The man grunted a third time. “By your orders, your Supreme Beingness …”
Soho considered this for a moment. “That doesn’t sound like me,” he said, to which both guards grunted.
“And all our people are inside their houses?” he asked.
“All—except the ones we shot….”
“Shot?” Soho asked.
“On your orders, sir,” the first guard said, finally summoning up enough courage to talk. “Anyone outside their hut while the men from the heavenly submarines were here was to be shot. On sight. With no warning …”
“And you followed those orders?”
“Yes, sir. Two women. An hour ago. They were bringing flowers to you, sir.”
“And you killed them?”
“Aye, sir,” came the reply.
Soho thought for another moment. His arms were going numb. Were the fingers falling off his hands?
Suddenly, he was enraged. “And I suppose you also used acetylene torches to kill these women?” he demanded of the stunned guards, the drool turning to foam at the corners of his mouth. “And did you also burn their wings off? Their propellers? Their wheels?”
The guards looked at him. What was he talking about?
They didn’t know—nor would they find out. Soho staggered away, the small torch cranked up to high, the chunk of opium-dipped hash glowing in the dark night.
He stumbled through the beautiful floral gardens, down the pathway to the cliff and past the body of Colonel Ikebani, still rotting on its blood-smeared wooden post.
Soho had decided he was going to fly—just fly away. He would have to do this without an airplane—all the airplanes had been butchered by the soldiers with the torches. No—he would have fly by himself, using his arms as wings, his feet as rudders. Getting airborne would be no problem. In fact, if he tried hard enough, he might make it all the way back to Okinawa.
He fell twice before making it to the cliff. Here was the Shrine of the Sukki jet, the hideously pink airplane that he may or may not have flown to the island a couple months before. There were at least 500 lit candles surrounding it as usual, and its cinnamon fire pots were going full blast.
But something was different here.
He strained to focus his opium-soaked eyeballs and believed he could see four or five figures huddled around the jet. They were poking inside the cockpit, fussing with something, quietly murmuring among themselves. They were dressed oddly—their neon blue uniforms were actually glowing in the moonless night. There seemed to be halos around their heads. They may even have been floating several inches above the ground.
Soho approached, his torch still ignited. Suddenly one of the men looked up at him.
“… and you are?” he asked in very heavily accented English.
Soho straightened up. Now all five men in glowing blue suits and white halos were looking at him.
“I am the Supreme Commander of the Asian Mercenary Cult,” Soho told them in his own severely fractured English. “As such, I am your god …”
The men laughed. “Sure you are,” one replied.
They returned to their work, completely ignoring Soho. This infuriated him.
“That is my airplane!” he screamed, “And you are trying to cut it to pieces!”
The men continued their work inside the Sukki cockpit, looking all the world like surgeons, calmly operating on a patient.
“You will not take a torch to my airplane!” Soho screamed at the top of his lungs.
Suddenly one of the men was right in front of him. Soho stared into his eyes. They seemed to be pure white. The man’s hair was long and blond, like that of an angel—or maybe a Viking. And his face—it seemed to be glowing. And the halo looked quite real, too.
The man smiled. He looked at Soho’s torch and suddenly the flame went out. He looked at his water pipe and suddenly the hash stopped glowing. Soho was now trembling—and it was not just from the opium.
“I am … I am your commander …” Soho somehow managed to blurt out. “You … you must obey me …”
The man was smiling so benignly, it frightened Soho even more.
“You are nothing but a lowly pilot,” the strange being told him, his face but two inches from Soho’s. “Now just follow orders …”
At that moment, Soho opened his eyes.
He was alone on the cliff. It was close to dawn. And all of the candles around the Sukki jet had gone out.
The next morning
The small runway on the western tip of Fiji was lined with hundreds of natives, all of them bedecked in flowers, grass hats, and leis.
Gentle string music wafted through the early morning air, broken only by the occasional blast from a conch shell. Off in the distance, a choir of children could be heard softly chanting.
The Sukki jet was at the far end of the runway, a new coat of sickly pink paint still drying on its wings. Soho was there, a cup of opium-laced alcohol in one hand, the everpresent hash pipe in the other, sitting on a throne carried by six of the strongest natives on the island.
The young girl who had been living in Soho’s hut was also there; her parents were at her side, weeping openly. They were convinced that she was about to be killed by Soho’s men as a kind of sacrifice to the higher Cult gods—whoever the hell they were.
A team of Cult flight mechanics was standing around the Sukki—they hadn’t done a stitch of work in months, and now they were wondering how an airplane designed more than a half century before could be returned to flying condition without benefit of any specs, design plans, or schematics.
But as it would turn out, getting the old Me-262 down from its shrine on the cliff would be their biggest task. Because though they didn’t know why exactly, once the airplane was on the runway, it was quite capable of taking off, all by itself.
Soho clapped his hands twice and two aides brought forward a wooden bucket full of ice water. On his command, they threw it directly into his face, brutally reviving him. He stepped from the portable throne and with wobbly knees, approached the Sukki.
He was dressed in a ragged flight suit, with a leather cap and goggles—the same uniform he was wearing when he arrived on Fiji in the Sukki, several months before.
The music drifted away, and a light breeze came up on the airstrip. Soho looked at the assembled natives and the small troop of Cult soldiers lined up at attention behind them. Once again, a question which had been bouncing around in his debilitated brain since he first made Fiji came back to him: Who the hell are all these people?
He staggered over to the Sukki, barely taking notice of the young girl and her distraught parents. He nodded to one of the flight mechanics who took a deep breath. Reading from a small piece of parchment containing the barely decipherable scrawl of Soho, this man reached inside the jet’s cockpit and pushed a single red button. Suddenly the Sukki’s pair of wing-mounted engines roared to life simultaneously. This even surprised Soho; despite his drugged-out state, he knew that by normal procedure, the Sukki’s jets were started very slowly and always one at a time.
But this lucid thought passed quickly. He took another titanic suck on the hash pipe and washed it down with a long swig of his opium-and-alcohol mixture. He knew there was some kind of ceremony over which he was now supposed to preside, but the details of it were lost long ago. The jet was running; it was obviously meant to take off. But to where? And with who?
He didn’t have the slightest idea.
But the voices inside his left ear began speaking again, and in one ragged heartbeat, it all seemed suddenly very clear to him.
He smiled and beckoned the young girl to his side. She was dressed in a flowing white gown, her hair braided with flower stems and sprinkled with pine-rose petals. She was trembling—and with good reason. Soho reached out and caressed the young girl’s hair. Then he pushed her up against the side of the jet, and to the stunned silence of all, engaged in a quick, exhausting round of intercourse with her.
When he was finished,
he drained his coconut cup, and then immediately threw up on himself. The young girl’s parents were crying openly now—they were certain their daughter’s life was about to come to a grisly end.
But they were wrong.
With the Sukki’s engines still screaming, Soho boosted the young girl up into the jet’s cockpit, and then threw two levers. One unlocked the jet’s brakes, the other lowered its canopy. In one swift motion, the jet began rolling down the runway, the startled young girl its only passenger. To the surprise of all, it lifted off and climbed almost straight up, as if it was under some kind of otherworldly power.
Leveling off at about 5000 feet, the Sukki circled the airfield once, came directly over the crowd, and then, with a wag of the wings, disappeared to the west.
As the noise of the jet engines finally faded away, another stunned silence descended on the crowd. All eyes turned back to Soho, who was standing alone on the empty runway, his dressing gown damp with vomit, his undershorts dangling around his knees.
“Why me?” he cried out, self-disgusted and mortified. “Why was it left up to me?”
With that, he produced a small pistol from his pocket, put it against his temple and pulled the trigger. There was a sharp crack and Soho immediately collapsed, half his forehead blown away.
No one moved to help him; no one dared.
All that could be heard was the sound of the wind, the rustling in the trees, and the chorus of children, still chanting in the distance.
Chapter Seven
Adora Atoll
Marshall Islands
THERE WAS A TIME when they called the place “Clark Kent.”
It was a small island, barely three square miles in total size, and that included the reefs on its northern and eastern tips. It was 212 nautical miles due west of Bikini, and like that famous island, it was noted for its heavily shark-infested waters, its near-lack of vegetation beyond isolated clumps of palm trees, and its enormous population of goony birds.
And one more thing: its one-time prominence as a top secret American air base.
They called it “Clark Kent” because sometimes aircraft flight-listed to land at other Pacific or Far East bases would take on a secret identity and be diverted to the small, single airstrip island. This was especially true if the aircraft were slated for black op missions or carrying cargo that, for whatever reason, had to remain secret. The base was originally built to conduct secret atomic bomb drop tests in the early 1950s. Later on, in the mid-1960s, it was where the United States kept a substantial number of nuclear weapons, earmarked for use on North Vietnam, should the word ever come down to do so. In the later years, it served as a stopover point for SR-71 Blackbird recon jets that regularly cruised the skies above China, Vietnam, North Korea, and much later, the industrial heart of postmodern Japan.
The base on Adora Atoll had laid abandoned for many years—that was, until a pair of Free Canadian C-141F Starlifters landed there a week before. Contained within these two long-range airplanes was a special unit of Canadian engineers. Their task: get the secret base up and running for the imminent arrival of a force of very large aircraft.
The Canadians worked day and night to do so. Their main project—to extend the runway of the atoll an additional 1000 feet—was accomplished twenty-four hours ahead of schedule. Smaller but no less important assignments—such as installing temporary fuel tanks, reviving a sea water desalination plant, and retooling a small gas turbine to provide electrical power—were also completed on or before deadline.
In fact, the Canadians were putting the finishing touches on, of all things, a baseball field when the first radio report came in. Suddenly, all thoughts of the baseball diamond were dropped. The transitting force they’d been waiting for were now only a hundred miles away and coming fast.
It was Bozo that came in first; Hunter’s expert touch at the controls put the extended runway to its first test and proved it was a job well done.
One by one, the other great Galaxy airships descended on the base, each setting down nimbly, drag chutes extended, engines screaming in reverse, strange colors displaying proud aerial individuality.
It took but three minutes, twenty seconds for all nine C-5s to touch down and taxi in. Their engines whining down, their cargo doors open, their crews disgorged, the first leg of a very long journey had come to a successful conclusion.
Hunter was greeted by the friendly Canadians, and he praised them for their efforts and obvious top-notch workmanship. They in turn challenged the Americans to a round of baseball games, to be played on the newly built diamond. Hunter quickly accepted.
Then he went to the Canadians’ recently constructed radio shack and sent a microwave burst message back to Edwards, clear on the other side of the globe.
The scrambled message simply read: “The First American Airborne Expeditionary Force has landed …”
Chapter Eight
Two days later
TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN miles to the southwest of Adora Atoll, Bobby “Wallybee” Fletcher was sitting in a blind near the shoreline of a long, boomerang-shaped island, known simply as Boho.
It was a perfect location, for he had a commanding view of a narrow but deep strait that ran through the nearby archipelago of small deserted islands. On and off for three weeks, and now for the past twenty-hours straight, he had hardly budged, despite the swarms of mosquitos that seem to cover every square inch of his exposed skin.
He was waiting.
Fletcher was a coastwatcher, and like his father, and his father’s father, he was one of the best. Regardless of the dangers or the isolation or the loneliness that came with the territory, Wallybee was able to draw on his enormous reserves of patience, the patience needed to sit through the worst kind of weather, severe hunger, thirst, bugs, and hours of boredom, simply to do his job.
And now this patience was about to pay off.
He heard it first, a kind of sloshing noise, slightly punctuated by a low mechanical throbbing. He took another long pull on the jug of New Zealand moonshine he kept handy to sharpen his senses, and then peered into the inky blackness of the moonless night.
The noise grew louder and louder until it was almost on top of him. In the black night, Fletcher could see a gigantic shadow passing by, like a great black cloud. He instantly knew it was what he had been waiting for all this time. The size of the phosphorescent wake spreading out after it passed was confirmation enough.
Fletcher opened up the wooden carrying case that shielded his World-War-II-vintage radio and quickly plugged in the antenna that stretched between two nearby tall trees. Then he rigged the power line from the battery to the generator and to the axle of a rusty, rear-wheel-less bicycle mounted on a stationary platform. For the next fifteen minutes, he sat on the tattered seat and pedaled furiously, building up electricity. After a quick voltage test, he set the transmitter to the frequency of the day, tapped out a short coded message on the sending key, and waited until he received the return verification signal from the place he knew only as “Clark Kent.” Then, as quickly as he had set up his gear, he broke it down, camouflaged it among the vegetation, and disappeared into the night.
Chapter Nine
Dawn
THE LONE, GRAY BATTLESHIP sliced through the deep South Pacific waters, heading southwest. Its engines running at full steam, it was on its way to rendezvous with the remainder of the Asian Mercenary Cult fleet cruising off of Luzon. If all went well, they would join the fleet within forty-eight hours.
The warship was two days out from its last port of call, a small South Pacific tropical island that was once a favorite tourist spot.
Typically, the battleship had left the island in flames.
Met at the dock by the beautiful women of the island, the crew had eagerly accepted the flower leis offered to them. Once ashore, the 1,242-man crew drank every drop of alcohol it could find. And then they went berserk.
First, they looted everything that wasn’t tied down, and what they could
n’t carry, they simply destroyed. Then they embarked on a killing frenzy that went on all through the night and all the next day. They eventually hunted down and slaughtered every living soul on the island including the elderly, the young, and even infants. Only the beautiful women were spared, but just long enough to be gang-raped and then killed. By dusk that next night, when the crew had finally staggered back to the ship after twenty-four hours of uncontrollable blood lust, they’d murdered more than 10,000 people. Then, with the crew on board, the vessel’s nine massive 16-inch guns opened up, splitting the black night with their long, white-hot flames.
Every square foot of the island was obliterated, the great explosions throwing tons of dirt and rubble hundreds of feet into the air and creating craters more than a half mile across. Fires erupted everywhere, and burned wildly out of control. The heat generated was so intense that even steel was vaporized. By the time the battleship sailed away, nothing was left standing on the island, nothing was left alive. For the next day at sea, the crew could admire their handiwork: a huge, thick column of black smoke could be clearly seen rising from below the horizon behind them.
Junior Radio Officer Oka Ueno did not remember much of the raid. The booze and the drugs had flowed so freely through the entire rampage, he’d quickly lapsed into an alcoholic blackout. But he knew that if there was a hell, he surely had a place reserved. For when he finally woke up the morning after, he discovered that his uniform was encrusted with blood, caked brain matter and dried semen. His shipmates later told him that of them all, he’d done the most raping, the most killing. His officers went so far as to commend him for his actions.
Now, this early morning, as one reward for his butchery, Ueno was given the honor of raising the ship’s colors and insignia of the Asian Mercenary fleet high up the battleship’s mast.
But he would have much rather stayed in his bunk. Even two days later, he was still suffering from the worst hangover of his life.
Ghost War Page 5
