifts. Strands of yellow hay could be seen too, most of it plastered up on bare rock faces, the amber color very alien against the frozen waste.
They flew along like this for nearly 45 minutes, the winds buffeting the Beater’s rotors, and causing metallic screams that shuddered throughout the aircraft. The trail led back toward the circle of American bases. It was soon evident that the Germans—with their horses and their hay—were heading for someplace close to the airfields. But again the question was, why?
They finally found their answer on a frozen plain that, when they would do their rough calculations, was located in a spot exactly equidistant from all the bases.
Here they found the people who had made the first tracks through the snow. They were all dead too. Men and animals, frozen together. They had huddled for warmth, possibly waiting for the relief column that had never come.
The Beater landed and Hunter and the others got out to see it all up close.
Hunter pulled Zoltan aside. “This stuff, or a lot of it, is familiar too.”
Zoltan pulled his collar closer to his neck. “A plane full of horses. Soldiers carrying red tape? None of this makes any sense. How can it be familiar?”
But then, beside the dead, one of the guards found something. It was the beginning of a long line of the same bright red tape. It was partially hidden underneath the snow. But it turned out it stretched for nearly one half mile, east to west.
It didn’t take long to figure out this str
ip of red tape was actually part of what would have been a huge cross. The second column had been carrying the second half mile of fabric—and the horses had been used to pull the huge wad of tape across the frozen waste—and provide food for the troops.
But two long strips of plastic in the middle of the ice and snow? Why?
But Hunter knew exactly what was going on.
Two strips, crossed. Bright red against the white terrain, to be hidden under the snow until the last possible moment?
“It’s a target,” Hunter told them. “A cross, to be hit. A huge aiming point.”
Payne and Zoltan just looked at Hunter then at each other.
“A target?” Payne said, yelling to be heard against the howling wind. “A half mile long? Why that big?”
Hunter felt the blood freeze inside his veins again. Then his body started vibrating.
“Because,” he said, “whatever is coming down on this thing is big too…”
Chapter 26
EVERY AIRPLANE AT DREAMLAND was either out on the runway or taxiing up to it by the time the Beater made it back to base.
Hunter was surprised at the number of aircraft. Not just the several dozen Mustang fighters, but a couple huge Boxcar cargo jets that had been hiding somewhere in the hangars way out back.
In all, there was at least 65 airplanes waiting to take off; even then some would probably be left behind.
They were bugging out. Payne had ordered it, via radio from the Beater. Every base around the Circle was evacuating. And doing so as quickly as possible.
There was no doubt in Hunter’s mind that some kind of German weapons strike was coming. The partially constructed big X in the snow had been the bull’s-eye—and the German military had gone to great lengths, and wasted some valuable troops, in its attempt to set it up.
It was also obviously an aiming point, and one whose location was not just a guess in the wind. If the point was equidistant from all the Circle bases, the middle of the necklace as it were, that meant to Hunter that something big was coming—something that could hit in the middle of nowhere and wipe out 12 airfields with its 20-mile radius.
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