Target: Point Zero (22 page)

Even though Gin had been put off at first after hearing about all the attention Chloe had received when she arrived down on the beach, they’d become instant friends, as all girls their age seemed to have an ability to do. They’d talked while Chloe bathed and climbed into her borrowed clothes, and the chat had continued nonstop as they ate the spare but nutritious meal.

Still, Chloe knew that Gin was terribly worried—her fiancé was one of the city’s defenders, an officer assigned to an outlying AA crew. Gin had not heard from him since the bombing raids started early that morning. She
had
heard reports that some of the AA crews had been hit with antiradar missiles and that there were casualties at some of the posts. She was terrified that her boyfriend might have been among those killed.

So it was a joyous occasion when he suddenly walked through the door, slightly burned, dirty and sporting a large bump on his head, but all in all in good shape.

Gin was immediately reduced to tears as she leaped into his arms and flooded him with kisses. He responded in kind—he’d been worried all day that she, too, had been killed in the bombing raids. Now they were together again.

Still embracing, still kissing, they moved across the kitchen and onto the small couch just off the pantry. Gin’s boyfriend, Gozo, was overcome with relief now. He was pleading with Gin to marry him, quickly, tonight even, so they could at last be joined for eternity. Gin was much too emotional to reply; she was still sobbing and hugging him tightly even as her dress was slipping off her shoulders.

Somewhere an explosion went off—it came from a few blocks away, probably a previously unexploded bomb. It shook the building slightly, but made absolutely no impression on Gozo and Gin. They continued kissing each other lustily, shouting declarations of love back and forth with increasing gusto. Quite quickly these professions of love turned amorous. Gozo ripped away what was left of Gin’s blouse; she pulled his service shirt from him. Gozo undid her belt and tossed her skirt aside; Gin yanked Gozo’s trousers to his ankles.

Both of them were panting now, rocking back and forth on the couch, completely caught up in their happy, sexual moment. Gin was now pleading with Gozo to make love to her even as he was asking her permission to do so.

“I don’t know how I could love you more!” Gozo shouted to her.

“No, I don’t know how
I
could show
you!
” she groaned in reply.

With that, they both tore away what was left of their underwear and began the final approach. But suddenly, they were aware of someone standing over them.

It was Chloe. She was naked and panting, too.

“Excuse me,” she said breathlessly. “May I make a suggestion?”

Both Bear bombers were still aflame by the time Hunter, Baldi and a contingent of MDF security troops reached the airport.

The expansive field, once operated by the RAF, had been cordoned off shortly after the two enemy airplanes came down. Hunter, Baldi and six special policemen would be the first then to examine the wreckage.

It was not a small part of his dream that came back to Hunter as he stepped from Baldi’s jeep and walked slowly towards the crumpled back of the first Bear bomber. He almost had to laugh. The Bear had been designed in the late forties; the Heinkel 111 of his dream in the mid-to-late-thirties.

Only off by a decade or so, he thought.

The rear gunner was still inside his weapons capsule, strapped in and bleeding, his neck broken. The midsection of the monstrous airplane had all but burned away. Through its skeleton, Hunter could see a rack full of un-exploded bombs and two more horribly burned bodies. He climbed over the twisted left wing, taking special note of the buckled jet-prop blades—this was evidence of the strain put on the massive engines as they unsuccessfully tried to regain level flight after Hunter had flown the seaplane so close to them he’d disrupted their forward airflow.

He climbed down from the wing and up to the crumpled cockpit. Both pilots were still strapped into their seats, huge fatal gashes cut out of their chests. The bodies of the four remaining crewmen were all lying on the runway nearby. They, too, were burned and horribly wounded, but they had all managed to get out of the airplane before expiring. The way they were lined up, it appeared as if they’d tried to crawl off towards the lights of the city, as if they believed they’d be able to find refuge there. Very odd….

The front of the blue Tu-95 was painted in a garish application of nose art. It was practically impossible to understand what all the graffiti-like swirls and nonsensical lettering meant, but below this Day-Glo mess was one word written in decipherable English. It was the plane’s nickname:
Pterodactyl.

Baldi threw up a security ring around the downed bomber, then walked up beside Hunter.

“So, where did it come from, Hawk?”

Hunter shrugged a little, then said: “Let’s try to find out.”

They walked over to the right outboard engine. Of the four, this one had been damaged the least. He reached deep inside its cowling and took a finger’s worth of grease from the back of the lower turbo-charger. Pulling it out, he examined it briefly by the light of the smoldering fire and then put it to his tongue.

“This plane flew about an hour to get here,” he declared. “Seventy minutes tops. I’d say, taking into account time to take off, form up, and then fly here, they came from about a hundred miles away.”

Baldi was shaking his head.

“That proves it,” he said. “They came down from Sicily. From Syracuse.”

They drove up to the second wreck and did another quick but thorough inspection.

Hunter’s findings here only confirmed his previous guess. The planes were definitely mercenary craft and they had definitely come from someplace nearby. This was very important information for him—and for the plan he was formulating.

“So, now we know where,” Baldi said as they finished looking over the second crashed jet. “But what about the ‘why’?”

“I think I know why,” Hunter told him starkly.

He stepped away from the wrecked jet and looked down the extra-long runway. If his memory served him,

Malta at one time had served as an RAF refueling base as well as one for heavy bombers. As such, its runways were extra long—the main one was nearly three miles in length, with a vast expanse of flat, hard, sand and rock bordering both ends. It was certainly big enough to handle the heaviest bombers the RAF ever employed.

It was also big enough to land a space shuttle.

That’s when he pulled Baldi aside and told him everything. Star City. St. Moritz. Point Zero. The Zon going over—and his guess as to when it would be coming down.

“They wanted to land here,” he told Baldi. “They wanted to burn you out first, and then come in and take over.”

Baldi stared back at him, his expression turning from one of astonishment, to confusion, and finally anger.

“They wanted to kill all my people just so they could land their spaceship here?”

Hunter nodded solemnly. “They’d bring it down, hold the city until a heavy-lift aircraft could get in here, and then take it out piggyback. They would have probably come and gone in forty-eight hours, maybe less.”

Baldi was absolutely fuming.

“Those bastards,” he cursed, angrily taking off his helmet. It attacked all of his sensibilities that he, his people and his country, would be used, abused and wiped out simply so some madman could land his trophy spacecraft.

He looked back towards the city of Valletta, columns of smoke still rising above it.

“I will find the person responsible for this and kill him,” he vowed, his teeth clenched, his words seething.

Hunter clapped him on the back, calming him down a bit.

“We’ll both find him, my friend,” he said.

The first place Hunter went when he returned to town was the house belonging to Gin, Baldi’s niece.

He was surprised when they rolled up in front of the place and found the squad of soldiers left behind were nowhere in sight. Sitting behind the wheel of the jeep, Baldi’s weapon was out in a flash—he suspected something was afoul.

But Hunter indicated the MDF leader could put his weapon away. There was trouble, all right—but not the kind that Baldi suspected.

Hunter asked his friend to remain in the jeep while he climbed out and bounced up the stairs to Gin’s second floor living area. He came upon three of the guards sitting on the steps, casually smoking cigarettes and jiving with each other.

They froze at the sight of him, like kids caught playing hooky. He dispelled their concerns with one wave of his hand. He had no complaint with them. If what he suspected was actually going on, well, he couldn’t really blame them for leaving their posts.

He climbed up the last set of stairs where he found three more of the guards standing next to a recently painted green door. They were not smoking, nor were they joshing with each other. They were obviously waiting to go inside the apartment, the place where Gin, Gozo and Chloe were. All soldiers seemed tense, though not in an uncomfortable way.
Anxious
was more like it.

Like their colleagues, they, too, froze at the sight of Hunter bounding up the creaky wooden steps. One look at him and they knew that
he
knew exactly what was going on behind the green door. A wave of disappointment washed across all three of them. It was like a large bubble had burst Sullenly but quickly, they left, slinking down the stairs, grumbling at the bad timing of the situation.

Hunter went through the green door a moment later—and found exactly what he thought he would find.

The other four guards were inside; as was Gin, her boyfriend and, of course, Chloe. She was lying on the couch near the pantry, naked and sweaty. Gin was sitting beside her, clinging to her exhausted Gozo, both collapsed into a deep sleep.

The four soldiers were all in some sort of undress. One was completely pantless, the three others were wearing underwear, moist though it was. Chloe looked simply enraptured. She was writhing around on the couch, alternately hugging Gin and the guards. The smell of the place told of heavy, recent lovemaking.

Everyone turned towards Hunter as he came in through the door. At first they all greeted him loudly—but again, one look in his eyes and they all very quickly knew it was time to go. The soldiers departed, one at a time, all of them waiting until they were outside to climb back into their clothes.

Once they were gone, Hunter slowly walked over to the couch and took a long gaze at Chloe. She was upside down, smiling innocently up at him. On the floor in front of her was a battalion of used condoms. Gin was awake and looking up at Hunter, too, but she could see he was less than approving of what he’d walked in on.

With much effort, she was able to rouse Gozo and drag him from the room, closing the green door behind them.

Now it was just Hunter and Chloe.

She turned right side up and giggled.

“Well, what do you think of all this? Cool, huh?”

Hunter started to say something but caught himself at the last moment. Once again, he was tongue-tied.
What could he say to her?

He took off his helmet, unstrapped his ammo belt and rifle. Then he sat down next to her and ran his hands over his suddenly tired face and head.

“What’s the matter?” she asked him, authentically puzzled. “Did I do something wrong?”

He looked over at her—the beautiful face, the naked wet body. But still, he remained silent.

She was growing concerned now. She reached up and grabbed him tightly.

“Tell me, please, Hawk,” she pleaded with him. “What’s the matter?
Did I do something wrong?
”

But all Hunter could do was stare back at her.

“I don’t know,” he finally managed to croak. “I
really
don’t know…”

T
HESE DAYS IT WAS
called
Siracusa.

Located on the southeast coast of Sicily, it was an opulent, seaside paradise, lorded over by members of the most prominent crime families in postwar Europe.

These characters had turned Siracusa into a mercenary’s dream. An entire city filled with barrooms, eateries, gambling halls, and brothels. Everyone had money, and anyone who didn’t, could earn some real quick. No less than seven armies—a total of twenty-one divisions—of hired soldiers were encamped around the city, most of them up in the hills to the north. A large, ever-changing mercenary fleet of warships—destroyers, minesweepers, fast-attack boats—were crowded inside the protected harbor. The officer corps for all this lived in the villas and grand hotels lining the main boulevards of the city.

The centerpiece of this corporate-warrior heaven was located ten miles to the west, in a place known appropriately enough as
Vallo del Mazzio Corleone.
To say this place was an airport was like saying the Mediterranean was a puddle. There were no less than thirty-two runways, six control towers, fifty miles of taxiways and more than two hundred hangars and maintenance barns, both big and small. The fuel depot alone covered nearly a half-mile square. The ammunition bunker was nearly as big.

The business at Vallo del Mazzio Corleone was aerial bombardment. Strategic, tactical, sneak attack, fire bombing—the planes at Vallo del Mazzio Corleone, or more simply “Vallo Mazz,” could do it all. There were more than eight hundred bombers operating out of Vallo Mazz at any given moment. The main fleet line was made up of two hundred thirty reconditioned Tu-95 Bear bombers, the same prophet powerhouses that had bombed Malta the day before. Second-of-the-line were one hundred slightly smaller Bison bombers, they, like the Bears, being of early-Soviet design, There was also a similar number of Xian H-6s, Chinese-built rip-offs of the Russian Tu-16 bomber.

For special high-priority operations, the corporation at Vallo Mazz had fifty-five high tech, swing-wing Backfire bombers, backed up by twice as many Mirage IVAs. The rest of the fleet consisted of Tu-22 Blinders, several old South African Vulcans, and three squadrons of old prop medium-size attack bombers, including B-25s, B-26s and a handful of Transail C-160s, converted into gunships.