Sky Ghost Read Online Free Page A

the middle of the ocean.
    But then his ears began to pick up things his eyes couldn’t. Noises. Motors running. Neon burning. People talking, yelling. Music playing. A big band sound—but louder. With echo. And reverb. Was that Tommy Dorsey? Through reverb? Really?
    What happened next was simply astonishing to him. One moment they were moving in complete and utter darkness, the next they were sailing off a very bright, very noisy coastline.
    What happened?
    Hunter looked behind him and realized that the destroyer had just passed through a huge almost-invisible screen. It was at least a half mile high and was being held up by an endless series of slender poles set into pilings about a mile offshore. It was as if someone had put a big curtain along the entire coastline.
    “You really are from another place, aren’t you?”
    Hunter turned around. It was Commander Zal, the XO. He’d been watching him.
    “I can tell just by the way you looked at the Big Screen,” Zal went on. “You’ve never seen anything like it before, have you?”
    Hunter just shook his head.
    “Nope. Never,” he said.
    “It’s called an LSD,” Zal told him. “Stands for Light and Sound Dampener. It keeps all light, all radio signals, all TV signals from going out, but still lets everything in. Like a two-way mirror. This way the coastline doesn’t have to black out every time it gets dark. Everyone knows about them—they’ve been around for years. Look at this one. It stretches all the way up to Canada. And it’s getting very ratty. But it’s still holding up.”
    “It’s amazing,” Hunter said. “Sort of…”
    Now he saw plenty of lights. And heard plenty of noise. He could smell life, lots of it, on the shoreline not too far away. This place—it actually looked familiar to him. Tall buildings. Lots of bridges. A city screaming at the top of its lungs.
    Then it hit him—they were right off the coast of New York City!
    But wait a moment. This wasn’t exactly how he remembered it. The Manhattan skyline was still there—but the buildings were twice as tall and there were twice as many as he recalled. And the Empire State Building was still the tallest one around—and it was at least three times as high as he remembered it.
    “They added to it in 1968 and then again in 1979, after the big air raid that year,” Zal told him. “You didn’t know that either, did you?”
    Hunter just shook his head no.
    Zal reached into his pocket and came out with a pack of Lucky Strikes. But these Luckies were laid out in a cardboard gold box—like fancy English cigarettes used to be. He lit a butt and then offered one to Hunter, who declined.
    “You know what, pal?” Zal said. “Maybe you are an angel. Maybe you really did fall out of the sky.”
    But Hunter did not really hear him. He was too busy looking at a heavily bomb-damaged Statue of Liberty.
    “Great Air Raid of 1989,” the XO explained. “They ain’t going to fix it until the war’s all over. Which should be any day now. It’s been more of a resistance symbol these past few years—wrecked the way it is. Lots of people have painted it. Photographed it.”
    They were passing a tremendous amount of naval activity now. Tugs. Ferries. Repair ships. Hunter soon realized New York Harbor was now one enormous naval base. And even though it was past sunset, the lights around it were so bright, it was lit up like a bright, sunny day.
    There were at least 200 warships of all sizes tied up at various points around the harbor. At first, they all seemed very odd to Hunter in shape or design. Some were sleek and long, some were fat and stubby. Some were enormous, some seemed too small. Some were actually two ships linked in the middle as one, like a catamaran. Yet all the ships were covered stem-to-stern with a navy gray paint that seemed very familiar to Hunter. It was so strange. The ships all looked bizarre and different to him, yet perfectly normal at the same time.
    “This war you are