Target: Point Zero (17 page)

Chloe was leaning over this man now, cooing about his welts and injuries. To the reawakened technician, this was all like a dream. One moment he was unconscious, the next he was being beaten and kicked, and now he was looking into the face of an angel—one who was wearing a low-cut, ebony ski-bunny suit.

“Let me help you up,” she said, gently pulling him to his feet. She began kissing his wounds passionately, stunning all three of them. The third man especially couldn’t believe what was happening—but then it began to sink in. The other two had brought back a hooker with them. An unbelievably gorgeous one.

“So
this
is what you won in town?” he asked them between Chloe’s tongue-lashing kisses.

The two men quickly eyed each other. One winked; the other displayed a sinister smile.

“It is,” he replied. “At the poker table. She’s better than money. As you’ll soon find out.”

The third man, soaking wet, bleeding slightly and massively hung over, just shook his head. Chloe was practically wrapping herself around him now. Her warm body instantly dissipated the chill from his.
Maybe he was dead,
he thought,
and this was Heaven. Or maybe he was still dreaming. Or maybe he was just still high.

But he was also very suspicious.

“What do you mean I’ll soon find out?” he asked the other two.

“We mean you can have her first,” one of his colleagues replied. “With our compliments.”

He eyed both of them cautiously, his eyes watering with distrust.

“Really? I can go first?”

“Yes, take her,” the second man insisted, “Pave the way for us, so to speak…”

The two men eyed each other again. Yes, it was time for this clown to go. Slowly and painfully. And when that happened, the girl would have to go, too.

But, first they wanted to count their money.

“Take her to your room and warm yourself up,” they told him. “Tell us how she is…”

As excited as he was, the third man just couldn’t believe all this. He was suddenly very frightened of the other two. But then he looked at Chloe and she at him and he realized that she was so fucking beautiful, it would be worth the risk, whatever the other two were planning.

So he foolishly began leading her towards his sleeping quarters. Ever-so-willing to please, Chloe went without a hint of resistance.

“See you in a couple of hours,” he told the other two warily.

“Sure thing,” one of them replied. “Take your time.”

The top of the Point Zero tracking station’s dome was exactly 15,835 feet above sea level, just five feet short of three miles up.

But the peak of the mountain called
Niedencastel
was actually thirty-two feet higher than that, due to a crag that jutted out just above the northwest corner of the building’s bubble-top.

This outcrop protected the dome somewhat from the fierce winds blowing out of the north. It was so blustery on the peak there was no snow—the wind had been blowing it away for eons, gradually wearing down the rocks in the process as well.

All in all it was a very inhospitable place. Still, it was about as close as you could get to the stars in this part of the world, and here, tucked into a crevice at the top of the crag, was Hawk Hunter, battling the wind and the cold, his eyes lifted heavenward.

It was now about 0545 hours—quarter to six in the morning, and about twenty-five minutes away from sunrise. Despite the harsh, arctic-like conditions, Hunter felt a faint throb of warm satisfaction beating in his chest. His calculations had told him that there must be a tracking facility at Point Zero, and here it was. Because of the angles, it was undoubtedly the best place in Europe, if not the world, to see the Zon go over and to view it for the longest time. So his long drive, and the adventures he’d experienced both awake and asleep, had been worth it. Thus, the spark of heat radiating from his rib cage. At last, it was time to turn the page and get on with the rest of the story.

He did have some idea of the last time the Zon had passed over. Computing back from when he watched it lift off, then factoring in its speed and a number of projected daily orbits, he guessed it had gone over Point Zero about sixty-eight minutes ago. This meant it should be passing overhead again inside the next quarter hour. He intended to stay right where he was until it did.

Following the two mooks to Point Zero had been easy. Fueled by greed, distracted by lust, they had taken no care at all to check if they were being followed. By alternately gliding and reviving his plane’s engine every few seconds or so, Hunter had tracked them without incident all the way to the top of the mountain. He had spotted the dome and its antenna headdress as far as twenty-five miles away.

The nearby lake had provided the perfect landing area for the Macchi seaplane as a large portion of its center was essentially ice-free. Hunter set the racer down like he was landing on glass, taxiing into a conveniently hidden cove, one which would render the airplane practically invisible from all directions.

It had taken him less than thirty minutes to scale the remaining one thousand feet to the top of the mountain, an amazingly easy ascent. There was a reason for this though: the mountain was lousy with work roads and pathways to the summit, the result of their fairly recent construction. Hunter simply picked the most direct one, and double-timed it to the top.

Now he was here, a snowball’s throw away from the front door of the dome, his ears peeled for any sound of Chloe coming from inside, his eyes staring up at the awesome array of stars and planets floating over his head.

He couldn’t help but get contemplative—staring out at the Universe did that to him. Though he had led a dangerous and complicated life, Hunter had to admit he’d completed many of the lofty goals he’d set out for himself. He’d helped free the American continent finally—and in this he took the greatest personal satisfaction. He’d put together a team of loyal, professional and astute soldiers to secure that peace, and a well-armed, well-trained army and air force to protect it. These, too, were proud accomplishments.

But there was one mad dream he had yet to fulfill, one that up until the moment a few days ago when he saw the Zon go up, he’d considered impossible in this chaotic, confused world.

This was his dream to one day fly in space. He had come damned close once. Just months before the Big War broke out, he’d been selected for space shuttle training. He’d been just days away from his first shuttle flight when the balloon went up. In the ensuing years of anarchy and combat in America, he’d all but given up on ever going up—it seemed like the technology curve would just take too long to regain the point of launching shuttles again.

So it was one of the supreme ironies of his life that his most-despised enemy—or at least someone using his name and personage—would get him dreaming about going into space again. Seeing the Zon go up, knowing it held Viktor and a band of his cohorts had been a disheartening moment—but the Wingman was nothing if not resilient. He was an expert at finding the tiniest sliver of silver lying behind the greatest, blackest cloud. This time it came to him very simply: If Viktor could fly in space, why couldn’t he? If Viktor’s minions were smart enough—or was it
dumb
enough?—to light a shuttle, then certainly Hunter and his gang could do it, too, even if they had to steal Viktor’s spaceship to do it.

He laughed out loud now anytime he thought back to the crazy dream he’d had back in the cab of the tanker truck. Biplanes against a shuttle? Now there was a vision for the cover of a cheap paperback. But maybe there was a message in there, too. Just like the Nazis were responsible for putting NASA on the moon, maybe Viktor would lead the democratic forces in America back into space.

But there was still a long road to go.

Hunter checked the western horizon and figured he still had about twelve minutes before the Zon would pass over. But it would prove to be eleven minutes and fifty-five seconds too long, for Hunter found his thoughts plunging from their dizzying heights and landing smack dab and hard on top of the big dome before him.

It was, of course, the Chloe problem again. If he stared long enough at the tracking station’s ivory, spherical shape, he believed he would be able to see right through it, maybe into a room directly below him where Chloe was on her knees performing every gyration of the world’s second-most popular sex act. It was more than a bit difficult for him to think about what she might be doing in there. Sure, her sudden inclusion in the high-stakes game had actually worked to his advantage. She certainly provided a distraction for the two men as they drove back to the mountain—and she was probably keeping them quite busy now, again all the better for him. But he felt his mouth going dry at the very thought of it. What he had seen. What he had heard. He feared he would never get it out of his mind. Not even if he wanted to.

He turned away from the dome and into the wind and let the frigid gale blow him back to reality. He would have to take in a lot of things in the amount of time that the Zon was in view. Once it was gone, he would have an ever-shrinking time span figuring out exactly what this data told him. Hopefully what he saw would be enough to guide him further towards the twin holy grails of this trip: where the shuttle would be coming down and when.

Only then could he think about rescuing Chloe—if she needed to be rescued, that is.

Five minutes to go. He bundled up against the howling wind.
Just where would the shuttle be coming down?
He really didn’t have a clue at this point. He had already influenced its landing site to a degree by so thoroughly fouling the runway at Star City. But how big of an effect would this have? Like all shuttle flights, he was sure the Zon had a number of back-up sites at which to land in an emergency. All you really needed was a runway that was at least twelve thousand, five hundred feet long.

While flying around in orbit might not be as much of a tricky business as it seemed, coming back down certainly was. Once the people inside the Zon realized that the runway at Star City was not an option, they would have to find an alternate landing area that was still in their reentry path, with no more than a fifteen-degree swing either way. Now there were probably a half dozen airports somewhere in a band stretching from the immediate European neighborhood all the way to Asia and the Pacific with the extra-long runway needed to land the Zon. But who was controlling these bases? Were they all loyal to Viktor, either by money or fear?

Hunter was banking that they were not—and if this was true, it meant that once the emergency landing site
was
selected, Viktor would probably have to buy some mercenary forces on the QT and dash them to the landing place so they could secure it before the Zon came down.

But if Hunter arrived first, then…

Two minutes to go. He stepped back out into the roaring wind and began adjusting his eyes to the deep black sky and the massive carousel of stars above. It wouldn’t be easy picking out a reflection in all that starlight—he would have to let it all burn into his retinas, memorizing it, so something moving through the field of burning specks would be evident right away.

One minute to go. He pulled his collar closer to his neck, and yanked his helmet further down on his head. Though his flight suit was minimally heated via a battery pack, it was just enough to prevent him from freezing to death and nothing more. Thirty seconds to go. A huge gust of wind nearly sent him flying down the side of the cliff. Despite the freezing bluster, he couldn’t deny that there was still a warm feeling welling up inside him. Space, baby. The Final Frontier. It was inhabited by human beings again, as despicable as they were.

And now he wanted to go there more than ever.

Ten seconds. He squinted now, locking his eyes on the northwestern horizon. Suddenly he could feel it. A wave of psychic energy washed right through him. At that instant he knew all his calculations had indeed been right.

He saw it a second later.

It was just a faint light at first. Bluish in the haze at the far edge of the horizon, growing white as it approached. His breath caught in his throat as it came more clearly into his view. He had to take a moment to admire the damn thing. There was a certain amount of credit to be given to Viktor’s blow boys in all this. After all, they were up there and Hunter was still down here.

Another gust of wind yanked him back to reality again. Now the wheels in his head began turning in earnest. He glued his eyes on to the thin point of light as it rose twenty degrees above the azimuth. Speed, angle of flight, even its luminosity were all taken in by his brain and absorbed, filling his short-term memory banks with more numbers than could be spun out on a small computer.

It was heading right for him, moving swift and silently through the starry ocean.
Son-of-a-bitch,
he thought,
that must be a gas.
He began craning his neck as it raced to a point right over his head. Preliminary stuff was coming in now: the Zon was one hundred and fifteen and three-tenths miles straight up. Velocity was 15,672 miles per hour. Its mean orbital path was deteriorating at a constant rate equal to (x = y (b) and it was most definitely heading towards the southeast. It was all just as Hunter thought. The thing had reached space all right, but had found itself in a rather clumsy orbit. It was, in effect, wobbling through space, as opposed to speeding through it. This was the last piece of evidence Hunter needed to figure out along what reentry corridor the spaceship would be coming down.

Suddenly a huge strobe light located beneath the crown of the dome came to life. Its mad flickering gave everything within sight a bizarre fractured look. The light was so intense, Hunter could hardly look at it. He knew at that moment, the characters in the Zon were looking down at Point Zero, perhaps comforted by its nonverbal message that everything was still okay here, down on earth, as misleading as that message might be at the moment.

Hunter looked back up, instantly picking up the Zon’s reflection again. It was going away from him now, a last second stutter in its path telling him that it would be coming down soon—maybe within the next twenty-four hours, and certainly no more than forty-eight. He felt another surge of excitement run through him. Part Two of this little jaunt was soon to start. As the Zon disappeared over the southeastern horizon, he knew that he’d been able to capture more than enough data to figure out along what path it was most likely to attempt an emergency landing.