Target: Point Zero (35 page)

Just as they were asking themselves this rather heart-stopping question, another swarm of blips appeared in the southeast quadrant. These bogies were bigger and moving much slower than the first set, fitting the profile of midsized cargo planes, medium-sized bombers or possibly both. The techs did another diagnostic, but they knew these babies were the real items. There were five groups of them, each one containing six aircraft. Like the bogies up north, they were heading west.

Their alarm increasing with each passing second, the techs were about to call up to Crunch to tell him all this when he called down to them instead.

All concern about radio protocol gone, the UA pilot was practically shouting into his radio mic: “Jessuz! Can you guys see all this?”

The techs hastily assured Crunch that yes, they did, and then asked him to zero in his long range video camera on the incoming aircraft.

“Which ones?”
was his equally hasty reply.

Somehow, someone decided they should look at the oncoming fighters first. Crunch turned over and was soon aiming his ultra-long distance cameras at the large group of fighters approaching from the northeast.

They were flying in a tight formation now, seven lines of ten airplanes apiece. Crunch felt his breath catch in his throat as the camera focused on the first wave of these airplanes, now but seventy-five miles away. Somewhere in the back of his head he’d expected to see a row of mismatched, broken-down or barely flying airplanes. These days quantity often meant little quality. The more planes one side threw at another the more likely those planes were ancient machines; Starfighters, Voodoos, even older stuff like Sabres and Starfires, anything that could get airborne and carry a gun.

But this wave of fighters was no less than Panavia Tornados, high tech, ultrasophisticated, air interdiction/ground attack planes. There couldn’t be more than fifty of these aircraft left in the world. But now Crunch and the crew of
Black Eyes
were looking at ten of them.

The next wave was only a little less frightening. It consisted of ten Jaguars, pesky little warplanes that could fight in the air or serve in ground attack. Behind them were two lines of Nanchang Q-5s, Chinese-built rip-offs of the ancient MiG-19 design. Behind them, two lines of Hawk 200s. Bringing up the rear were ten A-4K Skyhawk buddy-tankers, small in-flight refuelers that were carrying extra gas for this aerial force.

“Jessuzz, whose party are these guys going to?” Crunch exclaimed.

He turned over and was now zooming in on the flight of larger airplanes approaching from the southeast.

Once again, Crunch felt a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach as the camera focused in on the vanguard of this flight. At first glance, these planes actually looked rather innocuous. They were a flight of C-23 Sherpas, midsized, prop-driven, two-engine cargo handlers famous for lugging big loads over medium distances. These thirty airplanes, obviously a merc group, had broken up into a very loose formation, a sure sign that they were expecting to go into action soon and were trying to avoid radar detection.

The difference between these planes and the seventy fighters approaching from the north was that Crunch knew who was flying the Sherpas. They were the Island Rats, Inc., a short-lift paratroop brigade out of the Marshall Islands. Their forte was island invasion; they’d made a small fortune attacking their way up and down the thousands of atolls stretching throughout the South Pacific.

The trouble was, there weren’t many islands beyond the Palawan Passages in the South China Sea. So what the hell were the Rats doing way out here?

Crunch turned back towards the oncoming storm of jet fighters. They were now fifty-five miles away and flying due west, at about three hundred knots, typical precombat cruising speeds. He had to guess that they were a conglomeration of several fighter merc groups in the area. The Jags and Hawks and the Q-5s were troublesome enough—it was the ten Tornados that had him worried. The Tornado came in two flavors: the GR.l, which was a ground attack airplane whose specialty was coming in low, fast, undetected and hitting a target right on the nose with the first pass. Then there was the F.3, the interceptor version of the Tornado. This plane was especially good at knocking big planes, like bombers, out of the sky from as far as fifty miles away.

Unfortunately, these days, some mercs adapted their Tornados to do
both
roles, adding on a few options, such as sea strike capability as well.

Either way, the Tornados meant major trouble.

Crunch could tell the guys down in
Black Eyes
were getting nervous. The two separate flights were obviously in league with each other; there might even be plans to eventually link up. The cold truth was the big C-5 radar plane was flying right in their way.

Actually, Crunch had seen enough. Large fighter group approaching from the north; island invasion group coming out of the south. Both oncoming flights were obviously going to the same place with a list of possible destinations being a short one.

In Crunch’s mind then, he and
Black Eyes
had fulfilled their mission. There really wasn’t any reason to hang around here.

He punched his microphone button and called back down to the radar plane.

Peel off
he told them.
Head back to Tommy. I’ll watch the rear.

Word of the two, large mercenary flights approaching from the east reached United American Expeditionary Force headquarters at Da Nang five minutes later.

The call from Crunch had to be coded, decoded, re-coded and then decoded again, this through six satellite scramble bursts that bounced his message as far away as the skies high above Afghanistan. Through all these twists and turns, Crunch’s message arrived fairly intact. Basically it said two multiple-aircraft attack columns had been detected and were coming on fast. By their direction and speed, they could be heading for Tommy Island, Crunch reported, or for an attack on the Vietnam mainland itself.

Or they could be heading for Lolita.

Either way, Crunch was strongly advising that the UA get as many of its airplanes in the air as quickly as possible and be ready to go into action.

It was a suggestion that the UA high command had to take. Whoever made up the two airborne forces, there was a good chance they would have to go into action against them. And at the very least, the UA could not be caught on the ground should some kind of an attack be coming their way.

Within a minute of receiving Crunch’s message then, the scramble horns began blaring at Da Nang.

There was an explosion of thrust and power as nearly sixty jet airplanes lit their engines at once. Two squadrons of UAAF C-5 Galaxys were currently active at Da Nang. Of these thirty-two airplanes, fifteen were outfitted as either gunships or missile carriers, two were armed navigation ships, one was a radar ship, seven were troop ships, and seven were refuelers. Within five minutes each one was loaded, engines hot and rolling out to the base’s myriad of runways.

There were also three squadrons of fighter jets at Da Nang. One of these was the famous Football City Air Force’s F-20 Tigershark squadron. The other two units were comprised of a hodge-podge of jet models, from the ubiquitous A-7F Strikefighters, (ten in all), to several T-28 armed trainers and one, ancient F-106 Delta Dart. All of these airplanes and their pilots were veterans of the wars in America. All of them were outfitted for both air defense and ground attack.

They were also experts in getting off ground in a hurry. No sooner had the warning klaxons around the base died down when the first of the F-20 fighters were lifting off. Climbing high into the midday light, they quickly went into a protective circle around the huge UAEF facility. Four F-20s were already airborne, patrolling the local coasts; they’d arrived back over Da Nang by this time and took up station with their brother Tigersharks.

It took but six minutes and change for all of the fighters to get airborne. Now it was time for the C-5s. With remarkable, almost scary precision, the huge air beasts rolled down the runways and clawed their way into the air, one right after another, nonstop for three and a half minutes. As soon as each one became airborne, it flew to a preassigned spot at a preassigned height above Da Nang and stayed there until the whole group was in the air.

Then, on one call, the C-5s formed up into combat profile: six waves of six planes each, the missile ships guarding the fronts and rear, the gunships holding the flanks while the troop transports, the refuelers and the support planes stayed huddled in the middle.

Surrounding this formation were the fighters: F-20s at the front and back, the older airplanes mixed in on the sides and down below. It was an amazing choreography, close to sixty airplanes big and small, falling in behind one another as if they’d done it every day for the past years, which in reality, they had, between alerts and training sessions.

Leaving a small contingent of F-5s back at Da Nang for defense, the United American aerial group turned towards the south just as they received word that the two mercenary groups heading east had indeed linked up and were flying in one, large loose formation, too.

Like two naval fleets, anticipating a battle on the high seas, the two great air armadas were now heading at the same speed for roughly the same spot over the South China Sea.

If everything continued as it was, they would collide over Lolita Island in less than an hour.

Lazarus was hot.
Very
hot.

The heat generated by the immolation of the fake foliage on Lolita Island had been so intense, it had hardened some of the sand on top of his hiding place, causing it to break off and fall in on him, a few torturous chunks at a time. At one point, the flames had come so close, there’d been a real danger that his hiding spot would collapse in on itself, exposing his position or worse, burying him alive.

But luckily the fires eventually retreated and the heat began draining away. It was still extremely hot inside the hole, but for the time being, he was confident the walls would stay intact.

Kurjan still had a peephole to the outside world—his sliver-thin imaging scope was still poking out of his sweaty, precarious position, looking this way and that. Truth was though, he hardly needed the scope’s enhancements to see what was going on.

Lolita was now a huge flat slab of white, coarse, rock-hard cement. The Cult landing force had managed to burn away every bit of the fake jungle that had covered the island for the past two months. Only now could Kurjan appreciate the scope of the strange construction project that had been carried out on the anonymous little atoll.

The amount of cement alone needed to flatten the place must have been in the millions of cubic feet, he figured; just getting such a mortar to mix with seawater must have been a major challenge in itself. Though the engineering looked fairly elementary—the island was covered by a squared-off slab that appeared to be sound enough to serve as…well, as what? An airport? A troop staging area? A jump-off spot for some further, larger action? Something else completely?

Once again, Kurjan just didn’t know.

As soon as the entire island had been uncovered, the Cult troops had laid aside their flamethrowers and had commenced another odd little enterprise. Landing craft coming in from the battleship offshore had been dropping off dozens of six-foot rolls of a bright orange material, possibly plastic or fiberglass, some of it not fifty yards away from Kurjan’s position. Teams of Cult soldiers were grabbing one roll between them and scampering off the beach and back up on to the slab. A small group of officers overseeing the operation were mercilessly driving these men to get the bolts of material into what were apparently preassigned positions all along the width of the concrete island. Once in place, the soldiers stood at attention, waiting in the broiling sun for their next command.

Finally, on an officer’s radio call, they began unfurling the lengths of orange material. Then, as Kurjan watched with some amazement, they began marching across the huge slab, some traveling east to west, others north to south, dragging the long lines of orange behind them.

It took a few minutes for Kurjan to figure out exactly what they were doing. But then, slowly, it became clear.

The Cult soldiers were laying out the orange material into the shape of a huge arrow stretching along in the center of the slab. And at the end of this gigantic marker they were similarly laying out a gigantic cross.

Well, at least one of Kurjan’s questions had been answered. The Cult was undoubtedly preparing the island slab as a landing strip; the large arrow and the huge cross were obviously meant to help pilots spot the place and land on it. But if this was the case, then the runway they’d outlined was nearly three miles long and more than a half mile wide.

Christ,
Kurjan thought as he began hitting the button on his sat-com device again.
What the hell kind of airplane an these guys expecting to land here?

C
RUNCH SPOTTED THE INCOMING
missile first.

It was about twenty minutes after he and
Black Eyes
abandoned their station off of Palawan. He was flying at forty thousand, covering the rear of the unarmed radar plane now just five thousand feet below him.

He’d left all of his airborne detection going during this hasty tactical retreat, still painting the combined force of the seventy fighters and the thirty troop carrying planes belonging to Island Rats, Inc.

One of the fighters had fired the long-range missile at
Black Eyes;
most likely a Matra Super 730 antiaircraft missile off the wing of one of the Tornados. Crunch’s weapons warning buzzer went off when the missile was still thirty-two miles away. He quickly called down to
Black Eyes,
who acquired the MSAAM just moments later.

There was no doubt the radar ship was the missile’s target. The fighters had probably expected to find the heavy-lift An-124 Condor waiting at the Palawan station. When they found nothing and turned up their long-range radars, they’d obviously detected the fleeing C-5. Whether they mistook it for the Condor, bugging out on its contract, or something else, they’d launched a missile at it—and that missile would probably hit it sometime within the next forty seconds.