Target: Point Zero (11 page)

That is, when he dreamed at all…

Vietnam

I
T WAS TWELVE HUNDRED
hours, high noon, when the trio of C-5 Galaxy gunships began taking off from Da Nang air base.

The first to go was “Football One,” one of three C-5s operated by the United American Football City Special Forces. The enormous red, white and blue-striped airplane was known as a “shooter.” It contained two dozen antiaircraft missile ports along both sides of its vast fuselage. Specifically these were locked-down Stinger missile platforms. The airplane also had a dozen Sidewinder air-to-air missiles hanging beneath its wings. Sophisticated air defense radar installed in the airplane’s cargo bay had the capability to pick up enemy fighters from as far as one hundred miles away. Any unfriendly airplane coming within twenty-five miles of Football One would be shot out of the sky almost immediately.

The second Galaxy to launch was called “Black Eyes.” It was operated by an aerial intelligence unit attached to the United American Armed Forces Command Section. Its bay contained tons of high tech navigation and detection equipment; poking out of the top of its fuselage was a huge revolving radar dish more commonly seen on AWACS aircraft. A recent transient to Southeast Asia, the equipment contained inside
Black Eyes
was so advanced, even some members of its eighteen-person crew didn’t know the true capabilities. The rumors said the plane could see up to five hundred miles away, on land or sea.

In contrast to the first two, the third C-5 to take off was nondescript. It had no intriguing nickname, no fancy paint job. It was simply covered with dull sea-camo gray and had very few attachments sticking out of its body or wings. This C-5 simply was a cargo ship; oddly though, it was the most important airplane of this mission.

Once aloft, the three huge planes turned out over the South China Sea and headed east. Ten minutes later, they were picked up by their fighter escorts, two F-20s of the Football City Air Force. Once connected, the five-ship formation immediately went into radio silence. They climbed to twenty thousand feet and turned south.

Though the communist capitalists of CAPCOM had been soundly defeated, there was always a chance that fighters hired by forces unfriendly to the United Americans might be about. Even a stray force of air pirates, still plentiful around the troubled planet, would relish the chance to shoot down a United American aircraft; there were huge bounties offered by many despots around the world that would pay an unsavory pilot to do just that.

But this flight turned out to be uneventful and routine. The five airplanes maintained their altitude and three hundred fifty knot speed for one hour. Two blips appeared on the radar screens within the
Black Eyes
intelligence craft. The radar indications turned into a pair of medium-sized fighters, appearing out of the south. The five airplanes went up to high alert, but this, too, was just procedure. They’d been expecting the two fighters at this coordinate. They were Panavia Tornados, the entire complement of the Tommies’ Air Force.

The Tornados took over escort duties for the F-20s, who turned with a wave and then accelerated back towards Da Nang. Now covered by the Tommies, the three C-5s altered their heading slightly, pointing southeast now. They flew along like this for another hour and a half. At precisely fourteen thirty, a terrain search and guidance radar aboard
Black Eyes
picked up a speck of land in the middle of the vast, empty sea. It was Lolita Island.

Preparations for the second phase of this secret mission had been going full-steam in the back of the non-descript C-5 since takeoff from Da Nang.

Any C-5’s original claim to fame was its vast cargo bay. It could carry one hundred fifty tons inside this maw, whether that load be made of men, material or weapons. The package inside this C-5’s hold weighed less than eight hundred pounds however.

It was one of the rarest aircraft in the world. Called a FW-1 Flex Wing, it was half ultralight, half hang glider. Fifteen feet long, barely five feet wide, it was a favorite of U.S. special operations groups in the 1970s. It could carry two crewmen and up to one hundred fifty pounds of equipment. Though basically a ferry craft, it still carried admirable capabilities for maneuver and speed. This was due to its flexible kite-shaped wing. The batlike affair could be raised and lowered by the pilot at will, allowing the aircraft to either hover for long periods of time or dash ahead at a respectable eighty knots.

The FlexWing inside the C-5 hold was attached to a system of winches and rollers, the same used for loading and unloading cargo pallets aboard the airplane. Two men were already strapped into its seats. Ben Wa would be piloting the airplane; his colleague and friend, J. T. “Socket” Toomey was riding in back.

Below them now was the island of Lolita. It was almost perfectly square, about five miles on each side and surrounded by rings of glittering coral reefs. As in the recent recon photos, the island appeared completely covered with vegetation—shrubs, trees, and grass. Yet now, seeing it live, the people inside the C-5s couldn’t help but feel the jungle below them was a little too green, too cluttered to be real.

And it really was out in the middle of nowhere. There was not a surface ship or airplane anywhere within a two hundred fifty-mile radius of Lolita, a fact confirmed by the gizmo-packed
Black Eyes.
The island was about to have a couple of visitors—in the FlexWing.

The three C-5s now went into a wide orbit above Lolita, the protective Tornados following in their wake. On cue, the huge clam shell doors at the rear of the gray C-5 opened up. The hold was struck by a fierce whirlwind, everyone inside had been strapped onto long tethers, so great was the danger of being sucked out the back of the airplane.

The trio of C-5s descended to fifteen thousand feet, then ten thousand. At this point, Ben Wa started the FlexWing’s souped up two hundred ten-horsepower engine. The racket from the small engine filled the already chaotic cargo hold. Its nose pointed backward, the fumes from the engine were vented by the vacuum created by the large open doors.

The C-5s then went down to five thousand feet and adjusted their course slightly to the north. This side of the island had a small beach about a quarter mile long. With the suddenly enveloping foliage, it was the only clear area of any consequence on Lolita. If all went well, it would provide the FlexWing with a suitable landing strip.

The unmarked C-5 broke away from the others and descended to a heart-stopping altitude of fifteen hundred feet. The huge airship slowed its speed down to two hundred ten knots and banked even sharper over the north side of the island. The tethered cargo hands in the back of the airplane did a last check on the FlexWing, then with a thumbs-up from both Ben Wa and Toomey, they kicked away the FlexWing’s undercarriage restraints. With a whoosh and the snap of metal, the diminutive aircraft went right out the back of the plane.

Ben Wa gunned the Flex’s engine as soon as they were free of the C-5. It sputtered once, then easily went up to full rev. Ben did a quick visual of the plane and its controls, then pointed the nose of the Flex towards the north end of the island.

In seconds, he and JT were spiraling downward, shifting their weight this way and that, positioning the motorized kite for the best attitude for landing. Even as they rode this breathless controlled plunge, they couldn’t help but notice just how damn green everything seemed on the island below them. The closer they got to
terra firma,
the more dazzlingly emerald everything became. By the time Ben was putting the kite into its final approach, both he and Toomey knew the jungle that had so suddenly swallowed up Lolita Island was anything but ordinary.

They set down with a bang and bump, Ben steering the bucking aircraft towards the hardened edge of the narrow beach, kicking up clumps of wet sand and sea-spray in the process. They rolled to a stop in about forty-five feet, a perfect landing. The circling C-5s began drifting away, slowly moving towards the east, where they would wait while Ben and Toomey did their work. Likewise the covering Tornados zoomed up to thirty-five thousand feet They would watch over everything from this height.

It took about a minute for Ben and Toomey to pull the Flex up out of the lapping shoreline to the drier part of the beach. They did a quick check of both their primary and backup radios—the comm techs on
Black Eyes
responded in kind. Then Ben and Toomey checked their personal weapons, both M-16F2s. They, too, were in good order.

They began moving towards the jungle.

They reached the top of the sandline, climbed a coral rock and stared out at the vast swatch of foliage. The prevailing wind, providing little relief on the hot sun baking down on the vegetation, was blowing with a familiar but vague odor—and herein lay the answer to the mystery of Lolita Island.

Ben and Toomey climbed down off the rock and walked to the edge of the jungle itself. Toomey reached out and grabbed the longest branch of the first tree he came to. It literally came apart in his hand, covering his fingers with a hot, oozing substance. Ben did the same thing, grabbing a long piece of what looked like elephant grass. It, too, quickly turned into a greenish slime. They began pulling up everything they could get their hands on. Each time, the foliage practically melted away at their touch.

They finally stopped, looked at each other and began laughing. It was funny, in a very strange kind of way. Mother Nature hadn’t suddenly bestowed the green life on the isolated island; this covering was hardly natural. It was plastic—thin, delicate and extremely real-looking. The foliage, the trees, the bushes, and the fields of grass, were all fake.

They walked about ten feet into the plastic jungle, the highest plants no more than five feet above their heads. Toomey bent down and began hauling up some of the
faux
-plants by the roots. It took some doing; unlike their branches, the fake plants were literally cemented into the ground. The fake jungle was standing on a vast platform of recently poured concrete.

Wa and Toomey weren’t laughing anymore—they were just staring at each other now. The scope of what they were looking at was almost mind-boggling. Somebody—or something—had actually gone through the trouble of lugging thousands of square feet of concrete to the small island, had laid it out in a huge twenty-square-mile pattern, and had taken care to drill literally hundreds of thousands of tiny holes in the drying concrete into which each fake plastic piece of vegetation was placed.

It was an incredible notion, but after twenty minutes of wading through the stuff, Ben and Toomey were convinced that the whole island was covered this way. Lolita was a huge concrete platform in disguise. The concept was rather frightening.

They continued walking through the fake jungle, taking pictures and retrieving samples. By the time they returned to the FlexWing on the beach one hour after landing, they were pondering only two questions. One: who had the capability and the resources to build such a massive slab? It was a construction project of enormous proportions.

The second question was even more intriguing:
Why
in the world would anyone want to do such a thing?

A
S LUCK WOULD HAVE
it, the first living, breathing human being Hawk Hunter came upon after three days of driving turned out to be a naked woman.

It was midmorning. Six hours had passed since he’d crossed the twin peaks. It had been one mountain road after another until, suddenly, a huge crystalline lake appeared between the Alps. About three miles up its shoreline, rising out of the morning mist, there was a city—a real one this time. The map in his head told him he was nearing St. Moritz, the famous Swiss resort. If so, he was no more than a hundred miles from Point Zero itself.

He’d driven about a half mile along the lake’s shoreline road when he got
the feeling
—there was at least one person up ahead, and probably many more. Did this mean the city itself was populated? If so, he would have to deal with its residents very discreetly. He didn’t come all this way just to blow the mission on the wrong word said to the wrong person.

He parked the tanker trucker in a shielded wood and made his way along the edge of the shimmering, pristine lake. Staying deep in the underbrush, while keeping in sight of the road, he soon found himself climbing to the top of a massive outcrop of rock. Fifteen feet below was a small, snow-encrusted beach. And there she was. Swimming, alone, in the frigid waters of an Alpine lake, a beautiful, naked girl.

She was blond, slight, and doing a languid backstroke about twenty feet out from the shore, totally unaware of his presence. Hunter was distracted for a few seconds, unable to take his eyes off her gently moving form. She was gliding so smoothly through the placid waters, it was exhilarating just to watch her. Her hair was flowing behind her as if in slow motion, her body wet, silky, pert, and hairless. Hunter felt his heart deliver three massive beats. In that one, quick, strange moment, he realized that she might be the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

He quickly shook himself back to the matter at hand; he really had no time for this. He could see the city finally emerging from the thick morning mist about two miles up the shoreline and exuding many signs of civilization. The place was alive, populated—he was sure of that now. But more than warm bodies and naked flesh lay up ahead of him. There was the barest trace of aviation fuel in the air. One sniff and Hunter knew that an airplane of some kind was also close by.

His attention drifted back to the naked girl—and, still hidden, he found himself taking the outrageous luxury of the next two minutes just to watch her. At first, he tried to tell himself that this “recon” was necessary; after all, shouldn’t he learn everything about her, so he would have some kind of idea exactly what kind of people were up ahead? But in the next breath, he was laughing to himself, not in humor but in surprise. This was not intelligence gathering he was engaging in here—it was blatant voyeurism. He’d seen a million naked women in his time and just about all of them had made him shake. But he usually knew when to turn it off and get his big head thinking again.