Target: Point Zero (3 page)

But eventually he found himself slumping down further into the cold, hard seat. He knew he would have to stay here, in the cab of the truck, for at least a little while. Night would soon be falling for real. If he was going to drive through the city, it was best he do so under the cover of darkness.

He adjusted himself in the seat yet again, lifting his feet up to the dashboard and leaning back against the driver’s side door. Gradually his tired muscles began to relax. His ears heard nothing but silence—and were grateful for the change. Slowly, he began to close his eyes.

When he opened them again, the first thing he saw was a line of hundreds of lights, twinkling off in the distance.

Hunter was back up sitting straight in his seat in a flash. The lights were coming from the city, aglow at the base of the two mountains. He rubbed his eyes, just to make sure. This was the first sign of civilization he’d seen since leaving Baikonur. The buildings appeared alive and cordial, the smoke from many fires wafting high above them. Another warm tingling sensation was building inside his chest. He rubbed his eyes again. When he listened hard enough, he thought he could hear the faint hum of voices, electricity and machines, the sounds of life were resonating from the place.

Rising out of the city, he could see a string of lights climbing up the side of the mountain towards the wide, snowy pass where the twin peaks met. They were bead-lights, faint and stuttering, illuminating a mountain road-way. This was good news; the road continued up and over the peaks, just as he’d hoped.

But there was something happening way up where the two great mountains converged. The glow of many fires was illuminating the pass and the night sky on both sides of the peaks. A thick cloud of ugly black smoke was rising above it all. It looked like a forest fire, even though both the mountains and the crevice in between were capped in a perpetual layer of snow and ice. Hunter rolled down the truck’s window and turned his ear toward the west. He could hear the sound of explosions and gunfire, way off in the distance. He couldn’t believe it, it sounded like a war going on up there.

He let his eyes fall back to the small city, getting slowly sucked in by its mysterious warm glow again. He hated to admit it, but he was cold, tired, hungry and thirsty. He was eyeing the place rather dreamily now—a shot of
bergenwhiskas,
a mug of beer and a plate of roast-beef stew would be a feast to him at this point…

The next thing he knew, he was climbing down out of the truck, jumping first to the running board and then to the snowy road below. It was cold out and he had only a medium-season jacket pulled over his flight regs. Strangely though, it seemed warm enough. Strapping his trusty M-16F2 over his left shoulder, he pulled his ball cap down over his head as far as he could, stuck his hands in his pockets and started walking.

After a while, his feet felt so light, they hardly touched the ground.

T
HE NAME OF THE
place was the
Rootentootzen.

Located near the south end of the city just below the twin massive peaks, it was a tavern in the very best old Alpine tradition. Built of stone, wood and mud, the structure had stood in this place for more than ten thousand years. Not much had changed inside in that time. A huge fire was roaring in the hearth that dominated the west wall of the place. A massive slab of roast beef was slowly rotating above it, spattering its juices onto the flames below. A half dozen kettles surrounded the spit as well, all of them full of steaming beef stew.

The tavern was packed with a few hundred armed men, all of them wearing some variation of a mountain combat uniform. Everyone was drinking beer, everyone was eating stew. Buxom blond waitresses with blouses cut so low, their ample breasts were more exposed than not, literally flew above the crowd, trays full of food and ale balanced in front of them. Providing a soundtrack for all this, a battered CD player was pounding out the computerized bleats of an oom-pah band. Like the music, the mood inside the tavern was lusty and festive.

Suddenly the doors to the place came flying open. A squad of enormous heavily armed soldiers walked in. They were dressed in bright-white combat fatigues, wearing Alpine-style fritz helmets and carrying Heckler & Koch MP5A3 submachine guns. The place came to a dead stop. Even the roaring hearth fire quieted down. Rock-jawed and cold, the soldiers eyed the crowd cautiously. The patrons stared right back.

The man at the head of the column took one step forward. He was at least seven feet tall and sported an enormous white mustache. He gave the room a quick once-over then shouted: “Service papers…
please!
”

In one oddly choreographed movement, every man in the place pulled a bright blue slip of paper out of his left breast pocket and held it at eye level. The massive white soldiers quickly began checking these slips. Vital information was written on them: the bearer’s name, his last rank, his weapons specialty, and how many hours of combat he’d seen in the past thirty days. Anyone bearing a card indicating less-than-expected service up on the line risked the humiliation of being dragged out of the bar and rushed back to the front.

It was called a muster check. They were a nightly occurrence in the
Rootentootzen.
This particular evening everyone on hand passed the test.

The mood in the tavern eased considerably as the last of the blue slips was checked. The gigantic officer with the white mustache signed off on the final one himself. Then, with an almost casual wave of his hand, the
Rootentootzen
came alive once more. The officer barked an order and his soldiers marched back out into the cold night, singing as they went. Down the street and into the tavern next door, the soldiers had more than a hundred and twenty-five of these places to check before their night was through.

Drinking heartily from a mammoth beer stein, his face just inches above in a plate of beef stew, Hawk Hunter had watched the incident in a state of bemused amazement. He was sitting at the table in the corner, next to the antique CD machine. When the muster soldiers reached him, not only did they ignore him, they seemed to be looking right through him. Between his mouthfuls of stew, he’d simply stared up at them and very quickly they went away.

Hunter had found the muster drill somewhat fascinating. The whole thing had played out like a ritual. It was obvious the huge white soldiers were looking for deserters and malingerers—the most interesting thing was they didn’t find any. Nor did it look like they ever did. It was clear to Hunter that great dishonor would have been felt on both sides should anyone be found out of order.

He’d relied on his extraordinary pickpocketing talents to get the funds to purchase the bowl of beef stew and the huge stein of thick, sweet beer. All of it was going down extremely easily. He’d been at it for quite a while now, eating, drinking, studying the people and he’d learned much in this time. Though everyone was armed and obviously combat-hardened, they were a civilized lot. Many were drunk, but no one was rowdy. Many were horned up, yet no one was harassing the airborne waitresses. This was a very strange thing: a well-behaved, almost polite army.

He’d also learned that a war—a small but brutal one—was being fought way up on the mountain, near the pass where the twin peaks converged. The glow of fire, the pall of smoke and the explosions he’d heard earlier were all coming from this nasty little conflict.

The people in this city were fighting the people in another city that lay on the other side of the peaks. Hunter had heard many disparaging curses describing the
alpineoberlanders
—“the people over the mountains.” He’d noticed that a number of soldiers inside the tavern were missing fingers, ears, tips of the noses, bits of lips and chin. Others were limping noticeably. These fighters had been victims not of bullets but frostbite. Hunter shivered at the thought of it: mountain warfare was probably the worst way to fight; the worst way to die. If the guy shooting at you didn’t kill you, then the cold and the snow would, even if it did happen one digit at a time.

After a trip to the head, he pinched some more money—weird-looking purple notes, splattered with portraits of apes, monkeys and chimps. He lifted enough to buy another bowl of stew and a refill for his stein. He’d shot down one of the waitresses, and during a moist session on his lap, she’d told him much about the cold little war up on the peaks. The city on the other side of the mountain was attempting to invade its neighbors. The city’s defenders had stopped them at the mountain pass. A frozen-form of trench warfare had been going on for six months now—and getting worse by the week. More casualties, and more deaths, were being reported every day. Supplies on this side of the mountain were running very low. No one in the city felt safe anymore—and everyone was expecting some kind of a larger, surprise attack at any moment.

Hunter really didn’t want to hear any of this. It said a lot about the world these days: the first place with any signs of life in two thousand five hundred miles had a war going on close by. But even worse, he was still at least one hundred fifty miles away from Point Zero, the magical place he had to climb in order to get a good look at the Zon. It most certainly lay over this mountain and a few dozen more.

So what should he do? Attempt to drive over the peaks anyway? Could he somehow avoid all the shooting and get to the other side to continue his journey?

Probably not.

But going around the conflict and searching for another way through the mountains would take much too long. This left a very short list of options, none of which he knew could be acted upon in here in the tavern. Reluctantly, he let the waitress go, scraped his bowl clean and then drained his stein.

It was time to tell someone he was here.

The official name of the city was
Clochenspieltz.

It had served as an exclusive ski resort for Europe’s rich and famous for centuries; even swells from the Bronze Age came here for the scenery. These days, everybody in the region knew it by the nickname: “Clocks.”

There was a huge pyramid in the middle of Clocks. It was made of solid gold and was lit on all sides by huge halogen lamps. This imposing, magnificent building was actually the main headquarters of the
Volksdefensfuhr,
the city’s Home Defense Forces. Within it, a command staff of five hundred people ran operations against the army hired by the people on the other side of the mountains. The enemy city was just as big, just as isolated and oddly, just as picturesque as Clocks. Its official name was
Werkenhausen.
Everyone called it “Works.”

On the top floor of the pyramid was the combat command center itself. It was a large, spare place, filled with radios and computers to assist the humans in the war effort. Next to the war room were the private quarters of the man responsible for running the defense of the city. Part-defense minister, part-mayor, part-dictator, he was known throughout Clocks as the
Wehrenluftmeister.

It was almost midnight when the
Wehrenluftmeister
came through the door of the war room; he’d just arrived back from the front. He found most of his command staff were asleep; the others were masturbating quietly in the corner. The
Wehrenluftmeister
dismissed his bodyguards, breezed through the command room and wearily unlocked the door to his private quarters. It had been a very long day; he was absolutely dead on his feet.

He slipped inside, closing the door softly so as not to disturb anybody. He had barely enough energy to flip on the light—and he wasn’t surprised when it did not come up to full power right away. Electric flow was fluctuating throughout the city this night, just like every other night this week.

It was just another problem the
Wehrenluftmeister
had to worry about; the city had experienced a major blackout two nights before, and the lights had been flickering then, too. Soon, he might have to order all electrical devices shut off during certain hours, if only to rest the city’s already-ragged power-generating turbines.

He threw his helmet and gun on the floor and walked deeper into his spacious, but spartan room. A lighted planning table dominated the middle of the compartment; the
Wehrenluftmeister
collapsed into the overstuffed chair next to it. He was an enormous individual, tall and hefty—and the chair bent mightily against his weight. It would have been very easy for him to fall asleep at that moment—and be out cold for hours. But sleep was not an option for him now; indeed, it was no more than a sinful temptation. He had so much work to do, it would be hours before he could consider even taking a short nap.

So, reluctantly, he dragged the chair up to the blinking light table and retrieved a leather packet from his uniform pocket. Emptying out its contents, he was soon looking at three dozen photo negatives with a magnifying glass. To his dismay, more than half of them were solid black; either from bad development or bad imaging. Disgusted, he swept these off the table.

But when he began examining images that he could actually see, he felt his heart sink even further. They were pictures from the front. Most of them showed the same two ragged set of battle trenches dug deep into the snow and ice at the top of the mountain. Both trenchworks were three kilometers long and they ran almost exactly parallel to one another. In between were blotches of smoky fires and bomb craters, many more in front of the eastern line, the one occupied by Clocks’ Home Guard.

This alone was a stark reminder of which side was getting bested in the high-altitude, frozen war.

In fact, close-up photos revealed many breaches had been cut in the
Volksdefensfuhr
’s lines in the past twenty-four hours. The enemy had brought up more heavy guns during the previous night. They’d been blowing bigger holes in his defenses ever since. Now in a pique, the
Wehrenluftmeister
swept all the photos away from him—each one had brought more bad news than the one before. Disheartened, he slumped back in his chair. At this rate, his army could not hold out very much longer. Maybe two weeks, maybe three at the most.