Tomorrow War

by Maloney, Mack;

  They walked him to the corner of the tent, where they had been talking when he came in. Zoltan went back to sleep, Crabb went back to sharing coffee with the four “Brandy”s.

  In the corner was a small collapsible desk and on it there was a map. Y took a quick look and realized it was a map of the city of Kabul Downs and the disposition of the opposing forces both defending and surrounding it.

  Seth Jones pointed to a spot at the very edge of the map.

  “We are here,” he said plainly. “Mile one behind the Red Army line, at what these guys call headquarters south. As you can see, the Red lines go right around the city. These guys are stretched very thin over a twenty-two-mile front.”

  Seth told Y the story about the mysterious princess and how she was being held by the blue bloods and how the Reds were intent on getting her back, but had laid siege to the city for nearly a year now and had yet to come close to accomplishing that goal.

  “This is being fought over a woman?” Y asked, somewhat astonished.

  The Jones boys nodded gravely.

  “She better be a real sweetheart,” Crabb chimed in from the other side of the tent.

  The Jones boys turned Y’s attention back to the map.

  “Inside the city, they are facing fifteen divisions of Blues. The Blues have a lot of tanks, the Reds have a lot of artillery.”

  He cocked his head to one side and said: “Listen … hear that?”

  Y listened and did hear the steady whump-whump-whump of big guns going off in the distance.

  He nodded.

  “Blue tanks and Red artillery shooting at each other,” Seth explained. “Whenever you don’t hear that sound, you know something is up. Something big. Either we have broken through a Blue line, and they’ve broken through one of ours—”

  Y stopped him right there.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “What’s with this ‘we’ and ‘they’ stuff?”

  Dave and Seth just stared back at him for a moment.

  “Well, look closer at that uniform you just put on,” Dave told him.

  To help with this, Seth shined a flashlight on Y’s new combat suit. Sure enough, it was red.

  “Didn’t anyone mention that to you?” Dave Jones asked. “You’re in the Red Army now. We all are.”

  Y just stared back at them, his mouth agape.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” he began. “We can’t join up with these guys. Even though they did save our lives—”

  Seth Jones interrupted him. “Well, listen, if that’s what’s bothering you, we’ve been assured the Reds are the good guys in this little dustup. The Blues have been committing atrocities since day one. They’ve been threatening to kill this princess for a year or so, and there are a lot of indications they might actually do it very soon. So, you see, we have to work like crazy to make sure that doesn’t happen and—”

  Y held up his hand again.

  “Am I dreaming?” he asked plaintively.

  “That’s not a good question to ask,” came Zoltan’s deep intonation from across the room, even though he seemed absolutely dead asleep.

  “A day ago we were in prison,” Y went on. “The day before that we were flying over the longest goddamn railroad track in the world. The day before that we were in Thailand crawling all over the superbomber.”

  “I’m surprised you can recall all of that,” Dave Jones said dryly.

  Y felt his cheeks flush. He decided to ignore the comment.

  “What I’m trying to say,” he began again through gritted teeth, “is that we started out on a mission here. A very important mission. And nothing can prevent us from fulfilling that mission—not even these guys breaking us out of prison and saving our hides.”

  The Jones boys looked at each other again. It was their ritual to be performed when someone in their company had to be brought up to speed on a subject that everyone else in the room knew about.

  Seth took the lead.

  “That’s what we’re trying to tell you, dude,” he said. “We’ve fulfilled our mission.”

  Y felt his head start to spin. Again. Seth looked at Dave.

  “He’s confused,” he said to his brother. Dave nodded. “You want to un-confuse him, or should I?”

  “I will,” Seth said.

  With that, he took the flashlight and then Y’s arm and led him out of the tent. They walked quickly and wordlessly across the compound to another row of tents. These were bigger and more elaborate than the tent they’d been in. The security around this area was extremely tight.

  They passed through one checkpoint being manned by no less than six guards. Y stared at them—they all looked familiar somehow. But in the dark and the confusion of the moment, he could not place their faces. Plus they were all wearing beards. He did however hear one guard refer to the other as “Brother Clancy.”

  They passed this checkpoint with a word from Jones and moved toward the large elaborate tents. There was a small, muddy field beside one of the largest, and it was here that Y saw something else that seemed very strange. There were about fifty men in this field and they seemed to be playing a game of football.

  Y started to comment on this but Jones interrupted him.

  “That will explain itself in good time,” he said.

  They finally reached the largest tent. There was a sign above it: “Red Army—Special Operations Branch.”

  Three men were sitting in half chairs out front, smoking cigarettes and drinking what smelled like rum. One was an Asian; another looked like a rakish college professor. The third spoke with a thick brogue.

  “Now there’s a man who needs a drink!” this man roared to the delight of the other two as Jones and Y passed by.

  They went into the tent where they encountered a Red officer who had a distinct, slightly French accent.

  “Can I help you?” he asked Jones, while eyeing Y. They both seemed to recognize each other.

  “He’s here to see he major,” Jones said simply.

  The officer nodded and indicated the next room over.

  “He’s in there,” the officer said. “But he’s real busy—as always.”

  “This won’t take long,” Jones said.

  He led Y to the door of the next office and stopped. There was a man sitting behind a desk, his back to them poring over a map.

  Jones gave Y a nudge.

  “You’re on your own from here,” he said.

  Y found himself inside the room, with Jones beating a hasty retreat.

  He stood there silent for a few moments. Then he cleared his throat.

  “Ah … excuse me?” he said in a near whisper.

  The man spun around and took one look at Y. Then his face lit up and he pushed his hair back and suddenly it all fell into place.

  Well, sort of.

  “Jeesuz, man, I never thought I’d see you again!” the officer said, coming out from behind the desk to shake his hand.

  “Me neither,” Y croaked.

  It was Hawk Hunter.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 32

  WHEN HE FINALLY WOKE up, Viktor found himself in chains.

  He was blindfolded, cold, and hungry. But he was not alone. There were others around him. The stink of body odor was very thick in the air.

  His first thought was maybe at last he really was dead and had gone to Hell—and Hell was a small place where he was confined with hundreds of people who smelled worse than Soho.

  But in his next groggy thought, Viktor became certain this was not Hell unless Hell floated. The constant up-and-down motion was unmistakable to his bones after his experiences as a sailor. There was no doubt about it, he was on a boat—again.

  Why am I always drawn back to the water?

  He shook his head to clear it and now heard a cacophony of despair rise up around him. Moaning, weeping, coughing, and even some snoring.

  Where the hell was he?

  That’s when it all came back to him.

  The mercenar
y ship. The big black vessel he’d seen anchored in the harbor at Fiji, taking away the male islanders. That’s when he had his grim answer. He was in the bottom of this mercenary boat with the rest of the exiles from Fiji.

  But heading where?

  He lay there for a long time, trying to block out the sounds of the unfortunates around him, and failing miserably. His chains were heavy; there would be no way of breaking free or slipping his hands out between the clasps. And even if he could, what good would that do? Other than being able to remove his blindfold, he’d still be stuck on the ship, with hostile guards and no place else to go but back into the water.

  And he’d had his fill of that by now.

  The sound of human misery grew around him, and now the scent of blood was thick in his nostrils. The man beside him was moaning so loudly, his voice was cracking with a sickening wheeze. This sound was going in Viktor’s left ear and coming out his right. Never had he heard such a mournful cry. The man was begging to die.

  Viktor stretched his chains as far as they would go. It was painful but he was able to place his fingertips on the dying man’s forehead. It was burning to the touch.

  Viktor wiped the sweat from the man’s brow and said: “Be cool, my brother. Have peace. There is nothing to fear.”

  With that, the man stopped moaning. And a certain kind of peace did descend on wherever he was. All the weeping and moaning and coughing stopped. Now all he could hear were the snores.

  “Very impressive,” a strange voice said.

  Viktor’s back stiffened. Someone had been standing there the whole time, staying perfectly still, watching him.

  Now a hand reached down and roughly tore his blindfold away. Viktor’s eyes took a moment to focus. When they did, he saw he was indeed inside a dirty hold with greasy walls and a filthy deck. Three men were standing over him. They were all dressed in black uniforms. Viktor looked about the room. He was not surprised to find it was filled with dead and dying men.

  The soldiers in black were laughing at him. They were all tall, blond, and blue-eyed. One was an officer.

  “We’ve been watching you,” the officer said. “Even the captain had a strange feeling about you, and now it looks like he was right. You seem to have a way with the dying. And the living, too.”

  Viktor looked over at the man he’d just comforted and saw that he had not died at all, but was now resting rather comfortably, his fever suddenly gone, a weak smile cracking his bloated lips.

  “We are in the business of selling men for war,” the officer said. “And in this business, every body counts. You’re certainly an odd one. But we believe you might be more valuable to us alive than dead. We need a healer.”

  The officer pointed to Viktor.

  “Take him out of chains,” he snapped to the other two. “Clean him up. Put him in a uniform. We now have our medic.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Outside Kabul Downs

  HAWK HUNTER—AKA THE Wingman, aka The Sky Ghost—hadn’t slept in three days.

  That was normal these days. Hunter had always viewed sleep as an annoyance. An unnecessary break in the action movie that was his life. Sleep interfered. It was lost time. Missing hours that one could never get back. He’d trained himself long before to exist on coffee and catnaps for as long as three weeks or more. In fact, at these times, he found his instincts heightened, more acute.

  But there was something more to it than that. There was one indisputable fact about sleep, especially during times of intense conflict: Hunter knew that eventually his enemies would have to go to sleep. And when they did, that would give him another advantage. In combat, some times that’s usually all that was needed to succeed.

  Now he was downing a massive cup of coffee, no cream, eight teaspoons of sugar. It was very early in the morning. The sun would be up in thirty minutes. He was standing just outside a makeshift airplane hangar at Red Base One, a flat piece of grassy plain that served as the airfield for six squadrons of the Red Air Corps’ prop-drive fighters.

  Three dozen of these biplanes were warming up on the field now. This was the Red Force dawn patrol, getting ready to take off.

  Hunter had been flying for the Reds for three weeks and in that time he’d fallen in love with the Red Force biplane. It looked like an ancient Sopwith Camel on steroids, but in reality it was altogether a different airplane.

  It was designed like a fine classic automobile. Hunter had learned the Red Forces had built these airplanes at an old auto-assembly plant about fifty miles south of Kabul Downs, in a place called Xanana.

  The biplane—officially known as the SuperCamel—had a rugged, finely tuned twelve-cylinder 3,200-horsepower engine with an unbelievable kick to it. The wings were sturdy and well wired, as was the fuselage. This gave the airplane a great degree of maneuverability.

  Then there was the cannon.

  One airplane from where Hunter was really from was called the A-10 Thunderbolt II. It was a ground-support aircraft, not very fast, but durable and able to withstand lots of punishment. It was built around a huge cannon called the GAU-8 Avenger.

  This was in a similar style with the SuperCamel. The cannon inside the crimson biplane and it ammunition belt took up most of the fuselage. Just like the A-10, the SuperCamel was really a cannon with an airplane wrapped around it. That appealed to Hunter.

  He was about halfway through his coffee now and rereading a map of this day’s Blue Force disbursements. Not much had changed around the defense perimeter of the city. The Blues were just as strong as the day before, despite the huge Red Army raid, which had gotten inside the city twenty-four hours earlier.

  A photo snapped of the two Blue Force airfields just a half hour earlier showed they’d be launching three squadrons, as well, this morning. Again, in the air both sides would be evenly matched.

  He finished his coffee and folded the map and took a deep breath of the cool morning air.

  It was time to get flying.

  Hunter adjusted his leather flying cap, checked his parachute straps, and then walked out to his airplane. The rest of the squadron members were already inside their aircraft, warming the precise engines, filling the morning air with a rumbling so low, it actually shook the ground.

  He reached his airplane and climbed in. Two ground-crew members helped strap him in. They handed him a last-minute weather report. The skies would remain clear and the winds would be negligible. Just the kind of atmospherics Hunter liked.

  He gunned his engine and heard it growl back in fine form. He checked his cannon’s diagnostic. The weapon was at full power. He checked his ammo load. It was boasting twelve hundred rounds for his disposal.

  That, and a full tank of gas, was all he needed.

  He saw a bright flash of red light come from the base control tower. It blinked three times, paused, then blinked twice more. This was a signal indicating that the Blue Force dawn patrol was just taking off. Once again the morning would start with a bang.

  Hunter knew deep inside that in another life he had come up against a variety of aerial opponents and had bested them all. Even here in this strange world, he’d fought against German jet fighters, buzz bombs, and rocket planes, as well as the Japanese SuperZero.

  But of all those opponents, he’d never come up against anything like the Blue Forces SuperSpad.

  It was such an odd little airplane. Its overall appearance and design came directly from the Spad World War One fighter. This aircraft was about twice the size of the original Spad, was heavily armored and, like the SuperCamel, was made of metal and not wood. But the strangest thing about it was its power plant. It carried a double-reaction jet engine.

  Now this was strange because the engine in the Super-Spad was made for an airplane at least twice its size. But the Blues, by being surrounded, had only one engine design they could make and only one airframe available, and while they did not exactly match the resulting airplane, it could fly, it could carry weapons aloft, and in the end, that’s all you really wa
nt.

  Just as Hunter’s SuperCamel was built around its big gun, the SuperSpad was built around its big engine. It also carried four machine guns and a good supply of ammo, which made for a classic matchup. A fast, lightly armed jet airplane against a slower, heavily armed prop-driven one.

  However, the Blue pilots were a tad better than the Red fliers, and so in the course of the first year of the war, the Blues had dominated the skies. That is until Hunter arrived on the scene.

  But in any kind of combat, the victor always needs some kind of advantage over the eventual loser. And it took awhile before Hunter pinpointed exactly what the weakness of the SuperSpad was. But when he did, it turned the tide of the battle in the air.

  Hunter knew the double-reaction engine was usually a sturdy piece of machinery, able to take some punishment and keep on working. But there was a weak link in its design. It was in the double-reaction chamber itself, where the two chemicals mixed together to provide the reaction. There was a valve that regulated the chemical mixing, called the primary-flow valve.

  The first time Hunter got into an air tangle with the Blues—three weeks ago—he’d lured a SuperSpad over Red lines and then shot him down. He had the carcass of the SuperSpad hauled back to Red Base One, where he dissected it.

  To no surprise, he found that the critical flow valve was located at the very bottom of the SuperSpad’s fuselage on the right side. Like everything else on the SuperSpad, it was jammed tight inside the relatively narrow fuselage.

  Hunter knew that a cannon shot or two in that location would be all that was needed to down a SuperSpad “super quick.”

  He passed this information along to Red Air Force high command, and that’s when Hunter, who up to that time had just been a guy who could fly who happened to have been rescued by the pilot-strapped Red Forces on a raid inside the city, began getting noticed. He was activated as provisional major in the Red Air Corps the next day and had been flying full-time ever since.

  It was important that the Reds did not give away their secret of how they could destroy the SuperSpads with minimum effort. The word went out to the Red pilots to engage the Blues in pairs. While one shot at the enemy target in the normal way—out of the sun or even head-on—the wingman would sneak underneath the Blue plane and put a string of cannon shells into its Achilles’ heel. The tactic worked right away, and the air battle had turned to the Reds’ advantage.