"There's one thing for damn sure," he whispered loudly to the lieutenant.
"This bird didn't land here . . ."
"Not unless it came straight down," the younger officer agreed.
Frost refilled the camera with a fresh roll of film and began shooting again.
"Well, someone knows how it was done," he said, clicking the camera's shutter as fast as he could. "Someone up there . . ."
He nodded toward the mountain on the far side of the clearing. Several hundred feet above the timberline, barely visible in the rapidly fleeing twilight, was a Gothiclike structure perched on the side of the mountain. It was large enough by far to qualify as a castle, but its position looked so unnatural that it appeared as if it had been carelessly tossed there by a giant hand and just happened to stick.
As such, the fortress managed to look both precarious and impenetrable at the same time.
Frost turned back to the C-141 resting in the clearing, then called up his squad leaders.
"This is it, guys," he said, pointing to the haunting, abandoned aircraft.
"Not a peep from now on in."
The word was passed down the line and, then, with Frost and his lieutenant leading the way, the unit silently crossed the darkened field and climbed into the C-141's bent fuselage.
Though cramped and gloomily enveloped in ice, the insides of the odd aircraft were reasonably clear of any sharp debris. Frost knew this was a good sign, Each of the eighty-five heavily armed Free Canadian Rangers found a reasonably smooth place to sit. Then, with not a word among them, they began the anxious wait for the night to pass.
*
A few miles to the east, another group of soldiers was advancing stealthily toward the same mountain.
There were one hundred and twenty of them in all, the majority of whom carried high-powered assault rifles, ammunition belts, grenades, and a full assortment of mountain-climbing gear.
This contingent-known as Blue Force-was led by a tall black man named Major Lament "Catfish" Johnson. Formerly second-in-command of the famed US Marine 7th Cavalry, Johnson now was one of the United Americans' most highly decorated officers. His most recent assignment had been as commander of the troops aboard the Freedom Express, the train that had blazed a path through the southwest Badlands. Before that, he had played a major role in the successful invasion of Nazi-controlled Panama.
About half the men with Johnson were also veterans of the old 7th Cavalry, a misnamed unit that was now part of the crack 1st United American Airborne Division. The other half of the column were members of the Football City Special Forces Rangers, the ultra-elite fighting force whose support had helped the United Americans achieve many of their key victories in the recent past.
Combined, they made up a group of professional soldiers that had no rivals on the American continent, and quite possibly in the entire world.
As darkness fell, Johnson led his men to a particularly secluded spot in the midst of a thick grove of towering pines and then checked his map.
"We're here," he said simply to his second officer.
Rapidly and silently the news passed among the men.
"Find a dry place," the second officer called back down the line. "Cover up, check your equipment, and then chow pack number two."
Within a few minutes, all of the men had settled in for the evening, thankful to be at the end of the tortuous fifty-mile trek into the barren territory, yet anxious for
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morning to come so they could get on with the mission.
Johnson and his second officer crawled under the overhanging branches of a particularly large northern pine, and with a half dozen other troopers, shared a cold meal. The evening was growing chilly, but a campfire was out of the question. This mission had to be secret, silent, and, at least until tomorrow morning, invisible.
"Hard to say just how well protected this place is," the second officer said, scanning the castle with his infrared NightScope binoculars between bites of cold Spam. "I see AA gun lights, and LED's from some SAM's, but they've got a lot of places to hide things up there."
He passed the NightScope glasses to Johnson. "Recon is tough in the mountains," he said with the comfortable tone of experience. "But according to St. Louie's spook's estimates, there shouldn't be more than about five hundred troops up there right now."
The St. Louie Johnson referred to was Louie St. Louie, the flamboyant leader of Football City (formerly St. Louis) who, besides running the largest gambling empire in the Western Hemisphere, also operated its the largest intelligence network.
At the request of General David Jones, commander of the United American Provisional Government, St. Louie had assigned some of his top agents to track down Duke Devillian, leader of the Knights of the Burning Cross, the racist terrorist organization that had tried to halt the cross-country mission of the Freedom Express. Following the United Americans' victory in the pivotal Grand Canyon battle, Devillian had been shot down over Death Valley-by Hawk Hunter himself no less-but somehow escaped what seemed to be certain death.
St. Louie's operatives also had been searching for another threat to the newly emerging American republic-the woman named Elizabeth Sandlake. Incredibly bright as well as beautiful, Sandlake's mind had been forever twisted during the last days of her brutal captivity at the hands of the vicious Canal Nazis of the Twisted Cross.
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Hunter had rescued her, and eventually defeated the neo-Nazi thugs who had used her in their plot to seize control of a world in turmoil. But Elizabeth Sandlake was never the same. She had spent too many months immersed in evil to ever return to normal. The lust for power was contagious and she had caught it. Soon afterward she had set out on her own bizarre quest to overthrow the government of America and turn the country into an all-woman aristocracy, with herself as nothing less than its queen.
She convinced herself that the first step in this strange plan was the assassination of the traitorous ex-vice president. She came very close to completing this act, firing six bullets into the man minutes after he'd been convicted of high treason against the American people.
Captured, tried, and convicted herself, Sandlake was considered so dangerous and such a threat to escape that she was sentenced to serve her life sentence aboard a series of flying prisons.
Somehow she managed to commandeer one of them and escape. It was that plane that now sat mysteriously in the middle of a field on the other side of the mountain.
When all the leads were put together, it was particularly ironic that St.
Louie's intelligence operatives traced both Devillian and Sandlake to the same spot: this fortress lodged on the side of the mountain here in the wilds of western Canada.
But as far as irony went, this was only the beginning.
As a personal favor, Hawk Hunter had asked St. Louie to also find a trail that would lead him back to Dominique, and St. Louie obliged. But even the top intelligence experts at Football City were spooked when the twisted trail in search of Hunter's paramour eventually wound up at this same, desolate mountain outpost.
As the first orange-and-yellow streaks of dawn began to edge the blackness away from the eastern horizon, the
18
hundred and twenty men of Catfish Johnson's Blue Force expertly linked up with the eighty-five Free Canadians of Frost's Red Force and together they resumed their silent advance toward the base of the mountain.
Meanwhile, seventy miles to the east, on a flat Alberta prairie, the early-morning calm was shattered by the roar of a dozen jet fighters, their engines shrieking like banshees, screaming for takeoff.
It was a diverse collection of aircraft: two F-104 Starfighters, two F-4
Phantom fighters, four F-106 Delta Darts, four F-105X Super Thunderchiefs. Not one of the airplanes was newer than thirty-five years, and two of the Thunderchiefs were closing in on the half-century mark.
Still, age notwithstanding, the dozen jet fighters represented a formidable force, a fact that said as much about the pilots as the quality (or lack of it) of jet aircraft in postwar America.
There were also two OH-1 support helicopters-code-named Seasprays-taking off nearby. One runway over, a KC-135 in-flight refueling ship lifted off in a roar of dirty exhaust.
There was one other aircraft, sitting by itself on the far side of the makeshift airfield. At a bare-ass eleven years old, the plane was just a pup compared to the geezers warming up a half an airfield away. But that was the least of the differences between this solitary aircraft and the rest of the patchwork squadron. For this plane could not only fly conventionally, it could also fly straight up and straight down. It could stop in midair, go backward and land in about twenty feet of clear space.
This airplane was a souped-up AV-8BE Harrier jumpjet. The pilot standing next to it was Major Hawk Hunter.
The AV-8BE was a two-seat version of the famous British VTOL attack jet that was later built in the USA for the Marines. Hunter had extensively modified the extra large flight compartment, and normally the rear part of the cockpit was jam-packed with his personally designed advanced flight and weapons systems avionics.
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But now all of this clutter had been cleared away to make room for a passenger. It was Hunter's plan to be alone in that cockpit when he joined the assault on the mountainside castle.
But he didn't plan to leave alone.
Confident but anxious, Hunter ran his hands through his longish blond hair.
There always was a certain amount of nerves before any military operation, but he couldn't remember ever being this jumpy. Sleep had been impossible the night before and the night before that. Instead, he passed the hours by going over the plan of attack from beginning to end, following it through, hundreds of times in his mind.
The key was tiniing. The air strike had to take place just as the combined American and Canadian assault force was beginning their ascent of the mountain. For the first several critical minutes, the assault force would be exposed as they climbed toward the fortress; their survival would depend entirely on the effectiveness of their air cover.
As he watched, the two Seaspray helicopters lifted off and turned westward.
The two copters were piloted by his friends, the highly renowned Cobra brothers. Not really brothers, pilots Jesse Tyler and Bobby Crockett and their gunners Max Baxter and John-Boy Hobbs had gained both their fame and their nickname by flying deadly UH-I Cobra gunships.
For today's mission, Tyler and Company were leaving their familiar Cobras behind in favor of the Seasprays, and there was one very important reason for this: the Seasprays were almost totally silent.
Using these remarkable birds to their fullest advantage, the Cobra brothers hoped to get within a few hundred yards of the castle before they were noticed, thus maintaining the element of surprise until the last possible minute.
If their luck held, the Cobras would fly close in to the castle and launch the cannisters that were piled in the rear
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of each Seaspray. Those cannisters were filled with a powdery compound that when mixed with an accelerant became a unique crowd-control gas known as SX-551. In layman's terms it would probably be called "knockout gas."
According to St. Louie's spies, many of the soldiers holding the mountainside fortress were women. Enemies or not, the United American and Canadian commanders didn't relish the idea of killing a castle full of females. So they decided to try the knockout gas, which also increased their chances of capturing Devillian and Sandlake alive, as well as the many other notorious criminals known to be hiding in the castle.
But the strike force knew they wouldn't be able just to put everyone to sleep and waltz into the fortress unchallenged. St. Louie's spies also uncovered evidence that a sizeable group of incorporated mercenaries-known as the Guardians, Inc.-had joined the castle forces. The Guardians called themselves soldiers for hire but really were just killers for hire. Their ranks were of full cutthroats, murderers and Busted Wings, grounded air pirates who just couldn't get wanton killing-for-money out of their systems.
So in addition to the nonlethal knockout gas, the United American aircraft were packing plenty of deadly firepower as well. Both Seasprays were bristling with machine guns, and all of the fighters in the raiding party were equipped with air-to-surface missiles and nose cannons.
For their part, the ground troops were heavily armed with high-powered assault rifles of various designs, HE grenades, and even a few small rocket launchers.
Each soldier was also carrying a gas mask.
The two Seasprays vanished over the horizon and then ten tense, uneventful minutes passed. Finally, at exactly 0615, the Star fighters gunned their engines and rolled into position for takeoff. Piloting them were J.T. Twomey and Ben Wa, two of Hunter's closest friends. They had flown 21
with him in the Thunderbirds before the Big War, and had served at his side throughout the United Americans' struggle to reclaim their continent. After Hunter, they were probably the most skilled fighter pilots in America.
Following the Starfighters into the sky were the two F-4's, also carrying some of Hunter's friends: the fighter team known as the Ace Wrecking Company, commanded by the bold and colorful Captain "Crunch" O'Malley and his partner, the somewhat enigmatic pilot known as Elvis Q. The rest of the pilots were volunteers from the UA's various air squadrons.
Within the preplanned time frame of exactly ninety-two seconds, all of the fighters were airborne. Hunter watched as the last Thunderchief disappeared in the western sky. Slowly, he climbed into the Harrier. He still had several minutes to kill and he knew they would pass slowly. For this unusual plan called for the raid on the castle to be underway before he arrived.
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At the base of the mountain, still hidden in the edge of the forest, the soldiers of the combined assault force anxiously scanned the skies to the east for the first sign of the Seasprays. It was 0645.