Tomorrow War by Mack Maloney Read Free Book Online Page B

pirates’ aircraft. A second later, the men inside the second copter opened up with their heavy weapons.
    Zushi’s Bug was suddenly filled with tracer fire. Zushi felt two bullets enter his right arm and saw a piece of another guard’s head flick off the control panel and land in his lap. Zushi immediately panicked and, in trying to sweep the piece of bloody skull away, hit the Bug’s vertical-translation lever. The aircraft was now on fire and plunging rapidly toward the dense jungle below. Just beyond the next hill, Zushi could see the glowing green lights of the Cherries’ main base. He looked around the Bug cabin and saw his three companions were dead, their skulls perforated with still-glowing tracer bullets.
    The Bug plunged into the jungle seconds later.
    Just how Zushi managed to survive the jetcopter’s crash, he would never really know.
    One moment the aircraft was totally out of control, on fire with his dead companions’ bloody bodies being thrown around the small cockpit like mannequins, and the next thing he knew, he was lying facedown in a jungle stream. The water was warm, gurgling up against his face—it felt too good to be true. He looked up and saw that a colleague’s body was lying in the stream about ten feet away from him. It was spewing blood and other bodily fluids, and it was this warmth that was washing across Zushi’s face.
    Zushi leapt up in horror and began scrambling away from the corpse and the bloody stream.
    He nearly ran right into the burning wreckage of the Bug—it was hanging from a tall tree, gas and oil leaking down on him just as his dead colleague’s bodily fluids had done. Zushi bounced off the tree and threw himself into the jungle, running as fast as he could away from the crash site.
    His body pumped with adrenaline and fear, he topped a hill and saw a bunch of lights over the next ridge. He heard voices—urgent, commanding tones, but not in Japanese. These people were speaking English.
    Zushi immediately dove into a thick bush and hugged the ground. Fifty feet away he saw more of the black-uniformed soldiers running this way and that, carrying huge weapons, talking into radios and looking up into the early-morning sky as if a battalion of angels was about to descend down upon them.
    Beyond these men was the red brick mansion, a house that had existed on the atoll for a hundred years before the Cherrybenders ever came to this place.
    It took Zushi a few moments to realize what he’d stumbled onto. The mansion was where the Wiki-Wiki hostages were being held. The Cherries’ ace in the hole. Now these soldiers in black were running through the building and bringing the hostages outside.
    Out from the darkened sky, one Bug appeared over the treetops and went into a hover. It began a vertical translation, and no sooner had it done this, another Bug appeared above the tree line. Then another and another.
    As Zushi watched, the hostages were taken out of the mansion, were loaded on the Bugs, and were lifted away. Zushi was amazed at the precision. Within two minutes the Bugs had landed, all twelve hostages taken out, loaded on board, and lifted away.
    The thing that stayed on Zushi’s rather rattled mind was the fact that the hostages, while being loaded onto the Bugs, never once lost their poise, their bearing, or even the slightest curl in their hair.
    They looked like princesses, he thought. But Zushi knew better. These people were comfort women. The hostages the Cherries had taken from Wiki-Wiki were actually high-priced prostitutes who had once served the top echelon of the Japanese Armed Forces.
    Each one was more beautiful than the next.
    Zushi felt a foam start to dribble from his mouth. He began to lose consciousness. He felt his temple, and for the first time realized he had a bloody gash stretching down to his ear lobe. Stars appeared before his eyes, yet he couldn’t take his eyes off the lovely painted women.
    They were so beautiful ….
    Zushi passed out