The enemy column was recovering. It had stopped but now was returning fire toward the sub as well as toward the stadium parking lot. Hunter grabbed Dominque one more time. She hugged him and then squeezed his hand and whispered: "I'll always be with you…"
Then she was gone, hustled off into Wack's gunwagon. Zal rushed up to Hunter and quickly shook hands.
"Don't worry, Hawk," he said. "We'll take care of her. We'll get her to a safe house in Quebec. Fitz will know where she'll be."
"Thanks, Zal," Hunter told his friend. "Thanks for coming to the rescue."
"Good luck, buddy," Zal said, as they both ducked away from another enemy shell explosion. "I hope I get a chance to get back into my F-105 and join the party out in the Bads."
"Great!" Hunter yelled over the noise.
With that Zal jumped into the House gun wagon. Wack wheeled the big car back toward Hunter. The fighter reached his hand out the window.
"See ya, Hawk," he said. "Take good care of that flag."
"You know it," Hunter told him. "We'll meet again."
The gun wagon roared away, followed by the rocket car that was firing as it went. The last Hunter saw of Dominque, she was waving to him through the bullet-proof glass. "Goodbye," he said, to no one but himself. Suddenly, he was alone. He couldn't remember ever being so devastated.
Another shell hit nearby, too close to the now-warmed up Stealth. He turned his attention to the troops firing at him from the highway. His sadness turned instantly to anger. A fire was lit in his heart that wouldn't go out for a long time. He clenched his fists. His eyes began to burn. These troops. The Russians. The Circle. The Mongols. Viktor. All of them were marked. He felt himself go a little bit crazy. Another shell landed nearby, but he didn't even bother to duck.
"Fuck around with me, will you?" he screamed, climbing into the Stealth.
He spun the jet around and pointed it toward the longest part of the parking lot. There was only one way the jet would get airborne. He simultaneously engaged the air brakes and gunned the engine. Higher and higher the RPMs climbed. The engine was roaring, smoking, straining. Like a coiled cat, it was ready to leap. Yet he held back, waiting. Two more shells landed nearby. He could see the deck gun of the submarine go off again. The House of David rocket car fired once more. There were tracer bullets flying everywhere. All the while, the Stealth's engine was screaming for release.
"Okay," Hunter said after checking the instruments. "Time to go…"
With that he snapped off the air brakes. Like a dragster starting out down a quarter mile, the jet's tires squealed and smoked. The airplane catapulted forward, going from zero to 100 mph in less than three seconds. At 125 mph, Hunter coolly brought up the landing gear. Now the airplane was airborne whether it liked it or not. At the same time he yanked back on the controls and turned the nose of the airplane straight up. He felt the tail end of the ship smack into the far parking lot fence. No matter. Scratched paint he could live with. He was flying.
Higher he climbed, until all the lights and the omni-present fires of New Order Manhattan came into view. He quickly checked his instruments. Everything looked good. The airplane was very smooth flying and easy to handle. And the controls were so standard, any military pilot could have figured them out eventually. It took Hunter approximately four seconds.
He test-fired the cannons. They too worked perfectly. Then he turned the airplane around and dove. Below him was the enemy convoy. He could see the sub still firing off shore. Somewhere down there he knew that the Canadian commandos were scrambling aboard a rubber life raft and paddling like hell toward the sub. Wack and his fighters, vastly outnumbered, would soon be drawing all the fire from the enemy column. Hunter intended to even things up.
He came in low and fast on the line of trucks, tanks and gunwagons. With the press of a button, the two cannons opened up and a deadly spray of fire rained down on the column. One truck, then another went up in flames immediately.
He flipped the airplane over and bore down on the enemy again. The cannons routinely chopped up vehicle and body alike. More explosions followed as the shells hit gas tanks and ammunition boxes. Best of all, no one was shooting at him.
By the end of his third strafing run, all firing from the column had ceased.
He pulled up and slowed down. After a few seconds he spotted the two House of David gunwagons sprinting across the George Washington Bridge. They would temporarily retreat into New Jersey then sneak back into Manhattan when the time was right. Hunter was glad to see the brave fighters make it out in one piece.
He turned again and came down low over the river. A light was flashing at him from the sub's conning tower. It was blinking: "A-OK. A-OK." One more pass over the river and he saw the sub was submerging. He knew it would glide just a few feet below the surface until it got out into deeper water. Then it would be off to the sanctuary of Canada. He felt his heart lighten just a notch. For the first time in a long while, he felt that Dominque was finally safe.
He climbed and turned the jet west. Already he could fee the sting of the battle in his bones.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The flight of 20 B-52 Stratofortresses were still 30 miles from their target when the SAMs first appeared.
"Take evasive action!" each bomber pilot heard simultaneously. "We got company coming up at five o'clock!" The familiar voice belonged to General Jones.
Flying the lead bomber, he was the first to pick up the Soviet anti-aircraft missiles. The general hit a button on his control column which activated a chaff dispenser at the rear of the airplane. Immediately a long stream of radar-reflective tinfoil squirted out of the B-52. The other bomber pilots did the same. The tinfoil cloud would serve to confuse the on-board radar homing devices on the SAMs. But not by much.
Within 10 seconds the early morning sky was filled with SA-2 missiles — the same type American pilots dodged over North Viet Nam years before. One missile found its target with deadly accuracy, hitting one of the big bombers on the port wing, severing it from the fuselage. The airplane immediately flipped over and began a long plunge to earth. There were no parachutes.
"Group, break!" Jones yelled into his radio. Immediately the Stratofortresses peeled out of their closed formation and went to pre-assigned staggered altitudes. At the same time, each pilot switched on his airplane's Electronic Counter-Measures devices designed to confuse the enemy missiles. But Jones knew that this would provide only minimal protection at best.
"Jesus, this one has our name on it!" Jones yelled to his co-pilot, as they could see a missile's trail of smoke rising up toward them. Jones pushed down on the controls and put the B-52 in a harrowing dive. The missiles whooshed by them dangerously close to the starboard wing. They had hardly recovered when another missile just missed impacting on their nose.
"Christ, there are hundreds of them!" the co-pilot yelled, looking down at the multitude of tell-tale smoke trails rising up out of the clouds.
Jones yanked back on the controls and put the bomber into a steep climb. Back in Viet Nam, a bomber force such as this would have had the luxury of dozens of fighter aircraft as escorts, as well as many fighter-bombers sweeping in on SAM sites before the big boys arrives. But not so here. With the exception of a half dozen fighters looking out for the Yaks, the B-52s were on their own.
Jones had ordered the big bomber strike on the most formidable targets in the Badlands: the Soviets' castle-like main base near Wichita and the nuclear power station nearby, both of which Hunter had identified during his foray into the forbidden zone. The pre-dawn bombing raid was timed to catch the enemy off-guard. But still, Jones knew his losses to the SAMs would be high — probably no other target in the 'Bads was so protected as these two were by the deadly Soviet missiles.