Target: Point Zero (14 page)

“Two against one?” one asked, slightly confused.

Hunter smiled, but only for a moment. “Why not?”

The men looked at each other, and then they smiled, too. This guy, this famous pilot or whoever he was, was apparently drunk. No one would sanely play high-stakes high-card draw with the odds stacked two-to-one against them.

Or would they?

The travelers moved quickly. They loaded up on Hunter’s two-hundred dollar bet, each plopping down two hundred, then two hundred more.

Hunter turned to the astonished card dealer. “Flip ’em,” he said.

Flip them, he did. He dealt a king to the first man, a queen to the other.

He threw Hunter a card—down, the challenger’s prerogative. Hunter didn’t even look at it. He flipped it over to reveal the Ace of Spades.

The crowd gasped. The croupier slid the chips Hunter’s way and he let Chloe stack them one by one. The Wingman tripled the bet. The two men reluctantly did the same.

“Deal them,” Hunter told the pit boss. Another king to the first man; another queen to his partner.

Again, Hunter didn’t even look at his card. He flipped over the Ace of Clubs.

Another pile of chips came his way and once again Chloe breathlessly stacked them. Hunter guided the stack to the appropriate felt-lined square in front of him. He’d double-tripled the bet. The crowd gasped once more. Again, the men had no choice.

Two more cards came out, face up. King of Clubs for the first guy, Queen of Diamonds for his colleague. Hunter got his card and let Chloe turn it over this time. It was the Ace of Hearts.

The two men turned pale. Both instinctively reached down to their belt buckles, feeling for the huge hand guns they had hidden there. It was a less than subtle hint that they should not be trifled with.

But Hunter only grinned when he saw them do this.

“Shame on you,” he told them, piling his latest winnings with his old and now racking the bet up to an exponentially mushrooming twenty-six thousand dollars.

Both men withdrew their hands from their weapons. The truth was, they were so devastated by what they had gotten themselves into, both hardly had the gumption to start a gunfight.

Hunter took note of this reaction, too.
This won’t take long,
he thought.

He pushed the growing pile of chips back in front of him again, then motioned to a nearby credit man. This man hastily scribbled something down on a piece of paper and placed it carefully on the edge of the table. Hunter’s line of credit now stood at a half million dollars.

He doubled the bet again—now he had fifty-two thousand dollars on the line. The two men had to put up twice that much. Two more cards were dealt up to them. Predictably, one was the King of Spades, the other the Queen of Hearts. Hunter flipped his card over even before it hit the table. Another louder gasp went through the crowd. It was the Ace of Diamonds.

He leaned back, took a healthy swig from a recently delivered scotch-and-water, and lit up a proffered cigar.

Then he turned back to the pair of disheartened, demoralized, angry spacemen. There was little evidence of a twinkle in their eyes now.

“Shall we double it again, gentlemen?” he asked.

It was all over not ten minutes later.

Through two deck shuffles, Hunter won the next six hands. One and a half million dollars in gold chips was now sitting before him.

It was strange how money affected people—the two spacemen still had a half million dollars left, a lot more than either one of them had ever possessed before. But still, they were miserable. They had, up until a half hour ago, two million in near-cash. At this point, they would have done just about anything to get it back.

And that’s exactly what Hunter wanted.

So he eased up on them, calling a halt to his streak at $1.5, and distributing twenty thousand dollars of that to the various dealers, credit men and waitresses who’d hitched themselves to his star.

The two men, both of them scowling and suddenly looking in need of a bath, knew another unofficial rule of the house. Now Hunter would have to give
them
a chance at winning back their lost fortune. They had a hasty conversation with the pit boss, who hustled down the length of the table and whispered the proposal in Hunter’s ear.

It was simple: “Same time, tomorrow night, game of our choice.”

Hunter was nodding even before the man had completed the message.

“I’m looking forward to it,” he told them.

T
HAT NIGHT, OR WHAT
was left of it, Hunter slept on the couch in Chloe’s chalet.

She was there with him, wrapped up in his arms, snoring softly. Actually, he’d napped for only ninety minutes or so, a short charge-up for the busy day he knew lay ahead.

The weirdness of the night before was beginning to fade as he stared out at the sun, rising over the peaks, lighting up the lake and casting the first shadows on the sleeping city of St. Moritz. Despite the twists and turns, he’d learned much. He knew what was up with the two men at the gambling table—he’d met people who’d gone to space before. Once you saw the look, you never forgot it.

If these guys had walked in space then they could only belong to one of three very exclusive groups: astronauts, cosmonauts or part of Viktor’s space cadet club. One look at the men told Hunter they belonged behind door number three. He was sure that Viktor had been launching the Zon shuttle for some time now, and that somewhere along the line, these two guys had taken a ride—though why Viktor felt the need to include the two gorillas was beyond him.

But that was immaterial. The real question was this: what were two of Viktor’s go-boys doing here in St. Moritz? They didn’t live here, that was obvious from the buzz in the crowd. So they were just visiting. But from where? After all, they were twenty-five hundred miles east of Star City, the center of Viktor’s space ops.

But that’s what gave them away.

Hunter’s quest was to find that one spot on earth where the Zon could be plotted and tracked with the highest accuracy. It was no surprise that Viktor’s minions knew this location, too. If Hunter really was a betting man, he would have laid a hundred-to-one that there was some kind of a tracking station located at Point Zero. If this was true, the job of looking for the damn thing would be that much easier.

Everything else fell into place after that: the two men were in town for a little lubrication and a dream of leaving with a barrel of gold. He couldn’t imagine them wanting to stray too far from their post, so, just as he had guessed, Point Zero must be somewhere in the neighborhood, no more than a hundred miles away. This, too, was good news. Hunter was getting tired of driving over the humps. At last, he was closing in on his quest.

Hunter knew his encounter with the two men was an opportunity to push his trip into higher gear. While most of the gray matter in his head was busy soaking in Chloe, what was left still retained that feeling that somewhere nearby, certainly within St. Moritz, there was an airplane, one he was sure would be able to assist him from this point on.

Trouble was, he didn’t know where the airplane was exactly; there was still the faintest smell of aviation fuel in the air, especially now, early in the morning. But he would have to find its source soon, as he was getting a vibe that the airplane might not be up to snuff exactly. Something was telling him he was about to get his hands dirty in a few hours.

He also had to start gearing up for his rematch against the space travelers that night. Nailing ten aces, in a row, in perfect order of suit, was an old trick; he’d have to change his tactics tonight. Blackjack maybe, or even three-card stud. Whatever the game might be, it would have to go off for big stakes in a short amount of time.

His thoughts drifted back to Chloe, still snuggled tightly against him. He was almost ashamed of himself by now—about the way he’d gone nuts for her, about the way she’d sent a shiver right through him by her actions inside the red bedroom. There always seemed to be a romantic angle to his adventures, at least in the early days. But he usually dealt with the phenomena quickly or not at all—the mission always had to take precedence. But now, with this beautiful girl and her strange, sexual ways—well, he was just thinking too much about it.

The truth of the matter was this: The last thing he wanted to do today was find the airplane he knew would carry him away from her.

He gulped again. Suddenly the first direct ray of sunshine hit him right between the eyes.

Yes, this whole Chloe thing was getting serious.

She finally awoke, and after a few rounds of passionate good mornings, she was off to take her daily bath in the cold waters of the lake just outside of town.

She invited Hunter to come along and looked genuinely hurt when he turned her down. He was the first to admit it: what he’d peeked in on the day before, he wanted to see again. But once more he had to yank his brain out of his pants and get it back up to the top of his head where it belonged.

So Chloe went off alone, to bathe in the nude and partake in God-knows-what else. Hunter went through his morning ritual in the emptiness of her bathroom. Then, with a newly pressed suit and an extra clip for his Magnum in hand, he set out in search of his ride out of this strange, frozen paradise.

St. Moritz had no airport. Not one that was working anyway.

Hunter drove out to the place, more out of curiosity than anything else. It was located about two miles outside of the city, a twenty-minute ride in the rumbling, bumbling tanker truck. The field had three runways, two of them long enough to handle the largest of airplanes. It wasn’t a stretch for Hunter to close his eyes and see squadrons of private jets of all sizes landing and taking off from the place way back in its go-go heyday. Sheiks, kings, queens and movie stars used to crowd this airport—now it was covered with snow, its buildings abandoned, its control tower battered and leaning, slowly surrendering to the years of wind and weather.

He did a cursory search of the place, but he knew there was no airplane here. He would have felt it by now. Jumping back in the truck, he set off to his next stop: a military base located five miles east of the desolate airport. Operated by one of the city’s private security armies, it was a huge installation with a heavily guarded checkpoint. He’d raised a few eyebrows approaching in the battered tanker truck. He didn’t try to get inside—he didn’t have to. The airplane wasn’t here, either. However, the place looked tight, alert and professional. This told him the security troops deployed in the mountains surrounding St. Moritz were probably the same way.

He drove back to town, parked the tanker next to Chloe’s, then headed down to the lakeside. A quick recon of all the roadways around the city told him that while some of them were indeed flat, and straight—the Swiss Air Force was famous for using its highway system as emergency runways—he found none that had any evidence of recent use.

This left only one place from which an airplane could operate: the crystal lake.

There were only about a million boathouses ringing the long shoreline north of town—Hunter wound up looking inside of half of them before he finally found what he was searching for.

It was almost an airplane from a dream—
his
dream, the one he’d had while stuffed behind the wheel of the big tanker truck. He found it locked away in one of the larger houses, a place originally built for a yacht of some size. The airplane was a Macchi MC.72, a rather famous type of flying machine. A racer that was also a seaplane, it broke a lot of speed endurance records back in the 1930s, and probably still held a few to this day.

Hunter cased the place, found no one around, and quickly picked the lock on the back door. All he could hear inside the dark, dingy boathouse was the lapping of the waves echoing throughout the cavernous structure. The airplane was tied up to the enclosed dock with a legion of chains and heavy rope. There was some buildup of algae and water crud along the bottom of its pontoons, but not as much as he would have expected. One sniff of the air told him that this was what he’d been detecting since arriving in St. Moritz. Now the fuel smelled stale, as did the oil. His premonition that some work would have to be done to peak out the airplane had been correct.

Still, odd as it seemed, a seaplane was exactly what he needed up here, high in the Alps. The chances of any serviceable runway being located anywhere near Point Zero was remote, or at least any airstrip he could simply drop down onto. However, the whole area was dotted with lakes, and with a seaplane, each one could provide a runway for him. Once again, the cosmos had directed him to exactly what he needed.

He climbed out onto the wing, and after much dusting, was able to recover an ancient FOR SALE sign. There was no price mentioned. Next he crawled into the cockpit, quickly hot-wired the ignition and finger-snapped the control panel to life. Just like the pea-shooters in his dream, the Macchi’s controls were quaint and rudimentary. He twisted the wires and pulled on the choke switch and, damn it if the thing didn’t spring to life right away.

He gunned the engine once, then gradually cut back on the fuel mix. The motor was rough—there was no miracle happening here—and the control surfaces a little tight. But the airplane was flyable.

He climbed out, took a small bag of gold from his boot, and placed it atop the FOR SALE sign next to the head of the dock.

Then he opened the boathouse doors, climbed back into the plane and puttered away.

Ten minutes later, he was two miles north of the city’s shoreline.

Hugging the nap of the lake and getting the engine in trim, he found there was about fifty gallons of gas sloshing around inside the airplane’s wing tanks, and another fifteen or so in the reserves. The petro was at least a year old, maybe two, or even three. Still, Hunter was fairly sure the cold climate had preserved it somewhat and it was still usable.

The oil, too, was crappy—it had taken forever for the oil pressure gauge to start moving. Even now it was reading only halfway up to what was considered safe for takeoff. But Hunter was getting impatient; he still had many things to do. With one last check of the airframe and surfaces, he gunned the engine. A few seconds later he was skimming along the mirrorlike surface of the lake.