The Wing Commander instantly panicked. Something was definitely wrong here. Very wrong.
“You killed a lot of my people,” the man with the knife was spitting at him. “For nothing. For money. You will the a very painful death for that, sir…”
The Wing Commander was listening to the man—but his attention was actually distracted elsewhere. He was laying on the deck directly below the forward observation hatch. From here he could see into the cockpit. And sitting there, illuminated only by the dull green of the cockpit lights, was the girl named Chloe.
She was enough to make him forget about the razor-sharp blade pressing against his neck. Momentarily anyway. But one thing had become abundantly clear: he was being kidnapped.
The Wing Commander tried to sit up but Baldi shoved him back down. Growing foolishly defiant, the WC suddenly pushed Baldi’s blade away from his throat.
“You’re not about to slit my throat,” he told the infuriated Baldi. “What good would that do you? Once they realize that I’m gone, they’ll send people out to get you. Don’t you think we’ve been prepared for this? I’m one of the most important people in the world. We have contingencies for these types of things. They’ll shoot you down if I tell them to.”
At that moment, the Wing Commander heard a voice from the cockpit call back to Baldi: “Get him ready…”
The Wing Commander stared up at Baldi, confused. Then he leaned forward and for the first time saw the man who was driving the airplane.
“You?…The Wingman? You are real?”
“For now…” Hunter replied sullenly. “After this party, maybe not…”
He turned back to his controls. “Get him ready,” he repeated to Baldi.
Once again, the WC began stuttering. “Ready?…for what?”
Baldi did not reply. He stood the WC up and roughly began removing his clothes.
“What…what the hell is this?”
Baldi had him down to his boots inside ten seconds.
“I said you have killed many of my people,” he growled in the Wing Commander’s face. “I said you will pay for it.”
With that, he pushed the WC to the forward hatch. The airplane was now descending so steeply, Baldi and the WC were momentarily weightless. Then the plane leveled out and the Wing Commander could see they were about a mile high, over water, but approaching a small island off the eastern horizon.
Baldi pushed him even closer to the open hatch. The WC couldn’t speak. This Wingman—this wasn’t how he operated, was it? He and his gang weren’t really going to kill him—were they?
“About twenty seconds…” Hunter called back to Baldi. “Fifteen…”
The Wing Commander was standing buck naked in the open hatch now, all of his extremities quickly freezing up. They were getting closer to the land mass: he could see waves crashing on the beaches below. And people, lining the shoreline, shaking their fists up at him. The Wing Commander realized that they were flying over the island of Malta.
“Ten seconds…” Hunter yelled back.
Baldi turned back to the WC. His knife was gone; he was holding a green bundle instead.
“You can’t kill me!” the Wing Commander screamed as Baldi drew closer.
“We don’t have to,” Baldi said.
He shoved the bundle into the WC’s hands, pulled its rip cord and then kicked him out the open hatchway.
The WC fell head over heels, nearly entangling himself in the unfurling parachute. Somehow, the fabric billowed and caught the air, jerking the Wing Commander to a violent midair stop. He’d voided his bladder and thrown up during this short freefall, but now he was floating and still alive—for the moment anyway.
He quickly looked down to see he was heading right for a crowd of people gathered in the main square of the city he knew from his bombing maps must be Valletta. These people were armed with guns, knives, clubs, and pitchforks. He could also feel the heat of their anger rising up to meet him. Heart-pounding, he wet himself again. He knew there was no way he’d be able to live through this reception.
Panic-stricken, he looked up at the Tu-95 as it slowly moved away from him. The last thing he would ever see was the blurry image of the girl with the red dress looking back out at him from the cockpit window.
She was waving goodbye.
Eighteen
Da Nang
South Vietnam
THE RF-4X PHANTOM RECON jet lifted off cleanly from Da Nang’s longest runway and immediately turned out over the South China Sea.
The “X” was an unusual aircraft. Formerly a fighter-bomber/ground attack plane, it had been converted into an armed reconnaissance platform about a year before. Its already-ugly nose had been extended by fifteen feet, providing room for a twelve-lens detachable SLAR/TEREC camera pod. Beneath its wings was a clutter of FLIR pods. TACAN and LANTIRN modules—and four Sidewinder missiles. The airplane was painted in a sheer black; the gold scrolling running back from the cockpit to the tail read: ACE WRECKING COMPANY.
Behind the controls of the unusual airplane was Captain John C. “Crunch” O’Malley. A gifted pilot and tactician, at thirty-six, O’Malley was the old man of the United American gang. Though originally hired on as a freelancer, he’d been flying exclusively for the UAAF for three years now: He’d been flying solo for just about that long, too. The Ace Wrecking Company was at one time a two-man operation, but he’d lost his partner twenty-eight months ago, on an operation over the mid-Pacific.
Since then he’d downsized. The rear seat where his partner used to ride was now crammed with recon and intelligence-gathering gear. The Ace Wrecking Company hadn’t really wrecked anything in a while, and it wasn’t really a company anymore either. Now it specialized in long, really long, recon flights. Crunch had gotten to the point where he could do a fourteen-hour hump without breaking a sweat. In his opinion, it was a good way to spend his old age.
He had several photo targets today. He would first do a high-fly over Lolita Island, the site of the mysterious plastic forest. From there he would head east, towards the Palawan Passages, an area just west of the Philippines. This was a favorite hiding spot for the battleships of the Asian Mercenary Cult, the prime troublemakers in this vast region. From the United Americans’ point of view, it was always a good idea to keep an eye out for any of their movements.
After taking a wide-sweep of Palawan, Crunch would return to Lolita, reaching there some two hours after nightfall for a series of FLIR, heat-trace and Nightvision photography. Then he would head home.
In all, the mission would last about seven hours, a short hop compared to some of his flights.
If he hurried, he’d be back in Da Nang before the moon came up.
It was fourteen hundred hours on the nose when Crunch first picked up Lolita Island on his Forward Looking Infra-Red scope.
It was still some distance away, off on the southern horizon. But just from what he could see on the IF scope, Crunch could tell something was very queer about the island. The jungle looked too damn perfect—every tree was the exact same height, every blade of grass was leaning the exact same way. The heat signature alone was enough to scramble his screen. The island had been baking in the height of hazy sunshine for two hours and its plastic foliage was giving off tremendous amounts of heat. It was so hot on the greenish world of the FLIR eye, it looked to Crunch like the island was actually engulfed in flames.
He immediately pulled back on his crank, booted the throttles and climbed nearly straight up to 63,360 feet. Once at this height—exactly eleven miles above the earth—he throttled back, turned the plane on its left wing and opened his camera pods. For thirty seconds he maintained this attitude, long enough for four of the cameras inside the pod to run through one can of film.
Then he leveled out, shut everything off and did a time and position check: fourteen hundred and five hours, just about eleven-degrees by one hundred fourteen. For his voice-activated cockpit reporter, he mentioned the heat coming off of Lolita and his own impress
ions of the bizarre, faultless jungle growth.
Then he punched his next destination into the flight computer and felt the airplane jerk to the left.
His nose now pointed at the eastern horizon, he pushed the throttles forward again and was off.
The crew of the huge Antonov An-124 “Condor” had been circling for hours.
They’d been holding in a ten-mile orbital pattern off the Filipino island of Tatota since before zero six hundred hours that morning; it was now almost three in the afternoon. They’d already refueled in the air twice, and as the prospect for yet another gassing was coming up, the airplane’s radio man was trying frantically to contact one of the several freelance flying gas stations known to serve this part of the globe.
The problem was the price went up with each minute the giant cargo ship drew nearer to empty. These days, negotiations for an aerial drink skyrocketed the closer the fuel-starved plane got to a bingo situation. The in-flight refueling bandits were in no hurry to answer the Condor’s calls; they preferred to make their customers sweat a little first, a brutal fact of supply and demand at thirty-five thousand feet.
The Antonov crew were themselves freelancers; this particular Condor was outfitted to carry a SEXX, a special-external/extra, as in extra-heavy payloads. The Condor was essentially a gigantic aerial tow truck. Its specialty was picking up broken or damaged warplanes, bombers mostly, strapping them on to its back and flying them to a destination for repair.
They’d been contracted for this particular mission around 11 P.M. the night before. Leaving their island base off Brunei, they’d reached this coordinate as instructed just after sunrise, to await further instructions. They’d been going around in circles ever since.
They had no idea if there was a problem or what was causing the delay—they’d received nothing other than a single radio message two hours back telling them to hold their position. They didn’t know who had hired them—the deal had gone through an Indonesian middleman—or what they were expected to carry. All they knew was they’d get paid the minimum whether the mission was brought to the second stage or not.
It was now growing on fifteen hundred hours, and the big Soviet-designed cargo plane was nearing its bingo point once again. Once the gas light flashed red, the cargo plane would have just enough fuel left to get back to its base. If that happened, everyone onboard knew it would be a bitch to get paid at all. Contractors could always wiggle-out of a no-show bingo clause. They could always say, hey, we showed up, with a lot of gas for you and you were gone.
So the crew of the Condor were torn: should they buy some more fuel from one of the robber gas merchants and hang around a little longer? Or should they just say fuck it and go home?
In the end, they decided to stay. The contract had called for a ten-percent overpayment for a timely mission; this told the eleven crewmen that their employer had deep pockets, someone who could afford to have the largest airplane in the world circle endlessly around an isolated patch of ocean, chewing up time at more than ten thousand dollars an hour.
Finally, they made a deal with a refueling outfit out of Mindoro. Ten minutes later an ancient British-built Handley-Page Victor K.Mk2 showed up, leaking gas from all three hoses. The midair fuel-up went anything but smoothly—the tanker crew was probably drunk—but eventually the Condor took on another ten thousand pounds of fuel, good for another few hours.
After that, they would have to make the decision to stay or go, once again.
Unknown to heavy lifters in the Condor, an interloper had witnessed the whole refueling episode.
It was Crunch. He was flying ten miles directly above the Condor, watching the SEXX plane go round and round and round.
This in itself was not unusual. Many times, SEXX planes were hired prior to the opening of a battle or a military attack, and left on call, like an ambulance, ready to pick up any ailing airplanes. But this was a An-12 extra-large external lifter—a plane outfitted to carry the largest piggyback loads possible. The plane was so big, it could probably carry a small airliner on its back, even a F-111 or a Backfire bomber. So what the hell was it doing, circling around this part of the empty ocean? There were no conflicts about to break out anywhere nearby—the United American intelligence services knew these things. And certainly not one that would require the services of this flying monster.
So, what the hell was it doing out here? And exactly what had the people who’d hired it expected to carry on its back?
Crunch didn’t know—and didn’t hazard a guess.
Instead, he did the next best thing. He took a couple hundred pictures, of the dizzily circling Condor, then turned west and headed back home to Da Nang.
This, he thought, was more important than going back and shooting Lolita again.
Nineteen
NIGHT HAD DISAPPEARED BY the time the Tu-95 passed over the coastline of the country once known as Lebanon.
Hunter was steering the big airplane with his knees now, head back, resting his eyes. Chloe was asleep in his lap. Baldi was strapped into the radio engineer’s seat behind him, crash helmet on, two parachutes clutched to his chest. He was a sailor; he’d yelled forward to Hunter many times during their high-altitude trans-Mediterranean flight. He belonged in a boat, on the sea, not in the belly of a monster, flying at sixty-five thousand feet.
There were many other places Hunter wanted to be at that moment, too. Chloe’s warm chalet was his first choice; sleeping in the front seat of the long-gone tanker truck was his second. But he knew now was not the time to start dreaming about unattainable things. He had to keep his eyes on the prize, and his brain on the matter at hand.
The nose of the huge Bear was laid exactly on an unwavering southeasterly course. This heading was the result of a very simple navigation plot Hunter had made earlier, before they’d left Malta for the air base in Siracusa. He was sure that the people operating the Zon had attempted to bomb Valletta to its knees just so they could use the city’s extra-long runway. Combining this with what he’d culled from his observations when the shuttle went over Point Zero, he’d determined that this course, which stretched all the way to below the equator before it began a loop around the world again, was a retracing of the Zon’s orbital path and hence, its reentry track. In other words, the way the shuttle was flying, it had to come down somewhere along this line eventually.
Hunter’s plan—and it was not a modest one—was to locate every air base sporting an extra-long runway along this course and fuck it up, just as he’d done at Star City, and on Malta. If he was able to somehow accomplish this, then possibly he could close the gap on just where the shuttle could land and further ensure his being there when it finally did come down.
But he’d have to hurry. He was sure the Zon would be reentering sometime within the next twenty-four hours. In that time, he knew he might wind up having to fly more than halfway around the globe, all in less than a day. The good news was the Bear bomber was well-suited for this quest. It was fast, somewhat fuel-efficient, and carrying all of the rudimentary navigation devices he needed to aid in his search. Also its weapons bay was filled to the brim with a variety of bombardment devices.
But how far could they actually go? Of this he was a little uncertain. Bad weather, enemy opposition and a million other things could arise and make him eat fuel and thus cut down on his range. But if he was careful, and if everything worked right, he figured he’d be able to fly all the way to the Fiji Islands and beyond, if he had to.
They were now passing over what was once the city of Beirut. These days it was little more than a burned out hole surrounded by encroaching olive groves and grapevines. They used to call it the Jewel of the Middle East. Now, like so many cities in this part of the world, it was vanishing, slowly but surely, being reclaimed by the earth and the olive groves.
They skirted the airspace around Damascus a few minutes later. Hunter noted a couple of search-radar emissions rising from SAM sites below, but nothing ever came of them. The Bear was
too high to be hit with most SAMs anyway, and if a nuclear-capable strategic bomber was flying over your turf, it was good foreign policy not to piss them off. With so many different kinds of warplanes plying the skies these days, you never knew which one might return to drop a big one on you—“accidentally,” of course.
They did meet up with a couple of interceptors once they’d passed out of Syrian airspace and found themselves above the relatively new country of El Alanbar. The interceptors were laughably old Mirage-1s though, planes that were obsolete before Hunter was born. They couldn’t climb any higher than forty-five-angels, so their pilots could do little more than look up and watch as the turbo-charged high-flying Bear passed four miles over their heads.
Chloe woke up momentarily, readjusted herself in Hunter’s lap and then went back to sleep again. They passed over into airspace controlled by what used to be called Iraq, now known as Trans-Mesopotamia. Instantly a dozen SAM radars locked onto them. But again, Hunter was not concerned. He was flying so high, so fast, it would take a one-in-a-million shot to knock them down.
About one minute into Mesop airspace, he felt a jolt of electricity run up his spine. It went through his neck, around his ears and into his brain. Suddenly, a taut vibration began singing deep inside him. His neurons, all sixteen billion of them, were suddenly heating up.
“Chloe, wake up,” he whispered, failing to avoid the temptation of stroking her hair lightly. She sat up sleepily.
“Are we there yet?” she asked sweetly.
Hunter shook his head and began pushing buttons and throwing levers. Suddenly the plane began losing altitude.
Somewhere down there on the Iraqi desert, something was beckoning to him. Something important to this mission; critical even. He had to go down and take a look.
The place was called Qum and it was very near a place known as Uruk.
Target: Point Zero Page 19
