Target: Point Zero (25 page)

They’d been holding in a ten-mile orbital pattern off the Filipino island of Tatota since before zero six hundred hours that morning; it was now almost three in the afternoon. They’d already refueled in the air twice, and as the prospect for yet another gassing was coming up, the airplane’s radio man was trying frantically to contact one of the several freelance flying gas stations known to serve this part of the globe.

The problem was the price went up with each minute the giant cargo ship drew nearer to empty. These days, negotiations for an aerial drink skyrocketed the closer the fuel-starved plane got to a bingo situation. The in-flight refueling bandits were in no hurry to answer the Condor’s calls; they preferred to make their customers sweat a little first, a brutal fact of supply and demand at thirty-five thousand feet.

The Antonov crew were themselves freelancers; this particular Condor was outfitted to carry a SEXX, a special-external/extra, as in extra-heavy payloads. The Condor was essentially a gigantic aerial tow truck. Its specialty was picking up broken or damaged warplanes, bombers mostly, strapping them on to its back and flying them to a destination for repair.

They’d been contracted for this particular mission around 11 P.M. the night before. Leaving their island base off Brunei, they’d reached this coordinate as instructed just after sunrise, to await further instructions. They’d been going around in circles ever since.

They had no idea if there was a problem or what was causing the delay—they’d received nothing other than a single radio message two hours back telling them to hold their position. They didn’t know who had hired them—the deal had gone through an Indonesian middleman—or what they were expected to carry. All they knew was they’d get paid the minimum whether the mission was brought to the second stage or not.

It was now growing on fifteen hundred hours, and the big Soviet-designed cargo plane was nearing its bingo point once again. Once the gas light flashed red, the cargo plane would have just enough fuel left to get back to its base. If that happened, everyone onboard knew it would be a bitch to get paid at all. Contractors could always wiggle-out of a no-show bingo clause. They could always say, hey, we showed up, with a lot of gas for you and you were gone.

So the crew of the Condor were torn: should they buy some more fuel from one of the robber gas merchants and hang around a little longer? Or should they just say fuck it and go home?

In the end, they decided to stay. The contract had called for a ten-percent overpayment for a timely mission; this told the eleven crewmen that their employer had deep pockets, someone who could afford to have the largest airplane in the world circle endlessly around an isolated patch of ocean, chewing up time at more than ten thousand dollars an hour.

Finally, they made a deal with a refueling outfit out of Mindoro. Ten minutes later an ancient British-built Handley-Page Victor K.Mk2 showed up, leaking gas from all three hoses. The midair fuel-up went anything but smoothly—the tanker crew was probably drunk—but eventually the Condor took on another ten thousand pounds of fuel, good for another few hours.

After that, they would have to make the decision to stay or go, once again.

Unknown to heavy lifters in the Condor, an interloper had witnessed the whole refueling episode.

It was Crunch. He was flying ten miles directly above the Condor, watching the SEXX plane go round and round and round.

This in itself was not unusual. Many times, SEXX planes were hired prior to the opening of a battle or a military attack, and left on call, like an ambulance, ready to pick up any ailing airplanes. But this was a An-12 extra-large external lifter—a plane outfitted to carry the largest piggyback loads possible. The plane was so big, it could probably carry a small airliner on its back, even a F-111 or a Backfire bomber. So what the hell was it doing, circling around this part of the empty ocean? There were no conflicts about to break out anywhere nearby—the United American intelligence services knew these things. And certainly not one that would require the services of this flying monster.

So, what the hell was it doing out here? And exactly what had the people who’d hired it expected to carry on its back?

Crunch didn’t know—and didn’t hazard a guess.

Instead, he did the next best thing. He took a couple hundred pictures, of the dizzily circling Condor, then turned west and headed back home to Da Nang.

This, he thought, was more important than going back and shooting Lolita again.

N
IGHT HAD DISAPPEARED BY
the time the Tu-95 passed over the coastline of the country once known as Lebanon.

Hunter was steering the big airplane with his knees now, head back, resting his eyes. Chloe was asleep in his lap. Baldi was strapped into the radio engineer’s seat behind him, crash helmet on, two parachutes clutched to his chest. He was a sailor; he’d yelled forward to Hunter many times during their high-altitude trans-Mediterranean flight. He belonged in a boat, on the sea, not in the belly of a monster, flying at sixty-five thousand feet.

There were many other places Hunter wanted to be at that moment, too. Chloe’s warm chalet was his first choice; sleeping in the front seat of the long-gone tanker truck was his second. But he knew now was not the time to start dreaming about unattainable things. He had to keep his eyes on the prize, and his brain on the matter at hand.

The nose of the huge Bear was laid exactly on an unwavering southeasterly course. This heading was the result of a very simple navigation plot Hunter had made earlier, before they’d left Malta for the air base in Siracusa. He was sure that the people operating the Zon had attempted to bomb Valletta to its knees just so they could use the city’s extra-long runway. Combining this with what he’d culled from his observations when the shuttle went over Point Zero, he’d determined that this course, which stretched all the way to below the equator before it began a loop around the world again, was a retracing of the Zon’s orbital path and hence, its reentry track. In other words, the way the shuttle was flying, it had to come down somewhere along this line eventually.

Hunter’s plan—and it was not a modest one—was to locate every air base sporting an extra-long runway along this course and fuck it up, just as he’d done at Star City, and on Malta. If he was able to somehow accomplish this, then possibly he could close the gap on just where the shuttle could land and further ensure his being there when it finally did come down.

But he’d have to hurry. He was sure the Zon would be reentering sometime within the next twenty-four hours. In that time, he knew he might wind up having to fly more than halfway around the globe, all in less than a day. The good news was the Bear bomber was well-suited for this quest. It was fast, somewhat fuel-efficient, and carrying all of the rudimentary navigation devices he needed to aid in his search. Also its weapons bay was filled to the brim with a variety of bombardment devices.

But how far could they actually go? Of this he was a little uncertain. Bad weather, enemy opposition and a million other things could arise and make him eat fuel and thus cut down on his range. But if he was careful, and if everything worked right, he figured he’d be able to fly all the way to the Fiji Islands and beyond, if he had to.

They were now passing over what was once the city of Beirut. These days it was little more than a burned out hole surrounded by encroaching olive groves and grapevines. They used to call it the Jewel of the Middle East. Now, like so many cities in this part of the world, it was vanishing, slowly but surely, being reclaimed by the earth and the olive groves.

They skirted the airspace around Damascus a few minutes later. Hunter noted a couple of search-radar emissions rising from SAM sites below, but nothing ever came of them. The Bear was too high to be hit with most SAMs anyway, and if a nuclear-capable strategic bomber was flying over your turf, it was good foreign policy not to piss them off. With so many different kinds of warplanes plying the skies these days, you never knew which one might return to drop a big one on you—“accidentally,” of course.

They did meet up with a couple of interceptors once they’d passed out of Syrian airspace and found themselves above the relatively new country of El Alanbar. The interceptors were laughably old Mirage-1s though, planes that were obsolete before Hunter was born. They couldn’t climb any higher than forty-five-angels, so their pilots could do little more than look up and watch as the turbo-charged high-flying Bear passed four miles over their heads.

Chloe woke up momentarily, readjusted herself in Hunter’s lap and then went back to sleep again. They passed over into airspace controlled by what used to be called Iraq, now known as Trans-Mesopotamia. Instantly a dozen SAM radars locked onto them. But again, Hunter was not concerned. He was flying so high, so fast, it would take a one-in-a-million shot to knock them down.

About one minute into Mesop airspace, he felt a jolt of electricity run up his spine. It went through his neck, around his ears and into his brain. Suddenly, a taut vibration began singing deep inside him. His neurons, all sixteen billion of them, were suddenly heating up.

“Chloe, wake up,” he whispered, failing to avoid the temptation of stroking her hair lightly. She sat up sleepily.

“Are we there yet?” she asked sweetly.

Hunter shook his head and began pushing buttons and throwing levers. Suddenly the plane began losing altitude.

Somewhere down there on the Iraqi desert, something was beckoning to him. Something important to this mission; critical even. He had to go down and take a look.

The place was called Qum and it was very near a place known as Uruk.

Both cities were located in the southern portion of old Iraq, near the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. To say that Uruk was an old city was a colossal understatement. There was good evidence that Uruk was the
first
city in human history, the place where language began, where things were first written down and where the notion of mathematical thinking was born. Forty thousand years before, the people of Uruk tended wheat-fields the size of the state of Kansas. A huge lake situated nearby was thought to be the planet’s only ocean. Everyone who lived there was healthy, wealthy and wise.

No surprise then that many scholars also believed that Uruk was the place that the people who wrote the Bible referred to as “Ed’n” or Eden. As translated through the twists and turns of the Old Testament, Uruk was where Adam and Eve had lived.

But it was a desert now, and had been for thousands of years. And its boast about being the birthplace of modern civilization hadn’t spared it a whit from the worst that monster had created: the area had seen an unusually high number of battles, and wars in its long, ancient history. One could push a shovel into the sand and find artifacts from any number of conflicts fought in the region over the past forty thousand years. The first layer would house relics from the Gulf War; the layer below that the effects from various Arab-Israeli conflicts. Before that, World War II; before that, actions associated with World War I, and on down through the centuries, until at about one hundred and fifty feet you’d start to find the spears and rock-hurling weapons of the people who eventually conquered the first city of Uruk.

Nothing had changed over four centuries. There was a war going on right now between Uruk and Qum, its sister city that exulted in almost forty thousand years of existence as well. The cities had clashed sixteen times in the past two months, sending men, missiles, tanks and terror bombs against each other with wild abandon, killing many but making no significant gains on either side.

The two cities had much to fight over. Qum had little water; Uruk had plenty. Qum needed food for its people; Uruk had warehouses full of barley, rice, and cooking oil. Qum needed gasoline and aviation fuel; Uruk had underground tanks full of both. The people of Qum were pissed that their neighbors wouldn’t share any of their wealth with them; the people of Uruk couldn’t believe the freeloading audacity of their rivals over the hill.

But the battle that was going on at this moment had nothing to do with food, water or airplane gas.

The battle today was over something else Uruk had that Qum didn’t: a fifteen thousand-foot runway.

It had been a strange turn of events for the military officers in charge of defending Uruk. Up until that day, the troops from Qum had always attacked through the pass in the middle of the mountain range that separated the two cities. A huge artillery barrage would give way to howitzer and missile fire, and then, an armed charge by infantry and mechanized units. The Uruk defenders usually managed to stop the invaders at the edge of the al Furat wadi, a natural formation that was now heavily fortified and bristling with weapons. Occasionally, the Qum troops would break through and run wild in the streets of Uruk. But they were always hunted down and shot like dogs, their bodies dismembered and shipped back to Qum for burial. On the rare occasions that Uruk attacked Qum, the opening artillery barrage could last up to ten hours, followed by air strikes, rocket attacks and then, maybe, special operations teams infiltrating the city and blowing up key targets before getting airlifted out.

But this day, the troops from Qum had suddenly switched tactics. Instead of coming over the mountain pass and flowing into the valley of Uruk, they climbed over the southern end of the peaks and launched a massive surprise attack on Uruk’s vast military airport. In less than two hours they’d been able to seize the base’s control tower, its fuel supply and half the long runway. Uruk security forces had somehow established a line that split the landing strip completely in two, and had held off the attackers until regular troops from the city arrived.

All that had happened about an hour ago. Now the fight was growing fiercer as each side closed within sight of each other, even within earshot. Weapons that had been previously used to lob weapons and artillery over distances of thousands of yards were now squared off evenly against each other, their turrets down to level, blasting away at ranges of less than one hundred meters. Meanwhile, both sides were firing tactical battlefield missiles onto the bloody runway fight, killing friendly and enemy soldiers alike. Each side also possessed a tiny number of small, battlefield nuclear weapons, mostly in the form of artillery shells. The commanders on both sides were now discussing whether these weapons should be brought into play, the first time since the latest war between the two cities began.