Target: Point Zero (28 page)

“What is happening here?” he asked the soldiers as everyone struggled to their feet. “Who is shooting at you?”

The soldiers almost laughed at him. They
were
Dutch, their country’s emblem was very prominent on the left arm of their uniforms.

“Who is shooting at us?” one replied, grimly amused. “Damned if we know…”

Ten minutes later, Hunter, Chloe and Baldi were sitting on the turret of the small Dutch tank, slowly making their way down the side of the hill and into the teeming mass of people camped out on the long runway.

After further explaining what they were doing in Karachi, the soldiers, part of a long-forgotten UN peacekeeping force, had agreed to take Hunter and his friends to see their commander. His HQ was located at the far end of the runway; a trip through the huge knot of humanity was required.

They entered the squalor and began slowly driving across the airstrip, the people sullenly parting the way for them. It was like one vast shantytown. The people were living in wooden structures, cardboard boxes or simply laying about on blankets. They had small campfires burning, but obviously there was very little for any of them to eat. Everyone Hunter saw—men, women, children, old people—looked like they were about to keel over from starvation. It was obvious that dysentery was also running rampant through the makeshift slum and that there was no supply of clean water or means of sanitation. The smell they’d encountered at the top of the hill was about one-hundredth of what it was down here.

Hunter had it all figured out by this time. Just as he’d suspected, there was a massive gun hidden up in the mountains to the north. It was probably placed so high and its range so long, that any target came under its range within a hundred miles or so—except the air base and its three-mile long runway. That’s why all the people were here—more than eight hundred fifty thousand of them the soldiers said. The entire population remaining in Karachi had fled to Ras Muari Rim, to escape the wrath of the massive, blockbuster shelling.

“It’s been like this for months now,” the soldier in charge of the small Dutch unit told them. “We can only do our best to keep them fed, and to keep the death rate to a minimum. As it is, more than a thousand die a day. Then again, eight hundred are born a day, too, not that many survive for very long.”

Hunter studied the faces of the people they passed. Each set of eyes looked vacant, each belly was horrendously distended. He’d seen many horrible things in his day; untold misery, usually after a particularly nasty battle. But he’d never seen anything like this.

Baldi, too, was simply astonished at the ocean of human misery.

But it was obvious that the whole, almost-surreal scene was affecting Chloe the most.

Hunter stole a glance at her while they slowly moved through the staggering number of refugees, and quickly found himself turning away. Gone was the perpetually bright smile, the sparkling eyes, the glow around her face. Now, instead, Hunter saw tears, running from her eyes, and her lovely smile inverted into the saddest of frowns. It was disturbing seeing her like this; she was someone who should never, ever be made this disheartened. To see her cry was almost as painful as seeing the human anguish all around them.

They finally reached the other end of the long runway, pulling up to a heavily sandbagged enclosure surrounded by both Dutch peacekeepers and Pakistani troops. The soldiers brought them inside and introduced them to the commander of the pitiful outpost. He was a Dutch colonel named Van Dam.

Up until that point, none of the soldiers nor anyone jammed into the instant slum on the runway had recognized Hunter. But Van Dam did right away.

He bolted from behind his battered, teetering desk and heartily shook Hunter’s hand. He was a massive man, with rock-hard Dutch features. In his enthusiasm, he nearly crushed Hunter’s right hand.

“We have mutual friends!” he boomed. “Sir Neil Asten is a close friend of mine. He’d spoke of you often, and your adventures together.”

Hunter retrieved his hand and gave the officer a salute. Sir Neil was the man who’d commanded the towing operation to bring the USS
Saratoga
across the Mediterranean to thwart Viktor’s invasion attempt. He was one of the bravest, smartest, toughest guys Hunter had ever run into.

“Please give him my regards when you see him next,” Hunter said, casually ending his salute. He then introduced Chloe and Baldi.

Van Dam sat down behind his desk and lit up a massive pipe.

“So what brings the famous Wingman to this horrible place?” he asked.

Hunter took the next ten minutes filling in Van Dam on the expedient points of his latest mission. The Dutch colonel’s eyes grew wider with each sentence. He was especially amazed at the description of the events leading up to their bombing of the airstrip near Uruk.

“When we arrived over Karachi and saw the conditions here, we felt compelled to come down and check it out,” Hunter concluded. “From what I’ve seen, I think you are all in very grave danger. You, your troops and the people living here.”

Van Dam laughed. “We’re shoehorned into an area little bigger than a few soccer fields. There’s a huge gun somewhere up in the hills that has kept us trapped here for months. We are all hungry, sick, thirsty, dirty, and tired. I really don’t know how it could get much worse.”

Hunter just shook his head slowly. “I know this character Viktor,” he began. “Or at least, I think I do. Believe me, sir, he will stop at nothing to clear this runway if he has to. Regardless of that gun up there and whoever is firing it at you. He’ll send forces against the people hiding here. I believe he’ll do anything short of nuking this place if he feels he has to use it to get back down—or more accurately, he’ll hire someone to clear it for him.”

“Poison gas. Nerve agents. Strafing attacks,” Baldi chimed in. “He could move a large force in here in hours and just mow everyone down—and probably take out that big gun, too. Or at least shut it down for a while.”

Van Dam’s face dropped with each syllable. He’d already had his hands full; this latest information was especially troubling.

He quietly laid his pipe aside and ran his hands over his dirty, tired head.

“My God,” he whispered. “What can we possibly do?”

Hunter, too, rubbed his tired brow.

“There’s only one thing we
can
do,” he said, his voice gaining in strength with each word.

Now everyone in the HQ was looking at him. Suddenly there was a huge explosion outside, the ground rumbled for ten full seconds. Another massive shell had fallen just outside the camp limits.

“And what is that?” Van Dam asked hopefully.

Hunter cocked his head in the direction of the latest explosion.

“We’ve got to take out that gun ourselves,” he said finally.

T
WO HOURS LATER, HUNTER
was back at Karachi Airport, his head buried in yet another aircraft engine.

The abandoned airport was not without its airplanes. There were actually a couple dozen airliners, cargo planes and even some small private craft stuffed away in the various hangars. Trapped there by the conditions surrounding the city, there was simply a lack of fuel and knowledgeable people to fly them out.

All of these planes were also woefully unmaintained, and none of them were airworthy. But this didn’t bother Hunter. The plan formulating in his head didn’t call for an airplane that was safe to fly. In fact, it called for one that had no engine, no propeller, no way at all to stay airborne on its own.

The plane he’d selected for this odd flight was, by a rather spooky coincidence, a biplane, a reconditioned duffer known as a Gloucester Gnatsnapper. Originally built as one of the first planes to operate from aircraft carriers, this particular model had apparently been part of an aerobatic team in better days. It was covered with Arabic writing, the rough translation of which Hunter believed indicated a Yemeni dialect. The plane was nearly seventy years old, yet its fuselage and wings were still in remarkably good shape.

The fact that it was almost identical to the biplanes of his dream had ceased to amaze him more than an hour ago. He was used to strange things like this happening in his life. Signs and omens popping up and then disappearing only to reappear again at a crucial time—these things were run of the mill to him now. What part of his unconscious, yet highly perceptive mind had foreseen his coming upon this particular airplane and thus transplanted it into his dream? He didn’t know—and really didn’t want to dwell on it. But his dream—at least this part of it—had indeed come true.

He was in the process of taking the biplane’s engine out completely; its small size and relatively light weight made this a fairly easy job. With Baldi’s help, they had unlocked the engine mounts and allowed the seized motor to fall to the floor of the work hangar. The propeller, landing carriage and all internal instruments came out next. Hunter even went so far as to yank the control sticks and the seats out of the airplane.

None of this stuff would be of any use to it anymore—not where it was going.

The Gnatsnapper was stripped and unladened by 3:30 P.M. Now came the next part—packing it up again.

Once more with Baldi’s help, and that of several Dutch soldiers put at his disposal, Hunter pushed the lightened airplane on a dolly a quarter mile across the empty airport to where the Bear bomber was waiting. Another squad of Dutch peacekeepers had already removed what was left of the bomber’s weapons load: two five hundred-pound bombs and a single fifteen hundred-gram package filled with incendiaries. Once Hunter and the others had moved the Gnatsnapper into position under the Bear’s right wing, the combined group began carefully loading this ordnance into the cored-out biplane.

Once it was all packed in and taped, Hunter positioned the biplane under the Bear’s right wing. Here, between the plane’s interior and outboard engines, was a hard-point where huge antiship or cruise missiles could be attached. Now the group grunted and groaned and sweated and spit and gradually lifted the bomb-laden biplane up to this hardpoint. It took some doing, but finally they managed to get the thing mated and wired up. Incredibly, the snout and top wing of the Gloucester just cleared the twin-propeller sweep of the Bear’s two huge right-side engines.

Though it wasn’t all that apparent to the Dutch soldiers at the moment, what Hunter had created was a flying bomb—a crude glider carrying a one thousand-pound plus warhead. Placing a contact fuse on this strange aircraft would be no problem; the parts from any kind of battery-operated device would do. And there was no doubt in Hunter’s mind that the glide-bomb packed enough punch to knock out the monster gun, or at least damage it—if it was hit in the right place, that is.

That
would be the hard part.

By 4 P.M. Hunter had the wiring for the bomb-laden biplane completed.

He’d set up a crude electrical fusing device plus a way to disengage the glider from the wing of the Bear at just the right moment. All this was hooked up to one of the plane’s internal auxiliary batteries. When Hunter ran a series of quick checks, everything worked perfectly.

By 5 P.M. the Bear was fueled up with the last of the gas available at Karachi airport. There were about two more hours of daylight left. Hunter wanted to take advantage of every minute of it. But there was another problem they’d yet to tackle. They knew the general direction of the big gun, but they didn’t know which mountain, or even which mountain range, it was hiding in.

Searching for it would take valuable time and fuel—and might end up without result. Hunter asked Van Dam to canvass the huge population of refugees and find out if anyone had any idea where the gun was located.

As if on cue, Van Dam and
&
security attachment arrived just as Hunter was completing the last of his tests on the glide-bomb. With them was an old Pakistani man named Koki. He knew exactly where the big gun was located—or so he claimed.

“It is inside the mountain forty kilometers northeast of here,” the man told them excitedly. “It’s huge and very ominous looking.”

Hunter greeted the man’s information politely, but with some dark humor. “I flew over these mountains,” he told Van Dam. “They all look huge and ominous.”

But now Koki was grabbing his sleeve lightly. “But this one,” he was saying. “This one will be easy to find.”

Hunter just shrugged. “How?”

Koki tugged him a little closer. “Because it is a mountain that looks like no other. It is a mountain that is shaped like a monster!”

Hunter did laugh a little now. The old man
was
trying to be helpful. But…

“A monster?” he asked him. “What kind of monster?”

Koki threw his arms dramatically into the air.

“Like a dinosaur!” he roared. “It looks just like a Tyrannosaurus Rex!”

Hunter stared back at the man for a long moment; suddenly more waves from his dream came back to him. Then he laughed again.

“The mountain is shaped like a dinosaur?” he asked Koki to the amusement of the others.

“It is, sir,” Koki replied.

Hunter put on his helmet and started strapping up his flight suit.

“Somehow, I’m not surprised…” he said finally.

The late afternoon sun was just waning as the final preparations for the Bear were completed. To save fuel, Van Dam’s men were making arrangements to have the big bomber towed to the end of the airport’s north-south runway. They’d hooked the front of the Tu-95’s nosegear to a tandem of two small tanks and began pulling. It took a full minute for the plane to even budge. But finally it began rolling, and slowly, but surely, commenced moving out and towards the runway.

Hunter was inside the airport’s long-ago abandoned operations room while all this was going on. He was looking for a map, a chart, anything that would help him navigate once they got airborne. The ops room files were a mess; some were so old they’d actually turned yellow and were near-impossible to read. Though there were some computers on hand, there was no way to switch them on. The wire from their electrical connections had all been chewed away some time ago by rodents.