Target: Point Zero (34 page)

“But I just
can’t
leave you here all alone,” he was saying. “Who’ll look after you? Who’ll protect you if…”

“I will…” they both heard a strong voice say. Hunter and Chloe looked over at Baldi.

“I will stay here, with her,” the Maltan was saying, tears almost forming in his eyes. “Nothing will happen to her…nothing she doesn’t want to happen.”

Hunter stared at him, speechless. Then he looked back at Chloe.

She kissed him lightly on the lips and then turned and walked up the steps to the Kid King’s throne. She immediately took her place at his feet and began rubbing them provocatively.

Hunter was absolutely crushed. But he had to face the reality of the situation—and think quick. Two seconds later he had the basis for a long-term plan already figured out in his mind.

“Okay, I’ll go,” he told the Kid King, “but if you want me to come back here with
my
airplane, then there’s one thing you must do for me.”

Suddenly the innocence returned to the kid’s face.

“Like what?” he asked.

Hunter climbed up onto the bottom step of the throne.

“You must let me borrow one of your airplanes…” he said.

In orbit

The pilot of the Zon space shuttle was in such bad shape now, he didn’t know if he was hot or cold.

He’d been tucked inside a pressure suit ever since accomplishing a nerve-wracking yet successful breakaway from the Mir. The problem was the suit, which was two sizes too small for him, and had no heating or cooling capability. Even worse, it had a faulty oxygen valve and its urine venting tube was cracked and frayed around the connecting ring. This was actually the most critical of his problems at the moment. He had to go—badly. But they were now less than one hundred minutes from reentry; at this point every second was precious. For him to climb out of the spacesuit, attach himself to the flight compartment’s “pee pack,” do his thing, then squeeze back into the suit and back behind the controls of the shuttle would just take too much time. So he would have to hold it as long as he could, and when he couldn’t any longer, well, he would have no choice but to go in his pants.

He had already convinced himself that this would be his last flight in the Zon. One way or the other, he felt he would not fly in space like this again. One reason for this gloom: the chances were very high they were all going to be killed on reentry—there were so many things wrong with the spacecraft now, he couldn’t imagine it coming down in one piece.

Even if they did somehow make a successful return, the whole question of their landing site could prove problematical.

This was due to their wacky orbital status, the one that had sent them staggering through space rather than zipping through it. The cockeyed course dictated that they could come down only within a very narrow burn corridor. The pilot’s original orders had him plotting reentry for a site in the eastern Mediterranean. Then this was changed to somewhere in the Arabian desert. When this was nixed, he had his computers—what was left of them—work on a site on the northwest quadrant of the subcontinent. Then this was scratched in favor of a West Asian strip, somewhere in Burma.

But now, he’d just learned, even
that
option was gone—and therein lay the problem. As far as he knew there was only one possible site left, this one lying further along the burn-line from Burma, a place that was, in the shuttle-speak, a “Grade-Delta receiving plot.” In other words, it was a highly unprepared landing strip, probably just recently built, with little or no crash protection or emergency services in place.

Also, according to a report handed up to him by one of the disgusting passengers below, this landing site was currently graded as being under “dubious security.” Translation: it was not yet fully in the hands of people allied with Viktor’s Legions.

Oddly, this aspect didn’t bother the pilot all that much. Certainly the image of an opposed landing of the Zon was enough to give anyone the shakes—after all, once the shuttle returned to the Earth’s atmosphere, it was little more than a big glider; there was nothing it could do if someone was trying to shoot it down. But the pilot didn’t think this was a real possibility, simply because Viktor’s Legions were so cash-rich he knew they would hire every available mercenary crew in the area to rush to this landing site—wherever the hell it was—and nail it down quickly, no matter what the cost.

No, coming down on an insecure landing strip would be the least of the pilot’s concerns, he thought as he began working his computers for the new burn site. Just as long as the place was long enough and hard enough, he could set the Zon onto it.

That is, if there was anything left of the shuttle to land once they began the long burn-down.

H
IS NAME WAS DONN
Kurjan.

He was a colonel, a special operations officer attached to the United American Armed Forces Joint Command Staff. Kurjan was an advance man, the first guy sent into an area that soon might be the site of military action involving the UAAF. He was, in effect, the scout riding ahead of the cavalry column. His eyes were their eyes in the most important part of the battle: the opening minutes.

Kurjan also had a reputation for coming back from the dead. He’d been in many situations in the past when he was literally given up for lost, only to return time and time again. This is why his code name was “Lazarus.”

At this moment, he was lying in a deep hole on the east beach of Lolita Island, systematically picking the sand fleas off his hands and face. The cleverly disguised hiding spot, built to the exacting specifications of the old SEAL units, was just about invisible to the naked eye. It was five feet by five feet, covered with netting and papier-mâché the combination of which looked like real beach sand. Inside Kurjan had two rifles, a camera, two radios, a sat-com locater, several flash grenades, and a gallon of water. His most important piece of equipment however was his Peeping Tom, a hybrid IR/electronic telescope which allowed him to see as far as twenty miles away in any direction, day or night.

Before him was the vast South China Sea; its oddly green water stretching far as the eye could see. There was no other land mass of any discernible size within two thousand square miles of this place. Kurjan was literally out in the middle of nowhere.

He’d been on Lolita for twenty-four hours now, dropping in soon after Toomey and Wa returned to Da Nang with the startling news that fake foliage actually covered the island. The speculation about the mysterious Lolita had been running rampant when Kurjan left Da Nang; he couldn’t imagine what it was like now.

His own guess was that the island had been converted into a secret, though temporary air base, a place where several squadrons of heavy bombers or dozens of fighters could land, get refueled and then go on to a primary objective. Where would all these airplanes be going? An attack on South Vietnam was the best possibility. Perhaps the thugs of CAPCOM were able to hire a massive bombing strike on the already battered country as an attempt to reignite the war they’d just recently lost.

But Kurjan knew there were problems with this scenario, the first thing being that Lolita was still hundreds of miles away from the Vietnamese mainland. There were many other islands just as isolated, that could serve as a disposable landing strip, and be closer to their targets. Plus, besides being a huge concrete slab out in the middle of nowhere, there was nothing else on Lolita—no set ups for fuel tanks, pumps, generators or anything essential for a refueling base, temporary as it may be.

So why did someone go through all the trouble of laying a huge concrete slab on such an out-of-the-way speck in the sea? No one in the UA command had any firm idea—yet.

But as it turned out, Donn Kurjan, would be the first one to find out.

The battleship appeared out on the eastern horizon just after noontime.

Kurjan had seen its smoke trail even before it appeared out on the sea line. He’d crawled deeper into his observation post even before the ship’s stacks broke the azimuth, pulling his sand netting up and over his head and settling down into invisibility.

He had his PeepScope warmed up by the time the battleship was ten miles away. The ship’s appearance was not unexpected—that the Asian Mercenary Cult might be behind the activities on Lolita would come as a surprise to no one. The trouble was that the Cult was still a formidable force in the Pacific and beyond. The United Americans had sunk nearly a dozen of their battleships over the past year. The Cult still had up to thirty of them left. This in addition to more than five hundred thousand men under arms and a substantial sea invasion capability. The guns on their battleships alone could hurl a shell the size of a small automobile more than twenty-five miles. Moreover, the Cult was cash-rich; they were capable of hiring any number of mercenary outfits around the world, whether they be airborne, seaborne or strictly ground units.

The cold truth was, far from home, their lines of communications stretched to the limits, the United American Expeditionary Forces were outnumbered by the Cult more than ten to one.

Kurjan studied the battleship as it sailed quickly towards the island. It was moving at all out flank speed, its stacks were belching huge amounts of black smoke into the otherwise pristine sky. This told Kurjan that not only was the battleship in a hurry, but that the people running it didn’t care who saw them doing it.

The ship finally slowed to one third speed about a half mile offshore. Kurjan was taking pictures of it now. It was gray and black like most of the Cult battlewagons, but this one also had red trim and only two sixteen-inch gun turrets, both in front. This told Kurjan the ship was actually a converted battlewagon, one that was equipped to carry and launch troop-landing craft.

Sure enough, no sooner had the huge ship dropped anchor when a half dozen landing craft were lowered over the side, filled with troops and pushed off towards the island’s north beach.

Kurjan had two radios with him—a VHF field set and a backup UHF. But he could not make a radio call now. He was sure the enemy ship had an electronic interception capability and making any squawk on the airwaves would undoubtedly give away his position. But he did have the sat-com locator, a device that could serve as a beeper system, tied into a receiving station back at Da Nang. He now began pounding out Morse code on its send button. He was confident that someone back at Da Nang was picking him up and getting at least a rudimentary message that something was happening on Lolita.

By this time the first of the six Cult landing crafts had pulled up onto the north beach. It contained a dozen soldiers which were the closest thing the Cult had to marines. They were about a half of klick from Kurjan’s hidden position—and even from that distance he could hear them yelling and bellowing at each other. The sound of their voices had a definite edge to it; they seemed to be in an immense hurry.

Now the rest of the landing craft arrived, and soon there were sixty Cult troops charging up the beach and into the
faux
-jungle. The most interesting thing about these guys was they were all armed with the same weapon: flamethrowers.

No sooner did they reach the fake jungle line when they activated these torches and began sending streams of flame all over the edge of the plastic foliage. Kurjan was amazed how quickly the imitation greenery went up.

It ignited like magician’s flash paper—one touch of flame and an entire tree or bush would suddenly disappear in a ball of harsh, bluish smoke.

Kurjan dug down a little deeper into his hole. More troops came up from the shore, they, too, were carrying flamethrowers, they, too, plunged into burning the plastic forest with absolute abandon. Kurjan began getting the notion that maybe he should have put his hiding place a little closer to the water. The heat rising around him was getting so intense, he imagined all the sand on the beach would soon turn to glass.

It was a wild thought, but he began punching his satt-com device again anyway. In minutes, half the island was engulfed in flames—and the other half was melting before the raging conflagration. At this combustible rate, the whole five-mile-square spit of land would be cleared in a matter of minutes. Then what would happen?

Again, Kurjan couldn’t even hazard a guess.

All he knew was that someone in Da Nang better be getting his message—and start thinking about sending someone down to Lolita damned fast.

It was twelve-thirty hours when every bell and whistle went off inside the airborne radar ship known as
Black Eyes.

The huge early warning craft had been holding its circling pattern off the Palawan Passages for hours now. Crunch’s RF-4X was still flying a couple miles above the big C-5, sending a live video feed of the skies one hundred twenty miles around down to the Galaxy radar plane.

They were just beginning the one hundred first orbit of this repetitive pattern when every primary and secondary warning light blinked on aboard
Black Eyes.
At first the small army of technicians manning the radar ship thought their equipment was malfunctioning. A patch of radar indications—
swarm
would be a better word—had suddenly shown up in their northeast quadrant. They’d materialized so rapidly, it actually seemed like the airplane’s major screens had experienced a simultaneous glitch-out, possibly due to a power surge.

But when all the breakers were checked and the whole system purged and self-diagnosed and everything came back on line, the swarm of blips was still there. At this point, the crew went on high alert; its myriad of systems were slaved up to the main screen located above the plane’s central console. As the two dozen techs watched, the primary radar arm made its first sweep. Sixteen blips were revealed, their size and profile matching that of medium-sized jet fighters. The next sweep revealed twelve more. In the next sweep, twenty more. In the next, twenty-two more.

Oddly the techs thought once again that this was some kind of equipment failure, a catastrophic one at that. Surely seventy fighter aircraft were not heading towards them—were they?