"Why, yes, it was off," Banner stuttered, knowing full well that Austin was the only person who could actually fire him.
"Well, actually it's been broken . . . going off and on, and-"
"Don't give me that bullshit, Banner," Austin interrupted him fiercely. "Have you taken a goddamn look out of your window?"
"I'm sorry, Bill," Banner replied. "I'm having trouble hearing you over these damn sirens. They must be testing them or something. What did you say?"
"You idiot!" Austin raged back at him. "I said take a goddamn look out of your window! You're missing the biggest story in years!"
Banner yanked on the phone's cord and slowly walked to his porch window. He lived on the 38th floor of a luxurious high-rise right in downtown LA, and as such had an expansive view of the city.
Drawing back the heavy drapes, Banner walked out onto the porch and peered out on the semi-soggy metropolis.
And instant later, he wet his pants.
"Jesus Christ!" he yelled.
"We're under attack!"
As Banner clenched his sopping wet crotch, he watched in absolute terror as at least a dozen jet fighter-bombers screeched over the city, dropping bombs, firing missiles and strafing indiscriminately. The air raid sirens were now blaring at full pitch, and several SAMs could be seen streaking up from the outskirts of the city.
"Banner!
Banner
!" Austin was screaming from the other end of the phone. But Big Red was not in any condition to speak coherently.
He had just barely gotten over the shock of the crash of the Modern Pioneers train several weeks before and now this!
"Who . . . what . . ." he babbled into the phone.
"Spoken like a true journalist!" Austin roared. "We don't know who in Christ they are! But I want you to get your ass down to this station right now. We've got to go on the air with this, and you got to do it!"
"But . . . how . . . when . . ."
At this point, Banner was even having problems spitting out syllables. A whole newscast might be out of the question.
Suddenly one of the raiding jets flashed right over his building, emitting a terrifying shriek and rocking the high rise like an earthquake.
The next moment, Banner found himself on the floor of his living room, praying that (A) he wouldn't die and (B) his body functions wouldn't commit open revolt.
But the only answer to his prayers was the sound of even louder sirens, more screaming jet engines and more bombs going off.
Then, amongst the racket, he heard someone pounding on his door.
Thinking it was some kind of rescue team, Banner leapt to open it, stained pants and all.
Total incontinence hit when he found three heavily armed men in Nazi uniforms waiting on the other side.
"You're coming with us," one of the men said before slugging Red in the temple, knocking him cold.
All the while Austin was screaming from the other end of the now-abandoned phone. "Banner?
Banner
! Are you still there?"
Captain Crunch O'Malley of the Ace Wrecking Company landed his F-4X Super Phantom at the main base of the Republic of California's Air Force, not quite believing his eyes.
Part of the air base-formerly known as LAX-was in flames, and there were at least three burning jet fighters on its auxiliary runway. He taxied around one wreck, nothing through the flames and smoke that it was an F-101 Voodoo, and pulled up to a stop in front of his assigned hangar. His partner, Captain Elvis Q, was waiting for him there.
"What the hell happened?" was Crunch's first question.
"Air raid," Elvis replied in his authentic Southern drawl.
"They hit us right after seven; snuck up on us real good. Came in over the ocean. Voodoos mostly. A bunch of them launched a few Mavericks to keep us busy here, while another bunch bombed the city itself."
"Christ, who were they?" Crunch asked, removing his helmet and rubbing his neck from his long flight.
"Still checking," Elvis replied.
The air raid was just another bit of strangeness for the Wreckers. Although the distances involved had kept him and Elvis out of the direct action around the train as of late, they had been doing nightly recon missions over Arizona and western New Mexico, trying to spot any Burning Cross troop concentrations.
"Did the city's air defenses work?" Crunch wanted to know.
"Did anyone scramble to meet them?"
Elvis nodded. "It was a quick hit-and-run attack," he said.
"But the Coasters were able to launch a half dozen F-5's. They iced one Voodoo right over our heads. That's the one burning way out there. SAMs got the other two here, and I hear the inner city AA and SAM guys got another two. It was noisy, but overall the damage both here and in the city was very light."
Crunch rubbed his weary eyes, his brain flashing all the implications of the air raid. "You know why Devillian is pulling this crap now, don't you?" he asked Elvis.
The younger man nodded. "Sure do," he replied. "He knows that once the train is in range of the fighters here, we can escort the thing through west Arizona and make it a lot harder for him to attack it full force."
"Right," Crunch replied. "But now, with this new air raid stuff, he knows the Coasters will have to keep some of their fighters at home, just in case the Voodoos come back."
"He's not only crazy," Elvis said, as they walked toward the base's debriefing room, "he's smart, too."
"That's the worst kind of animal," Crunch told him.
Twenty minutes later, they were sitting in the debriefing room with three officers from the California Air Force.
On the TV screen in front of them, a videotape retrieved from Crunch's recon pod was just beginning.
"Everything is as it should be," Crunch said as a burst of static introduced the tape. "Just like Hawk predicted, I found twelve holes in the ground just north of Chihuahua."
The tape's static cleared up and quickly became focused.
It depicted first, the vast reaches of the Mexican desert near Sierra del Nido from a height of forty-two thousand feet, and then after a long zoom-in, the mountainous area north of the mostly abandoned city of Chihuahua.
"There's the first one," Crunch said. "See it?"
Elvis squinted and soon saw a light stream of smoke rising from the desert floor.
"And the second," Crunch went on. "And the third. . . ."
By this time the other officers saw the columns of smoke as well.
"Twelve F-4's took off from the mesa," Crunch said. "Twelve auger in three hundred and fifty miles due south."
"Well, he was right again," Elvis said, picking up the rest of the smoke columns. "If this were peacetime, our old buddy Hawk could be rich just from gambling."
They slowed the tape and zoomed in closer on the dozen
spirals of smoke, all that was left of the Skinhead squadron.
It was the titanium oxide that had done the job. The weird little chemical had effectively turned the twelve F-4's into time bombs, just waiting for the right moment to go off. When mixed with JP-8 jet fuel, TO added just enough instability to the volatile mix to begin a break-down of the fuel's molecules.
Working mostly on the kerosene-like base of JP-8, just a touch of the TO turned the jet fuel into a completely new mixture, one that actually raised the temperature of fuel proportionately until it quite literally blew itself up. Not only that, but the time of the reaction could be determined right down to the last minute.
"It must have been quite a shock to them when their airplanes just started going up around them," Elvis said. "Well, at least we won't have to worry about them anymore."
"Yeah, those boneheads really fell for it," Crunch said.
"When it came right down to it, they were more concerned with saving their own asses than anything else. But I would have felt a whole lot better about it if this air raid thing had never happened." Elvis nodded glumly.
"Kind of changes the whole equation, doesn't it?"
It was close to six AM when word reached the
Freedom Express
that LA had been bombed that previous evening.
The crew of the train had just completed a sobering ceremony next to the freshly dug graves of the two dozen Modern Pioneers, when a series of messages came over the scrambler telex.
The first message detailed the air raid, its damage, the number of raiders shot down and a preliminary report that the Voodoos were owned by a notorious southern air pirate band run by a former drug-running pilot named Riggs.
The second communiqué reported Crunch's discovery of the destroyed Skinhead squadron.
"Will we ever catch a break on this one?" Fitz asked, as he read the reports over for the third time. "No sooner do we get rid of those Skinhead Burns than a new bunch takes their place."
Hunter too was momentarily disheartened. With the
Skinheads gone and many of Devillian's Mirages and Soviet aircraft destroyed in the Santa Fe air strike, he had hoped that the Burning Cross's air support would be at a minimum once the train reached the Grand Canyon.
But now it appeared that this would not be the case.
"The only bright spot is that these air pirates are probably undertrained as compared to the Skinheads," he said. "If they've thrown in with Devillian-which it appears that they have-they might be a little easier to handle when the time comes. But not much."
"Devillian's got to be hopping mad over the fact that the Skins deserted him," Cobra Brother Jesse Tyler said. "He probably doesn't even realize that we just did him the favor of icing the bastards."
"That appears to be true," Fitz said, reading a new report as it clicked over the telex. "This is from Bad River's guys down near the mesa. They say that Devillian's own chopper was spotted leaving the place early this morning. He had an escort of Hinds with him, and fighter contrails were also spotted overhead."
"If past performance is any indication, Devillian's probably on board," Tyler said. "They're so short of fuel I can't imagine anyone just taking the SOB's personal gunship up for just a joyride."
Hunter nodded gloomily. "He's making his move."
Red Banner was terrified.
He'd been beaten and chained by the three men in Nazi
uniforms. Yet the worst torture of all for him was the
frightening helicopter ride he had been forced to endure shortly after his abduction. Following the flight he'd taken the day the Modern Pioneers train crashed into the LA Amtrak station, Banner had an addendum written into his contract at KOAS-TV that he would never have to fly while on duty again. Being the station's senior on-air man, the management agreed, and Banner was positive that he would never leave terra flrma again.
But his mysterious kidnappers had changed that.
After being spirited away from his high-rise, his
abductors, practically oblivious to the air raid going on all around them, pummeled him for several minutes and then threw him into the trunk of a car. Roaring off into the night, they drove at break-neck speed for more than three hours.
When they finally stopped and pulled him out, it was close to midnight. They were in an isolated canyon that might have been near Topanga, but Banner had been too frightened to even get his bearings. At this point, he was clubbed briefly with what looked to be pool sticks.
He was then thrown into a sack, and minutes later he heard the dreadful sound of the helicopter approaching. Through a pinhole in the bag, he saw that the aircraft was a cleverly disguised version of a regular LA militia chopper. Banner vomited heavily at this point, so certain that the strange men in Nazi uniforms were about to drop him into the Pacific Ocean.
Instead, he stayed sick for the next five hours as the
helicopter made its way south and east, setting down frequently in order to dodge the Coaster militia's air patrols.
When the chopper finally reached its destination and Banner was unleashed from the bag, it was morning, and he was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon.
He vomited once again, his condition hardly being helped by the several swift kicks to the stomach he received courtesy of the man dressed in the very ornate Nazi uniform. Then he was blindfolded, dragged up a hill for about an eighth of a mile and at some point thrown into a small pool of water, which though muddy, did serve to wash away the more disgusting stains from his clothes.
Still blindfolded, he then was force marched for about
fifteen minutes. When his captors finally removed the cloth from his eyes, he was astonished to see that he was in the middle of what looked like a cross between a military encampment and a movie set.
Some sort of a lecture was going on not far away, and his guards eventually kicked him in that direction. They met a tall, blond, very German-looking man who was covered in bandages about his head and shoulders.
One of the men addressed this man as Major Heck.
"This is the newsman," the other told Heck. "He threw up the entire way here."
The Nazi officer looked at Banner and sneered. "Typical,"
he said.
"What . . . what do you want with me?" Banner was surprised to hear himself ask.