Target: Point Zero (2 page)

A silence descended on the room. Outside the monsoon continued to roar. Every man involved knew that in saving JAWS, the Tommies had rescued one of their own family. There was no way they could turn down their request for aid. From a contingency standpoint, getting some eyes and ears on the ground on Lolita Island wouldn’t be that hard. The C-5 fleet had many options to turn to for such a long-range spy mission.

The problem was that, though the men sitting around the table were well-known for the countless acts of bravery and gallantry in the name of liberty, the group was not complete. Their key member was not among them. Hawk Hunter, AKA the Wingman, had taken off, alone, from Da Nang a little more than seventy-two hours earlier—and no one had heard from him since. They didn’t know where he was or even if he was still alive. This cast a disturbing pall over the proceedings.

But, like always, the group pressed on. They discussed the situation with the Tommies and Lolita Island further and decided they would lend a hand and send a spy team to the isolated island.

But in approving the mission, each man knew that this type of thing always went better when Hunter was involved.

And each man couldn’t help but wonder exactly where their friend was at the moment….

Central Europe

T
HE HUGE TANKER TRUCK
was out of control.

It was skidding down the winding, slippery, barely paved mountain road, tires squealing, brakes smoking, huge clouds of exhaust belching from its twin stacks. It was traveling so close to the edge of the roadway, the rear wheels were sliding out over the ledge on every turn. Trying to recover, the truck would fishtail left, slamming its undercarriage into the mountain wall on the opposite side of the road. With six thousand gallons of gasoline sloshing around in each of its two tanks, it appeared the truck would come to a fiery end at any moment.

But appearances can be deceiving.

The truck was not in trouble. In fact, its driver knew exactly how fast he could go down the steep, icy roadway, how sharp he could turn, how much deceleration he would need to counteract any skidding, all while maintaining a high rate of speed. He’d driven the truck over dozens of mountains in the past forty-eight hours, all of them in the exact same fashion: fast and with controlled abandon. This one was no different.

Hawk Hunter was behind the wheel of the big tanker. He’d been pushing the double-loaded Benz-fueler for two days now, growing colder and more tired with each mile. He’d seen no other human beings in that time; he’d passed no fuel stops, no outposts of civilization, either in the mountains or on the vast stretches of wasteland in between. This part of Europe—last known as the Austrian Free Zone—had been desolate for years. Across the bleak landscape, the gray-slate sky changed only when night fell. When he wasn’t going over mountains, the road was unrelentingly straight and empty.

Good thing he didn’t have to worry about running out of gas.

He’d found the tanker truck in a deserted fuel depot outside the Russian city of Baikonur the morning before last. Baikonur was the site of the old Russian government’s “Star City,” a socialist’s version of Cape Canaveral. Many spacecraft, manned and otherwise, had been launched from Baikonur during and after the Cold War. It was the home of Soyez, the Mir and Sputnik. It was where some cosmonauts spent their entire lives. The place was thought to have been abandoned shortly after the Big War.

But just seventy-two hours ago, a spacecraft had roared off the main pad at Star City. Hunter had seen it go up. It was a space shuttle, a crude but apparently workable Russian version designed to look exactly like the once-famous American craft.

The sight of it rising into space had been haunting him unmercilessly ever since.

He had been drawn to Baikonur from the recent war in Southeast Asia, arriving in a Galaxy C-5 cargoship just minutes before the Russian shuttle went up. From the little he had seen of it, he knew the spacecraft was probably a second-generation Russian design known as the Zon. Supposedly it had never gone beyond the planning stage. But obviously, at least one had been built—and from what Hunter could tell, it seemed to be a vast improvement over the original all-thumbs unmanned Russian shuttle craft known as the Buron.

The Zon’s leap into space was a stunning turn of events for Hunter and his colleagues. It had taken five years of struggle in America just for them to put together a credible air force. Now, for someone to actually launch a shuttle was a gigantic step forward, no matter who was at the controls. But here was the really bad news: Hunter had seen at least a dozen people getting on the Zon spacecraft before it went up. One of them was no less than the world’s most wanted criminal, an individual going by the name of Viktor Robotov.

This in itself was very strange. Everyone thought the real Viktor Robotov was dead. In fact, Hunter, himself, had seen him the in the sands of the Saudi Arabian desert, not three years before. Or at least he
thought
he’d seen him die. This “new” Viktor not only looked and acted like the original, he was also just as bloodthirsty, cunning and savage—if indeed they were two different people. Demented and perverse, right down to the Satanic facial features and the devilish goatee, Viktor was responsible for a number of small wars that had flared up around the troubled globe, mostly in the Pacific of late. His methods were always the same: gather together a large number of unscrupulous, cultish mercenary forces, give them a wealth of military hardware and let them loose on the innocent, unsuspecting and helpless peoples of the targeted region. Distress, anguish and death would quickly follow.

Why was Viktor doing this? No one really knew. There was little to gain tactically or strategically from these actions—in fact, Hunter and the United Americans had soundly defeated two separate legions of these mercenary armies in just the past few months. Whoever the hell this Viktor was, winning in a military sense meant little to him. He seemed bent on one thing: creating havoc and misery on a planet that needed no more of either.

And now he was in space.

It was this thought alone that was driving Hunter faster than the five hundred and two cubic-inch engine under his truck’s hood. Big as the place was, he’d not been able to find any jet fuel for his G-5 anywhere in Star City—even worse, he had wasted many hours in trying. He did, however, find this truck, with all its stale gasoline, and had laid claim to it immediately. That had been two days ago. He’d been driving like a madman ever since.

He’d only been a few hundred yards away from the pad when the Zon went up—he’d emptied a clip from his M-16 into it as it rose into the heavens. But if he had caused any damage to the damn thing, he’d found no evidence of it later. The shuttle went straight up and then over, just like it was supposed to, quickly disappearing from his view. It was a flawless launch and now he had no doubt that the Zon was up there, somewhere, traveling around the earth, carrying at least one pair of eyes that were looking down on the battered planet and thinking of more insidious ways to fuck it up.

But in firing his M-16 at the launching Zon, Hunter had had more in mind than just shooting it down. By tracking the trajectory of his bullet stream against the trajectory of the rising spacecraft, he’d been able to calculate the Zon’s acceleration, its rate of climb, its angle of flight and apparent attitude, and hence, its expected point of departure from Earth’s atmosphere and its insertion into orbit. From this, Hunter had determined the Zon’s probable orbital status and flight path. If he had added everything up correctly, the Russian shuttle was 127.550 miles above the earth, flying an orbit that brought it roughly fifty-one degrees above the equator and forty-two below.

From all this, he’d come up with a coordinate, a spot on the map he’d termed Point Zero. It was located more than two thousand miles west of Star City, somewhere deep in the Swiss Alps. From this place, he’d determined, he’d be able to see the Zon go over as many as seventeen times in one clear twenty-four-hour-period, including dusk, night or even early daylight, if he could get high enough, at the right angle and know exactly where to look. In that was born his current plan. If he could get to Point Zero, and take these observations, or even see the Zon go over just once, Hunter hoped he’d be able to learn something very important about the spacecraft: when it would be coming back down to Earth—and where.

If all this was made known to him, then he’d vowed to be on hand wherever the Zon landed, and personally deal with Viktor, once and for all.

It seemed like a fool’s quest though.

The two thousand-mile dash in the beat-up Benz tanker alone qualified for some degree of madness, never mind expecting to find a near-mythical spot from which he could look into outer space.

But Hunter was always doing things like this. His intellectual capabilities were beyond quantum, his adventuresome spirit more intense than anyone who’d passed before. He was, no argument, the best fighter pilot who’d ever lived. He was possibly the best military strategist to ever come along as well. His mind was not simply some kind of an organic supercomputer: it
corrected
supercomputers. His ability, in flight, to anticipate the realities of the human-combat-flying experience was eerie. He knew trouble was coming anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes before it actually arrived, a rather frightening talent. But most importantly, he was also a cosmically lucky man: he’d fought in nearly a dozen armed conflicts in the last five years—and had come through all of them with hardly a scratch. All the smarts in the world couldn’t explain that.

But his goals were also immense. He wanted no less than a world in which every human being was able to make his own decisions and forge his own destiny, without interference from demagogues and power-mad personality freaks bent on fucking it up for everyone else. Five years of hard-fought combat and intense intrigue had finally brought a somewhat stable state of affairs to his beloved American continent. Just how long the export version of this noble cause would take was unknowable.

Two months before, after receiving an urgent call for assistance from the countries of Southeast Asia, Hunter had organized the large air fleet of C-5 Galaxy cargo jets, outfitted them into combat aircraft and had led them clear around the world to once again come to the defense of a struggling Vietnam. That war ended just a week ago. His comrades, as well as the majority of the air fleet were still there, keeping a shaky peace. When Hunter discovered a homing device that would lead him to Viktor, he’d outfitted it on one of the C-5s and hours later, found himself in Star City. After the Zon launch, anyone left on the ground got out of town real quick, because the place was deserted when Hunter began his search for jet fuel. Finding none, he intentionally wrecked the C-5 on the airport’s longest runway, blowing large craters in it and leaving it fouled for some time to come. At least he knew the Zon would not be coming down there.

So now here he was—driving across the endless barren landscape, growing cold, growing tired, getting hungry, just driving towards Point Zero, from where he could plot his next move. And like many of his important journeys in the past, he was taking this one alone.

At last, the truck reached the bottom of the treacherous mountain roadway and now settled itself onto a long stretch of absolutely straight highway. If Hunter’s recall of the area was correct, the road would run like this now for the next one hundred and forty-eight miles.

With this in mind, he pressed down on the accelerator with even more gusto, raising the big truck’s speed over one hundred ten mph.

He still had many miles to go before he could sleep.

Hunter thought he was dreaming when he first saw the Alps.

One moment, he was rolling along the frozen, barren plain—the next, the mountains were suddenly there, rising out of the haze on the western horizon. These peaks were much higher, much steeper than what he’d been schlepping over the past two days. Like teeth on a massive, snowcapped jigsaw, they stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see.

Hunter tried to conjure up a map of the region in his head. This was probably the
Zillershausen Alpen,
he figured, the first line of western Alps. This meant he was somewhere in central Austria, about one hundred fifty miles from the old Swiss border and more than three-quarters of the way to his destination.

But though it should have been a moment of triumph, Hunter let out a sad whistle as soon as he saw the mountains.
How things change,
he thought. Sure, he’d driven from the steppes of Russia to the foot of the Alps in one long dash, probably setting some kind of transcontinental land-speed record for heavy trucks in the process. Had he made the trip in his usual mode of transportation—his souped up F-16XL Cranked Arrow superfighter—the whole thing would have taken less than an hour.

He drove on for another thirty miles or so, wearily shifting his tired butt around in the uncomfortable seat every few seconds. The Alpine peaks gradually filled his windshield; it was scary how high and jagged they were. The road was leading right towards two peaks in particular, both of which were so immense, they’d blotted out the late afternoon sun a long time ago. The shadow caused by these monsters made it seem like it was night already.

He negotiated a long bend in the road and only then did he realize that there was a small city nestled at the base of the gigantic twin peaks. Even from five miles away, to Hunter’s tired eyes, this place looked different from the dozens of other empty cities he’d passed along the way. Though just as dark and cold as they were, looking at it through the dirty windshield was almost hypnotic. He was warm inside for a moment, a sensation he didn’t experience too often.

He brought the truck to a stop at the side of the road about two miles from the outskirts of the city. Finally killing the big engine for the first time in fifty-one hours, he sat inside the chilly cab, soaking in the stupendous scenery and paying close attention to the small settlement just ahead. It could have been a postcard for the Alps: a collection of chalets and quaint Alpine buildings with the twin peaks soaring dramatically in the background. It was incredible. Hunter believed he could never get tired of looking at it.