Target: Point Zero (31 page)

After helping the NJ guys set up their equipment, Toomey and Ben hustled over to the Tommy ops building. It was now close to 10:30 P.M. local time. From here on, every minute would count.

They took over the Tommy’s flight control computer, quickly making copies of the hard disks taken from the Condor and adapting them to the room’s Mac. Soon enough they were into the data base, bypassing hundreds of screens containing the maintenance background and manufacturing information for the plane itself. Finally, after a few minutes of searching, they came upon the flight plan the Condor crew filed before leaving for its latest mission.

Just as they’d suspected, moving the An-124 up to the holding point off the Palawans had been just the beginning of the Condor’s mission. Once told to move, the plane would have flown to a designated land base, picked up its load and then gotten airborne again as quickly as possible. From there, the plane would head for its faraway delivery point and drop off the package.

Though no specific destinations were given for the plane’s pickup and delivery, the estimated mileage to these destinations was on the screen. The pickup point was less than three hundred miles west of Palawan. The delivery point was a whopping thirty-five hundred miles away. By delving deeper into the secret plans, Toomey and Wa discovered that this particular Condor was actually one of five similar heavy-lift airplanes which had been hired out and sent to different parts of the globe. The Palawan Condor had been given the code name “Epic.” A similar An-124 code-named
Alpha
was flying around somewhere in the mid-Mediterranean;
Beta
was circling high above the Persian Gulf;
Cosmos
was flying station two hundred miles off the coast of Pakistan;
Delta
was somewhere above western Thailand. These four airplanes had been airborne for at least twenty-four hours, too, all awaiting some kind of a major event within their particular region.

While their potential pickup points were far flung from each other, each plane had the same destination should it be the one selected for the job: a base somewhere deep in Russia.

Toomey and Wa were understandably amazed with what they found. When Geraci, the
NJ104
commander, arrived in the control center they quickly revealed to him what they had learned.

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Geraci said after hearing the whole crazy story. “Someone hired five heavy-lifters to fly in circles for twenty-four hours, hundreds of miles from each other, just waiting for one pickup job?”

Wa and Toomey told him he had it right so far.

“And whenever whatever they were waiting for arrived, the one who was the closest was supposed to go pick it up and fly it into Russia?”

Again Wa and Toomey were nodding their heads.

Geraci pulled on his chin in deep thought. He told them that his preliminary analysis of the Condor said the big plane had definitely been outfitted to carry a large load on its back, something much bigger than a medium-sized bomber or fighter plane.

“It must be some pretty important package,” he concluded.

But then Wa told him of yet another bombshell they’d uncovered. It had to do with the so-called
Epic
Condor, the one they’d just hijacked and where
it
was supposed to land.

“It says here they were going to proceed to a pickup point approximately three hundred and ten miles to the west if the package arrived in this area,” Wa explained to Geraci. “To an island in the lower South China Sea.”

Geraci studied a local map and began looking for any possible landing spot large enough to handle such a big plane like the Condor and its “package.” It took only a few seconds for him to put it all together.

“Well, isn’t there only one place in the SCS that could possibly handle all this?” he asked.

Wa nodded gravely and then moved his finger the equivalent of three hundred miles across the map.

“I’m afraid there is,” he said, finally stopping at the pinpoint in the middle of the vast sea known these days as Lolita Island.

I
T WAS THE MIDDLE
of the night when the Tu-95 Bear appeared high over the city of Rangoon.

These days, most cities around the world went dark at nighttime. Some were under strict blackout decrees, some couldn’t afford to burn electricity both day and night. Others were simply dead, or near-dead.

But not Rangoon.

The sprawling Asian metropolis was lit up to the max. The light rising from the city was so bright, it looked like a gigantic jewel, blazing green and yellow in the middle of the dark night. After the long flight over India and then the Bay of Bengal, the warm glow of the Burmese capital looked almost inviting to Hunter, Chloe and Baldi. They were all growing weary; it seemed like they’d been flying for days.

The mad dive bombing run on the big gun had been a success—but not without its cost. The fuel consumption alone had been very severe; the big bomber was now working on the bottom half of its main tanks. The strain on the engines had done them no good either—the twin-bladed powerplants were older than Hunter and Chloe combined; they didn’t need any more abuse. The same was true for the airplane’s fuselage. Flailing the big bomber all over the sky had been kid’s play for Hunter. But the plane’s skin was older than its engines. It was now bent and rippled in many places; stretched and weakened in many more.

And then there was the noise.

Because of the bad engines, the holes in the skin and a million other things, it was now horrendously loud inside the Bear—so much so, both Chloe and Baldi had spent most of the last few hours tightly holding their ears.

But the racket inside the cockpit was the least of Hunter’s concerns at the moment. Not only was Rangoon glowing in the night, it was bristling with scores of electronic weapons, tracking devices, SAMs and radar-controlled AA guns. There was also evidence of fighter aircraft. Even more worrisome, Hunter needed no fancy contraptions like a FLIR or a NightScope to see this vast collection of weaponry. It was all highly visible, caught in the glare of dozens of spotlights illuminating a huge air base located just outside the city.

Whoever owned this wealth of military hardware wasn’t making the slightest attempt to keep any of it hidden. This told Hunter volumes about them. There were two ways to avoid trouble around the world these days; one was to hunker down, stay quiet, dark and safe—and hide just about every major weapons system you had, so as not to reveal your hand to any potential enemies.

The other way was to simply pull down your zipper and show the world what you had. And apparently that was the tactic the people of Rangoon were employing. Taking it all in from fifty-two thousand feet, Hunter had to admit it was an effective way of saying
fuck you
in any language. But it was also a very dangerous, almost adolescent, way to live.

The problem was the air base below was sporting a runway in the fifteen thousand-foot range, long enough to handle the Zon shuttle. If Hunter’s master plan was to succeed, this strip would have to be made inoperable somehow.

But this wouldn’t be easy; obviously Rangoon was not the retro-primitive desolation of Uruk, the hard-luck valley of Karachi or the defiant fortress of Malta. There could be no sneak bombing run here; no hoodwinking, no victory with mirrors. This would be different. This would have to be done up close and personal.

It was a hard decision to make, but when he saw a swarm of fighters rising up from the city to intercept them, Hunter did not run. To the contrary, he started descending, past fifty thousand feet, down to forty and then thirty-five, making it easier for the fighters to reach them.

Within a minute they were surrounded by a dozen Swedish-built Viggens, odd airplanes to find in this part of the world. Each one was painted in bright garish colors and adorned with highly stylized Burmese characters. There was a frantic round of nav-light blinking, followed by the ominous warning tones caused by all twelve fighters flicking on their missile-guidance radars at once.

But Hunter knew they wouldn’t shoot him down. Anyone who displayed military might like the people below didn’t have to go around blowing everyone out of the sky—not initially anyway. Rather, he guessed they’d be curious at first, like the beast that sniffs its prey before devouring it. This might give him the time he needed to plan his next move.

So with these thoughts in mind, Hunter began blinking his navigation lights back, telling the Viggen pilots he understood.

Then, slowing his speed and lowering his flaps, he followed the fighters to their base.

They called the place the
Yawdoo Kichi-wan.
It was an enormous palace-fortress, built of teak, polished mortar and jade. Heavily fortified, and surrounded by guard towers, moats and barbed wire covered with tiger spikes, it looked as if it could have been built anytime within the last several centuries. There was even a white elephant elegantly penned up outside.

The
Kichi-wan
or “Kitchen,” as everyone called it, was located just a quarter mile from the air base where Hunter’s Bear had been forced to land. Even from this distance, the palace looked gigantic and imposing, lording over the air base and the thousands of plain white but tidy buildings surrounding it. The Kitchen was the center of Rangoon’s universe.

The Bear was quickly encircled by at least two hundred troops as soon as it set down and rolled to a stop. Hunter and Baldi climbed out of the airplane first, hands up and smiling. They were quickly disarmed by the soldiers and confronted by the officer in charge.

Just as Hunter had predicted, their captors appeared arrogant, curious, but not outwardly hostile. They were also outfitted very queerly. All were armed with at least one shiny AK-47, but many were carrying two or even three. They were all wearing flashy green camos, with insanely bright-yellow pith helmets and sand-colored Schwarzkopf boots. This was hardly proper combat gear. The officer himself was dressed in a garish red uniform with multiple ammo bandoliers crisscrossing his chest and at least a half dozen pistols and knives hanging from his belt.

Hunter took a closer look at this officer. Small of stature and almost demure, he didn’t appear to be any more than fifteen years old. Now Hunter looked into the faces of the soldiers surrounding them. None of them appeared over their mid-teens either.

At that point, Chloe emerged from the front hatch of the Bear, instantly swooning the small army ringing the bomber. This gave Hunter further opportunity to do a quick look around. There was more military equipment packed into this place than he would have thought possible. He could see literally hundreds of AA guns, from big one-hundred-twenty-mms to small, multibarreled twenty-two-mm weapons. There were also dozens of SAM sites, all of them Russian-designed surface-to-air weapons ranging from SA-2s to SA-16s. Combined, there was enough AA here to protect a small country, never mind just a city.

The runway itself was crowded with jet fighters. Viggens and MiG-21 Fishbeds mostly, they were lined up, wingtip-to-wingtip, for nearly the entire length of the fifteen thousand-foot landing strip. Like the ones that had intercepted them, these airplanes were painted in the strangest of colors—bold reds, blues and greens. Some were so brightly adorned, Hunter was sure that when airborne, they could be spotted from twenty to thirty miles away.

The arsenal to feed all these potent weapons was sitting very close by also. Lining the landing strip were dozens of small concrete bunkers, enclosures that undoubtedly contained bombs, bullets, and missiles used by both the impressive air fleet and the air defense forces. This was dangerous planning, Hunter thought. Most military men would have strived to isolate their weapons’ magazines as far away from the rest of their components as possible for obvious safety reasons. With the arrangement here at Rangoon, one spark could send the whole place up.

A brand new, bright blue HumVee arrived with a heavily armed motorcycle escort waiting in tow. The officer helped Chloe in, politely sitting her up front, while Hunter and Baldi were put in back. All four doors were then bolted and locked, with the young officer keeping the key. The HumVee’s driver seemed to be barely into his teens. He shifted into first gear and began rolling, intentionally going slow as they passed the rows of AA weaponry so prominently displayed around the base.

Each one of these guns was painted in bright, shiny chrome. It was absolutely the worst covering one would want for any kind of operational weaponry. With all these lights, the reflective glare from the guns could be seen from miles away, too.

The driver continued poking along as they passed a strange aircraft storage area located off the main taxiway and behind several layers of barbed wire fencing. It contained no less than thirty-six MiG fighters, most of them highly advanced Fulcrums. Each of these formidable airplanes was sporting a loud, reflective camouflage scheme of some sort, again, as far away as one could get from the typical dull green, blue or gray prescribed for air combat and avoidance.

But this was not the strangest thing about the airplanes. The strangest thing was that the three dozen jet fighters were actually sitting in a huge wooden enclosure filled with sand. There were many shovels and large buckets lying around them, and in several places, what could only be described as sand castles could be seen.

“What’s going on there?” Baldi leaned over and whispered to Hunter. “None of this seems real.”

Hunter didn’t know—and he couldn’t fathom a guess. Why in the world would someone keep these airplanes locked up inside what amounted to a gigantic sandbox? Few things were more harmful to an aircraft than sand. One speck in the wrong place could definitely ruin a pilot’s day—permanently.

One of the MiGs in particular caught Hunter’s eye. It was located at the far end of the holding pen, and unlike the others, it was not up to its tires in sand. This jet was painted all black with hot-rod red trim. Like the seaplane he’d procured back in St. Moritz, this airplane looked like it was going Mach 1 even when it was standing still. It was a MiG-25, an airplane originally built to counter the USAF’s B-70
Valkyrie
bomber way back in the 1960s.