Target: Point Zero

by Maloney, Mack;

  Now it was starting to make a little more sense to Hunter. It appeared that by some fluke of royal ascendancy, this young kid was the top dog of Rangoon. This would explain the garish uniforms, the young age of his troops, the brightly colored airplanes, the sandbox full of Fulcrums and all those shiny AA guns. All of the military might centered in Rangoon looked like it had been put together by a child—wild, imaginative and hopelessly naive. In other words, this boy was actually living out many a kid’s dream: playing army with a real army.

  The Kid King made a gesture for the guards to bring Hunter and the others forward. They were led to the bottom step of the elevated throne platform. The Kid King looked down at them, his pouty face a mask of uncertainty.

  “Is that your airplane out there?” he asked them in halting, but understandable English. “The big one, with the strange wings?”

  Hunter stepped forward. “It is,” he replied.

  “What kind of airplane is it?” the boy asked. “I’ve never seen one like it before.”

  “It’s a Tu-95F Bear high-altitude, long endurance strategic bomber,” Hunter told him. “Not many of them left around anymore…”

  The Kid King’s eyes lit up slightly.

  “It carries four jet-powered, twin-bladed, propeller-driven engines,” Hunter quickly went on. “It can fly halfway around the world without stopping for fuel.”

  Now the kid’s eyes went wider. He’d especially liked that last part.

  “How fast can it fly?” he wanted to know.

  “Close to five hundred miles an hour,” Hunter replied. “Maybe more, if it’s done right.”

  The kid’s entire face was beaming now. “With just propellers?” he exclaimed

  “Jet-powered propellers,” Hunter gently corrected him. “The power taken by the jet engine’s propulsion turns a pair of contra-rotating propellers…”

  “Wow!” the kid yelled.

  “…and that’s what makes the Bear able to stay up so long,” Hunter went on, intentionally feeding his excitement. “You know, when you fly high enough, it takes a lot less gas to get the job done. Well, these engines are really fuel-efficient…”

  At this point, Baldi stole a sideways glance at Hunter. Even he knew this was bullshit. But obviously the Wingman was trying to work a vein here.

  “I have a lot of airplanes,” the Kid King boasted. “Did you see them?”

  “Sure did,” Hunter told him. “Especially those Fulcrums. They’re some of the best machines I’ve ever encountered.”

  “I’m collecting them,” the kid bragged. “I’ve got almost forty so far. I’m also getting a MiG-23 swing-wing soon.”

  “I used to fly an F-111…” Hunter lied.

  The Kid King practically leapt from his jewel-enraptured seat.

  “No!” he yelled, shaking all over. “An Aardvark? Really?”

  Hunter nodded politely. “It was a real gas to fly.”

  The kid finally did jump off his throne now, running down several steps until he was at eye level with Hunter.

  “What’s your favorite airplane, Mister?”

  Hunter smiled again. “I’m partial to F-16s,” he said.

  “I love them, too!” the kid proclaimed. “I’ve been trying to buy one forever—but they are very hard to find.”

  Hunter kept grinning. “I know,” he said. “I’ve got the last one left in the world.

  The kid stared back openmouthed at him now, disbelief distorting his chubby features.

  “You do?” he asked, amazed. “The last one? What model is it? A ‘C’ or a ‘D’?”

  Hunter took a step closer to him.

  “Neither,” he said in a slight whisper. “My airplane is an F-16XL Cranked Arrow. It’s got a seventy-five thousand-pound thrust, GE-606 turbo fan inside that’s been uprated to 92.5 It’s also got six Vulcan cannons on the nose, and twelve hardpoints under the expanded wing.”

  The Kid King was simply astounded by now.

  “Awesome…” he whispered. “How fast can you go in it?”

  Hunter winked. “That’s top secret…”

  The swammi-wan let out a low whistle. “Wow…”

  Hunter stepped back, looked over at Chloe then Baldi—they seemed to know what he was up to. He’d dealt with many crackpot power characters around the world in his travels. Some admired him, some hated him, some wanted to hire him as their own. He’d bargained with them, cajoled them, and when things went wrong, threatened them. Sometimes the art of survival was all in the words you selected—and how convincingly you could fib. But dealing with a kid, that was another thing. He had to be especially careful about what lies he told.

  The kid’s eyes were still glued on Hunter.

  “I want one,” he demanded. “An F-16. I want to add one to my collection.”

  Hunter took a deep breath. Was it really going to be this easy?

  “Well,” he told him, “I can let you have mine for a while. For free. To add to your collection.”

  “You will? How? When?”

  “Once I get home,” Hunter told him. “I’ll fuel it up and fly back over myself. It’ll take me a week, maybe a little more—depending on how long your soldiers want me to stay around here.”

  The Kid King stood up, hands on his hips.

  “Well, you don’t have to stay here at all,” he declared. “You can go free, right now. Return to your home base and then come back…”

  “All of us?” Hunter asked.

  “Yes, of course, go!” the Kid King was yelling. “Please, I must see this super-airplane as soon as I can…”

  Hunter took a deep breath. Already he was formulating a plan in his mind. The way the ammo bunkers were lined up so close to the air base’s runway, he was sure a few well-placed tracer rounds, fired just as they were taking off, could start a chain reaction that would certainly fuck up Rangoon’s airstrip in a major way.

  “Go, now!” the kid yelled at them. “…and hurry, please?”

  Hunter gave him a quick salute.

  “Sure thing,” he said, stepping back with Chloe and Baldi. “I’ll bring you some other stuff too. Jackets and a T-shirt…”

  “Cool,” the kid exclaimed.

  At that point, Hunter looked over at Chloe who looked to Baldi. Then, they all took a step backwards. No one did anything to stop them. They took another step. Again, there was no resistance.

  So they simply turned around and began walking, calmly, but anxiously towards the waiting HumVee. Would it really be as easy as this? Hunter wondered.

  As it turned out, it wouldn’t. Just as they were about to climb into the Hummer for the ride back to the Bear, the hall suddenly reverberated with the sound of one word, a forcefully shouted: “Halt!”

  Hunter, Chloe and Baldi froze in place. Their guards did the same thing. In fact, everyone in the royal hall dropped to their knees once they heard the echoing command. Hunter gritted his teeth—damn, he’d jinxed himself.

  He finally turned around to see a large woman had just taken her place at the top of the throne. One look told him that this was the Kid King’s mother. She was as big as a house and her face looked perpetually angry.

  She flew down the stairs, pulled the Kid King up by his collar and delivered three hard whacks to his substantial hindquarters. The kid instantly began squealing.

  “How…many…times…have…I…told…you…not…to…do…things…like…this?” she screamed at him, punctuating each word with a mighty slap to the kid’s rear end. “You are the worst child that’s ever been conceived!”

  She finally stopped and let him go. The Kid King fled the scene quickly. Nearly all the guards were either looking at the ceiling or rolling their eyes by now. Obviously they’d seen this before.

  The big, old mean woman scowled at them—then turned towards Hunter and the others.

  “And you!” she screeched in the same voice with which she had scolded her son. “You are not going anywhere…ever!”

  Five minutes later, Hunter and
Baldi were tossed into a cell located in a tower at the rear of the palace fortress.

  The guards were much more forceful with them now. They no longer looked or acted like kids playing guns and dressed in ridiculously bright camos. They were flailing their weapons around threateningly—and actually looking like they knew how to use them. They’d roughly thrown Hunter into the clink, tossing Baldi right in after him and slamming the massive door behind them.

  Chloe was led to a cell just two doors down from theirs. Hunter could hear her talking to her guards, asking them sweetly why she and her friends were being locked up.

  But the guards were not responsive. Finally they slammed her door shut, too.

  Hunter’s cell wasn’t much, as jails go. It was built of bare teakwood, with two large, barred windows and a skylight over their heads. It smelled like the inside of a sauna, and like everything else in the Kitchen, it had a toylike quality to it. There were no chairs or benches, no place to sit at all. Dog-tired and deflated by this time, Hunter and Baldi slowly slid down the wall to the floor.

  Hunter folded his arms on his knees and for the first time in a long time, rested his weary brow.

  “I should have booked it while we had the chance,” he said, his voice low and uncharacteristically bitter. “Those Vigs can’t top fifty-one. We had more than a five-angels buffer. We should have just kept going…”

  But Baldi was already shaking his head.

  “To where, Hawk?” he asked simply. “If we had fled from here, what point would there be in going on? Viktor would simply land here.”

  Hunter just shrugged. He could have easily slept for a week.

  “Yes, but maybe I could have figured out something else,” he replied wearily. “I mean, lying to that kid like that—that might have been the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”

  Baldi laughed for a moment.

  “Hey, you took a chance,” he said. “And the kid almost fell for it. How’d we know his old lady was going to ride in on her broom? Another minute or two we would have been gone.”

  Hunter just shook his head from side to side and was quiet for a long time.

  “Well, I feel bad for you,” he told Baldi after a while. “You got a wife, a family. You belong with them, not running halfway around the world with me.”

  Baldi laughed again, this time more powerfully.

  “They would want me to be here,” he replied. “Believe me, the fact that I’m fighting at the side of the Wingman will give them pride for generations. They know this quest is right, and that nothing will happen to me. So don’t worry, my friend. Everything is temporary. This will be, too.”

  Everything is temporary. How true that is, Hunter thought. Freedom. Life. Happiness. All of them last but a pin-prick in the vast fabric of time. And now he was wasting whatever precious amount he had left, getting himself locked up at the very worst moment of his dash along the shuttle’s reentry line. He stared up out of the skylight window to the star-filled heavens above. It wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch if he saw the Zon suddenly pass overhead right at that moment, gradually getting lower and lower, until finally making contact with the Earth’s atmosphere and burning its way back in.

  How fucked up would it be if he was still here, inside this cell, and the Zon landed, unadulterated, just a quarter mile away? He had no doubts now that some kind of a deal had been worked out with the Rangoonese for just such a thing to happen—maybe that was another reason the place was so lit up. He shook his head and then sank it lower into his knees. His promise to himself would certainly be fulfilled then: he’d vowed to be on hand when the Zon came down and he would be—it was the being locked-up part that he hadn’t foreseen.

  And then what would happen? Would it really end here? His psychic innards were telling him probably not. At the very least, he believed Viktor would take them with him in chains when he left. But supposing it did turn out this way? Supposing the four walls of this cell were the last things he ever saw? What if this was the last place he would ever be? How long would he last? Would he go insane? Would he pace like a caged animal right to the end?

  He considered all this just in the course of a few seconds, but, surprisingly, at the end of it, he wasn’t totally disheartened. Why? It was weird, it was even irrational, but deep down Hunter knew that a life sentence here would be bearable for one reason: somewhere down the hall, sitting in her own cell, would be Chloe. And if they were really going to be locked up in the Rangoon tower, for the rest of their lives, then at least he would be close to her over the years, and maybe even see her every once in a while.

  As strange as it sounded, that would be enough for him to die a happy man.

  Out on the runway of the huge base, it was obvious great preparations were taking place.

  Though it was early morning now, and just two hours before sunrise, there was a lot of activity. Trucks moving this way, airplanes being towed that way. Every light on every taxi strip was at full illumination; even the backup lights were on, as were the blue runway fog lights and the blinking red lanterns that were lit only in times of great emergencies.

  Every pilot in the employ of the royal family of Rangoon was on duty—most had been on site for the past forty-eight hours, the guard at all of the main entrances to the bases had been tripled. Tanks had been stationed at most of these checkpoints. Special K-9 squads were now patrolling the perimeters. All civilian access to the base and the city itself had been blocked off.

  Just about the only weapons systems not turned on were the empire’s substantial antiaircraft forces. Though the whole region was ringed with SAMs and radar-guided AA guns, none of them were operational at the moment—this, on an order from the Palace Mother herself. There could be no errors—an antiaircraft missile launched by mistake now could prove catastrophic on many levels.

  It was no surprise that none of the thousands of Royal Burmese troops or their officers knew what all the activity was about, or what was supposed to happen some time in the near future. They were rarely told what was up as far as the royal family and their activities. They were paid warriors, young, impressionable and for the most part, tight-lipped. They simply carried out orders whenever and wherever they got them.

  There was one clue lingering about though, one that many of the soldiers could see. At a juncture of roads which eventually flowed into the main thoroughfare leading to the Kitchen there was a knot of T-72 tanks, backed up by a dozen APCs and another half dozen assorted armed vehicles. All this armor was protecting a rather indistinct-looking truck which was parked at the center of this mobile defense perimeter. This truck, known to all as the hoochee, was familiar to the soldiers. It was the same vehicle that showed up any time they got paid—and today was not payday.

  The Kingdom of Rangoon was expecting some kind of payment for whatever the hell was going to happen. How large a payment?

  Enough for more than twenty-four armed vehicles to be on hand to guard it.

  The sound of all this activity wafted up from the huge air base and carried easily over the palace-fortress and into the tower cell currently occupied by Chloe. She was more confused than frightened now. She knew Hunter was close by; she thought Baldi was with him, too. At least they were all together. But what would happen next? Did Hunter have a plan? She couldn’t imagine he didn’t. But what if she had an opportunity to do something, to get them all out of this safely. Should she take it? No matter what?

  She lay on the floor of her cell, looking out the skylight. The stars were very bright tonight—it was not too long ago that she was riding up there among them, Hawk at the controls of the big noisy plane, her nose pressed up against the cockpit window. She thought at that moment that she would like to be up there forever, to be as close to the stars as possible. But then she laughed a little at herself.

  There was no way that kind of dream could come true—how could someone stay up high, dancing in the sky, and be close to the stars for the rest of their lives?

  The knock on
her door came softly.

  Chloe rose to her feet and backed herself against the wall. Who would this be? The guards? The Mother?

  The door swung open to reveal the Kid King. He was surrounded by heavily armed soldiers, all of them peering in at her. The kid took a step forward, stopped and then began fidgeting.

  “Am I…disturbing you, ma’am?” he asked in a barely audible whisper.

  Chloe shook her head no.

  The Kid King took two more steps forward. “Can I…I mean, may I talk to you…for a moment?”

  “Of course,” she answered sweetly. His chubby cheeks rose into a smile.

  With the snap of his fingers, the guards disappeared. The Kid King pulled the door shut behind him and took two more steps inside.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her innocently.

  “Chloe,” she told him. “What’s yours?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t have one,” he replied. “Not a real one anyway. Everyone calls me the Swammi-wan. But that’s not a real name. Like yours.”

  He took another tentative step closer. His eyes were now glued on her.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked.

  She just shrugged and smiled. “It’s a long story,” she replied. “But I can tell you we didn’t come to hurt anybody. Not you, or your family. Or any of your men.”

  “That guy,” the kid said. “The one that knows all about the airplanes. Is he famous or something?”

  Chloe laughed. “Everyone seems to think so,” she told the kid. “He really would have come back here in his superplane, to show it to you. I know he would have…”

  The kid’s features dropped a mile and a half. “I know,” he said. “But my mother. She never lets me do anything.”

  Chloe studied the boy for a moment, then motioned him even closer.

  “But you own all this, don’t you?” she asked him. “You’re the king, aren’t you?”

  “I am the Swammi-wan, yes,” he told her. “But still, my mother is a big nag. I really can’t do much…”

  Now Chloe took a step towards him.