He wasn’t really surprised that the F/A-18 he’d wounded had led him here. The large concentration of unfriendly fighters that had been converging on Key West had to have come from somewhere. And if there wasn’t an aircraft carrier or two about, then Cuba was the most likely spot.
Lawless, corrupt, and filled with terrorists, criminals, drug runners and spies, present-day Cuba wasn’t that much different from the pre-Big War version. With its hundreds of miles of rugged coastline, thick jungles, and vast mountainous regions, Cuba was a natural safe haven for some of the world’s more nefarious types. More than once in the top-secret meetings of the United American Armed Forces Security Council the subject of invading Cuba had come up. Such an action would have eliminated not only the misery of several million civilians still stuck on the island nation, it also would have secured the UA’s southeastern flank.
But such an idea was always voted down simply because an invasion of Cuba would cost too many lives, both in UA troops and civvies on the ground. It would soon be evident to Crunch, though, what the price of that decision might be.
His Super Voodoo had a certain amount of stealth capability, and its high-speed and high-altitude operating characteristics made it a hard target to detect. He crossed over the edge of Cuba right at Matanzas, about 50 miles east of Havana. The lights from the notorious place were quite evident off to Crunch’s left. Green, yellow, and neon blue, they gave the impression that one big festival was in progress just over the horizon.
The F/A-18 pilot, his left wing smoking badly, still wasn’t aware that Crunch was trailing him. It was obvious that the Nazi flier was concentrating all his efforts into getting back to where he’d come from and setting down safely. Looking in his rearview mirror for anyone on his tail certainly wasn’t foremost in his mind.
The Hornet finally began descending about ten minutes after Crunch made landfall. The pilot was turning slightly to the left and heading for what looked to be a fog-enshrouded valley surrounded by mountains and high ridges on all sides.
Once Crunch saw the Hornet pilot commit to a landing approach in this valley, he yanked back on his stick and was soon traveling straight up again. At last he knew where the Nazi F/A-18 was going—now he wanted to find out why.
Within forty-five seconds, the Super Voodoo was doing a long, looping orbit nearly thirteen miles above this mysterious valley. Crunch had spent the first couple of minutes of this high-flight checking his instruments and making sure that his airplane would be able to stand the nose-bleeding altitude. But everything seemed to be green, so he clicked open his lookdown IF radar set and took a peek.
What he saw chilled him.
The valley housed a huge military base, one that had somehow gone undetected by the routine recon flights the UA flew over Cuba. This base had no less than a dozen runways, several control towers, two dozen large aircraft hangars, and rings upon rings of SAM sites and AA guns protecting it all.
The place was enormous and obviously well equipped. But once he got over the initial shock, the surprise wore off pretty quickly. To find a secret air base in the middle of the Cuban wilderness was only mildly astonishing. As the United Americans had grown in strength and projected power, their various enemies had excelled in building secret bases. It was almost like a game: the UA’s enemies concentrating on getting as close as possible to the land of milk and honey, and usually the UA discovering these hidden places and taking them out.
So this place in the Cuban mountains was just another example, though its size was certainly larger than those bases found in the past. Crunch opened up the small but powerful recon camera he kept in the nose of his airplane and snapped off a roll of IR photos. He saw the wounded F/A-18 land on the base’s northernmost runway and the small army of crash trucks that had come out to meet it. He also saw at least another dozen or so Hornets out on the flight line along with a dozen or so medium-sized bombers. They looked like Ilyushin IL-28 Beagles, formidable if ancient airplanes, capable of bombing any number of targets in the southeastern part of America.
Crunch did another sweep over the base, he wanted to make sure he was getting an accurate account of the surrounding AA emplacements. After what had happened earlier in the Florida Straits, he was anticipating that the UA would have to hit this place someday soon, and finding out what the ground opposition was going to be was very important.
After about two more minutes of selective picture-taking, Crunch checked his fuel load and decided it was time to start thinking about returning to base. He would do one more go-around, and then scoot. If everything went okay, he could be back in UA airspace inside 15 minutes.
Then something strange happened. Whether it was because of a brisk wind or that the ground temperatures were suddenly changing, the fog was lifting slightly around the hidden base, giving Crunch a much better view than before. For the first time, he realized that there were actually two valleys down there, hidden by the high mountains, one sitting right next to the big air base. Inside this new place, Crunch spotted more military installations.
But they weren’t SAM emplacements or aircraft revetments or AA sites. Nor were there runways or hangars or fuel depots. Inside this valley next door were roadways that, from Crunch’s tremendous height, looked like dozens of figure-eights carved into the rugged, if flat, terrain. Inside these looping thoroughfares he saw hundreds of cylindrical objects, some long, some short, many apparently still inside packing crates and poorly camouflaged with netting and jungle flora. All of this was contained inside a miles-long extremely high fence.
Even for a veteran like Crunch, it took a few moments for him to realize exactly what he was looking at. The curly-Q roads, the large number of thin tubes, the crude attempts at camouflage—this was a weapons storage area he was looking down on. But it was not a typical one; it was one that seemed sinister by virtue of its rather elementary layout.
“Jeezus,” he breathed, “Can it be?”
Crunch desperately put his airplane into yet another orbit, now concentrating on the second hidden valley. Looking down through the dissipating mists and the moonless night, he switched on a device that had come already installed inside the Super Voodoo. It was an ACQ-167YV radiation threat detector, literally an aerial Geiger counter.
No sooner had he powered up this doodad when he heard a high-pitched series of staccato electrical bursts. The volume grew and grew until Crunch had to reach over and turn the amplification down and then finally off completely. Still his ears rang from the frightening sound for several seconds; it was echoing back and forth, up and down, as if it were bouncing around inside his skull and couldn’t get out.
Then he felt as if a giant hand had taken him by the chest and was beginning to squeeze him tightly. The ACQ-167YV had confirmed his worst fears. The weapons storage yard below was generating tremendously high amounts of low-yield radiation.
In other words, it was filled with nuclear weapons.
Crunch’s fuel bingo light popped on a second later, but he hardly noticed it. His heart was beating faster than he could ever remember. He was taking gulps of oxygen so deep, his eyes began to ache.
He suddenly felt as if he’d been transported back in time to the cockpit of a spy plane overflying Cuba more than forty years before—and finding just about the same thing below. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had transformed the world, had brought it to the brink, and had run up the collective anxieties of just about everyone on the planet. Many wars had been fought since then, and more than once the earth had felt the nuclear glow.
But because they were so expensive and so hard to maintain, nukes were very rare these days—or at least, everyone thought they were. The UAAF had a stockpile of less than three dozen. The UA’s various enemies combined had fewer than that, or so the current intelligence said.
But right now, right below him, within about a square mile area, were at least forty nuclear warheads of all shapes and sizes, many more than he or anyone else in the UAAF thought still existed on ear
th.
The most frightening part was, all these nukes were just 90 miles from the American mainland.
Eleven
Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, UA Florida
IT WAS CALLED THE VAB.
The letters stood for “Vehicle Assembly Building,” but this did not come anywhere near to describing what the building actually looked like. Many people called it the VBFB—“Very Big Fucking Building”—and that was much closer to what it was: the largest freestanding one-room structure on the planet. Its front door was so monstrous, an entire space shuttle and its movable launch pad could fit through it with room to spare. It was by far the biggest structure among the vast expanse of buildings, roadways, and wetlands that made up the Kennedy Space Center.
The VAB also had an extensive underground section, and it was here that the United American Armed Forces command had set up temporary headquarters.
The only reason the UAAF was located at the Kennedy Space Center was that the Zon shuttle had blasted off from here and it was here that it was expected to return, with the supercriminal Viktor II in custody. The entire command staff of the UAAF had taken over the sub-basement of the VAB, a bunkerlike affair which gave them plenty of room to move around and install their communications gear.
General Dave Jones, commander-in-chief of the UAAF and the de facto president of United America, had brought his office here, too. For the past few weeks, in tandem with the UA’s infant space program, he’d been running the country from a small suite located in the deepest part of the VAB. Because of the quick move to the Kennedy Space Center, there were only about 800 UAAF personnel at the base at present, most of them technical support people. Only about 200 were combat soldiers. This number was low for two reasons: the UA command didn’t expect to stay at the KSC for very long, and moving a large number of UA troops to the KSC didn’t seem necessary because no one was expecting any trouble from any outside forces.
As it turned out, that had been an incorrect assumption.
The disturbing news about the brutal firebombing attack on Key West and the sighting of the battleship flotilla in the Florida Straits reached the VAB command bunker at about 0430 hours.
General Jones immediately called an emergency meeting of his command staff; they were all gathered in the VAB situation room by 0500. Every one of the officers was astounded at the reports of enemy activity off the south Florida coast, Jones included. There had not been a substantial attack on American soil in nearly a year, not even a threat of one. The UAAF reconnaissance and intelligence services were the best in the world. Neither of them had foreseen any kind of unfriendly activity on any potential front around the UA’s borders.
It was obvious now that strong naval elements of the Asian Mercenary Cult had made a long, covert transglobal trip to show up off the American East Coast. Even worse, at least three squadrons of swastika-adorned warplanes were operating somewhere in the Caribbean, too. These, Jones and his officers feared, might actually be remnants of the Fourth Reich, the Nazi-led mercenary army that had invaded America several years before only to be thrown out after a series of titanic battles.
Jones and his men spent the next few hours hunkered down in the command bunker, poring over a huge lighted situation board currently projecting a map of the south Florida region. UAAF reinforcements were already rushing to the area. A company of the famous Football City Special Forces, UAAF’s version of a rapid deployment force, was presently en route to the Kennedy Space Center. Six UA C-5 gunships, monstrously armed aerial weapons platforms, were also on the wing, heading down from their base at the former Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Advance elements of the UAAF’s 1st Airborne Division Reserve, presently headquartered near Fort Hood, Free Texas, would also be at the Cape by dawn.
There was some cold comfort in the fact that though the sneak attacks had destroyed the Key West base, the quick action of the scramble planes and especially the crew of the Seamaster had forestalled what probably was intended to be a follow-up bombardment on another target and possibly even an armed landing by Cult troops aboard the battleships. And the UA did have three high-tech jets and five prisoners to show for their defense of the doomed air station. Still, the unexpected action cast a gloom over Jones and the two dozen or so men crammed into the VAB situation room. What they’d heard about Key West was apparently part of a trend that was actually developing worldwide.
During the past 12 hours, reports had been flooding into the VAB bunker concerning conflicts that had suddenly popped up all around the world. Using the few spy satellites it had at its disposal, plus intelligence from various radio monitoring assets and the old reliable “Hum-Int,” the UA command staff had been besieged with communiqués of wars suddenly breaking out in many parts of the world, especially in the Balkans, the Middle East, and South and East Africa. A full-scale conflict had apparently erupted between what was once China and what was once India; enormous bombings and missile attacks were reportedly going on between the Kingdom of Brazil and the so-called Glorious Empire of Argentina. Dispatches telling of battles big and small were coming in from just about every point on the globe. Even a war between Iceland and Greenland had apparently broken out, prompting one UA staff officer to ask: “What the hell are those guys fighting over? Ice?”
It seemed like the world had suddenly gone mad. Anyone anywhere who had a gripe against his neighbor had suddenly decided now was the time to do something about it.
“We live in very scary times,” Jones had told his command staff, as they’d worked feverishly to pull UA combat units from all over the continent and get them to the crisis zone. “Every day, every hour, we still do not know what the next will bring…”
No sooner were those words out of his mouth than a radiophone on Jones’s desk began beeping.
On the other end was John O’Malley, Captain Crunch himself.
He’d just returned from his overflight of Cuba—and he had some rather disturbing news to tell.
Twelve
New Kingdom of Burma
CHLOE APPEARED BEFORE THE GATES of Rangoon City just as the sun was coming up over the titanic mountains to the east.
It was just as she remembered it—yet different, too. The huge air base, the rows of shiny jet fighters, tanks, and other military equipment, were displayed like the toys of the richest child in the world, which was exactly what they were. The streets were lined with old-fashioned American-style billboards. The glittering spiral palace rose above it all.
This was the center of the kingdom of the place once known as Burma. Its ruler was a thirteen-year-old boy referred to by everyone as the Kid King.
Chloe knew this place, and its adolescent monarch, very intimately. During the transglobal dash to keep Viktor II’s space shuttle from landing except where they wanted it to land, Hunter and Chloe had come here to Rangoon, and after a bit of subterfuge and intrigue, had convinced the Kid King to deny his huge base and its ultralong runway to the orbiting superterrorist. This act set up the final battle on the South China Sea island of Lolita and resulted in the United Americans’ capture of the Zon spacecraft.
Though Hunter had moved on to this final confrontation, Chloe had chosen to stay behind in Rangoon. It was from here that she eventually traveled up to the high mountains where the temples were. At the time, she believed that she would stay up there forever, or at least, until Hunter came to get her.
But now she had returned to the city, to the place where it had all started. It had taken her just two days to get here—coming down off the mountain, the trip south on the Irrawaddy River, hitching a ride down to the Imperial City. None of it was any problem. Chloe was so beautiful that getting people to help her had always been easy. But the dream that had woken her up at the temple had stayed with her throughout the journey; even in the daytime it was always there, in the back of her mind, its vision haunting her, especially the horror of the gigantic hand and the sound of someone laughing from very far away.
She knew sh
e had to do something about it, knew she had somehow to warn people—the right people—about the writings in The Book of Thirteen. That quest had to begin here, oddly enough, at the palace of the Kid King.
To her amazement, the guards at the entrance to the palace recognized her right away. They fell to their knees in tribute, an action which lasted for an embarrassing length of time. They remembered her as the beautiful woman from whom their king had finally found his first manhood, an outstanding national event. In the short time she’d been gone, her image had been ingrained in their minds as some mystical entity, both real and unreal at the same time. Indeed, a myth had risen up around her, fueled by the Kid King himself. Completely without her knowledge, Chloe was in the process of being deified in Rangoon. For her to suddenly show up at the palace gates like this was the equivalent of the guards witnessing a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. No wonder they’d remained prostrate until Chloe gently nudged them back to their feet.
Once the commander of the guard was called and he recovered from his shock, Chloe was whisked to the palace. Word had already spread by this time, and the Kid King, anxious and yearning, was waiting for her as soon as she arrived inside the Imperial Hall. He yelped when he first saw her, literally running down the steps from his throne and embracing her lustily. She had facilitated his journey from virginity to adulthood, so far the biggest event in the Kid King’s life. To see her now again, so soon, was like a dream come true for him. He immediately began leading her to the royal bedroom.
But Chloe had to gently stop him and request they speak privately, while remaining vertical. The King reluctantly agreed and they retired to the royal drawing room instead. Fresh melons and a pitcher of ice-water awaited them there. A luxurious foldaway bed dominated one corner.
“I need your help,” Chloe told him, watching his pudgy, dark features rise and fall on her every word. “And I need it badly.”
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