Yet Hunter still climbed…
He clutched the picture of Dominique. There were too many questions bouncing around his head. So he sought refuge. At 85,000 feet the sky was like night and the stars were bright and in full view. Suddenly he saw a huge band of red light streak across his northern horizon. It was followed by another, then another. It was the Aurora Borealis again. But strangely it displayed just one color. Deep red. The streaks were dazzling, sparking bright crimson leaping across the sky like huge airborne waves. In all his years of flying, he had never witnessed the phenomena as intense as this.
Hunter felt a jolt run the length of his body, bounce off his flight boots and rebound back to his flight helmet. He was transfixed by the brilliant, eerie lights and their strong, hypnotic quality.
He found himself being drawn toward the display. Slowly he leveled off at 90,000 feet. The air was so thin at this height he imagined he could see it travel by him in long curling wisps.
He pointed the jet fighter north, determined to plunge into the bath of red light. Soon the entire airplane was awash in the one color. It was the color of blood. He took his hands off the controls and held them up to his eyes.
Strangely, they looked white while everything else around him appeared red.
His body shook again. The red became more intense. He closed his eyes.
He knew it was an omen. War was coming. A big one. To the east. He could already hear the bombs exploding and big guns being fired. He could see the smoke and the tail fires of missiles as they streaked to their targets.
Highways lined with the weapons of war. He could smell the gunpowder and the cordite and the napalm. He saw huge fires. He heard people screaming — their sounds intertwined into a symphony, playing so hard in his ears they started to ache. The jet was shuddering, its engine shrieking as it streaked into the Northern Lights.
Suddenly a new, entirely different feeling washed over him. His eyes were still jammed shut. Inside, he felt the color turn from red to white. Then, everything started to clear. In an instant he knew how the Russian jets had pulled off their svengali. The answer had been there all along and he laughed when he finally realized the truth. So that was it! He felt a surge of power travel through his body. His fists tightened. His teeth were clenched. He gulped the oxygen from his face mask. The fuckers. They almost had him. They almost psyched him out. But now he was on to it. One mystery down, just several more to go. No more time to contemplate his condition. No more self-pity. No more doubting his resolve. He had to get to work.
He kept his eyes closed just a moment longer, drawing the last jolts of strength from the feeling. The last image he saw before opening his eyes was that of the beautiful Dominique. She was alive. The photo proved it. He knew it now for sure. She was out there. Somewhere. He would find her.
He opened his eyes. The Northern Lights were gone and the night sky was cold and clear. The feeling hadn't entirely vanished, however. In fact, a little bit of it would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Chapter Eight
Hunter returned to the base, shut down the F-16 and ran to the base's recon photo analysis lab. The two technicians who had been laboring over his footage came out to meet him, both anxious and glowing with news.
But before they could say a word, Hunter spoke to them. "Jump jets?" he asked.
"Bingo, sir," the senior tech told him. "Yak-38's. We narrowed it down about two hours ago."
The Yak-38 was an airplane design the Soviets ripped off from the famous British Harrier. By using a multi-direction jet nozzle, the airplane could lift off vertically, then, with the push of a button, its thrust could be redirected backward and the jet could instantly fly like a normal fighter. The Harrier was an amazing airplane; the Yak-38 an effective, if bargain basement version of it.
Now all the pieces were fitting into place. The Russians hadn't really constructed an air base in the arctic valley — they had simply cleared a landing spot, for the jets could land vertically, too. The airplanes had leapfrogged over from Siberia, probably rendezvousing with tanker planes or even preadapted ships at sea for refueling. After all, the Yak-38 was originally designed to operate off Soviet aircraft carriers. When Hunter happened to find their base, it only would take about an hour or so to get the 50 airplanes lifted off and moving.
But one mystery solved sometimes led to another: Now that he knew how the airplanes got there — and how they got out — he had to find out where they were going…
"Where the hell are they now?"
Seated around the table were the principal officers of PAAC-Oregon. One by one, Twomey, Ben Wa, the Cobras, the Ace Wrecking Company, an officer from the Crazy Eights, Major Frost, and Dozer looked at the still photographs gleaned from the infrared tape of the Yaks.
"This is not your typical Soviet stunt," Hunter was saying. "These guys were pros. It took a lot of planning and execution to jump fifty Goddamned jets across the arctic."
"And to do it in bad weather," Frost said. "And without a peep on the radio."
"Some kind of special unit," Dozer said. "Probably trained just for this mission."
"Damn!" Hunter said, pounding the table. "I would never have guessed the Russians had five of these Yaks left, never mind fifty!"
"We have to find them and take them out," Captain Crunch of the Wreckers said. "Any ideas where they went, Major?"
Hunter was quiet for a moment. "I hate to even say this but…" he began slowly. "My guess is they jumped themselves right over into the Badlands."
"Christ!" Twomey blurted out, expressing the feeling of every officer there.
They were all unquestioningly brave men. But still not one of them wanted anything to do with the Badlands.
"Why do you figure the Badlands, Hawk?" Wa asked.
"Well, based on the maximum operating range of the Yak-38, if they flew light and conserved fuel, they could have made it in one extra jump," Hunter said, pulling out a notebook of calculations. "And these photos show they weren't carrying any ordnance under the wings. They were, however, carrying extra large wing tanks.
"This tells us something else. If they weren't carrying bombs, it could mean they were meeting up with someone who was."
"Goddamn," Dozer said. "Fifty Russian jump jets flying around the continent can cause a lot of misunderstandings to say the least."
"What are they here for, Major?" one of the Cobras asked. "Convoy raiding?"
"Well, it seems like a hell of a lot of trouble to go through just to shoot at airliners," Hunter said.
"Could be part of another disruption campaign," Dozer said. "They sent a bunch of jets over to The Family, too."
"That's true," Hunter said. "But we've got to figure that they sent more jets than pilots that time. Pilots must be in very short supply over there, still. And so are top-shelf airplanes like these Yaks.
Top-shelf to the Russians, anyway."
"You think something bigger is brewing?" Frost asked.
Again, Hunter was silent for a few seconds. He had given it a lot of thought in the past few hours, though he had to admit, some of the answers literally popped into his head from nowhere. He now had theories on most of the recent mysteries, both on the west coast and on the east — all except one.
"Okay, let's look at these one at a time," he began. "First, we have a patrol boat who reports something strange and sends out an SOS. By the time we get there, they're gone. Now, whatever it was, it had to be a ship that attacked them. Yet the Wreckers didn't see anything else floating around out there."