Target: Point Zero (24 page)

It looked like something designed by a mad scientist back in the thirties. There were still knobs, push buttons, turn-wheels, levers, analog computers—and dials. Thousands of dials, none of which seemed to make very much sense to anyone, even the world’s best fighter pilot. Hunter had never been inside the cockpit of a Tu-95 before, but always wanted to. When he finally did, it was quite a shock.

Still it took him only a few moments to figure out how all the important stuff worked. The takeoff from Vallo Mazz had been as smooth as could be expected. Now that he was airborne it would give him some time to figure out what everything else did.

Baldi was sitting beside him, trembling as the huge bomber cut through the turbulent air above the Mediterranean. He was no fan of airplanes, bombers or otherwise. He had shook all the way up from Malta to Syracuse, both frightened and astounded at Hunter’s ability to fly the dilapidated seaplane barely ten feet above the surface of the water without killing them all. Baldi was so happy when they finally landed about a mile offshore from Siracusa, he got down on his knees and prayed for a full minute.

Now he was praying again.

Getting into Vallo Mazz had been easier than Hunter could have ever imagined. Sure, the place was wrapped a few thousand times in barbed wire and antipersonnel mines, but they didn’t cover the main gate of the place—and that’s exactly how they got in. Through the front door, driving a stolen jeep and allowing Chloe to do the talking. They casually dumped the car at the back of the sin palace parking lot, and when Chloe went one way, Hunter and Baldi went the other.

Trying to pick which Bear to steal turned out to be the hardest thing. There were many to choose from sitting idle on the parking apron, getting only cursory attention from the nearby maintenance teams. Hunter and Baldi picked the all-black, garishly nosed-up Bear simply because sneaking onto a black jet in nighttime was easier to do than attempting to get on one bathed in Day-Glo. The
DFA
was the blackest plane in the darkest shadow, so Hunter and Baldi stole aboard her, hiding in the rear bomb bay until the crew arrived and brought the airplane to the prep shop.

Only then did they reveal themselves, knocking out the gunners and the technicians with silent thrusts to the throat, and then clobbering the pilots over the head with the butts of their rifles. Chloe’s timing couldn’t have been better; no sooner had Hunter and Baldi joined the back end of the parking jam when she appeared, stringing along the WC like a mackerel to chum.

Now Hunter turned the big plane out over the Tyrrhenian Sea and pointed it due south, back towards the Straits of Sicily.

Chloe had climbed up into the copilot’s seat—and she was enjoying the fast, high ride. Even when she didn’t realize it, she still got what she wanted. Hunter was busying himself with the Bear’s antique controls, and tried his best not to pay attention to her—but it was impossible to do. Even though his mind should have been consumed with making their grand-theft bomber caper a successful escape, he couldn’t help himself from looking over at her, still clad in the tight miniskirt, her blond goddess looks clashing wildly with the dull, dial-crazy cockpit.

She was leaning all the way forward, nose pressed up against the cockpit glass, feeling her body sway as Hunter poured on the power and they gradually built up speed. She glanced over at him, began to smile—but stopped. They had hardly said a word to each other in the past few hours. The scene in Gin’s kitchen had been an eye-opener—for both of them. Up to that point, Chloe thought Hunter was like everyone else she’d grown up with—into sex, both the doing and the watching. Now she was beginning to think that he was interested in only one of those. It had cast a pall over the adventurous time they’d already spent together.

Then came the plan to steal the Bear—and Chloe’s surprise when Hunter gave her such a crucial part in it. She’d enjoyed using her sex into fooling the WC; she’d enjoyed the excitement of stealing the bomber. But how did Hunter feel about all that? She didn’t know—and any time it seemed like the question was going to come up—he always shut up.

How then was she supposed to know what the hell he was thinking?

“You did a great job,” he finally told her, quickly smiling and then turning back to the Bear’s myriad of controls. “Thanks…I appreciate it.”

She stared back at him, her eyes burning a pair of holes in his.

“I can’t wait to tell my father about it,” she said innocently. “He’d get a really big kick out of all this.”

Hunter leaned back and then gazed out at the vast night sky above them. The stars seemed brighter up here, around forty-five thousand feet, and closer. There was a full moon, and many planets and constellations were visible overhead.

Again, uncharacteristically, Hunter found himself taking time from the mission to admire them through the bubble-topped canopy.

Suddenly, he felt Chloe’s hand slip around his.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked, looking up at the Milky Way, seemingly just a hand grasp away from them.

“It sure is,” Hunter replied finally, finding his eyes not on the stars but resting on her instead.

The Wing Commander of Vallo Mazz airfield woke up to find a knife pushing up against his throat.

He was still drunk, still stoned, and still somewhat under the spell of the young woman who’d hooked him earlier in the night. At first he thought he was taking a joyride in the sky with her, and that he had simply passed out once the plane started to take off.

This would have made sense—if it wasn’t for the blade pressing into his gullet.

He finally opened his eyes and looked up to see a very large, very angry, unshaven, heavily mustached man staring down at him. He was the owner of the huge knife now drawing across his Adam’s apple.

The Wing Commander instantly panicked. Something was definitely wrong here.
Very
wrong.

“You killed a lot of my people,” the man with the knife was spitting at him. “For nothing. For money. You will the a very painful death for that, sir…”

The Wing Commander was listening to the man—but his attention was actually distracted elsewhere. He was laying on the deck directly below the forward observation hatch. From here he could see into the cockpit. And sitting there, illuminated only by the dull green of the cockpit lights, was the girl named Chloe.

She was enough to make him forget about the razor-sharp blade pressing against his neck. Momentarily anyway. But one thing had become abundantly clear: he was being kidnapped.

The Wing Commander tried to sit up but Baldi shoved him back down. Growing foolishly defiant, the WC suddenly pushed Baldi’s blade away from his throat.

“You’re not about to slit my throat,” he told the infuriated Baldi. “What good would that do you? Once they realize that I’m gone, they’ll send people out to get you. Don’t you think we’ve been prepared for this? I’m one of the most important people in the world. We have contingencies for these types of things. They’ll shoot you down if I tell them to.”

At that moment, the Wing Commander heard a voice from the cockpit call back to Baldi: “Get him ready…”

The Wing Commander stared up at Baldi, confused. Then he leaned forward and for the first time saw the man who was driving the airplane.

“
You?…
The Wingman? You are real?”

“For now…” Hunter replied sullenly. “After this party, maybe not…”

He turned back to his controls. “Get him ready,” he repeated to Baldi.

Once again, the WC began stuttering. “Ready?…for what?”

Baldi did not reply. He stood the WC up and roughly began removing his clothes.

“What…what the hell is this?”

Baldi had him down to his boots inside ten seconds.

“I said you have killed many of my people,” he growled in the Wing Commander’s face. “I said you will pay for it.”

With that, he pushed the WC to the forward hatch. The airplane was now descending so steeply, Baldi and the WC were momentarily weightless. Then the plane leveled out and the Wing Commander could see they were about a mile high, over water, but approaching a small island off the eastern horizon.

Baldi pushed him even closer to the open hatch. The WC couldn’t speak. This Wingman—this wasn’t how he operated, was it? He and his gang weren’t really going to kill him—were they?

“About twenty seconds…” Hunter called back to Baldi. “Fifteen…”

The Wing Commander was standing buck naked in the open hatch now, all of his extremities quickly freezing up. They were getting closer to the land mass: he could see waves crashing on the beaches below. And people, lining the shoreline, shaking their fists up at him. The Wing Commander realized that they were flying over the island of Malta.

“Ten seconds…” Hunter yelled back.

Baldi turned back to the WC. His knife was gone; he was holding a green bundle instead.

“You can’t kill me!” the Wing Commander screamed as Baldi drew closer.

“We don’t have to,” Baldi said.

He shoved the bundle into the WC’s hands, pulled its rip cord and then kicked him out the open hatchway.

The WC fell head over heels, nearly entangling himself in the unfurling parachute. Somehow, the fabric billowed and caught the air, jerking the Wing Commander to a violent midair stop. He’d voided his bladder and thrown up during this short freefall, but now he was floating and still alive—for the moment anyway.

He quickly looked down to see he was heading right for a crowd of people gathered in the main square of the city he knew from his bombing maps must be Valletta. These people were armed with guns, knives, clubs, and pitchforks. He could also feel the heat of their anger rising up to meet him. Heart-pounding, he wet himself again. He knew there was no way he’d be able to live through this reception.

Panic-stricken, he looked up at the Tu-95 as it slowly moved away from him. The last thing he would ever see was the blurry image of the girl with the red dress looking back out at him from the cockpit window.

She was waving goodbye.

Da Nang

South Vietnam

T
HE RF-4X PHANTOM RECON
jet lifted off cleanly from Da Nang’s longest runway and immediately turned out over the South China Sea.

The “X” was an unusual aircraft. Formerly a fighter-bomber/ground attack plane, it had been converted into an armed reconnaissance platform about a year before. Its already-ugly nose had been extended by fifteen feet, providing room for a twelve-lens detachable SLAR/TEREC camera pod. Beneath its wings was a clutter of FLIR pods. TACAN and LANTIRN modules—and four Sidewinder missiles. The airplane was painted in a sheer black; the gold scrolling running back from the cockpit to the tail read: ACE WRECKING COMPANY.

Behind the controls of the unusual airplane was Captain John C. “Crunch” O’Malley. A gifted pilot and tactician, at thirty-six, O’Malley was the old man of the United American gang. Though originally hired on as a freelancer, he’d been flying exclusively for the UAAF for three years now: He’d been flying solo for just about that long, too. The Ace Wrecking Company was at one time a two-man operation, but he’d lost his partner twenty-eight months ago, on an operation over the mid-Pacific.

Since then he’d downsized. The rear seat where his partner used to ride was now crammed with recon and intelligence-gathering gear. The Ace Wrecking Company hadn’t really wrecked anything in a while, and it wasn’t really a company anymore either. Now it specialized in long,
really
long, recon flights. Crunch had gotten to the point where he could do a fourteen-hour hump without breaking a sweat. In his opinion, it was a good way to spend his old age.

He had several photo targets today. He would first do a high-fly over Lolita Island, the site of the mysterious plastic forest. From there he would head east, towards the Palawan Passages, an area just west of the Philippines. This was a favorite hiding spot for the battleships of the Asian Mercenary Cult, the prime troublemakers in this vast region. From the United Americans’ point of view, it was always a good idea to keep an eye out for any of their movements.

After taking a wide-sweep of Palawan, Crunch would return to Lolita, reaching there some two hours after nightfall for a series of FLIR, heat-trace and Nightvision photography. Then he would head home.

In all, the mission would last about seven hours, a short hop compared to some of his flights.

If he hurried, he’d be back in Da Nang before the moon came up.

It was fourteen hundred hours on the nose when Crunch first picked up Lolita Island on his Forward Looking Infra-Red scope.

It was still some distance away, off on the southern horizon. But just from what he could see on the IF scope, Crunch could tell something was very queer about the island. The jungle looked too damn perfect—every tree was the exact same height, every blade of grass was leaning the exact same way. The heat signature alone was enough to scramble his screen. The island had been baking in the height of hazy sunshine for two hours and its plastic foliage was giving off tremendous amounts of heat. It was so hot on the greenish world of the FLIR eye, it looked to Crunch like the island was actually engulfed in flames.

He immediately pulled back on his crank, booted the throttles and climbed nearly straight up to 63,360 feet. Once at this height—exactly eleven miles above the earth—he throttled back, turned the plane on its left wing and opened his camera pods. For thirty seconds he maintained this attitude, long enough for four of the cameras inside the pod to run through one can of film.

Then he leveled out, shut everything off and did a time and position check: fourteen hundred and five hours, just about eleven-degrees by one hundred fourteen. For his voice-activated cockpit reporter, he mentioned the heat coming off of Lolita and his own impressions of the bizarre, faultless jungle growth.

Then he punched his next destination into the flight computer and felt the airplane jerk to the left.

His nose now pointed at the eastern horizon, he pushed the throttles forward again and was off.

The crew of the huge Antonov An-124 “Condor” had been circling for hours.