Target: Point Zero (19 page)

As it was, the Zon was breaking some kind of endurance records—though not necessarily ones to be proud of. This was the spacecraft’s third flight in as many months; back in the days of regular shuttle launches, if one orbiter went up twice in a year it was a rare occurrence, and then only after extensive reconditioning. But even though each time the Zon blasted off from Star City, every bolt, weld and adhesion agent inside got that much weaker, it was still somehow holding together.

The spacecraft was also hauling a lot more weight than would be considered normal, or, better put, sane. There were no less than fifteen people currently riding the Zon, more than twice the maximum human load. The spacecraft was built to handle five comfortably; triple that number introduced a lot of problems, fouled toilets being the first of them. There was also the matter of feeding such a horde—the Zon had taken off with only enough space-food for five people, eating three times a day for five days. It had been in orbit now for barely one hundred hours and already, almost all the food was gone.

But even this had a beneficial angle: once the food intake dropped, at least the toilet problem would stabilize.

Though the majority of space inside the Zon was unkempt and getting dirty very quickly, two areas were not.

First was the flight deck itself. Even though it bore the brunt of the constantly changing temperatures, the sole pilot occupying the spacecraft’s cockpit had worked very diligently making sure the area was kept clean. This was as much an exercise in keeping his sanity as it was for concern of the shuttle’s flight worthiness. The pilot was the only person onboard the Zon who was qualified to be here, and he, just barely. He’d had some of the basics of shuttle flight years before and he was a top-notch fighter pilot. If the Zon’s overall operation wasn’t so completely computerized, it would never be able to get off the ground. But because it did, it fell to him to fly it.

This was a strange situation as well, because the pilot was also a prisoner. He’d been kept under duress by Viktor’s forces for nearly two years. The circumstances of his captivity were as outlandish as the notion that a battered, worn-out space shuttle could actually fly in orbit. He was a member of the top echelon of the United American Armed Forces, a friend of Hawk Hunter, Commander-in-Chief General Seth Jones, Crunch O’Malley, Wa, Toomey, and the others. He’d fought in many of the early battles of American liberation; and conducted many successful covert operations towards that eventual aim.

It was during one of these secret missions that he’d been lost in action, his airplane shot down by a SAM over an obscure mid-Pacific atoll. The island turned out to be a huge staging area for the Asian Mercenary Cult, an army financed directly from Viktor’s coffers. He’d lived on this island for months before being captured while trying to steal an airplane in an attempt to escape. He was nearly executed several times before one of the Cult overlords, a man who had direct connections to Viktor, recognized who he was, and how his piloting skills could be utilized.

For the next year, the Zon pilot had been subjected to incredibly intense brainwashing, including the forced injection of psychosis-inducing drugs. Viktor’s underlings had made a special project of him, carting him to a secret location deep inside Russia and importing some of the most hideous of brainwashing experts from North Korea. At the end of the twelve horrible months, the pilot emerged depleted, shaken and suffering from many psychological maladies.

His piloting skills remained intact, however. And when Viktor’s minions located the Zon hidden in a vast underground shelter near Star City and realized it could fly if the right man was behind the controls, the pilot was nursed back to physical health and then ordered to learn everything he could about the Russian shuttle. He’d first taken it up seven months before—this was his fifth flight.

Keeping the flight deck spotless was part of his own, self-prescribed therapy. It was, quite literally, his way of keeping what was left of his sanity. Something deep inside told him that if he kept the flight deck clean and proper while the rest of the Zon deteriorated, it would somehow prevent him from going nuts altogether. Just why he felt like this, he didn’t know. That was probably his biggest problem—he had little or no memory retention these days in matters other than the technical aspects of keeping the Zon flying. The brainwashers had done their job well, almost surgically removing all aspects of his previous personality while leaving his ability to fly and understand things aeronautical completely intact.

The worst thing he’d suffered during his year in hell was the loss of his long-term memory. He was a victim of nearly total amnesia—despite all his talent and daring, the Zon pilot, an American, a true hero, a friend of the Wingman among others; simply didn’t know who he was.

Not exactly anyway.

The other part of the Zon space shuttle that was not in a state of complete disarray was the ICEM, the independently controlled environmental module.

This cylindrical container was about twenty-four feet long, ten feet around, and was located inside the Zon’s expansive cargo bay. As its acronym indicated, it was a self-supporting unit, a spacecraft within a spacecraft. Though it had no propulsive power of its own, it did boast its own life-support systems, including electricity, water filtration, air circulation and other essentials, all totally apart from the Zon itself.

There was no bad smell inside the ICEM, no water shortage, no temperature fluctuations, no clogged toilets.

There was only one permanent occupant within, and he was not hungry, thirsty or uncomfortable in any way, save for the nasty habit he’d developed of letting his cocaine spoon float away from his grasp, forcing him to unbuckle his safety harness and drift across the interior of the ICEM to retrieve it. This had happened to him at least ten times in the past hour, and at least a hundred times in the past twenty-four.

Being weightless in space was indeed a euphoric feeling. But being without gravity while under the influence of drugs was another thing completely. It made a weird sensation even weirder—and very unpredictable. Simple intoxicants like coke or morphine or speed could become like LSD, hallucinogenics that had the tendency to stay active in the bloodstream for longer periods of time. Many times nausea would result after injesting, or long bouts of cramping or hyperventilation. Floating while high wasn’t as much fun as it sounded.

The solution to all this would have seemed simple enough—either give up the nose candy or stop flying in space. But that was the big dilemma for the sole occupant of the ICEM: He was hooked on both.

Oddly, he had much in common with the pilot sitting alone up front in the Zon’s flight compartment. Like him, the man in the ICEM was something of a technical genius, an accomplished mathematician, a pilot and a professional soldier, all at one time. Or more accurately, he
believed
he’d been all those things. That he was also a KGB agent many years before was a little less certain. That he deserved the mantle as being the world’s most feared criminal and superterrorist was also very unclear.

Just like the Zon pilot, as far as he knew, he had no past, no family, no history at all. He wasn’t even sure what his name was. Everyone called him “Viktor” though, and after a while, he’d come to believe that was indeed his name.

At the moment, he was amusing himself by watching a pair of naked teenage girls float around the inside of the ICEM. They were trying to conduct a gravity-free forced-love session on each other, but hardly doing a good job of it. It was almost laughable to see them attempt to grasp and grope one another, all while trying their best to avoid coming anywhere near his vicinity—they knew anything could happen should they float too close to him.

So they flew about the cabin module, occasionally grabbing onto each other and performing several seconds of perfunctory lesbian sex before the uncertainties of weightlessness forced them apart to begin the whole display all over again. Viktor sat, strapped down, trying his best to pick the individual grains of cocaine out of the air with his tongue as he followed the bizarre zero-g kink show. This was usually how he passed the time during these flights; this and trying to come up with new, more efficient ways to snort his drug of choice while in orbit.

Occasionally, he used some rare energy to twist around and look out the ICEM’s only porthole. He did this now and saw that they had once again emerged from behind the Earth’s shadow. Somewhere in his drug-addled brain, he had the fleeting thought things were probably heating up inside the shuttle proper. Not that this made any difference to him. Shuttle operations bored him frankly—there were too many details, too many things to attend to. In many, many ways, he was just along for the ride.

Still, he was familiar with what his shuttle crew had to do while they were up here: since breaking into orbit three days ago, they’d been gathering up a series of satellites known as SDS-14s. These satellites, shot into space secretly by the United States nearly two decades before, were actually orbiting test stations, components of the so-called “Star Wars” system that had been designed to direct laser beams at enemy ICBMs, scrambling their guidance systems and their warhead targeting abilities even as they rose from their launchers.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, Viktor’s technical elite had discovered these small but lethal packages could be adapted for use back on Earth, and most conveniently, from aircraft. With very little tinkering, the SDS-14s could be mounted on an airplane of just about any size and used to either destroy enemy fighters in flight or to attack ground targets. The Zon had retrieved sixteen of these packages from space so far. There was thought to be another dozen or so still floating around in orbit.

The second half of the Zon’s current mission was to once again attempt a linkup with the old Soviet Mir space station. The Mir, abandoned years before, was still remarkably intact and operational. The mission of the first Zon launch several months before was to board it and replace the space station’s old, dead fuel cells. Since then, two of Viktor’s minions had been living inside the Mir, getting some of its systems back on line and taking out those that didn’t work.

Roughly the size of two city buses, the Mir was actually designed many years before with only one purpose in mind: to serve as a high-flying spy platform. The famous endurance records set inside the Soviet space station before it was abandoned were more suited to the annals of pre-Big War intelligence-gathering than any space achievements book. It was a poorly kept secret that the Mir had been used to peek in on many NATO operations which fell below its orbital path, and especially military developments in the U.S. It was a crude, expensive way to spy, but in the end, a highly effective one. Some of the cameras secreted on the Mir boasted the often-denied ability to photograph a pack of cigarettes in a person’s pocket on Earth so closely, the brand name was easily read. These cameras, designs stolen directly from the U.S., were still operational, much to the delight of Viktor’s technical corps. By using them, the two men inside the Mir could literally look in on just about any operation currently taking place in North America, Europe and the Far East. All without anyone on the ground suspecting a thing.

The problem with all this though, was locating the Mir once the Zon was up in orbit, and then docking with it once it was found. With the shuttle navigation system not being at one hundred-percent, just tracking the space station was a major chore. Once it was located, the Zon had to catch up to it, raising or lowering in its already shaky orbital path to do so. Then, if this was accomplished, the docking procedure would pose major complications. Because the Zon’s flight was skewed from the beginning, its tendency to wobble as it sped around the Earth at fifteen thousand, five hundred-plus mph increased with each orbit. This meant the two spacecraft could never actually link up. The whole idea was to get the Zon close enough to the Mir to allow someone to walk in space from one spacecraft to the other.

This was not always a successful procedure—they’d lost two men on the last flight trying to go from the Zon to the Mir. One had a tether line snap at the wrong moment; the other was killed by an electrical shock once he touched the main docking attachment on the space station. His death was due to incompetence however: the men inside the space station had forgotten to negative-ground everything before the transfer took place.

But it was very important that they link up with the Mir this time though—the two men inside had been cooped up for sixty-two days, with little water, food or personal comforts. Viktor and his technical people weren’t so concerned about the Mir crewmen as for the photographs they’d been taking while marooned inside the space station. That was another problem with Viktor’s low tech space program. The only way they could benefit from the high-flying spy station was to retrieve the photographs firsthand.

Viktor wasn’t sure exactly when he got the message that someone in the main section of the Zon wanted to come over to the ICEM.

He was bent over his seat, trying again to guide a wavering line of individual cocaine crystals up into his nostrils, when his intercom buzzed twice. It was more luck than anything that he was able to reach the return intercom button. He just happened to be floating nearby when it went off.

He was his usual gruff self dealing with the man on the other end. Viktor did not allow his minions to speak to him directly in matters that weren’t of the upmost urgency. Even when direct conversation was allowed, his underlings could not look him in the eye or speak more than three sentences without stopping and asking for permission to continue.

But he usually did talk to them on the radio. This one was telling him he had an urgent message which had to be delivered directly.

Viktor told him to come on over.

The act of transferring from the Zon, through the open cargo bay to the airlock on the ICEM was a ten-minute procedure. The person coming over had to climb into a spacesuit, get powered up, checked out, etc., then enter the egress chamber, where he would have to depressurize, open the hatch, crawl out into space, go hand over hand along sixteen supports, before reaching the ICEM hatchway. He would then have to go inside, pressurize the lock, depressurize his spacesuit and finally, step inside. One wrong move, anywhere along the line, would almost always prove fatal.