Sky Ghost by Mack Maloney Read Free Book Online Page B

fighters, selected one, and climbed up the access ladder.
    There was no one around the plane. No flight personnel or ground crew. It didn’t matter to him. He opened the cockpit on the vertical fighter himself and climbed in. The dials and switches inside looked like everything else in this strange world: props from a bad sci-fi movie. Again, this did not deter him. He began pushing buttons and throwing switches and in seconds, the big tail-sitter aircraft began to come alive.
    He was now aware of people around the bottom of the aircraft, pointing up at him. One man had a rifle and was aiming at him, but another was pulling it away from the would-be shooter. Hunter hit a few more buttons—oil pressure checks, electrical system readouts—and then pushed the start lever and the huge double propellers at the top of the strange aircraft burst to life.
    This served to scatter most of the people buzzing around below him. The cloud of thick black exhaust drove away the rest. The Pogo was shaking so much, Hunter’s teeth were chattering. He scanned the rest of the flight instruments, and somehow knew immediately what each one was supposed to do.
    Another check of the oil pressure, another check of the electrical readouts. Everything was green. He flipped a switch that read, WEAPONS LOAD. It blinked back on with a message that said: Full.
    Hunter then strapped himself in, leaned back in the seat, and reached for the throttle bar.
    And then, at that moment, it hit him…
    He spoke the words out loud:
    “What the hell am I doing?”
    He didn’t know. Just as he was compelled to get up and run out of the hypnosis session and climb into this peculiar airplane, now he was compelled to launch the damn thing and go somewhere to do something.
    But what?
    He just didn’t know.
    And could he actually fly this thing? Could he fly at all? Was he a pilot?
    Again, he just didn’t know.
    But something was telling him to go. Now…
    So he kind of shrugged and took a deep breath and realized at that moment that he wasn’t even wearing a crash helmet or an oxygen mask. But he hit the launch lever anyway.
    The big airplane shuddered once, twice. And then, in an amazing burst of power and speed, the Pogo jumped off the runway and went straight up into the cloudless morning sky.
    While it was not an unusual occurrence for the base’s attack warning signals to go off at Otis Field, it had been quite a while since they had done so.
    The vast air base had been attacked a dozen times in this latest phase of the war, the last time being 18 months ago. In that incident, two missile-firing U-boats surfaced about 20 miles out and launched a half dozen concussion rockets at the base’s main runway, cratering it badly.
    But no defensive measures were taken then or after any other attack on the base for one simple reason: the U-boats were usually long gone before any aircraft crews could get scrambled and any aircraft could launch. The standard procedure then for an attack on the base was for everyone to get to a shelter or a slit trench and stay hunkered down until the attack was over.
    That’s what most of the personnel at the base were doing now. The shelters were filled and the slit trenches were too. However, the sixth floor of the red administration building still held several people. The elderly officers had retreated to the basement shelter along with the stenographer.
    But Agents X, Y, and Z were still on hand, as was a very concerned Captain Zoltan, who was now in their secret room with them. He was looking out the huge unshuttered window to the ocean beyond. His body was shaking. Bad vibes were everywhere.
    “What if a German missile hits this building?” he asked the shadowy agents. “We’ll all be killed.”
    Agent X just stared back at him. “You’re supposed to be one who sees the future,” he replied snidely. “Do you see this happening?”
    Zoltan wiped his brow and nervously tried to push down the creases in his uniform jacket.