Target: Point Zero

by Maloney, Mack;

  At a half mile out, Wa sent a message back to the five other gunships, and as one, they began rising in altitude. His was the first one over the beach, making landfall above the island’s northwestern tip just as he reached the preordained firing altitude of thirty-five hundred feet. There was absolute panic below him now—there were probably two hundred fifty troops scrambling around, many were heading to the southern beaches, others were jumping into the shallows off to the east. Again, Wa could not help but feel a pang of conscience for these paid warriors; they’d simply signed on with the wrong side. Now they had to pay the price.

  He called back to his gunmasters and told them to commence firing. A few seconds later, the flight compartment was filled with the strangely muted sound of the gunship’s weapons computers ordering the twenty-one individual cannons to fire. An instant later the whole airplane began shuddering, again a strangely muzzled vibration as the massive weapons began spitting out thousands of uranium-tipped cannon rounds.

  There was nothing but smoke at first—probably the worst vantage point to see Nozo’s guns in action was up on the flight deck. The five-second burst seemed to last forever, but finally, the whirring sound stopped and the smoke cleared away. Wa craned his neck to the left—below him he could see several dozen enemy soldiers, lying broken and bloody on the hot concrete close by the huge orange cross; they were all dead, literally perforated by the cannon rounds. There were never any wounded soldiers after a gunship attack like this. Anyone caught within the firing zone died in the first few seconds of the surgical multicannon burst.

  Wa pulled the C-5 back to level flight and increased throttle just as the second-in-line gunship opened up on an area south of the one Nozo had just pulverized. Wa pulled hard right, pressing the C-5’s nose back to the northwest. The gigantic dogfight was now stretched from one horizon to another. Wa’s mouth dropped open—it looked like something from a dream. Planes were streaking all across the sky, some firing their weapons, others in flames themselves. The contrails left by their smoking wreckage now crisscrossed the sky like a canvas from a madman’s fever.

  But who was winning?

  It was impossible for him to tell. Wa’s headphones were filled with a cacophony of sounds—excited radio calls between the outnumbered UA pilots, telling each other to watch out here, look out there, bogies closing from twelve o’clock, others coming out of the six…He heard screams, whoops, yelps of both pain and joy. Nearly one hundred jet airplanes were mixing it up—that had to be some kind of record. But numbers alone said the enemy still had the advantage over the United American aerial force. In the sounds bouncing around in his ears, Wa could hear a desperate edge in the intonations of the UA pilots.

  Yet in among this chatter, mixed way down in this symphony of terror and men dying, Wa thought he heard another voice. A familiar one, echoing way off in the distance.

  “Hang on!” this ghostly voice was saying. “I’m on my way…”

  Flailing wildly all over the crowded sky in his antique F-106, Toomey had heard the strange, disembodied voice, too, somehow discerning the six words in the racket pouring out of his headphones.

  “Hang on. I’m on the way…”

  Who the hell is that? he wondered as he climbed on to the tail of an enemy Jaguar.

  Just like every other time he’d been inside an ACM, this dogfight was passing before Toomey’s eyes in ultraslow motion. All types of warplanes were falling out of the sky around him. Tornados, Jags, F-20s, C-5s. Of all the aircraft involved in this titanic battle, the poor, stubby A-7s and the underpowered Q-9s were probably the worst suited; more of them were going down than anyone else.

  The furball was so chaotic, so confusing, Toomey had no idea how many enemy planes he’d downed. He’d nailed at least two Tornados—they weren’t the best air combat fighters in close—and two Jags, the latest one now plummeting away from him, minus its tail and left wing. His F-106, heavy and sluggish, had taken about a dozen direct hits, mostly on its wingtips and tailcone. One advantage of tooling around in this ancient beast was that back in the fifties, when the Dart was born, they really knew how to screw the bolts on tight. The plane was nothing if not rugged—in fact, Toomey swore that in at least two cannon runs taken at him by a Tornado, the rounds actually bounced off his airplane’s thick skin.

  Or at least it seemed that way.

  A pair of F-20s went streaking by him now—to his dismay, both were heavily damaged and smoking, though they were still in the fight. Above him, he saw a UA Corsair simply evaporate in a combined barrage from three Tornados; below him, one of the C-5 missile shooters, caught in the middle of the knifefight without much leeway to fire its AA-weapons, had its left wing blown away by two Jags. It was going over, slowly, but irretrievably. A few seconds later the big plane impacted with a mighty crash into the already wreckage strewn sea, taking seventeen men down with it.

  Toomey gritted his teeth and went after the Jags that had iced the big shooter, but deep in his gut, he could feel the tide was turning in favor of the enemy pilots simply because they had more airplanes.

  Suddenly, things got a lot worse.

  It came in a call from one of the C-5 early warning ships, a cousin to Black Eyes hiding way in the back. Its pilot was reporting yet another large aerial force heading for the battle out of the southwest. Preliminary indications showed at least four dozen fighter-size aircraft. They appeared to be one type of airplane—a sure indication of a merc force—and were cruising at three hundred fifty knots, a typical precombat speed.

  As word of this new development flashed to all the UA aircraft, Toomey tried and failed to get the large aerial group on his dinky air defense radar set. But he didn’t need to see these newcomers to know that if they were indeed heading for this battle to fight on the side of the Cult and their allies, then the United American force was doomed—it was as simple as that.

  At that precise moment, he heard those six words again: Hang on. I’m on the way.

  Whose voice was that?

  Toomey couldn’t even hazard a guess at this point.

  But whoever the hell it was, he was now praying that he’d get there, damn soon.

  On Lolita

  Donn Kurjan was not sweating anymore. In fact, he’d grown quite chilly in the past few minutes, due to the cold sweat running through him as he lay huddled in his hiding place, watching the titanic battle unfold before his eyes.

  He’d seen his share of combat over the years, from quick-strike covert actions to large-scale battles. But he’d never seen anything like this.

  He’d witnessed the attack by the six C-5 gunships from a perspective no one in the UA should ever experience—close to the receiving end. It astonished and sickened him. He’d seen dozens of troops, Cult and Island Rats alike, simply evaporate before the thousands of cannon shells unleashed by the big UA jets. The noise alone was enough to drive a weaker man mad. A combination of mechanical firing and the sound of the huge, depleted-uranium rounds puncturing soft flesh—it was too much even for a veteran like Lazarus to take. He found his hands on his ears and his mouth wide open and screaming in an effort to block out that awful sound—but he didn’t even come close to doing so. He began praying instead, beseeching the cosmos to make it stop, to end the carnage.

  Finally, it did.

  Only after the sixth gunship had passed over was Kurjan able to turn his scope towards the runway where most of the enemy troops had been shot down. He saw little more than collections of cracked bones and smears of runny blood. No uniforms, no weapons, no boots. Nothing—but blood and broken skeletons.

  That’s when he began sweating ice cubes.

  Off in the distance, the massive dogfight was still going on—the sky was now filled with contrails so thick, there was no longer any bright blue sky along the horizon. Just in the course of one minute, he saw at least twelve planes drop into the sea, most of them on fire, or in pieces; most of them providing metal coffins for the pilots within.

  It was madne
ss. Man-made, uncontrollable madness all around him. And he was part of it, for this was the business he’d chosen for himself.

  Now his attention was turned towards the east, where the two Cult battleships were anchored. He’d checked them about a half minute before the gunships arrived overhead and saw their crews lined up against the railings, foolishly exposing themselves as they watched the unfolding battle.

  Now both ships had their warning klaxons wailing and their crews scampering about the decks. At first Kurjan wasn’t sure why the ships’ masters were suddenly swinging into action. A glint of light off to his left answered that question. Moving faster than he thought was possible for a surface ship, he spotted two destroyers under full steam, heading right for the battleships. They were the tin cans operated by the secret unit based on Tommy Island. At last, the Brits had decided to come out of their self-imposed cocoon and join the bedlam of combat. Though they were still miles apart, the destroyers opened up on the battleships, sending a stream of seventy-six-millimeter shells into their midst. Kurjan could see both battlewagons turn their massive turrets towards the destroyers, but the smaller, speedier ships, using the north tail of the island for cover, were moving way too fast to get a bead on.

  His attention was directed back towards the center of the island. The sky overhead was once again dark with aircraft—but these were not the C-5 gunships returning, nor the enemy fighters swooping in to provide air cover for the troops on the ground. Rather, they were the Sherpa paratroop planes, those few that were left.

  Unbelievably, they were coming in low, engines whining, totaling fifteen in all. Kurjan’s jaw dropped to his chest when he saw the back ramps of the Sherpas open and lines of paratroopers begin to stream out.

  Now this was real insanity. The Island Rats were dropping the rest of their airborne force onto the burning, smoking, bloody cement island. Whether they’d been offered more money, or they felt they had no choice in the matter, they were coming down like huge brown raindrops.

  The closest ones were landing just a stone’s throw from Kurjan’s position. They were all trying their best to hit the ground running and scramble for cover, with niceties like gathering up their chutes and forming up into viable units long forgotten.

  Another deep rumble drew his attention away from falling para-mercs and back to the skies. He saw then what the recently dropped Island Rats had seen: up high, maybe at fifty-five hundred feet or so, two chevrons of C-5s, a total of six in all. The Island Rats, having seen what happened to the first of their group to be dropped to the island, assumed these planes were the gunships returning to strafe them as well.

  But they were wrong—these particular C-5s weren’t flying gun platforms. They were the UA troopships; bigger, more powerful than the dinky Sherpas, but carrying the same cargo: paratroopers. As Kurjan watched, his mouth open so wide he was literally swallowing sand, UA parachutists began falling out of the backs of the big Galaxys as well.

  He couldn’t believe it. Was this really happening? A paradrop on top of a paradrop?

  It was. The UA command had apparently decided that the one way to take prevent the Cult and its paid allies from taking Lolita Island was to take it themselves.

  Kurjan began climbing back into his combat utilities. with this small war—on land, sea and in the air—raging all around him, he knew he was not long to stay inside his hiding hole. All the while he watched as the UA paratroopers dropped swiftly down, some of them catching up with the last of the falling Island Rats. Incredibly, fire-fights broke out between these rival troops even before they reached the ground. Streams of tracer fire were being traded back and forth even as the two sides drifted down to the hard landing on the cement slab.

  Kurjan’s head was spinning now. Maybe he was hallucinating all of this—after all, he’d been on the island for nearly forty-eight hours, without sleep, or food and just the barest amount of water. He found his eyes fluttering rapidly—as if some internal mechanism was trying to wake him from this bizarre self-induced dream.

  But there would be no easy way out of this one.

  He would never know why he suddenly turned his peep-scope to the south. In the pandemonium happening all around him, this direction had been relatively quiet. But now, he saw a long dark line, scoring the southern horizon.

  What could this be? Another aerial force approaching the fight?

  His heart sank lower as he focused in on this new development. These were not friendly aircraft—this was obvious by the direction from which they were approaching. And there were so many of them, it was almost impossible to count them all or identify their aircraft type right away.

  But perhaps the strangest thing was the color of this new, oncoming force. Either Kurjan’s eyes were going on him or something was wrong with the long-range lens in the peepscope.

  Because to him, these airplanes appeared to be painted in the most unlikely color, of pink.

  They were called the Red Lanterns.

  Headquartered out of what was once known as Singapore, the Lanterns were known in aerial mercenary circles for three things: their high contract price, which was three to four times more than typical fighter-pilots-for hire; their absolutely ruthless, win-at-all-costs tactics, which included strafing parachuting pilots or adversaries who survived once they’d hit the ground; and the color of their airplanes, which was actually more pink than red.

  The Lanterns flew the Su-27 Flanker exclusively. This big, maneuverable Russian-designed fighter was especially deadly in the hands of an experienced pilot, and that was another trait for which the Lanterns were famous. Their pilots, drawn from pirate air forces all over the world, were among the most combat-hardened in the high-fly merc game. There was an almost Zen-like quality to them: they were more experienced because they lived longer; they lived longer because they never gave their adversaries an even break.

  There were now forty-eight of them heading for the fight over Lolita Island, a massive reserve force sent in by Viktor’s moneymen to secure the victory once the lower-order combatants had killed each other off. Just like the fliers fighting in the massive dogfight or scrambling around on the ground on the disputed island itself, none of the Lanterns’ pilots knew why they’d been paid to fight here, in the middle of the South China Sea, nor did they care. It was just another job to them—a high-priced contract with a large financial pot waiting for them at the end of the day.

  The lead flight of Lantern Flankers were equipped with the most advanced, long-range radar sets and had picked up the action over Lolita about twenty-two miles out. The situation looked chaotic and confusing. On one hand they could see the massive dogfight going on just off the island’s northern beaches. Then there was the sight of the huge C-5 gunships circling above Lolita, plastering troops on the ground with massive firepower. Close by the eastern shore was the small but continuing battle between the two Cult battleships and a pair of swift-moving destroyers.

  Even by the Lanterns’ own janissary standards, this was a wild scene. But their mission was clear. They simply had to shoot down as many of the large C-5s as possible, rout their fighter escorts, sink the destroyers and then provide air cover for the Cult troops already established on the concrete island.

  If everything went as they hoped, they’d have the whole thing wrapped up in less than thirty minutes.

  Maybe even less.

  Exactly what Kurjan and the others saw next would be a matter of intense debate for some time to come.

  Not that anyone disputed what happened—it was just how it happened and how long it took.

  Everyone agreed that the line of pink Su-27 Flankers appearing out on the southern horizon was so thick, they looked at first like a solid entity, as if a huge prehistoric bird was heading for Lolita Island to swallow up anyone still left alive.

  Only when the mercenary air fleet broke up into its preattack formations did this frightening vision fade to be replaced by an even more startling one.

  The Lanterns split into four w
aves of twelve. Two dozen maintained an altitude of about eighty-five hundred feet, and turned directly towards the massive dogfight still going on five miles north of Lolita. The second contingent, also containing twenty-four aircraft, swooped down to wavetop level, approximately the same altitude as the rotating C-5 Galaxys.

  Right away this brought up twin visions of horror for Kurjan. For the huge C-5s, the gunships, the missiles shooters and the depleted troop carriers, the two dozen Flankers represented an unbeatable foe. Even now, the missile ships were struggling for height and distance from which they could launch their remaining Sidewinders at the oncoming Flankers. But while the C-5s strove for altitude, the Flankers simply went even lower, cutting down the chances of their being hit by any of the C-5 missiles.

  As for the pink Su-27s heading for the dogfight, it was all too clear that once they linked up with the surviving Tornados, Jags and Q-9s, they would make mincemeat out of the remaining United American airplanes, depleted of fuel and ammunition as they were.

  So, like the legions of Pithicus Augustus, marching on to the field of Galdo in 56 B.C., just in time to rescue his brother-in-law Titucus, the sudden arrival of the Red Lanterns and their high tech warplanes appeared to seal the fate of the United Americans.

  But once again, appearances could be deceiving.

  It would never really be clear just who saw the strange airplane first, those still battling in the never-ending dogfight or those involved directly in the action on Lolita itself. Everyone agreed on two things though: the airplane was painted all black with a hot red trim, and it came out of the northwest. It was huge for a fighter, long of snout, thick of wing, with a pair of high-rising tailfins. It tore through the air so swiftly, it seemed to be intentionally laying down a constant barrage of sonic booms, deafening the ears of friend and foe alike.

  From the beginning there was no doubt whose side the mysterious airplane was on. As soon as it was first spotted, it ripped into those forces allied with the Cult with almost unbelievable abandon. By this time, many of those who saw it realized the airplane was actually a MiG-25 Foxbat, probably the fastest combat aircraft ever built. This would later be used to explain, at least in some small part, how the airplane was reported seen in two places at the same time.