Ghost War

by Maloney, Mack;

  Hunter could only shake his head. “I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. “I’m not sure.”

  He tried to get to his feet, but almost fell backwards. He steeled himself and stood ramrod straight, his knees just begging to buckle under him. “I … I’ve never felt like this before,” he mumbled.

  He closed his eyes and did a quick self-diagnosis. The source of his malady was coming from deep down within. It felt like every element which provided him his extraordinary psychic powers were short-circuiting like crazy. He was in organic overload.

  But for what reason?

  It had been another strange day. After leaving the other Cult battleship in flames off Son Tay, they’d opened up the battleship’s computer-controlled engines to full steam, and plowed the 450 miles up the Vietnamese coast in just under 24 hours. Now they were but an hour away from Da Nang.

  Hunter was out on the bridge walkway in a flash, his eyes glued to the northern horizon. Then it hit him.

  “I don’t believe this,” he whispered in amazement.

  At that moment, Timmy the Z-man, who had been pressed into service as the battleship’s radar officer, let out a cry.

  “I’ve got something coming right at us,” he yelled. “Fast and low! Out of the north.”

  Crunch hit the general quarters alarm and was immediately scanning the northern horizon. “How many?” he yelled back.

  “Four,” Hunter replied from the walkway. As always he’d “felt” the incoming aircraft before they were picked up on radar.

  No sooner had he said it, when four dots appeared on the horizon. They were about twelve miles off the starboard bow, coming in at full military power no more than 500 feet off the deck.

  “Bloody—are they MiGs?” Terry asked.

  Hunter never took his eyes off the four airplanes. “They’re definitely not MiGs,” he replied quickly.

  “Well, whoever they are, they’re in attack formation,” Crunch yelled.

  He was quickly on the ship’s intercom, urging all of the Li-Chi Chi to take cover below. Timmy and Terry were heading for the nearest AA-gun, a Bofors twin-barrel, but Hunter stopped them in mid-stride.

  “They might shoot at us,” he said, “but we can’t shoot at them.”

  The New Zealanders were totally confused by now. “But, Hawk …”

  Hunter looked them straight in the eye. “Better get below guys,” he said firmly.

  They stared at him for a moment, but then did as he suggested. Now it was just Hunter out on the railing, staring up at the rapidly oncoming airplanes.

  “I still don’t believe it,” he whispered.

  It had been so long since Ben flew anything fast he wasn’t sure just where everything was.

  The F-20 Tigershark was a rare and powerful flying machine, a high-tech, souped-up version of the F-5, itself a highly regarded, mass-produced jet fighter. These Football City Air Corps variants were armed with double 30-mm cannons, and capabilities to carry everything from a smart weapon to a dumb bomb. At that moment, Ben was carrying a Harpoon antiship missile, as was Frost’s aircraft just off his left wing. ZZ Morell’s aircraft, off his right wing, was lugging a Shrike antiradar weapon.

  These were impressive weapons, but they were not nearly enough. The thick plating of the battleship would prevent wide damage by a Harpoon strike, and even a pair of good hits would prove nonfatal. So too the Shrike alone could not disable the battlewagon.

  No, Ben knew their only chance was to hit the Cult battleship in the only place it would hurt: on the bridge. If they killed the commanders, then possibly the surviving crew would be leaderless to the point of calling off what was probably going to be a bombardment of Da Nang.

  At ten miles out, he began checking the arming mechanism on his Harpoon. Everything came back green. Frost and ZZ reported the same.

  “OK, me and Frostie first,” he said. “Everyone else in back-up.”

  Ben kicked his Tigershark into afterburner and roared out in front. He switched on his cannons and fired a quick test burst. They were working perfectly.

  Now it was time to concentrate on the target. He lined up the nose of the F-20 with the bow of the huge battleship. He planned to release the Harpoon at just one mile out, bank slightly to the right and then lay a double cannon burst along the entire superstructure of the enemy ship. Who knows? he might just get lucky and pick off an important person or two.

  Six miles out Ben reduced his speed slightly and prepared to launch the Harpoon. He was surprised the battleship wasn’t taking any evasive action. They had to have spotted them by now, yet there was no AA fire, no SAMs locking on to him.

  No matter, Ben thought, let them make it easy for us.

  At five miles out, the Harpoon was ready to go. His right hand was fingering the cannon trigger; his left was on the throttle, his thumb resting on the Harpoon throw-switch. Still the battleship was steaming right at them.

  Four miles out, Ben did one last check of his systems. Everything was still ten-up. He did a final check with Frost and ZZ, they were right-on too. Still, Ben couldn’t ignore the strange feeling that was rising up in his stomach.

  At three miles out, he was feeling extremely anxious. Something was very wrong here—but he had no choice but to go through with the bomb run.

  Two miles out. Ben could see the battleship clearly now through the haze. Still no AA. No SAM lock-ons. Why are they making it so easy?

  One mile. His thumb moved to the Harpoon release. Do it! one side of his brain was telling him. Don’t do it! screamed the other.

  What the hell was going on?

  He hesitated. Suddenly his eyes were focused on the railing which surrounded the battleship’s bridge. There was a lone figure standing on the walkway, his hand raised, not waving, simply raised. Ben stared hard at this figure, looming bigger within his sights by the second. Who would be crazy enough to do such a thing?

  Then it hit him.

  “Pull up! Pull up! Pull up!” he screamed into his lip mic, at the same time yanking back on the F-20’s controls and putting the supersonic fighter into an inverted, full-afterburner climb.

  He anxiously looked behind him. Frost had heard his warning and was veering off his missile run. ZZ wavered for a moment, but then he too held his weapon and zoomed off to the west.

  Ben let out a long sigh of relief.

  That’s when he saw JT roaring in on the battleship.

  His partner had been trailing the Tigersharks by five miles or so, his role in the bombing run to inflict as much damage as possible with cannon and also do a quick poststrike assessment. That was just about all he could handle. He was flying the F-16XL, and though he was a top-notch pilot, there were so many advanced systems inside the rocketlike, futuristic jet, just keeping it level and pushing the cannon trigger was chore.

  Now Ben was screaming at him like there was no tomorrow, but typically, JT wasn’t listening to his radio.

  “Jesuzz, JT, pull up!” Ben was screaming, fearful he was about to see a disaster right before his eyes. “That’s Hawk down there!”

  It was almost like he willed it. Because suddenly, the red, white and blue delta-wing fighter jerked up and out of its strafing run. Ben watched as the Cranked Arrow turned over once, and then buzzed the ship from stern to bow.

  Ben let out a second longer breath of relief.

  “Another one for the memoirs,” he said.

  Chapter Forty

  THE BATTLESHIP PULLED INTO Da Nang harbor about two hours later.

  A company of Omani Marines immediately went aboard and took up positions to the captured battlewagon. The Omanis were trained seamen, having operated in the Persian Gulf for years. Of all the mercenary units at Da Nang, they were deemed the best suited to operate the highly automated warship.

  JT, Ben and Frost were waiting at the pier when Hunter and Crunch motored in. It was a happy reunion between Crunch and the others; they had feared that he was long dead. However, Hunter’s usually pleasant demeanor was not
in evidence. Instead he looked somewhat bewildered.

  “Close call out there, eh, Hawk?” JT asked him after an attempt at a hearty handshake.

  “I don’t believe you actually did it,” Hunter replied.

  “Believe what?” JT replied with a wiseass grin. “Pulled up at the last moment? Sent an air strike against my old buddy, the Wingman?”

  Hunter was almost beyond words. “I just can’t believe it,” he said again.

  Now Frost, Ben and Crunch had taken notice.

  “Believe what?” Ben asked him.

  Hunter looked at them, shook his head, and pointed at JT. “He flew my airplane. He almost shot my ass off—with my own airplane.”

  The other burst out laughing. “The next thing you know, he’ll be driving your Corvette,” Ben told him.

  JT didn’t know what to do, what to think. It never dawned on him that no one had ever flown Hunter’s souped-up plane before. “It handled great, Hawk,” was all he could say.

  Hunter just shook his head again. His sudden discomfit on the battleship had been caused by the approach of his own plane. Whereas he always knew when aircraft were coming in, his internal, organic radar had responded amazingly when it was the F-16XL involved. It was slightly unnerving to think that his psyche was so tied up with his airplane, that it would come close to making him suddenly ill when something was amiss. It was just another strange example of how melded he was with the Cranked Arrow.

  At that moment several boatloads of Li-Chi Chi arrived at the pier. JT, Ben and Frost were all eyes as the women fighters climbed out of the service boats and onto the dock, their rifles and bandolier belts contrasting with their open-shirt, bosomly uniform tops.

  “What the hell do we have here?” JT asked, his eyes almost popping their sockets. “Entertainment?”

  Crunch opened his mouth, to begin to explain, but Hunter tugged him at the last minute. The Wingman had just arrived at the proper punishment for JT for having the chutzpah to fly the XL.

  “They’re very entertaining ladies,” he told JT, who was succumbing to hormone overload. “Shy, though.”

  JT was rubbing his hands together like a teenager in a liquor store. “I’ll take care of that,” he declared as two more boatloads of the Chinese women fighters arrived.

  “I’m sure you will,” Hunter said with a wink.

  Chapter Forty-one

  24 hours later

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN ON Da Nang.

  The brutal heat of the day let up—but only slightly. A brief thunderstorm, nowhere near the intensity of the now-departed monsoons, had turned the air first cool, then muggy. The lights within the barricaded city were dimming considerably as hundreds of fans and even a few air conditioners were turned on to maximum power.

  Hunter had walked the half mile from Da Nang air base to the walled city alone. He’d just spent the last twenty-four hours in one of the billets at the base, sleeping, eating, and then sleeping again. Such idle time was rare for him—but he was smart enough to take advantage of the situation. He knew he wouldn’t have a chance of enjoying such luxuries as sleep and food again for a long, long, time.

  His life had been the usual surrealistic exercise in the past few weeks, from the green and brown claustrophobic hell of Khe Sanh to the deceptive, eerie beauty of the Mekong Delta, and now in what was probably one of a handful of urban settings left in a country owned by jungles, swamps, paddies and mountains.

  He felt like a foreigner here. The air itself was too thick for him, a very white man from a very white world. He might as well have been on another planet, a feeling he knew he shared with the majority of the hundreds of thousands of American troops who came here in 1960s and early 1970s.

  What was the point back then? What was the point now? There was certainly a lot of dirty politics involved in that “police action,” the result being the dreaded military-industrial complex looking on Southeast Asia as an open marketplace for testing and selling big-ticket weapons. Hunter abhorred the notion of sending Americans to die just so some fat-cat weapons manufacturer could see a new way to kill someone of the Asian race. He abhorred what the Presidents of those days did, to the people of America, to the people of Southeast Asia. And for what?

  When it came down to it, for nothing.

  So as he walked the dusty road from the base to the city, he looked out over the dried up paddies and weedy fields. Suddenly he imagined that he could see ghosts—not one, like the spirit that had haunted him back at Khe Sanh, but thousands, tens of thousands, rising up, uniforms tattered, their hands dirty, their faces bloody. American faces, all with the same expression: Why?

  Ghosts, Hunter thought drearily, imagining he could feel the earth moving beneath his feet. I’m walking in a land of ghosts.

  He reached the walled city ten minutes later, and passed through the heavily guarded main doors.

  The city itself had a beauty of its own. There was still evidence of French architecture, as well as sixties-style American buildings. The garish bar lights and the neon come-ons of the bordellos made the place look a little like New Orleans. Except much hotter.

  As usual, the streets were filled with troops. Different uniforms, different faces, everywhere. What was it about this place? What drew men from all over the world to fight here? What drove men to become ghosts in this, the most foreign of places?

  He just didn’t know.

  He reached the Alamolike palace and passed by the three rings of sentries guarding the place. Inside looked like a Middle East bazaar. There were soldiers, merchants, liquor dealers, souvenir hawkers, and of course, hookers everywhere. He walked through the Great Hall and into the immense bar. JT, Frost, and Ben were sitting at a corner table; they waved him over.

  Hunter sat down and studied the bottle of no-name booze on the table.

  “They’re selling Chivas out in the hallway and you guys are drinking this crap?” he chided them.

  JT’s ever-present grin grew even wider. “When is he going to learn?” he asked the other two. “You’d make a lousy businessman.”

  Hunter turned to Frost, usually the voice of reason in times like this. “Translate, please?”

  Frost picked up the bottle. “It’s Chivas in here,” he explained, “and rotgut out there.”

  Hunter sniffed the open bottle; sure enough it was the good stuff. He poured himself a glass and took a slug.

  “Heard a lot of Minx artillery up in the hills on the way down,” he told the others. “Big stuff. Maybe 155s.”

  JT sipped his drink and shook his head. “They’re just showing off, the dickheads,” he said bitterly. “They’ve got two hundred thousand guys sitting in the jungle, with all their stuff bottled up underground, and yet they feel they have to shoot some of the big guns, just to let us know they’re out there.”

  “In the old days, they’d send a company of Marines up there to take out those big guns,” Hunter observed.

  “Exactly,” JT replied. “And ten jarheads would wind up in body bags—and for what? To take out one piece of artillery? That’s insanity and it ain’t going to happen here.”

  Hunter sipped his drink again. This informal meeting was arranged so JT and the others could brief Hunter on their plans to thwart the impending attack on Da Nang. He was curious, to say the least.

  “So,” he asked his old friends. “How are you proposing we do this?”

  JT leaned in over the table, and lowered his voice a notch. “I’ll start by telling you what we ain’t going to do,” he began. “We’re not falling for any of their shithead tricks. They live out in that jungle, and we’d be like rats in the water out there. No—we got what they want, right here.

  “So that means no beyond-the-perimeter patrolling. No search and destroy crap. No preemptive strikes—hell, they got everything underground anyway, we’d just be wasting our fuel, our ordnance, not to mention risking our lives.”

  Hunter poured himself another drink. This was JT’s show—and he liked what he heard so far. For
once the shoe was on the other foot. The Minx might be good jungle fighters, but their present target was the very urban city of Da Nang and the wide-open spaces of the nearby air base. If they intended to take the city as part of the country-wide Minx offensive, they would have to come and get it.

  JT produced a map from his sleeve pocket and unfolded it on the sticky table. It showed a three-dimensional view of Da Nang city, the airbase and the enemy-held jungle beyond the mutual perimeter.

  “I don’t have to tell you that we’re outnumbered almost six-to-one,” JT began. “There’s no way we’re going to win by standing and fighting it out with them. That’s exactly what they want us to do.

  “But instead, what if we give these guys a swift kick in the balls, something that will knock them cold right here—who knows what will happen in the rest of the country?”

  Hunter just shrugged. “They’re fairly predictable by never being very unpredictable,” he said. “If they get hit with something big time from out of left field, it could reverberate, I suppose.”

  “Our thinking exactly,” JT smiled.

  He took the next ten minutes explaining his plan, the initial parts of which had been put into place over the past few weeks. Frequently indicating various points on the map, JT concentrated on the rather unique dual-defense plans for both the city and the air base. As it turned out, the arrival of Hunter, Crunch, and the battleship proved very fortuitous, it was “the last piece in the puzzle,” JT said.

  Like past United American operations against overwhelming foes, the emphasis of JT’s plan was on survival, cunning, and, most important, the protection of innocents.

  But it also called for one enormous sacrifice.

  Hunter had JT go over the specifics twice more, just to make sure he’d gotten it all straight. Once again, all of the United American principles would have key parts to play. Once again, Geraci’s men would be called on to complete a Herculian task in a short amount of time. Strangest of all was Crunch’s role. In many ways it would be the most difficult.