Target: Point Zero

by Maloney, Mack;

  But of all the Wing Commander’s bad traits, he was most noted for, and hated because, he was a thief. The majority of what had made him rich had been stolen from others; he’d much rather steal something than buy it. It was easier, cheaper and in the end, more enjoyable that way. But the Wing Commander was petty, too, some would say pathologically so.

  Though a billionaire several times over, he was known to steal change off the palace bar, the pittance of money left behind as tips for the help.

  The party was reaching its peak just around midnight when she walked through the door.

  Everything stopped.

  There were several hundred of the Wing Commander’s closest friends in attendance, with twice as many call girls, and every one of them fell silent when the girl appeared.

  She was dressed in a skintight red minidress, white high heels, and nothing more. Her blond hair was teased madly in the style of the moment. Pink lipstick, pink nails, pink blush on her bosom. She was a vision of au courant beauty. Anyone’s best guess would put her age at barely eighteen.

  She walked through the crowd of awed men and women, every last one of them wondering what it would be like to get her in bed. Past the main dining table, past the massive bar, right up into the slightly raised “private” section where the Wing Commander entertained his most-special guests. There was hardly a word spoken, hardly a sound at all, except for the roar of bombers taking off in the distance.

  The beautiful young girl walked right up to the Wing Commander himself, stopped, looked at him, shook her body a little and then smiled.

  “Hello,” she said. “My name is Chloe.”

  More than four miles away, at the other end of the vast air base, a Tu-95 Bear was being readied for a bombing job up in the Spanish Pyrenees.

  As usual, the huge, swept-wing, prop-jet bomber was loaded with ten thousand pounds of fuel and fifteen thousand pounds of bombs. The target for tonight was an anonymous military staging area and a town nearby, so the mix of weapons ranged from heavy iron bombs to incendiaries.

  As part of the prep process, the Bear was washed down thoroughly. This was done to remove its thin layer of salt dust, but also to allow the bomber’s wild paint scheme to shine through. This particular plane was done in a somber black fuselage, wing and tail, with a horrendously realistic painting of the Grim Reaper on its belly and nose, the arms of which extended all the way back to the tips of its wings. The message of the mural was clear—anyone looking up at this airplane would more often than not be meeting his death very soon thereafter. Indeed this was the last thing literally hundreds of people had seen in their lifetimes. Men, women, children, bombed by a painted-up airplane, driven by a crew who valued money over life and were confused by people who didn’t.

  The ground crew consisted of more than twenty individuals, including weapons specialists, fuelers, washers and avionic masters. They completed their work in under thirty minutes. Once the plane was ready, it was left to the hands of its crew, two pilots, a bombardier, and three gunners. They strapped in without incident and began taxiing the huge bomber across the tarmac towards the east-west junction of runways, where eighteen more bombers were also forming up for takeoff.

  As soon as the Bear was wheeled out of the prep area, a low-level Bison attack bomber was rolled in. Therefore, no one in the ground crew saw the big Bear stop momentarily about a half mile away from the prep area; nor did anyone see the six unconscious bodies drop out of the forward belly access hatch to the hard runway below. Though seemingly empty at this point, the Bear nevertheless jerked forward a few moments later, its huge wheels just missing the heads of the knocked-out crew members.

  It continued down the taxiway, joining even more bombers getting ready to launch for missions all over Europe, Asia and northern Africa. It finally came to a halt about a quarter mile away from the east-west junction, taking its place at the end of a long line of bombers waiting to take off.

  Because of the jam-up, it would take the Tu-95 known as Death From Above more than ten minutes to reach the runway it had been assigned to this night.

  Meanwhile, back at the sin palace, the Wing Commander had just ordered ten crates of his best champagne opened.

  To the party regulars, this was an almost frightening occasion. For the WC to so openly share his purloined bottles of Château de la Feete 1985 defied reality. This was not like him. A man who stole from his servants would hardly pass around bottles of such rare and high-priced bubbly if he was thinking rationally.

  But that was just it—the Wing Commander wasn’t thinking rationally; in fact he wasn’t thinking at all. He was hypnotized, mesmerized, fallen deeply under the spell of the young girl in the red minidress who claimed her name was Chloe.

  It was the Wing Commander’s personal bodyguards who were most alarmed at this strange turn of events. They’d steered their boss clear of many a harlot in recent times, but even they had to admit that this one was different. They could hardly take their eyes off her themselves. This all translated into trouble; they suspected the woman’s sudden appearance was a prelude to something catastrophic. To a man, each one checked his weapon’s ammo load. They expected trouble was not too far ahead.

  Still, fearless as they were, no one in the squad of hired goons dared suggest to the Wing Commander that he might turn a blind eye towards the enrapturing female. She was now ensconced so tightly on his lap that it would have taken a platoon of them to wrench her free. She was whispering nonstop into the WC’s ear, and when he was able to catch enough breath to do so, he was whispering back into hers. This would always be followed by a round of giggling and snorting.

  It was a grand embarrassing display for the man who ran the largest aerial bombardment company in history, but the witnesses didn’t really care: they were drinking great champagne and watching the patron saint of all strumpets do her stuff. In their world, it was all damn entertaining.

  It went on like this for about twenty minutes or so.

  Then the girl began a long, nonstop whisper in the WC’s ear, one that had him rising off his seat an inch at a time. Just what she was promising him, no one but she and the WC knew. But it was enough for the Boss to snap his fingers twice.

  He wanted his car brought around immediately.

  Meanwhile, the traffic jam of bombers lined up around the east-west junction had doubled.

  It was certainly a popular place. Any airplane leaving for a target east and south of Vallo Mazz was usually directed here for the most efficient takeoff. No less than four dozen bombers were waiting for takeoff clearances now, mostly Bears and Bisons, but with a handful of Backfires and Mirages mixed in, too. All of them were sitting stone-still, practically wingtip-to-wingtip, their engines screaming angrily, a cloud of exhaust rising above.

  Some kind of congestion resulted here most every night; but tonight, the jam-up was worse than usual. This was because a report had just been flashed to all waiting bombers that the WC was on the field, an unusual condition known as “Zebra-Flat.” No airplane could take off or land while the WC was about, due to an old order demanded by his security forces, and supposedly reserved only in cases of “extreme egress emergencies.” In other words, if a nuclear missile was incoming, then the WC had to be the first one in line to get out.

  Now some of the pilots in some of the waiting bombers wondered if in fact a nuke strike was on its way. It wasn’t like the operations at Vallo Mazz hadn’t made any enemies. But others, those with an unofficial ear into the sin palace, knew better. They knew that the WC and his latest female conquest were out riding in his staff car. The WC was very drunk and the girl was very beautiful. This kind of episode was not new, though rarely did the inside report comment on the attractiveness of the WC’s current victim.

  So the four squadrons of heavy jet bombers waited, falling behind their schedules with each passing minute. Some had to adjust their flight plans; others were already taking on extra fuel as they waited, preferring, as all pilots do, to have their ga
s tanks topped off upon launch. For the crews waiting in planes contracted to bomb some unknown target thousands of miles away, the delay added unneeded minutes to what were already ball-bustingly long missions. If bad vibes and engine noise could kill, the WC would have been microroasted by now.

  At the moment though he was anything but. He was sitting in the back of his Benz 414SL, a four-door special sedan of Germany’s Shickelgruber Era. The WC’s trusted driver, a man named Lars, was piloting the ostentatious vehicle. Chloe was painted into the WC’s substantial belly, giving him every indication that she’d be diving even lower very soon.

  They were going for a plane ride—that’s what Chloe wanted and that’s what she was going to get. She wanted to go high and fast and stay up there for a long time—practically the opening paragraph of a Bear bomber’s operations manual. Once they reached the traffic jam of bombers, the WC reluctantly allowed her to lift her head and pick out exactly which Bear she and he were going to take on their supersonic skylark.

  Typically, it took her a while to shop—or so it seemed. She had Lars slow down in front of any Tu-95 that had a wild type of nose art or overall paint scheme. She discounted many as being too gaudy; others as simply too dark. She paused in front of several which featured realistically painted naked women on their noses, only telling Lars to continue on once she’d been able to drink the whole picture in.

  After five minutes of this, the pilots of the waiting jets began gunning their engines, the only form of protest they could possibly commit with the WC flitting close by. They wanted to get off the ground and get to work; the last thing they needed was a prolonged delay while the Boss’s latest young twinkie was trying to decide between sea camo blue and off-camo red.

  Finally, she gave Lars a slap on the head, indicating he should turn towards one particular Bear located near the end of the pack. It was nearly all black with a hideously detailed portrait of the Grim Reaper on its nose.

  “This one!” she yelped, plunging her hand into the WC’s quickly rehardening genital area. “This one is so cool…”

  The WC was on his phone in an instant. He ordered one of the control towers to quick-prep and taxi out a replacement Bear—the one nicknamed Death From Above—was going to be his for the night.

  There was more growling from the pack of bombers now—a blast of hot exhaust in celebration that the WC’s scupper had finally picked her pleasure and that they could now get to the business of bombing. They watched as the WC and the young girl in the red dress alighted from the Benz, strolled over to the black Bear and waited for the hatch ladder to descend. The WC went up the stairs first, the girl right behind him. Those that were paving attention thought they might have seen the WC trip, or stumble or somehow make a clumsy entrance into the bomber itself. It was almost as if someone had grabbed him and shoved him to the floor. The girl went in right over him, and then the door closed, swallowing both of them up inside.

  Now the Bear quickly moved out of the pack of waiting aircraft and sped to the head of the line. The plane turned onto the idle east-west runway and never stopped—its pilot hit its engines full blast, and off it went, rumbling away for a noisy, smoky, takeoff. The control tower waited a full minute for the WC’s plane to clear the area before it began renewing takeoff clearances for the anxious pack of bombers.

  They eventually began launching, one right after another, for the next twelve and a half minutes. The last one, a big delta-winged Mirage being sent to attack a target in the Azores, left the ground at exactly 11:59 hours.

  A security patrol found the six unconscious crewmen from the plane called Death From Above two minutes later.

  Hunter had flown many different aircraft designs in his time, from fighters, to bombers, to recon craft and everything in between.

  But never, ever, had he seen a cockpit like the one inside the Tu-95 Bear bomber nicknamed Death From Above.

  The Bear had been originally designed in the 1950s. Over the years, many adaptations and upgrades had been shoehorned into the huge airplane, to help it keep pace with advancements in technology. But two things were never changed on the Bear. One was the powerplant design: the other was the cockpit.

  It looked like something designed by a mad scientist back in the thirties. There were still knobs, push buttons, turn-wheels, levers, analog computers—and dials. Thousands of dials, none of which seemed to make very much sense to anyone, even the world’s best fighter pilot. Hunter had never been inside the cockpit of a Tu-95 before, but always wanted to. When he finally did, it was quite a shock.

  Still it took him only a few moments to figure out how all the important stuff worked. The takeoff from Vallo Mazz had been as smooth as could be expected. Now that he was airborne it would give him some time to figure out what everything else did.

  Baldi was sitting beside him, trembling as the huge bomber cut through the turbulent air above the Mediterranean. He was no fan of airplanes, bombers or otherwise. He had shook all the way up from Malta to Syracuse, both frightened and astounded at Hunter’s ability to fly the dilapidated seaplane barely ten feet above the surface of the water without killing them all. Baldi was so happy when they finally landed about a mile offshore from Siracusa, he got down on his knees and prayed for a full minute.

  Now he was praying again.

  Getting into Vallo Mazz had been easier than Hunter could have ever imagined. Sure, the place was wrapped a few thousand times in barbed wire and antipersonnel mines, but they didn’t cover the main gate of the place—and that’s exactly how they got in. Through the front door, driving a stolen jeep and allowing Chloe to do the talking. They casually dumped the car at the back of the sin palace parking lot, and when Chloe went one way, Hunter and Baldi went the other.

  Trying to pick which Bear to steal turned out to be the hardest thing. There were many to choose from sitting idle on the parking apron, getting only cursory attention from the nearby maintenance teams. Hunter and Baldi picked the all-black, garishly nosed-up Bear simply because sneaking onto a black jet in nighttime was easier to do than attempting to get on one bathed in Day-Glo. The DFA was the blackest plane in the darkest shadow, so Hunter and Baldi stole aboard her, hiding in the rear bomb bay until the crew arrived and brought the airplane to the prep shop.

  Only then did they reveal themselves, knocking out the gunners and the technicians with silent thrusts to the throat, and then clobbering the pilots over the head with the butts of their rifles. Chloe’s timing couldn’t have been better; no sooner had Hunter and Baldi joined the back end of the parking jam when she appeared, stringing along the WC like a mackerel to chum.

  Now Hunter turned the big plane out over the Tyrrhenian Sea and pointed it due south, back towards the Straits of Sicily.

  Chloe had climbed up into the copilot’s seat—and she was enjoying the fast, high ride. Even when she didn’t realize it, she still got what she wanted. Hunter was busying himself with the Bear’s antique controls, and tried his best not to pay attention to her—but it was impossible to do. Even though his mind should have been consumed with making their grand-theft bomber caper a successful escape, he couldn’t help himself from looking over at her, still clad in the tight miniskirt, her blond goddess looks clashing wildly with the dull, dial-crazy cockpit.

  She was leaning all the way forward, nose pressed up against the cockpit glass, feeling her body sway as Hunter poured on the power and they gradually built up speed. She glanced over at him, began to smile—but stopped. They had hardly said a word to each other in the past few hours. The scene in Gin’s kitchen had been an eye-opener—for both of them. Up to that point, Chloe thought Hunter was like everyone else she’d grown up with—into sex, both the doing and the watching. Now she was beginning to think that he was interested in only one of those. It had cast a pall over the adventurous time they’d already spent together.

  Then came the plan to steal the Bear—and Chloe’s surprise when Hunter gave her such a crucial part in it. She’d enjoyed using her sex
into fooling the WC; she’d enjoyed the excitement of stealing the bomber. But how did Hunter feel about all that? She didn’t know—and any time it seemed like the question was going to come up—he always shut up.

  How then was she supposed to know what the hell he was thinking?

  “You did a great job,” he finally told her, quickly smiling and then turning back to the Bear’s myriad of controls. “Thanks…I appreciate it.”

  She stared back at him, her eyes burning a pair of holes in his.

  “I can’t wait to tell my father about it,” she said innocently. “He’d get a really big kick out of all this.”

  Hunter leaned back and then gazed out at the vast night sky above them. The stars seemed brighter up here, around forty-five thousand feet, and closer. There was a full moon, and many planets and constellations were visible overhead.

  Again, uncharacteristically, Hunter found himself taking time from the mission to admire them through the bubble-topped canopy.

  Suddenly, he felt Chloe’s hand slip around his.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked, looking up at the Milky Way, seemingly just a hand grasp away from them.

  “It sure is,” Hunter replied finally, finding his eyes not on the stars but resting on her instead.

  The Wing Commander of Vallo Mazz airfield woke up to find a knife pushing up against his throat.

  He was still drunk, still stoned, and still somewhat under the spell of the young woman who’d hooked him earlier in the night. At first he thought he was taking a joyride in the sky with her, and that he had simply passed out once the plane started to take off.

  This would have made sense—if it wasn’t for the blade pressing into his gullet.

  He finally opened his eyes and looked up to see a very large, very angry, unshaven, heavily mustached man staring down at him. He was the owner of the huge knife now drawing across his Adam’s apple.