Then they heard the scream of engines again. And they looked up, this time to the north.
And they saw another HellJet begin its murderous dive from 25,000 feet.
This time the mercs stayed down in their holes.
Seeing one piece of hell this day was enough for them.
The air strike lasted just fifteen minutes. All six of the AirCat HellJets delivered massive dive-bombing loads, one each on the six hills surrounding the embattled mercenaries.
Once the big dive-bombers had departed, the smaller AirCat fighter bombers swept in. Two dozen in all, they strafed and bombed what remained of the hills in a most workmanlike fashion. It seemed almost routine.
There was no antiaircraft fire any more, of course. The concussion alone from the dive-bombing runs had iced the electronics of all weapons in the hills and many on the plain of Long Bat itself. This allowed the AirCats to go about their deadly work unopposed; indeed after ten minutes it seemed like the swarm of fighter-bombers were simply dumping bombs on places where bombs were no longer needed.
Finally the last of the attacking airplanes pulled up and out, and silence returned again to Long Bat. This time it would last for more than a few seconds.
It was strange, though. The mercs slowly crawled out of their holes. Many of them saw the sun for the first time in a month. They were all hollow-eyed, gaunt, weak. Skeletons with drooping skin, and teeth loose in the gums.
But at least they were alive. That was more than could be said for their unseen enemy in the hills, because indeed there were no more hills. Long Bat now stretched as a plain for another three miles or so in every direction until the jungle took over again.
One month of hell over in just a matter of a few minutes.
The AirCats had struck again.
CHAPTER 18
THIRTY MINUTES LATER THE birds were singing again at Long Bat.
The runway, or crucial parts of it, had been hastily filled in by the bone-weary mercs, and nine big AirCat fighter-bombers had already set down upon it. They were lined up on the battered runway like a shiny honor guard, the only things that were not bent, twisted, or rusted in what was, just an hour before, a nonstop killing field.
Two Bugs were also on the ground. Y, Zoltan, and Crabb had arrived in one; the Jones boys had come in the other.
Y was still shaking from his gut-wrenching bombing run in the HellJet. The carrier was now anchored 150 miles off the coast of Vietnam. Returning at top speed to the ship after the air strike had taken but twenty minutes, he was met by Emma on the flight deck. Indeed it took her and a few deckhands a couple of minutes to unstrap Y and pry him out of his crash seat.
Once on deck, he had a flask containing some brandy slipped to him by Emma. Y downed it in one long, noisy slurp. Then the Bugs were brought up, he was loaded aboard and was soon on his way back to Vietnam.
And now Y was here. His hands still shaking, his breath sickly sweet, he was staring out at the hills that were no longer hills, astonished and a bit terrified at what the AirCat squadron could do.
LaFeet was there, reading a prayer to his assembled men, who were now starry-eyed at their mad commander. He was taking credit—he and God—for the positive turn of events, and when someone hands you a miracle and saves your life, you tend to accept their word for it. That’s why the 623 survivors were now hanging on LaFeet’s every word.
None of the AirCats or Y’s gang were even listening, though. They were too busy studying a map of Long Bat.
The place that had suffered hardly any damage in the massive bombing strike was the mountain at the northern end of the valley, right at the edge of the long runway. The five men were now standing about one hundred feet away from this mysterious mountain. Even to Y’s foggy eyes its formation reminded him of something.
Was it a dinosaur?
“Well, this is the place,” Dave Jones said. “Now what?”
Zoltan stepped forward, closed his eyes, and indicated a need for silence. Everyone else either rolled their eyes or looked up at the deep-blue sky. But the psychic stayed focused.
“Yes!” he finally exclaimed. “In there. That’s just what we’ve been looking for.”
They all looked at the mountain.
“In there?” Crabb asked.
“Yes,” Zoltan repeated. “There is a cavern inside. Behind a door, which we will find hidden in some shrubbery.”
They did a group shrug and then approached the place the psychic had indicated. And sure enough, behind a cascade of fauna and vine they found a huge iron door.
Y felt his head start to spin again.
He was having that feeling again. Not so much the sensation that he had been here before, or that he had lived these events just as they were happening. But rather, everything seemed so familiar to him. Like he was reliving a piece of history—someone’s history—that had already gone by. It was not a pleasant feeling, this odd kind of déjà vu. Yet, he knew it couldn’t be anything more than that. A feeling. It could not be a coincidence, simply because coincidences just did not happen in this world.
Bottom line, though: Thinking all this just made his head start to spin a bit faster.
Jesus, what I’d do for a drink.
The door had an enormous lock on it, of course, and a quick search of the area found no key.
“Can you think your way through that?” Dave Jones asked Zoltan snidely, indicating the lock.
The psychic, hurt again, shook his head no. But then he reached over and deftly lifted Crabb’s enormous twin-barrel Magnum from its holster. In one quick motion, he fired both barrels at the lock. It was vaporized in the small fusillade, sending pieces of flaming metal in every direction except toward the group of men.
The others were shocked—Zoltan had never handled firearms before. Yet he seemed to know what he was doing with the huge Magnum.
He sensed this and smiled a bit.
“It’s all in knowing where to aim,” he said mysteriously.
The lock gone, it took a little effort to swing back the huge worn door. Just judging by the size of the portal, though, Y figured whatever lay beyond must indeed be vast.
This thought was confirmed when the door was finally swung free. There was a huge cavern beyond—it was truly enormous. Big enough to hold the B-2000 superbomber, and much more.
But there was no superbomber. Even with the lack of illumination, this was obvious.
This did not mean, however, that there wasn’t an airplane within.
There was.
It was the tow plane—the Z-16 recon aircraft that the superbomber crew had taken with them.
“Son of a bitch,” Zoltan whispered. “I was right … sort of.”
CHAPTER 19
West Falkland Island
“THIS IS INSANITY. YOU know that, right?”
Viktor looked around at the deserted beach. The waves were small this morning—the wind was coming off the land for a change, yet they were still swelling to three or four feet. Beyond, the South Atlantic looked very gray and immense and forbidding.
“I know it appears that way,” he said to the Man. They were the only two on the beach. “But something is telling me that this is the way I must do it.”
The Man loaded the last bag of provisions into the open boat. It was nothing more than a skiff, a rescue boat used by the British soldiers on the island for any emergency in the surf. It was fifteen feet long, built of oak and mahogany, and double-sealed all-round. A small mast of sorts had been rigged in the center, and the rudder was wired up to a very rudimentary steering wheel and to a bolted-down chair in the rear. It was a sturdy boat, but hardly an oceangoing vessel.
Yet that’s where Viktor wanted to take it.
“You know, if I thought it was going to lead to this, I would never have showed you the door to Back There,” the Man told him.
Viktor secured the last bag of stuff in the boat and turned back to the Man.
“Quite the contrary,” he said sincerely. “I’m
glad that you did. It led me to this decision. I have to find the other man who came through with me. You seem to think he is this mysterious American pilot. If it is him, I must find him. I won’t be able to rest until I do.”
The Man began pleading with him.
“But this is not the Middle Ages,” he said. “This is a modern world. If you want to find someone you can use aircraft, you can hire a spy. You can make contacts. Send out feelers. There are many, many things you can do. I’ll even send a squad of British troopers with you, if you will only agree to do it some other way than this!”
Viktor just shook his head sadly. The wind began blowing a bit harder. “There is much truth and wisdom in what you say,” he said. “But there is also something deep inside me that is telling me this is the way to do it. And so I must.”
The wind picked up even more now; it turned around and was suddenly coming off the water. The waves were growing in strength. And, of course, a storm was brewing off to the southwest. Blowing up from Antarctica, as always.
Viktor shook the Man’s hand for a very long time.
“Thank you,” he said finally. “For looking after the children. For looking after me.”
The Man almost had to wipe away a tear.
“You’re thanking me?” he exclaimed. He grabbed Viktor by the shoulder. “You saved the most precious thing in my life. In this world or any other. I owe my soul to you.”
“You owe me nothing,” Viktor said. “Except a warm bed and a hot meal, when I return.”
With that, he pushed the boat out into deep water, jumped aboard, and began handling the makeshift sail.
He caught a gust right away and began moving quickly away from the shore. He turned just once and waved to the Man. Then he did not look back again.
Long Bat, Vietnam
It took them nearly two hours to push the Z-16 tow plane out of the huge cavern.
Its brakes were locked, which was strange because it appeared as if the airplane itself had not landed here. Its wheels were as new as the day they left the ground at Bride Lake Base in California five weeks before. In fact, it appeared like the plane had landed here still attached to the superbomber, and was left this way, hidden in the cave—with its wheels locked.
“Why?” was the question on everyone’s lips as they finally got the airplane out into the sunlight.
Their suspicions were confirmed when the plane’s gas tanks were checked and found to be absolutely full.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Y was saying. “Why would they land here, leave the tow plane, and then take off again.”
He looked down the length of the runway. It was at least seven miles long. In the hands of the right pilot, maybe just enough for the massive bomber to land and take off from.
Zoltan was pressing his hand against the airplane and keening, like a rabbi at the Wailing Wall. But it was obvious that not much was coming through.
Y finally climbed inside and went up to the flight deck. Through his blurry eyes, he solved one small mystery, only to reveal a larger one.
It was weird how Y first spotted it. The plane’s controls were all shut down, of course. But he noticed that there was a single red bulb blinking at the bottom and off to the far right of the flight commander’s console. Y stared at the bulb. He was not a pilot but he’d flown on enough airplanes to know that this blinking light was the indicator for the auxiliary flight-control computer’s D-drive. This was a kind of backup for the flight control’s backup system. On an airplane when everything else was shut down—but only temporarily—the D-drive was usually left on.
This was strange. Y had no idea why the Z-16 had been placed inside this huge cavern, on this weird battered plain. But why would it have been, in effect, left on? Why hadn’t everything been shut down?
Y yelled down to the others, and soon the Jones boys, Zoltan, and Crabb were up on the flight deck. Y pointed out the blinking D-drive light.
“Hmmm,” Seth Jones said. “Maybe someone was expecting to come back here for this baby sometime soon.”
“So what you’re saying is that they landed here safely,” Y hypothesized, “then hid this in here, took off again in the B-2000—yet left this thing with a heartbeat?”
“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Crabb injected.
“No, it doesn’t,” Zoltan said. “Unless you just reverse that rationale.”
They all looked at him, and as usual there was an orgy of eye rolling.
“Why don’t you ‘reverse’ it for us,” Dave Jones suggested.
Zoltan closed his eyes for a moment and put his fingers to his brow.
Then he came out of his minitrance, looked down at the myriad of buttons, switches and readouts on the control panel—and suddenly started pushing things.
And a few seconds later the cockpit burst to life. Everything that could be activated, was. Now there were many lights flashing, many buzzers buzzing. The airplane’s ten computers snapped on, and their hard drives were now chugging themselves to life.
All from one little button ….
“Jeesuzzz, what the hell is this?” Crabb yelled, startled. Everything but the plane’s engines was now turned on.
Zoltan was wearing a wide grin of triumph.
“I think someone was trying to leave us a message,” he said.
For once, the Jones boys agreed with the psychic.
Seth Jones reached forward and pushed the plane’s flight-control computer-panel main switch—and the message Zoltan had predicted appeared before their eyes.
There was a flight plan already loaded into the plane’s automatic pilot. It was so intricately programmed, all it would take was a push of the activation button, and the airplane would take off and head toward its assigned destination, which, on the large TV screen, was identified as Location X.
The meaning of all this was clear to the group.
“Someone must want us to get to this Location X very badly,” Dave Jones said. “Even though judging from this flight thesis, they might not have been exactly sure where Location X was.”
They all looked at each other. Finally Crabb spoke the words that were on everyone’s mind.
“They knew someone would come here looking for them,” he said. “Just how, I can’t imagine …”
“How they knew is not the question now,” Dave Jones said. “The question is now, who’s going to go?”
Y stood up, straightened himself out, and cleared his throat.
“We’re all going of course,” he said. “I suggest we get back to the carrier, gather some supplies—and other things—and then get a good night’s sleep, and ride this thing wherever it wants to take us ….”
The others were only mildly surprised that Y wanted all of them to go. But there was still one big question remaining: Where were they going?
“Don’t ask me,” Zoltan said, preemptively cutting off all inquiries to him. He was staring at the alphabet soup of computer commands flashing on the control panel’s main TV screen. None of them made any sense to him.
“No matter where it is, one thing is for certain,” Y told them. “It’s a place that the guys in the superbomber—maybe even Hawk Hunter himself—wants us to go. So go, we must.”
But again, where could that be? No one in the group had a clue—except Y.
His head was spinning again, and the weird feeling of déjà vu was now washing through him once more.
An airplane that is found in the wilds of Vietnam, with its controls already set for a predetermined point?
Yeah, he’d read that book before ….
CHAPTER 20
THE WATERS OF THE Gulf of Tonkin were very calm this night.
A light breeze washed across the deck of the small carrier as two Bugs and two AirCats flew endless circles around the vessel on aerial picket duty.
On the deck itself, one of the massive HellJet dive-bombers was being packed with provisions: weapons, ammunition, radios, and long-range TV cameras. All this in preparation
for the next day’s journey. The plan was for the HellJet to carry the voyagers back to Long Bat at first light. Then once the Z-16 tow plane took off, the HellJet and four AirCat fighters would accompany the recon plane on its predetermined, mysterious journey.
The carrier itself was quiet, as well. The air strike earlier in the day had been oddly routine for the AirCats. Four fighters had provided air cover for the evacuating mercenaries as they made their way down the Dong Long road to the nearest big city and safety. Those airplanes had returned with mission accomplished at 2300 hours. After that, the ship itself shut down.
There was a huge party taking place on the Bro-Bird, however. Anyone spared duty, whether inside the carrier or on the tug crew, was aboard the huge seaplane, drinking, dancing, and taking turns sampling the wares of the rescued hookers.
Y was not attending this bash. He was lying in his bunk, slurping a huge glass of brandy, with his eyes transfixed on the small door that led into his quarter’s tiny head.
The light was on inside this small bathroom, and every few seconds Y could see a graceful shadow move about on the other side. With each of these movements, he felt his heart leap a bit.
He sipped his drink in an effort to get his heart beating normally again.
What was happening to him?
He didn’t know. He’d been on dangerous missions before—he was, after all, a seasoned OSS agent. But nothing had affected his mind like this little sortie to Asia. Was he going just a bit mad? Was this constant state of déjà vu the result of a slowly creeping dementia?
No, it didn’t seem to be. And it didn’t seem that simple. Going insane was easy … or easier than this.
He felt like he was living someone else’s life, with bits and pieces of his own life thrown in, too. What strange feeling was this? Since leaving Edwards, just about everything he did from the moment he woke up to the moment he passed out every night seemed so familiar to him.
And then there was his drinking. He’d been drunk—falling-down, blacked-out drunk—exactly twice before in his lifetime. One upon graduating high school, and again when graduating college.
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