Death Orbit

by Maloney, Mack;

  In all his years of flying—and he was widely regarded as the best fighter pilot ever—nothing had matched that 22-minute ascent through the cloud layer above Florida, across the Atlantic, and eventually into orbit. The Zon, a crude cookie-cutter copy of the old American space shuttle, bucked and bronked the whole way up. At one point it was shaking so badly, Hunter and the others had clasped hands, so sure were they that the Zon was about to break apart in the upper reaches of the atmosphere and kill them all.

  But somehow the spacecraft had held together and attained the magical speed of 17,500 mph, or roughly 7 miles a second, the velocity needed to break out of the earth’s gravity. And it had deposited them here, shaken, into orbit, safe and in one piece.

  In surviving this, the most hair-raising experience of his life, Hawk Hunter had had an epiphany. Flying jets faster, higher, and better than anyone had been only a warm-up, a precursor to this, the ultimate high-flight. This was what he’d been working for all along; this had been his goal. Not so much the act of flying, which was, in exact terms, simply a way of fooling gravity. What Hunter had wanted all these years was to be free of gravity. To break those surly bonds completely—not just in his kick-ass fighter at Mach 2 or 3, but in a monstrous spacecraft: huge liquid-fuel tank, solid-rocket boosters, awesome shuttle engines, all combined for more thrust than what he’d summoned up in his many years of driving jets. Flying airplanes was just the first step to flying in space. He was convinced of that now—just as he was certain the Wright Brothers had been convinced of it way back when.

  But this was not just a free ride in space.

  There was a mission up here for them to fulfill. And a desperate one at that. The supercriminal, world-feared terrorist Viktor II was up here somewhere, too. This was his space shuttle they were flying, captured in a spectacular battle on the South China Sea island of Lolita, where Hunter, through many machinations and twists, had forced it to land.

  He’d been chasing Viktor II for many months now, ever since the superterrorist had ignited separate wars in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean. An embodiment of everything evil in the world, Hunter was determined to catch the devilish-looking war criminal and put an end to his reign of terror once and for all. Hunter had even gone so far as to vow to kill Viktor II with his bare hands if he had to. It was a promise he was still intending to keep.

  The catastrophic world war which had put the earth into its present chaotic position was now five years past. From the ashes, a new kind of pursuit of freedom had arisen. Not the old, cobbled-together, illusory freedom that politicians had bandied about in the years leading up to World War III—no, this was real freedom, real liberty, politician free. And it was not just for those who were fortunate enough to be born into the prosperous areas of the planet. This was worldwide freedom, individual driven, based on the concept that all men were created equal and therefore should be treated that way—might they sink or swim, do good or bad.

  This new concept was at the heart of the determination of Hunter and his allies of the United American Armed Forces. It had taken them four long years to rid the U.S. continent of those who had imposed an unequal peace at the cessation of hostilities of the last great war. Gone now for the most part were the left-wing terrorists, the far-right white supremacist armies, the Nazis, the Mid-Aks, the organized crime families, the air pirates, the greedy opportunists, the agents of disinformation and discord—all of them taken on and defeated by the United Americans, all of them now on the outside looking in.

  In the last year or so, the United Americans had found themselves fighting offshore, first on some of the very same Pacific islands where their great-grandfathers had fought during World War II, and then in the haunted jungles of Vietnam, where their grandfathers and fathers had also spilled blood.

  Now they were in outer space, doing the same thing.

  More than any other, it was Hawk Hunter who had led the forces of freedom in these campaigns, and it was he who was at the helm of this new expeditionary force. As with much of his life, times of great joy were frequently spliced into times of great peril. He loved flying in space—yet he was here to find and eliminate the world’s most dangerous criminal. He loved the freedom from gravity, the total unshackling of earth, yet he’d left behind two very personal entanglements. One was named Chloe. The other was named Dominique.

  It was perhaps not so ironic anymore that his relationship with Dominique had started in the cold, dark aftermath of World War III. He’d met her during his long, lonely march back across Europe once the fighting had ceased, staying with her in an abandoned farmhouse before moving on, eventually getting back to the States and having her walk back into his life again soon afterward. Beautiful, blond, erotic, and widely lusted after, they had been together ever since, unmarried and with no children, but bonded by real love and the passion of the times.

  Dominique was now at their farm on Cape Cod, the place called Skyfire, waiting, he supposed, as she always did, for him to finally return home for good. That had been Hunter’s dream, too: that all of the fighting and wars and intrigue would finally be over with and he could simply go home and be with the woman he loved.

  At least, that had been his dream before he’d met Chloe. This had happened barely a few months ago, while he was making his way through the Swiss Alps in search of a key tracking station being used by Viktor II and the orbiting Zon spacecraft. That Chloe was naked when he first set eyes on her, bathing in the frigid waters of an alpine lake near Saint Moritz, only increased the magnitude of the lightning bolt that struck him that day. The way she was, what she believed—it filled him up inside so much, he’d been tempted just to quit the whole hero business and settle down with her right then and there.

  But duty called and she became entangled and he wound up rescuing her from the clutches of Viktor’s minions and together they had tracked down the last possible landing site for the Zon, thus forcing the climactic battle which gave the United Americans a working space shuttle, but not the prize they were after, Viktor II himself.

  Now, for the first time in his life, Hunter was torn between two women, both beautiful, both smart, both patient. Both willing to be with him for the rest of their lives. And neither one knew about the other. Yet.

  No wonder he liked it so much in space.

  Hawk woke up to find the still-sleeping form of Elvis Q floating by him.

  One of the original United Americans, Elvis Q had just escaped several years of captivity by Viktor’s allies, a time during which he’d been brainwashed and taught how to fly the Zon spacecraft. Now that he was back in the fold, he was probably the most rabid Viktor-hater among them all, if that was possible.

  Also on board and floating nearby were Jim Cook of the elite JAWS special ops unit, and Frank Geraci of the famous NJ104 combat engineers. Both were close allies of Hunter. The only ones awake up on the flight deck at the moment were JT Toomey and Ben Wa, two of Hunter’s oldest friends.

  Hunter had been asleep for only an hour or so when his deep inner sense told him to wake up. The same extrasensory perceptive ability that made him the premier fighter pilot of his day worked when he was out of the cockpit as well. Now a vibration rising up inside him told him he had to get up, get alert. Trouble was on the way.

  Sure enough, the intercom inside the crew compartment came on not two seconds later.

  “Flight deck to Hunter,” JT’s very distinctive voice crackled. “You’d better get up here, Hawk, old boy, on the triple…”

  It was a short float up from the crew compartment to the flight deck of the Zon.

  Three days in space had acclimated Hunter and the others to the quirks of zero-gravity. Drifting along weightless was a very pleasant experience; it was almost like sex—Hunter just could not get rid of the feeling that this was how man was supposed to be.

  But when you had to get somewhere in a hurry, you had to bring one of Isaac Newton’s laws into play: once a body is in motion, it tends to stay in motion.
It was amazing how little muscle power it took to propel oneself across the crew compartment or up to the Zon’s flight deck. Hunter just gave himself a tap of the boots and he was spinning like a bullet toward the overhead hatch and the flight deck beyond. It was the slowing down part that could be painful. Usually a well-placed shoulder or even a preemptive kick of the boot would do the trick. Hit the right place on the ladder or the compartment wall and you had the equivalent of brakes. Miss it by a centimeter or two and you’d wind up with a space bruise, painful and long-lasting.

  The urgent call from JT had woken them all. Now, as Hunter bounced his way up to the flight compartment, Elvis, Cook, and Geraci were right on his heels.

  “What’ve you got?” Hunter asked, floating up and into the left-side commander’s seat.

  “Maybe trouble,” JT replied. “Maybe with a capital T.”

  He was pointing to an object that appeared to be about 20 miles straight ahead of them. It was white and twinkling, indicating that it was tumbling.

  “That showed up on the radar about two minutes ago,” Ben explained from the makeshift navigator’s station.

  “So?” Hunter asked. “We’ve seen a lot of junk up here.”

  “But the computer says this particular piece wasn’t there when we came around last time,” Ben replied. “Wasn’t anywhere near here. I checked the radar’s memory. It’s a new object.”

  “You mean something that’s been launched since we went around the last time?” Elvis asked.

  Ben could only shrug. “Maybe…”

  Hunter doubted this. His inner sense would have told him if it were so. Plus, they surely would have detected a new satellite’s entry trail; the telltale stream of smoke and exhaust left behind by a payload’s boosters was hard to miss.

  Hunter pulled out the shuttle’s extremely powerful bi-scopes, a kind of computer-driven set of binoculars. The radar on the Zon had been a hasty addition before take-off and Hunter knew better than to rely on it too closely. It was time to go with the naked eye.

  He got the tumbling object within his sights and tried to study it. It appeared to be a piece of space trash, one of many thousands of objects floating around above the planet, the result of nearly 50 years of earth-launched space flights. But looking at things up here was different than down on earth. First of all, the Zon at the moment was streaking along at several miles a second. The trouble was, so was just about everything else around them, thus giving the illusion that everything was in fact standing still, and the earth below them was spinning around at a fantastic rate.

  Second, just because they were in a stable orbit didn’t mean everything around them stayed in the same position in relation to them everytime around, especially in low-earth orbit. Space was not a static place, though it might look that way from the ground up. Actually, things were changing all the time.

  This particular object was bothering Hunter. It had taken a marathon preflight session to figure out the Zon’s rather primitive guidance computers and then link them up in such a way that they could keep track of the spacecraft’s orbital path and avoid any collisions. Up here the tiniest screw spinning free from a deteriorating piece of space junk could prove fatal to something as big and as fast as the Zon.

  Colliding with the object Hunter now had in the bi-scopes would prove catastrophic.

  The reason they were up here was to apprehend Viktor II and drag him back to earth for trial and hopefully execution. When they realized he was not on the Zon when it was forced to land on Lolita Island, that left only one place he could still be: inside the old Russian-built Mir space station, a frequent destination of Viktor’s previous orbital flights.

  But finding the Mir was a task that stretched even Hunter’s estimable talents to the limit. It could be anywhere in orbit—higher than the Zon’s present path, or lower; hundreds of miles ahead, or a few miles behind. It could be on one station one day and move to another the next. It could be on the other side of the globe and by maintaining the proper speed and altitude, forever elude their searching.

  But something inside Hunter’s brain was buzzing, and it had to do with this mysterious object which had suddenly appeared in their vicinity.

  “Is there anything in the computer memory that can ID this thing?” he asked JT.

  The shuttle pilot began furiously punching buttons on the main control panel. The small TV screen before him began generating long lists of known space junk on one side and two-dimensional stick-figure illustrations on the other. Both Elvis and Ben had bi-scopes and were studying the tumbling object, occasionally looking down at the computer readouts to see if there was anything similar.

  About twenty seconds into this procedure, Elvis got a match.

  “It looks like a Progress M-27 satellite, similar to the Cosmos series,” he announced, keeping the object in view. “Same framework. Same mass and dimensions, according to the computer. Same…”

  Suddenly, Hunter’s psyche began vibrating madly.

  “Jeezus…” he was just able to whisper. An instant later, the tumbling object blew up.

  It was an amazing sight—for about three seconds. The explosion went off as if in slow motion. A bright flash, and then a billowing cloud of flame shooting out in all directions. There was no sound, but a concussion wave hit the Zon a few moments later. It shook the spacecraft from one end to the other.

  And then it was gone. The flash, the flame, the sharp jolt. All that remained was the cloud of white specks—and that was the problem.

  Before Hunter even knew it, he was deep into the pilot’s seat and pushing buttons madly. He unlocked the Zon’s main systems from the GPS-2 computer, essentially putting the shuttle into manual control. Then he voice-commanded the steering jets to prepare to be lit. Then he lit them.

  Suddenly the Zon flipped on its side, which in the directionless environs of space meant it had changed its position relative to the earth. Hunter hit the steering jets again. Now the Zon began moving sideways, shuddering in protest at the violent action. Hunter hit the steering jets a third time. Now the Zon was suddenly standing on its tail and vibrating even worse than before.

  Throughout all this, the other crew members held on for dear life, their mouths hanging open at Hunter’s lightning-quick actions. They weren’t quite sure why he had suddenly seen fit to throw the Zon all over the place.

  The answer came a few seconds later.

  For suddenly the cloud of debris from the explosion was on them. It went by like a thousand tiny missiles, still aglow from the tremendous blast. Hunter had managed to steer the Zon away from the bulk of it. Still dozens of small particles began slamming into the spacecraft, especially around the tail section and the right wing. An outer glass panel directly over their heads was smashed. A large chunk hit the nose of the spacecraft, too. The lights blinked; the computer screens went crazy. Three separate warning buzzers went off at once. Even the intercoms went to static.

  But just as quickly as the debris cloud was on them it was gone. Its individual particles losing velocity by the second, it seemed to disappear as the Zon zoomed out of it. Elvis, JT, and Ben were pushing reset panels and hitting panic buttons, but in a relatively short time, the on-board main computers were telling them the damage to the Zon was slight and that all systems were still operating at high integrity.

  They had dodged a mighty large bullet.

  Finally Hunter pushed a series of buttons, putting the Zon back under control of the GPS-2, in effect, returning it to auto-pilot.

  In all, the crisis had lasted less than thirty seconds.

  “Christ, what the hell happened?” JT finally breathed. “One moment that thing is in our way, the next, it blows up and almost kills us.”

  “Some coincidence…” Ben gasped.

  Hunter was already scanning space in front of him. The rock-hard features on his face were not good news to his colleagues. When Hunter looked concerned, it was usually time to worry. And he looked very concerned right now.

 
“That was no coincidence,” he said finally. “Someone sent that toward us intentionally. In the old days, they used to call it flak…”

  Four

  On the Jersey Shore

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG year and a half for the members of NJ104.

  The high-tech combat engineering unit had been involved in continuous military action since the beginning of the previous year. Commencing with the war against the Fourth Reich and its Norse allies, the specialized combat engineers—who were actually members of the pre-Big War 104th Engineering Battalion of the New Jersey National Guard—had fought against the Asian Mercenary Cult in the South Pacific, had then transited to Southeast Asia for the Second Vietnam War, and had then played a key role in the capturing of the Zon space shuttle on Lolita Island in the middle of the South China Sea.

  In that time NJ104 had lost its air transport—a C-5 gunship specially outfitted for lugging the team’s vast array of CE gear around—along with about 20 percent of its weaponry and nearly 30 percent of its manpower. Moreover, in those 18 months of combat, NJ104 hadn’t had any R & R, vacation, or anything close to what could be considered a day off.

  The unit was long overdue for a rest.

  So this is what had brought it to the shore town of Surf City, New Jersey. The unit was now about 150 men strong, though just about everyone was nursing some kind of wound or ailment. Many men were suffering from simple exhaustion, others from dehydration and even malnutrition.

  Surf City seemed to be just the place for the unit to heal its wounds, regain its strength, and catch its collective breath. The nearby beaches were pristine, the water clean, relatively warm, with high waves and plenty of bluefish and stripers. The town was full of saloons, eateries, gambling halls, and strip clubs. The old O’Keefe Naval Air Station was close by and here a new C-5 Galaxy gunship was being refitted for the combat engineers. A well-staffed medevac unit was also located on the base.

  The unit and their families were billeted in a row of beachfront condominiums about a quarter mile south of Surf City, at a place called Ship Bottom Bay. One of the condos had been turned into a command post and chow hall. The hierarchy of the elite engineering unit was stationed here. The place was known simply as the Hut.