Return of Sky Ghost (6 page)

All this was happening so fast, the people on the beach stood aghast, not quite knowing what they should do. It was High General Wakisaki who acted first. As the fifth pair of bombers swooped in low and unloaded their fire weapons, Wakisaki pulled out his pistol, put it against the head of his chief Air Defense officer, and pulled the trigger. The man immediately collapsed to the platform floor, blood spurting out of his forehead. His second-in-command, the assistant air defense officer, got Wakisaki’s message right away. He grabbed a radiophone and made a very urgent call to the air base located in the Lima suburb of Costa Camu.

But the people at the air base, where five squadrons of Mitsubishi Super Zero jet fighters were stationed, needed no warning about what was happening. Their radar sets had picked up the incoming bomber force as soon as the first airplane came over the mountain. This was way too late to prevent the bombs from falling on New Lima, but still enough time to scramble aircraft together, to attempt to shoot down the attackers. The problem was, the air base itself was being attacked. Not by the gigantic B-17/52s, but by a single, much smaller aircraft.

The officer on the other end of the radiophone was in such a state he could barely speak—not a good situation for the newly appointed air defense officer. With panic breaking out among those on hand for the One Millionth Soldier ceremony, the air defense man wanted action quick from his newly acquired charges at the air base. But it seemed as if a single enemy airplane was keeping them all pinned down.

“How can this be?” the air defense chief demanded of the air base commandant.

“This pilot, he is crazy,” the air base commander was saying. “He is everywhere at once. We thought at first there were four or five of them. But it is only one!”

The air defense officer was getting very angry—and nervous. Wakisaki was not two feet away from him, broiling him with his laser eyes, even as the city of New Lima began to burn just a mile away. The next bullet from Wakisaki’s gun would surely wind up in the new air defense minister’s head if he didn’t get action very very quickly.

“You have antiaircraft rockets!” the air defense man was screaming into the radiophone. “And antiaircraft guns. And more than fifty airplanes. Are you saying that one airplane—a fighter—is preventing you from taking any measures?”

The air defense man hit the receive button for his answer—but there was no reply.

Startled, he sent the message again, his voice rising a full octave and five meters in volume for the benefit of Wakisaki, who was again fingering his pistol.

But again, there was no reply from the air base commander. A third try produced the same result.

The line from the air base was dead.

Wakisaki shot the new air defense man anyway and then turned to his ministers of ground troops and security. Unfortunately, both men were diving for cover under the review stand at that moment, an action Wakisaki first interpreted as cowardice but was actually done out of self-preservation. For now there was a new growl in the air. Wakisaki finally looked up and saw two more airplanes coming over the mountain.

They were big. They were silver. And they were heading right for the ceremony on Callao Beach.

Wakisaki himself just barely made it under the platform as the two huge airplanes roared overhead. The troops on the beach scattered at first sight of them too—the civilians had already fled the area in panic. Some soldiers simply hit the ground where they stood, covered their heads, and hoped for the best. Others darted into patches of jungle nearby. Some even jumped into the filthy water of the artificial Callao Bay. Everyone expected to have a heavy rain of firebombs come down on them at any moment.

But that did not happen. Dropping firebombs on human targets was usually a waste of weaponry. Besides, these airplanes—they were B-24/36s, mammoth aircraft which embodied the look of a B-24 Liberator and a B-36 Peacemaker—were not bombers per se. Rather their fuselages were thick with gun blisters up and down the length of them, and dozens of triple-.50 machine guns had been installed in these stations. They were then a rarity in this world. They were flying gunships.

Now, as the two planes roared over, they both went into a long, slow turn above the beach, one plane placing its nose on the other’s tail, almost forming one, nightmarishly huge gun platform.

Their first targets were the gaggle of warships anchored and vulnerable about one mile offshore. The airplanes went into a very tight circle not 500 feet above one of the huge, submersible troop ships. Suddenly, all at once, every gun on the right side of both airplanes opened fire. It looked like a sheet of flame pouring out of both giant airplanes. In seconds, the huge sub was shrouded in a cloud of fire and smoke as the planes went round and round like a devilish aerial merry-go-round.

When they finally backed off sixty seconds later, the big sub was burning in hundreds of places, stem to stern. So sudden was the attack, and so awesome in its sheer power, not a shot was fired in return from any of the many guns aboard the hapless warship. Soon the entire upper deck of the sub was consumed in flames.

The pair of gunships moved on to their next victim: a battle cruiser which served as Wakisaki’s floating command station while he was in South America. The gun crews on this vessel did send up some defensive fire. But their aim was so shaky, due to simple fright no doubt, that they missed both planes by a wide margin.

As with the troop-carrying sub, the gunships rained a storm of fire and lead down on the cruiser, and soon it was burning ferociously too. The planes moved on to the next target—another big sub, this one an aircraft carrier. They mimicked their earlier attacks, tearing up the top deck of the sub while successfully wending their way through weak streams of AA fire. This ship caught fire very quickly, its pathetic defenses soon disappearing altogether.

By now, the rest of the anchored fleet had finally sprung into action. There were fourteen other ships in harbor at the moment. None of them dared to return fire or flee to the open ocean. Instead, they simply dived—whether their crews were on deck or not. They began going down quickly, creating ripples of small tidal waves as their oxygen displacement systems expelled great amounts of air while sucking in seawater for ballast. The ships disappeared so quickly, the pair of giant gunships were able to set only one more on fire before they had no more targets to shoot at.

General Wakisaki watched all this from his hiding place beneath the ceremony platform, shaking with fright along with 300 or so of his best officers. The city of New Lima was burning behind him; the prize of his navy was burning in front. His troops were scattered and hiding their heads in the sand like ostriches. Wakisaki was quite nearly in tears. How could his world have turned so upside down so quickly?

Perhaps I didn’t pray hard enough this morning,
he thought.

The bombing of New Lima and the fleet offshore had come so suddenly, the city’s air raid sirens had not even sounded.

But the attack was not unexpected. Rumors that a mysterious air force had been seen operating way up in the mountains had been circulating in New Lima for weeks—though they never reached General Wakisaki’s ears.

Just who this mysterious air force was—and who was flying the Deathwings—was simply not known.

But the fortunes of the Japanese seemed to suddenly reverse when the tenth pair of bombers appeared over the city. Nearly one-third of downtown was aflame by now and these two airplanes seemed bent on adding to the conflagration. But they were both flying so low and so slow, it seemed impossible for them to stay in the air while they dumped thousands of pounds of firebombs down on the city below.

And as it turned out, one of the bombers was indeed flying too low.

It had just discharged all of its weapons when its pilots began a sharp pull out to the right. But the big plane was now over the center of the new city and trying to negotiate its way through a virtual forest of skyscrapers. Suddenly its left wing clipped one spire. The force of the collision cut a quarter of the wing off, taking two engines with it. The impact caused the pilot to yank the big airplane to the right, where it hit another tall building, taking off about one-quarter of its right wing. The plane was in grave trouble now. It roared over the southern part of the city emitting huge quantities of smoke and flames. Those on the beach hiding beneath the platform saw this, and suddenly a huge roar gurgled out of them. Their new city was burning, five ships in the harbor were in the process of sinking, and yet the sight of one airplane in trouble gave them occasion to cheer.

Now the officers were crawling out from their hiding places and watching the big plane struggle to stay airborne. Its pilots did a good job of keeping the huge bomber trim and steady as it passed over the city and headed toward the thickest part of the jungle, to the south.

But it was obvious to all those watching that the airplane was too severely damaged to stay aloft much longer. Indeed, about a minute after the twin collisions, and thirty seconds after it passed out of sight, it dipped down and crashed into a thick canopy of trees about ten miles south of the city limits. A cloud of smoke—but not too much flame—was seen rising over the forest. Another cheer went up from the Japanese officers on the beach.

Even General Wakisaki was letting out a guttural cheer. Then he turned to the man next to him, who just happened to be the officer in charge of security for the city, and shouted an order directly into his ear.

“Go, hurry to the crash site,” Wakisaki told the man. “And bring back any survivors to me!”

As it turned out, there was a large contingent of Japanese troops already near the crash site.

They were a combat engineering group located in another suburb of New Lima called Cucucha. This put them only four miles from where the huge bomber went down. The unit, 300 men strong, was equipped with heavy-duty earth-moving supertanks, mobile weapons that had huge shovels and blades on their front ends and towed assemblies for moving dirt on their backs. They would be ideal for making their way through the dense undergrowth and get to the crash site.

The phones started ringing at the engineering unit’s HQ not a minute after the big plane went down. The engineers needn’t have been told there’d been a crash. The burning airplane had gone right over their base camp and shaken it from top to bottom before finally plowing in.

But now the phones were ringing and the messages were coming directly from High General Wakisaki himself. The engineering unit was being told to get themselves to the crash site immediately. They were to bring back any survivors to Wakisaki personally, plus any pieces of wreckage which would help identify where the mysterious bomber had come from in the first place.

Knowing that the price of failure was death, the engineering unit’s commander managed to muster 200 of his troops in a matter of minutes. Within a quarter hour of getting the first call, twenty tanks of the unit were moving up the road toward the crash site, 200 heavily armed soldiers hanging from them.

After just ten minutes, this column was able to get within one mile of the crashed bomber, which was in a small ravine on the edge of the Simpacoo Hills. They could clearly see the smoke from the roadway. The column’s commanders laid out their maps and saw what was ahead of them. About 150 feet of thick jungle was right off the roadway. Then there was a bare field which ran up to a wide but shallow river. Then more jungle, then the crash site itself.

The task facing the engineers wasn’t so daunting then. They would plow through the first strip of jungle, quickly reach the field, and make short work of crossing the river. After that, only several hundred more feet of jungle needed to be covered before reaching the aircraft itself. Confident in the ability of their men and their machines, the commanders radioed back to High General Wakisaki’s headquarters and reported they would be at the crash site within twenty minutes.

Sending that overly optimistic report was their first mistake.

The first pair of tanks crashed into the thick undergrowth, their bulldozer blades cutting and slashing trees, rocks and thick vines alike. Behind them, another pair of tanks flattened the destroyed fauna into a makeshift roadway. Behind
them,
the majority of the column followed, two tanks remaining on the road in reserve.

The lead tanks reached the open field in just five minutes. From here they could see the shallow river and the thicker forest beyond. A large column of smoke was rising right above the next line of trees. The first tanks went into high speed, the troops draped all over their exteriors, holding on for dear life.

It was these troops who first heard the strange noise coming from high above them.

It was not a typical jet-engine whine. This sound was deeper, almost echoing. A definite
chop-chop-chop!
Times eight.

They saw it a few moments later, coming out of the north. It looked like a prehistoric monster. It was almost as big as the bombers which had just set many parts of New Lima ablaze. But it had no wings. Instead, it had many spinning rotors—eight of them. And it was gangly. It was all wires and wheels and engines and noise. There was a huge bubble of glass on its front which gave it an insect look. Yet its eight legs and rotors made it more resemble a flying octopus, which was close to its official name: Octocopter. It was loud, and scary, and it was coming down right on top of them.

The tank drivers saw it and out of sheer panic stomped on their brakes and brought their huge vehicles to a screeching halt. This served to throw many of the hitching soldiers to the ground, their weapons and helmets flying. The strange air beast descended on the field and went into a hover. Several dozen portholes opened all over the aircraft’s convoluted body, and just as many gun muzzles appeared. The Japanese soldiers looked up, and many of them saw their last sight: thick smoke and flame coming from those muzzles.

The noise from the guns was almost loud enough to drown out the roar of the aircraft’s eight rotors. The first two tanks were destroyed in a matter of seconds, so intense was the Octo’s high-caliber barrage. The second pair of tanks, and all those behind them, had just arrived in the open field—a big mistake, as they soon realized.