Target: Point Zero

by Maloney, Mack;

  Hunter held his anger—he was concentrating on getting a good look at the culprits first. It was a very dark night, overcast and moonless, and he’d yet to see any of the attacking airplanes up close. Still, he could tell by the drone of the approaching engine noise that the enemy bombers were not much newer than the gallery of antiques he’d just inspected inside the hangar. Even above the roar of bombs exploding and buildings collapsing inside Clocks a mile away, Hunter could detect the sounds of engine backfiring and fuel overloading on some of the oncoming bombers. They were definitely prop-driven, two engines per aircraft. The planes were not going much faster than ninety miles per hour when they released their loads. And their bombs had made a distinctive whine as they fell out of the sky. Quick calculations of all these factors led Hunter to one conclusion: the airplanes had to be something built back in the 1940s.

  One went overhead about twenty seconds later. It flew right into Hunter’s electronic sights—and at last he had a clear frame of the offending aircraft. He’d been right. The planes were reconditioned He-111 Heinkel medium bombers, a mainstay of the old Nazi Luftwaffe.

  In an instant the airplane was gone, its pilot yanking back on the control column and turning back towards the crotch between the twin mountains. Back in Clocks, Hunter could hear fire bells ringing, secondary bombs exploding, even the cries of many people, all running at once. And above all this, the rumbling of the third wave of bombers approaching the city. Just like the aircraft before them, their flight path would bring them right over the airfield as well.

  With this in mind, Hunter slapped a tracer clip into his M-16F2 and adjusted the electronic sight.

  It was time to go hunting.

  The noise inside the Heinkel was incredible.

  Everything that was not tied down was rattling mightily—and a lot of things weren’t tied down. It was all the pilot could do to scream instructions over to the copilot, who in turn would scream them down into the bombardier’s bay and hope that somehow the man down there would hear him. The noise was that loud.

  What’s more, the bomber crew was being tossed around inside the airplane as if they were dolls. The air currents here on the eastern side of the mountain were not what they had expected. They’d assumed the night air above Clocks would be calm, smooth, and even helpful in their low-level bombing raid. But just the opposite was true. The turbulence was ferocious—obviously the winds sweeping over from the west side of the mountain turned convex once they’d reached the other side. Instead of a smooth ride, flying low over Clocks was a very scary proposition.

  Still the bomber crew pressed on. They were the lead ship in the last wave. They had waited slightly north of the city, circling while the first two waves went in and did their work. Seeing the initial explosions, they had sent an enthusiastic report back to Works. “Clocks on fire,” it had said. “All bombs hitting targets…”

  This was not true, though. Clocks was hardly on fire, in fact, many of the bombs dropped by the first two waves had missed their designated targets by as much as three city blocks. Some large fires could be seen, and some primary targets had been damaged—but Clocks had hardly turned into Dresden. Not yet anyway.

  It was now time for the third wave to go in. The one thing they hadn’t seen was any substantial groundfire rising out of Clocks. This was a good sign. The bombing raid’s first objective—to conduct a surprise attack—had worked perfectly. The city of Clocks had been caught completely unaware and no one was firing back. This, too, was good—the last thing the Heinkel crew wanted to worry about was getting shot down.

  The pilot, a Captain named Heinz Franz, put the He-111 into a long, slow sweep towards the south. They would go over the center of Clocks in an east-to-west direction. Once they’d dropped their bombs, they would pull up quickly and gain altitude for the return dash over the mountain. If all went well, they’d be landing back in Works less than five minutes later.

  Franz yelled over to the copilot who yelled down to the bombardier to get ready. The Heinkel was down to five hundred feet now, and the winds above Clocks were throwing it all over the sky. There were four other crewmen on the plane—gunners stationed at midfuselage. They’d been battered around so much, one had been completely knocked out. Franz gripped the steering column of the He-111 even tighter. This was his first time flying a Heinkel in combat. It was becoming a little more than he’d bargained for.

  It will be all over in a matter of seconds, he told himself. Just stay low and steady and unload the bombs when you’re supposed to. They were now about three quarters of a mile from the drop point; Franz brought the Heinkel down to three hundred feet, the prescribed bombing altitude. Once again he yelled over to the copilot who yelled down to the bombardier. Twenty seconds to drop. They were right over the city now, the Alpine-style homes and buildings passing below them in a blur of fire and smoke.

  Fifteen seconds to go. The old Heinkel was rattling down to every screw and bolt now, the engines were backfiring and smoking badly—the rich fuel mix and the thick, wild air above Clocks made for a bad combination.

  Ten seconds. One last shout over to the copilot, who loudly began screaming out a countdown. “…Ninzen…eightzen…sevenzen…”

  They were flying so low now, Franz could see people running on the street below. Some were looking up at them and shaking their fists. Five seconds…they were over the city’s main power plant. Four…now through the smoke from the burning waterworks. Three…the main target, the city’s military headquarters loomed right off the Heinkel’s nose. Two…One…

  “Bombs away!” Franz yelled.

  “Drop now!” the copilot screamed out.

  “Dropping…now!” came the muffled response from the bombardier.

  Instantly, they all heard the clanging of the bombs falling off their racks, and the response from the engines as the airplane got progressively lighter.

  “Weapons gone!” the bombardier yelled up, but already Franz was cranking the Heinkel to the left, trying to aim its nose towards the split in the mountains and the safety of Works beyond. But suddenly, the cockpit exploded in a rush of fire, glass and smoke. In that first instant, Franz thought they’d run into their own bomb load—so quick and violent came the blast. But then the copilot fell forward, and in the horror of the next second, Franz realized that incredibly, the man had been shot six times through the head. His body was now pressing down on the steering column, causing the He-111 to go into a catastrophic dive. Franz was screaming for someone to get up to the cockpit and pull the dead man off the controls, but it was too late for that. The bomber’s engines coughed once, twice, then three times, all inside of a few seconds. The strain was too much—they both burst into flames a moment later. Franz ruptured blood vessels in his arms and hands trying to pull the plane out of its death plunge—but he wasn’t that strong. No one was.

  They were going to crash and he knew it. Water and oil spilling onto his face, smoke filling his unprotected lungs, he somehow managed to yank the plane once more to the right, towards the only open area in sight. With the last of his strength, he succeeded in killing both engines. Then he shouted back to the rest of the crew to get ready.

  The Heinkel plowed into the open field ten seconds later.

  The fires had gone out by the time Hunter and Orr reached the downed Heinkel.

  They’d made the fifteen-minute dash from the airfield to the crash site in Orr’s Rolls, nearly blowing out all the tires on the rough, snow-encrusted ground. Now leaving the car a safe distance away, they approached the airplane wreck slowly, weapons up, watchful for any armed survivors who might be hiding in the battered fuselage or in the patches of woods nearby.

  Like the elderly flying machines back in the warehouse, this airplane, too, looked like it had just fallen out of a history book. Hunter reached out and touched the still-smoldering tail, as if to check that the airplane was indeed real. Obviously, the city of Works had gone shopping in a time warp for its warplanes, too. Hunter’s perfect sh
ot from the roof of the control tower had reduced its air force by one.

  “I’m no expert,” Orr said, contemplating the vintage bomber himself. “But didn’t these things go out of style about fifty years ago?”

  “More like sixty,” Hunter told him.

  Making their way along the crumpled airframe and up to the shorn-off wing, they pulled a section of the airframe away from the skeleton and examined it. Oddly the gray-green paint was still wet in some places. A lot of the wiring looked new, too, though heavily taped. There were even a few microprocessor units taking the place of the older, heavier original equipment. Obviously the Heinkel had just been refinished, too—but the work was nowhere near the craftsmanship displayed in Clocks’ WWI fighters.

  They finally reached the shattered cockpit. The copilot was still there, slumped over the controls, bleeding heavily from a multitude of wounds. The rest of the airplane was empty however—there were no bodies, no sign of the other six crewmen. Not even any footprints in the blackened, thick snow.

  They took another long look around. The crash site wasn’t really near anywhere else. The base of the twin mountains was just a mile away; the airfield was about two miles in the other direction. There was some thin forest to the east, a wide chilly river to the south, neither of which was a good place to hide.

  This meant only one thing. If the rest of the bomber crew got away in one piece and if they were nowhere in sight, the only other place they would have gone was into the city of Clocks itself.

  Hunter and Orr spent the next two hours patrolling the streets of the-city, looking for any sign of the escaped aviators.

  More than a hundred military police had already been called out to search for the escapees, but many of them were being redirected to help in the aftermath of the aerial bombing. Making a short broadcast over the city’s Volksradio, Orr had appealed to citizens to join the hunt for the enemy fliers. Hundreds responded.

  But the search so far had been fruitless. The city of Clocks was a great place to hide. It was honeycombed with narrow streets and alleys, centuries-old buildings and an extensive ornamental canal system. The shadows alone could conceal a good-sized army. What’s more, nearly half of Clocks’ current population was made up of strangers—mercenaries, wearing many different kinds of combat uniforms and known only to themselves. It would be a hard job indeed to find six men in all this.

  The manhunt did give Hunter an opportunity to see the city close up for the first time. Most of the shadowy streets looked like sets from a 1930s Expressionist movie, but Clocks had also retained a lot of its look from its high-flying fancy resort days. Many of the residences were chalet-like, and there was an overabundance of inns, taverns and gambling parlors, especially on the south side of town.

  The city itself was laid out in a circle; the pyramid housing the military HQ being at the center. The western districts were taken up mostly by military installations and mustering houses. The eastern edge was mostly residential. To the south, the Sodom-like sin palaces, and to the north, the city’s formidable academic and cultural establishments.

  Orr revealed to him that learning the ins and outs of the various neighborhoods had taken him quite a while himself. He brought Hunter to a very strange place located just on the outskirts of the eastern edge of the city. A small village had once stood here, but now all its houses were wrecked, snow-filled and abandoned. Many appeared to have been crushed by some giant force.

  “A monster came down from the mountains about this time last year,” Orr told Hunter as they surveyed the eerily empty settlement. “A dinosaur—maybe a Tyrannosaurus Rex, I don’t know. Anyway, it came here and started stomping houses before the police and soldiers arrived and chased it away. Killed about fifty people or so before it was driven off. No one wanted to live here after that…”

  Hunter took a good long look at the abandoned village and the huge footprints still evident in the frozen-over ground.

  “I don’t blame them,” he said.

  Five

  HUNTER SPENT THE NEXT three hours upside down inside the Sopwith biplane’s beautifully reconditioned Wycoming engine.

  He was intent on getting the biplane airworthy. To do so, many things had to be checked: connecting rods, struts, wires, flaps, plugs, and magnetos. Unlike a modern jet fighter, there was no computer that could diagnose any potential problems with the push of a button. Everything had to be done by hands, eyes, and ears.

  As it turned out, prepping the Sopwith for flight had been the easy part—getting the damn thing out the door was another. The hangar was one in name only. It was really a big, empty storage facility that’d originally housed an Olympic-sized ice rink. When Clocks took delivery on the squadron of elderly airplanes, they’d come in crates, packed and disassembled. A freelance Polish aeronautical team had expertly put them back together again without realizing the doors of the building were too narrow to get the planes out. It took Hunter and six other people nearly an hour to manipulate the Sopwith an inch at a time and finally get it out of the building without ruining its fragile wings and tail.

  By the time they did this, the sun was rising over the miles of flat plains east of Clocks. Just as Hunter and the makeshift ground crew finally got the biplane out onto the only runway, a rare streak of sunlight made its way through a thinning bank of clouds. It had been a long time since the Wingman had seen the sun—he took a moment and allowed it to warm his face. Then he climbed into the Sopwith’s front seat.

  The engine grumbled to life on the second try. Orr strapped himself into the rear gunner’s seat—there never was any question as to who would be going along with Hunter on this, the first aerial recon flight of the Clocks Air Force. On his lap, the Wehrenluftmeister had two large cameras, a box of mice and a fully clipped M-16 rifle.

  The overall defense of Clocks had many problems, but one of the most serious was the lack of battlefield reconnaissance. Previous recon photos had been taken by intrepid militiamen who had climbed the peaks above the battle zone and pointed their cameras down. This was a brave, but rarely successful means of gathering usable intelligence. There was really only one good way to take pictures of a battlefield—that was to fly over it.

  And that’s exactly what Hunter had in mind.

  He took about ten seconds to familiarize himself with the plane’s controls, not that there were more than five of them. Then, with the engine up to peak, the oil pressure zooming and Orr buckled up in back, he gunned the plane’s oversized powerplant and started rolling down the frozen-hard airstrip. With the cheers of a dozen Clocks soldiers urging them on, the old airplane roared off into the frigid morning.

  At last, the White Elephant Squadron was in the air.

  Up they flew, almost straight up. Past the morning mist, through the pall of smoke still hanging over the city and into the low, wintry clouds. One thousand feet, two thousand. Three…Hunter was pouring the rpms into the big Wycoming and it was responding without so much as a cough. The Sopwith was old, but it flew neat, powerful and clean. By the time they broke through the top cloud layer forty-five seconds later, Hunter was in love with the reconditioned airplane.

  He turned it over and they were soon looking up at the massive twin mountains. It was an illusion of flight that things appeared smaller from the air than from the ground. But not now. The twin Matterhorns looked tremendously big and impossibly high. Hunter pulled back on the plane’s stick and sought to climb even higher. The engine began screaming, the cold air rushing madly against his face as they rose another one thousand feet. Still, the peaks seemed miles above them.

  Then the wind whipping between the mountains caught the bottom of the biplane. Suddenly they were going straight up and twice as fast. It was all Hunter could do to keep the twin wings level; he finally resorted to steering the plane with the wind, back and forth, like a gyrocopter. Yet even with their enhanced speed, it still took another minute to reach the top of the mountains.

  When they finally did clear them, it w
as like climbing out of a dark hole. The sky above the peaks was bright, clear—and cold. Damned cold. The air temperature had plummeted by more than fifty degrees Fahrenheit during the wild ascent. The Sopwith was still performing like a dream, but Hunter and Orr, sitting in open cockpits, were very quickly freezing up. The plane’s heater was working, and waves of irradiated air were washing through the cockpit, but they did little good. Within thirty seconds, both Hunter and Orr began to collect rows of long, sparkling icicles on their hair, noses and beards.

  He banked again, putting the Sopwith’s nose slightly off true south. Below them now were the trenchlines that made up the craggy, Alpine battlefield. It was amazing. Looking up from Clocks, the mountain conflict appeared troublesome but remote, a perpetual stream of flame with a cloud of smoke hovering above it. But from this height, looking down onto the trenches, it was easy to see just how nasty this little war had become.

  There’d been so much bombardment going on between the two sides, the snowcap in the pass between the mountains had actually melted in some places. Much of the frigid, two-mile-long battlefield was now covered with a layer of soot, rock and dislodged dirt. The whole area had become distinctly lunar—if it snowed on the Moon, this is what it would look like.

  As they approached from five hundred feet, Hunter could clearly see the lines of riflemen and machine gunners on both sides firing madly at each other. The combined fusillade was solid and continuous. So, too, the flare from mortars, small cannons and multiple-rocket launchers. From this altitude, Hunter could tell it was crowded in ditches, on both sides. To his eyes, it seemed like every last one of the ten thousand men currently fighting for Clocks was jammed into the front line of trenchworks someplace. The combined body heat was enough to cause a fine mist to rise above the ditch.