Hunter took a deep breath. His lungs filled with the fine damp mist. On the sea below, an ocean liner was passing by.
“Could you be who I think you are?” he asked him simply.
The Man began to say something but stopped himself.
“You will have to find out for yourself,” he said finally. “But remember this: Wherever you go, I’m there—and so is my wife. So always look for us. OK?”
“OK …” Hunter replied.
With that, they shook hands and Hunter put on his parachute.
Then he took Dominique in his arms and they stepped through the hole together.
But then something went wrong.
He remembered drifting towards the water and watching Y and Viktor land safely below. He turned to Dominique and put his lips to hers. At that instant, there was a flash of blinding light. Suddenly Dominique was gone—it was as if she’d evaporated in his arms! He began falling faster, his parachute long gone. Tumbling end over end, a deep warmth began to fill him—it was a pleasant feeling, but frightfully close to what he had felt during his near-death experience just the day before.
Then the sensation of falling ceased—and suddenly, he was sitting on the floor of a rickety wooden cabin. Through the dirty and cracked windows he could see green mountains all around him. The unmistakable sound of a small airplane, flying far away, began echoing in his ears.
He turned to look over his shoulder and found himself in a dark saloon. The place was crowded with drunken pilots and beautiful bar girls. He was wearing a deep blue combat uniform. On his right shoulder was a patch with the letters “ZAP” emblazoned on it.
He felt something in his left hand and when he looked down, he found himself in the cockpit of a crashed airplane, a racy picture of Dominique trembling between his fingers. Another flash of light. He looked up to see he was in a different saloon, this one in the middle of the desert. A movie crew had all its cameras trained on him.
He took a sniff and the stink of gasoline went up his nostrils. He closed his eyes from the pungent stench and when he opened them again, he was inside the battered cockpit of his old F-16XL fighter, a jungle surrounding him. His sleek jet was mired up to its wings in what he knew was Panamanian red mud.
He wiped his eyes only to find his fingers were freezing. Another blink and he was in deep snow, the wreckage of a B-1 bomber crumpled and burning beside him.
He heard a train whistle behind him. When he turned towards it, he realized he was at the top of a steep hill, looking down into a deep river valley. A massive battleship was just barely squeezing its way through the narrow, winding waterway, heading north.
Hunter rolled down the hill and fell into the water and was immediately taken under by a huge wave. He fought his way to the surface, and when he finally came up, an island with a huge volcano appeared in front of him. He saw soldiers running up the side of the volcano, firing their guns wildly. Hunter called out to them, but they could not hear him.
Another wave overwhelmed him. When he came up this time, he was in a rice paddy. A strange pink jet was flying overhead. He suddenly had a gun in his hands but by the time he went to aim it, the pink jet had turned into a spacecraft—something that looked like a space shuttle, yet much bigger and more elaborate. It was taking off, going straight up in a cloud of smoke and flame. Hunter began firing at it. But it kept going up and up until it disappeared amongst the stars.
And then, just like that, he was flying among the stars too.
About the Author
Mack Maloney is the author of numerous fiction series, including Wingman, Chopper Ops, Starhawk, and Pirate Hunters, as well as UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn’t Want You to Know. A native Bostonian, Maloney received a bachelor of science degree in journalism at Suffolk University and a master of arts degree in film at Emerson College. He is the host of a national radio show, Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1999 by Mack Maloney
Cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4804-0721-3
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Tomorrow War Page 32
