The choppy seas and the howling wind made the trip to the aircraft carrier a twenty-minute affair. Finally arriving, Wolf alighted onto the carrier’s bow access ramp, where two of the Fitzgerald’s staff officers were waiting for him. They escorted him through the various decks and up to a small conference room located next to the carrier’s Combat Information Center.
The captains of the Cohen and Tennyson were already present when Wolf walked in, as were Yaz, Toomey, and Ben Wa. The weariness of the past mission and the critical nature of the present situation were apparent on all their faces. Wolf knew they wondered if the same was true with him. Was his face as worried and lined with concern as theirs? But he was also confident that none of them had a clue as to what was going on behind his mask. And no one would dare ask. That was the whole point of his strange garb.
Wolf took a seat and politely refused a cup of coffee. That’s when Yaz stood up, a prepared set of notes in hand.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “I appreciate your efforts in coming aboard on such a short notice and under these conditions. However, I felt that this matter was so grave we had to handle it face-to-face. In light of the impending storm, I will be brief.
“As you know, Hunter left on a reconnaissance flight last night. He has not returned. He hasn’t responded to any radio signals, and he has not been spotted on any of our long-range radar screens.
“I’ve kept the Task Force almost at a dead crawl for the past few hours, and finally ordered it to stop approximately one hour ago. I gave these orders simply hoping that Hunter would catch up with us—but that hasn’t happened. Frankly, gentlemen, I fear the worst.”
No one stirred. Although everyone in the room was aware of the situation, it was still grim to hear it presented in such a sobering way.
“As commander of this Task Force,” Yaz continued, “my obligations are clear. My orders call for the speediest, safest return of our men and these ships to friendly waters. But …”
Suddenly Yaz’s voice began to crack. Still he pressed on.
“But … I am also Hawk’s friend. I know what he’d do if it were me still out there.”
Yaz cleared his throat; his voice was close to breaking completely. “The USS Fitzgerald will remain at these coordinates for another two hours. That will be ninety minutes past Hunter’s fuel range. If the current climatic conditions persist, that will also put us directly in the path of the approaching typhoon.
“I fully understand the obligations you men have to your ships and crew. Therefore, I am ordering you to continue on course, at full speed.”
At that moment, Wolf stood up.
“Captain,” he said in a deep Norse accent, “I refuse.”
Yaz stared at the imposing costumed figure for a moment. “There’s not really a question to this,” he told him. “The safety of your crew is …”
“My crew agrees with me,” Wolf interrupted. “They know, as I do, that should Hunter make it back to the vicinity of our present position and have to ditch, it is very unlikely that you could retrieve him. On the other hand, we have many launches and other lifesaving means. It would increase Hunter’s chances of survival dramatically.”
Before Yaz could say another word, the captains of the Cohen and Tennyson also stood.
“We will wait, too,” the top officer of the Tennyson said, speaking for the both of them. “Everyone aboard our ships owes something to Hunter somewhere along the line. There’s no way we’re going to leave when there’s still a chance he’ll make it back.”
Yaz felt as if the lump in his throat had swelled to the size of a basketball.
“As you wish, gentlemen,” was just about all he could say. “And thank you …”
At that moment, the carrier did a deep roll, a fair indication that the storm outside was growing even worse.
“You’d best be getting back to your ships,” Yaz told them.
At that moment, there was a quick rap at the door and a midshipman hastily stepped inside. He walked quickly over to Yaz.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, his voice slightly betraying a tone of hope. “You’re needed on the bridge. Radar reports something is heading this way.”
Nineteen
HUNTER WAS OUT OF gas.
His fuel gauge had blinked empty about twenty minutes before; the ’XLs on-board emergency flight-maintain systems had been clicking off one by one ever since.
He wasn’t so much flying now as gliding. Shortly after his quick recon of Okinawa, he’d climbed to an eye-watering 82,000 feet, beyond what would normally be considered safe operating parameters for the F-16XL. This forty-five-second ascent had burned up about two-thirds of his remaining fuel, but he knew it was a necessary expenditure of what was his most vital resource. He was so far away from the Fitzgerald his only hope was to get as high as possible as quickly as possible. After that the only question would be whether the wind currents and his piloting ability were enough to get him at least close to the Task Force.
He knew it was a long shot at best—one of the longest he’d ever faced. Piloting a shot-up airplane was a snap compared to trying to coax one home on an empty fuel tank. After all, there was only so far you could go.
Finding the carrier was not a problem. In fact, he knew exactly where the Fitzgerald was. Before snapping off, his radar had picked up the carrier and the three other Task Force ships right where he’d hoped they’d be: at his absolute bingo point. The fact that they had waited for him caused a proud ringing in his heart, and to his lips came the line from an old, sad sweet song.
“You did not desert me, my brothers in arms,” he thought.
But though in many ways they were endangering their lives just to save his, even under the best of circumstances, reaching the carrier was not even his biggest problem. Setting down in one piece would be. He was flying completely unpowered—one shot at a landing was all he would have. There’d be no opportunity to bolt, fly around, and try again. If he was off by one fraction of a degree, he’d wind up bouncing the ’XL off the deck. Then he’d have to do a split-second eject and his beloved plane would end up lying on the ocean floor. And maybe him along with it.
Still, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. After all, there was that typhoon brewing below him.
Hunter had been wrestling the sidestick with both hands for the past ten minutes. Every warning buzzer and light was going off on his display. But then he finally began to feel the tug of the typhoon’s swirling winds. Now came the biggest part of his dangerous, yet simple plan. With nothing but momentum and glide power, he had little choice but to get sucked up into the maelstrom, using the ferocity of its winds to propel him forward and downward and, hopefully, toward the Task Force’s current position.
He entered the vortex and was now flying blind—his visibility was absolute zero. The black clouds around him made it seem like night, and the torrents of rain only added to the unnerving descent into darkness. Buffeted by severe gusts of wind, the ’XL was rattling from every bolt and screw as it spiraled downward into the angry 100-mile-wide swirl.
Hunter was too busy fighting the controls to be more than passingly concerned about his situation. Yet he couldn’t help but notice that the angry swirl of the typhoon looked exactly like a black hole, sucking up everything in sight and hurling it into the abyss. This made him think of a graduate thesis a friend had written back in his school days at MIT, it had advanced the notion that at the seemingly-bottomless end of an authentic black hole lay Hell itself.
I wonder if he was right, he thought.
Down he plummeted, almost straight down, losing altitude at a rate of a thousand feet every few seconds. He was falling so fast into the darkness he felt almost weightless. The plane was almost totally out of power. His cockpit displays were all but extinguished. His altimeter clicked off at 38,000 feet; his airspeed indicator died at 35,000. And still, he could see nothing below him but thick, black, swirling clouds.
By 28,000 feet he was down to one last auxilliary genera
tor which was producing just enough electricity to keep the control stick operating and little else. Oddly, the twin cameras in his nose clicked on at 24,500, their self-contained microprocessors ordering them to run off the last of their film and video and then shut down completely.
Hunter smiled ruefully at this last bit of electrical glitch theater. Not many pilots were lucky enough to have what could be their final plunge caught by the movie cameras.
When he passed through 19,000 feet, only the cameras, his radar, and what was left of the control stick functions were working. He stripped off his oxygen mask; no matter what happened, there was enough air inside the cockpit for the last few seconds of this flight.
Besides, what he needed now wasn’t air; it was light.
It was readily apparent as he passed down through 15,000 feet that he would need more than a little luck to pull off this stunt. The blurred and fading images of the carrier on his lookdown radar weren’t so good—they showed the large target riding about ten miles south from the wall of the storm, but the exact location was far from precise. Yet the same black clouds that were enveloping him were also blanketing the carrier in almost total darkness. In order to eye it in, Hunter needed at least a momentary glimpse of the flattop; only then could he put the near-lifeless ’XL on its proper glide path.
Suddenly, there was a tremendous crack of lightning, the mother of all thunderbolts. It lit up the sky with an intensity brighter than the brightest daylight. The initial flash nearly blinded the Wingman—but he recovered quickly, and for a couple of seconds he was able to see the carrier quite clearly. It was practically below him, maybe a mile or two to the east.
He had only enough time to make one last adjustment with the stick, altering his direction by just a few degrees. He was now lined up with the flight deck center line. The carrier was lit up to the maximum, as were the three ships around it. Brightest of all was the amber light on the bow of the Fitzgerald, the so-called Meatball. It looked good to Hunter, not too high and not too low—but it was much too late to be delicate about this. He was coming down toward the deck too hard and too fast for him to use the Meatball to any effect.
He took a deep breath and patted his breast pocket.
At least it will be interesting, he thought ruefully.
Five seconds later, the F-16XL hit the Fitz’s deck at approximately 175 miles per hour. Just as it touched down, the carrier pitched forward, its prow dropping thirty feet between two big rollers. Hunter’s tail hook missed the first, second, and then third arresting wires. He had to decide in less than a split second whether to put his nose down to catch the fourth and last arresting wire, or hope that the ship came back up to catch him. If he timed it wrong, he would slam into the rising deck, or worse, miss entirely and go off into the sea. Hunter decided to gamble—he pushed down on the stick and literally slammed on the brakes.
His tail hook caught the fourth wire and he was yanked to a halt within 350 feet. It was all over in less than two seconds.
A flight deck crew member instinctively signaled Hunter to cut power and Hunter just smiled. “What power?” he yelled back.
Dozens of deckhands appeared on the rolling, windswept deck and with sheer manpower steered the ’XL to the flight elevator. Hunter rode it down to the hangar deck. Waiting there for him were Yaz, JT, and Ben. Despite their brave faces, Hunter could not help but see the evident relief in their eyes.
“Welcome back, Major Hunter,” Yaz told him, finally breaking into a wide grin. “I hope you aren’t planning to make this sort of thing a habit…”
Twenty
Okinawa
THE WOMAN WITH THE cherry blossom hair had spent the last few hours lying on the floor of her subterranean living chamber, sensuously licking the blood off the long-bladed carving knife.
Now she finally gathered herself up to her knees and lit a candle from one of the dozens already burning around the photograph of Hashi Pushi. Then she dutifully placed the gleaming, clean knife back on the shrine, took two steps back, closed her eyes, and bowed.
“You have done well, my child,” a voice whispered from behind her left ear. “I am very proud of you.”
The woman bowed even lower.
“We must now join together again.”
She felt her face flush.
“Lie back, my dear. Reveal yourself…”
Following the eerie whispered commands, the woman slowly lay back, her silk gown bunching up around her waist.
“Lift up your knees, my darling…”
She obeyed and felt her eyes go up into her head. A rhythmic low roar now filled her ears, like that of the ocean surf washing up on a beach. Suddenly it seemed as if the water was upon her, crashing on top of her. Soaking her. Cleansing her.
Though her eyes were shut tight, she imagined she saw herself lying on a deserted beach. A bright sun was rising before her; it slowly began to burn her flesh. Inside her, the woman felt a welling-up of emotions, emotions impossible to describe, ones that shook her very being.
The surf began to sound louder and louder now, pounding her harder onto the beach. The waves were frothing and swirling around her, each wave receding and then returning upon itself, each growing bigger and louder and more powerful than the last. The heat of the sun was becoming both intolerable and pleasurable. The frequency of the waves suddenly increased and she felt the sun roast her flesh. She knew there could be no turning back now. Faster and faster, harder and harder, hotter and hotter, she felt it all until she could stand it no more …
Then she felt her body suddenly stiffen—as if a lightning bolt went through her. And then the beach and the waves and the sun were gone. Now she saw only the two eyes, the two beautiful, mystifying, captivating eyes drawing nearer to her. Did they belong to Hashi Pushi? She couldn’t tell. She began to lose consciousness once again, hearing only the strange voice saying “We are one …”
Then it was over.
She opened her eyes to find herself once again lying on the floor.
She lay prone for several minutes as the last of the strange experience drained out of her. Slowly, reality began to creep back in. Her head began to hurt, her body began to ache. She looked around the large living chamber and through bleary eyes began to recognize certain things: a painting, the vase of flowers, the simple bed and stove. The shrine.
“It’s so cold in here,” she thought, wrapping her arms around her waist. That’s when she realized that her hands and gown were covered with a sticky red substance.
Then she turned and saw the lifeless body of Lieutenant Fatungi on the floor next to her.
“What is happening to me?” she screamed.
Her cry brought three guards immediately into her chamber. She stared at them for a long time, and they back at her. Gradually, they too began to look familiar to her.
“Please,” she whispered in horror, pointing at the naked, gutted body. “Please get it out of here.”
The guards obediently dragged the corpse out of her quarters, closing the heavy oak doors behind them.
Hysterical now with fear and confusion, the woman took a sheet off her bed, got down on her hands and knees, and used it to scrub every last trace of blood off the floor. Then she retreated to her bed and pulled the remaining silk sheets over her trembling body.
I remember -when my name was Mizumi… she thought. Then she softly cried herself to sleep.
Twenty-one
Aboard the Fitzgerald
“THE ONE GOOD THING about that long flight home,” Hawk Hunter was saying, “is that I had plenty of time to think about what I saw. And I’m afraid it’s all going to be very bad news for us.”
He was speaking to a small audience of six men gathered around the large table in the conference room next to the Fitzgerald’s CIC. Yaz was sitting at the far end, drinking coffee nonstop. To his left sat Toomey and Ben Wa, to his right Wolf and the captains of the Tennyson and the Cohen. Everyone looked decidedly concerned—even Wolf, despite his imposing comic-bo
ok-style mask.
“First of all,” Hunter said, slipping the videotape of his flight into the room’s VCR unit, “when I finally got where I was going, I met up with some very interesting characters.”
He hit the VCR’s PLAY button. Within seconds the six men were riveted to the screen as Hunter’s bizarre dogfight off of cloud-enshrouded Okinawa played out. There was no need for Hunter to narrate the sequence; it was plain as day that he was in air-to-air combat with World War Two vintage fighters, and that they were no match for his F-16XL.
Hunter froze the tape just after the Zero pilot shot himself. His audience was astonished, to say the least.
Ben Wa was the first to speak. “Are those really Zeros?” he asked. “Who the hell would be flying those relics these days? And why?”
“I don’t know,” Hunter replied. “But keep watching.”
Hunter started the tape again, picking up with his pursuit of the last Zero and culminating with one long, extremely high pass he made over the mist-covered island.
“Where the hell did the Zero go?” the captain of the Cohen asked. “Even with all that fog, it looked like he just vanished into thin air.”
“Close,” Hunter said. “But I believe that just after he got down below the clouds he flew into an airfield hidden in the side of a mountain down there called Shuri.”
“Sounds pretty elaborate,” the captain of the Tennyson said.
Hunter smiled grimly. “We don’t know the half of it,” he said.
He quickly fast-forwarded the tape to a spot where the entire island was in view. Then he froze the frame and punched up the infrared enhancement system on the console.
Suddenly the entire island was lit up in a deep shade of red. Again, each man was astonished. The intensity of the red colors could mean only one thing: there was a tremendous amount of heat being thrown off by the island’s surface.
“My God,” Yaz said. “What could possibly cause all that heat under those clouds?”
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