Target: Point Zero (40 page)

Not one of them made it though—each was shot down, seemingly by an air-to-air missile, specifically an AA-6 Acrid IR homing weapon. The problem was the MiG-25 had storage points on its wings for only
four
such AA missiles. Yet the many witnesses swear they saw a
barrage
of Acrids leave the Foxbat, traveling at incredible speeds towards the fleeing Flankers and picking them off one at a time. Whether other missiles were fired at the cowardly Lanterns—from UA fighters or perhaps from one of the C-5 shooters—was a possibility, thereby giving the illusion that the Foxbat fired all seven missiles. But this would never really be determined.

All that was certain was the seven Flankers were blown out of the sky and not one of their pilots survived.

And with that, the massive dogfight came to a very abrupt end. Any mercenary pilots left alive from the Tornado group quickly left the scene, escaping towards the east, though many of them had hardly enough fuel to stay aloft more than twenty minutes or so. Some of the survivors of the United American force—one third had been shot down, including three F-20s—withdrew about twenty miles north of the battle, where the C-5 refueling planes had been waiting. Those that could took on more fuel, and of those, the ones that still had any significant ammunition left, headed back towards Lolita Island.

It was here that the time element of this bizarre engagement would become the most confused and debated. For even as they saw and heard the Flankers and other enemy airplanes dropping out of the sky from the dogfight offshore, the UA paratroopers that had landed on Lolita itself, swore that the mysterious black jet was over their heads, battling the second contingent of Red Lanterns, the ones that had dropped down to perform ground attack duties even as the dogfight was still going on.

There were at least two hundred UA paratroopers on the southern end of the island fighting both the Cult troops and those of the Island Rats when the pink Flankers suddenly appeared. The ground fighting, centered at first around the base of the gigantic orange arrow, had been fierce and close at hand, so much so that the six C-5 gunships had to back off for fear their intense firing would kill some of the UA soldiers.

The ground-attack Flankers felt no such restriction. They came in, single-file, low and fast, their cannons opened wide, their rounds exploding around UA soldiers, Cult troops and Island Rats alike. They made one unopposed pass and killed more of their nominal allies than UA personnel. But it was as the two dozen airplanes banked up and around for a second run, that the black MiG appeared. As with the raging dogfight, it simply tore into the enemy airplanes, its cannon firing wildly yet with frightening accuracy. And just like the dogfight, Flankers began dropping from the sky like rain. The MiG’s performance was so ethereal, fighting on the ground actually stopped as soldiers on both sides couldn’t help but look up in awe at the huge fighter’s performance. What kind of flying devil was this? To twist and turn through the sky, not more than one hundred feet above them, firing in every direction at once, each shot so unbelievably accurate—a shorn-off wing here, an exploded fuel tank there—that the high tech Flankers appeared to be crashing on purpose, as if just to get out of the MiG’s way.

Some on the UA side said the whole thing lasted but a minute; others put the time at just a little longer, perhaps two minutes or more. However long it took, the results were the same. When the smoke cleared, and the noise of the speeding Foxbat finally eased, all twenty-four ground-attack Flankers were gone—dropped into the sea or augered into the hard concrete of Lolita Island.

Of the entire force of Red Lanterns, not one pilot, not one plane survived.

Still in his hole, still gazing out at it all through his peepscope, Donn Kurjan still could not shake the feeling that he was actually in the middle of some kind of extended waking nightmare.

To witness an airplane in the act of crashing was a traumatic event. Seeing tons of metal and machine slam into the ground, even at the height of battle, was such an unnatural thing, it could leave an emotional scar on one’s consciousness that just might turn out to be permanent.

Kurjan had witnessed no less than forty-two such crashes in the past quarter hour. Starting with the Sherpas knocked down by the C-5’s long-range Phoenix missiles to the rain of Flankers which had recently come down at the hand of the black MiG-25, flying machines had spiraled in all around him, each one hitting with an ungodly shriek that sounded so human, Kurjan still had his hands up against his ears even though all was nearly quiet on the island.

The only noise now was the exchange of long-range shells between the Cult battleships and the pair of Tommy destroyers; this, and the mild roar in the background coming from the engines of the remaining UA warplanes circling nearby.

Through his peepscope, he could see fighting was still going on between the UA paratroopers and the combined Rats/Cult forces at the far end of the island. Just as the battle in the air had subsided, this ground action was heating up. Devoid now of any kind of air support, the two sides were back to hammering each other with small arms, grenade launchers and in many cases, pistols and bayonets. Kurjan felt yet another chill go through him. Despite all the other action, the battle for Lolita would really come down to who won this nasty little fight.

Again, the question came back to him: what the hell was this all about anyway? A battle that rivaled Iwo Jima or Saipan in intensity, all for a chunk of concrete out in the middle of the South China Sea, a place so isolated that even the sea birds didn’t come here?

It seemed like most of the island was on fire anyway. Between the plane crashes, the gunship barrages and the battle still raging at the other end of the slab, all he could see was smoke and flame, and all he could smell was spent gunpowder, scorched metal, melted rubber and fuel, and the unmistakable stink of death.

And for what?

He just didn’t know.

But something inside him told him to look up, to the northwest, past the circling UA fighters, through the contrails left by the mysterious black Foxbat, through the thin clouds which now blanketed the island. Way up, into the stratosphere. That’s when he saw it: a speck of light, surrounded by its own halo of smoke and flames. A speck that was growing larger and going as fast as a meteorite hitting the Earth’s atmosphere.

It was so strange, and moving so quickly, to Kurjan’s tired, battered eyes, it almost looked like it was coming from outer space itself.

Forty-two miles above the Earth

It was now rattling so violently inside the flight deck of the Zon shuttle, the pilot didn’t know if he was peeing his pants or not.

All around him was fire, scorching the cracked windows, burning the out-of-joint nose, melting the shaky wings. The build-up of heat was so intense, the control panels, the CRTs, even the steering column itself was hot to the touch. Acrid fumes—from smoldering wires, un-vented fuel and a million other things—were filling his nostrils, right through the piece-of-shit spacesuit, suffocating him even as he imagined himself being cooked to death.

They were heading for the so-called “Grade Delta” landing site, a place he had only just learned from those below was a barely prepared spit of land in the middle of the South China Sea. It had taken him nearly forty minutes to input the new reentry commands into his balky flight computer; usually such a program would have taken about five minutes to perform, but this time the navigation and guidance links fought him the whole way.

He wasn’t even sure if he’d gotten all the numbers right and in the proper sequence—but this didn’t bother him. He was certain now that his premonition back up in orbit would prove correct—that this would be his last flight in the Zon. He would be killed during reentry, either in this frightening burn-in or by impacting with the Earth. So who cared if the burn numbers were correct or not?

Death…
would it be all that bad? the pilot wondered as his teeth began rattling and the tips of his fingers began to ignite. Life was not such a bargain for someone like him. The captivity was bad enough—it was not knowing who he was, where he came from, who his friends were, that was killing him.

A flaming death might even prove beneficial. There was comfort in the fact that this infernal space machine would go down with him, leaving Viktor rather high and dry. At least if he was dead, someone in the afterlife might actually tell him who he was.

He was just barely able to raise his head now for one last glance at the instruments. The shuttle was coming down much faster and at a much steeper angle than ever before—the pilot couldn’t imagine it holding together another moment longer. And even if it did, what then? His navigation and control computers had been working all this time on an error-factor of thirty-percent. This meant that even if the Zon did survive the fiery plunge of reentry, the chances that he would be able to direct it to the small patch of land in the South China Sea was only seventy-percent. There was a three-in-ten-chance then that he would wind up in the sea.

Death by fire or water? What was his choice? This thought went through his addled brain even as he felt the tips of his space boots began to spark, so hot it was now inside the cabin. If he’d had his druthers, he’d pick a quick burning death. Suck that fire right into his lungs and explode like a star. He’d been shot down over water already—two years before, when he was captured and this long, hellish imprisonment had begun. He really didn’t want to go through all that again.

Somehow, he managed another glimpse at the smoking control panel. They were still thirty-five miles up and dropping like a rock. Yet to his mortification, it was actually getting cooler on the flight deck. He let out a long, shaky sigh and wet his pants again. The Zon was apparently going to survive the hell of reentry. It looked like it was the water for him again.

He stayed like this for another minute, hoping he would hear the intense raiding turn into a grave crackling sound indicating the spacecraft was breaking up—but that noise never came. Instead, several bells began ringing on his control panel. He looked up to see that, damn it, the shuttle had successfully reentered the atmosphere and now the cockeyed flight computer was steering it to its landing spot—or at least somewhere in the vicinity of it.

The Zon pilot had no choice now but to sit up and start pushing the buttons that would allow him to bring the spacecraft in for a landing. The first thing he activated was his primary guidance computer; this was the baby that would tell him where he was and how far off the mark they were. He pushed the read-out button and his eyes nearly popped from his head.

Not only were they running right on the money, he could actually see the computer outline of their landing spot taking up the center of his read-out screen. He sat up further, looked out the front window and damn if he didn’t see it. An island lay dead ahead, not thirty miles away, with a big arrow pointing to a huge cross laid out on its surface.

The pilot began working frantically now—something deep inside him was saying, no, this was
not
his time to die; this was actually his time to do something else. With movements quicker than he’d mustered up in two years, he began pushing buttons, throwing levers and wiping computer read-outs, all the necessities needed before he could take manual control of the Zon.

They were still falling like a brick though, and the Zon’s imperfect snout was causing them to buffet violently. The pilot began flipping more switches, pushing more buttons, and entering more commands into his pri-fly computer than it could absorb. Ahead of him, the island was growing larger by the second—the giant arrow and cross almost looking comical from this height.

It dawned on him that what he at first believed were clouds surrounding the place, were actually columns of smoke rising from all over the tiny island. Another kind of tremor ran through him—
was
this place really secured? Hadn’t Viktor’s henchmen arranged for it to be in their hands before they came down? He didn’t know.

They were suddenly only twenty miles from the place and dropping so fast, the pilot imagined his fingertips were burning up again. He could see fires now, and burning wreckage both offshore and on the island itself, some of it very close to the huge arrow that he would have to follow in. It looked like a small war had been fought on the island. But between who? And to what outcome? Another series of shakes went through him. He really couldn’t take much more of this—he was not a well man. He took another look at the island, now filling the windshield very quickly as they closed within seventeen miles.

Who the hell was waiting for them down there?

The next twenty seconds were filled with more button pushing, more lever throwing, more computer overrides. When he looked up again, he was at seventeen thousand feet, traveling at five hundred knots and about, fourteen miles from set-down. The island looked like a little chunk of Gehenna at this point—smoke, flames, burning machines, all over the place. Astray mad thought filled the pilot’s head: maybe he
was
dead, and this was his introduction to Hell.

More computer-killing, more systems to be shut down. His hands gripped the melting control column tightly now. Somehow his attention was drawn to the outside, a glint of metal off to his left. He nearly wet himself again—there was an airplane out there, riding right beside him. It was so close he could see the pilot looking in at him.

Back to the computer screen. He was now at eleven thousand feet, trying like crazy to reduce his speed and coming almost straight down. Though he shouldn’t have, he looked out the window again—damn, there were two airplanes out there now, both pilots were looking right at him. He was too far removed from reality to know what kind of airplanes they were flying, but he could see that they had the strangest emblems on their sides.

What the hell were they? They looked like little footballs.

Suddenly he was at five thousand feet, still riding at four hundred fifty knots and barely seven miles away from the burning, smoking island. He was going much too fast for a safe landing—but what the hell could he do? He looked back out at the airplanes chasing him. The pilots were motioning to him frantically. They seemed to realize his problem. Suddenly one of them lowered his landing gear, violently jerking his plane back and off to the side as he did so.