Target: Point Zero (20 page)

The man from the Zon went through these gyrations slowly but perfectly. He came through the ICEM airlock within twelve minutes of getting permission to come over. The first thing he saw when he removed his space helmet were a pair of tiny breasts floating by. He looked away almost immediately, a wise decision.

Viktor was strapped into his seat at the far end of the ICEM. capsule, his long hair and beard rising almost surrealistically above his head. He was dressed as always, in a long flowing black gown topped by a flaming-red, knee-length vest. His face was heavily made-up. He looked particularly foolish, yet sinister at the same time. No surprise then that even among the lowest of his legions, Viktor’s attire was described as a cross between an especially “colorful” bishop and a drag queen.

Viktor had somehow managed to corral another long line of floating cocaine and manipulate it up his nose. The two girls came wafting by him, they were locked in a breast-to-breast embrace now. He gave them the slightest push and they went spinning off again, arms and legs seemingly going in all directions at once.

Finally Viktor turned towards the man in the spacesuit. He was breathing very heavily, both from his long arduous, sixteen foot journey and from the fear anyone got when coming in direct contact with the devil himself.

Viktor sensed this right away, and put the appropriate scowl on his face: “Come forward and report!” he screamed at the man.

Shaking, the man immediately went to his knees and gave himself a little push. He quickly shot across the ICEM, arriving just three feet from Viktor’s satin-slippered feet still in his kneeling position. It was a maneuver perfected by all of the men on the Zon, just in case they had to meet with the boss one on one.

But this particular crewman could barely breathe now—he had bad news to deliver, probably the worst circumstance in which to meet with his leader.

“Disturbing news, sir,” the crewman began, his eyes zeroed in on Viktor’s red shoes.

Viktor never looked at him—he was too busy watching the two girls fly right above his head, their crotches fused together.

“Continue…” he said finally.

“We have discovered the primary landing site at Star City has been fouled, sir,” the crewman said, not moving a bit from his subservient position.

This did give Viktor a pause—though only a short one.

“Fouled?” he asked, authentically puzzled. “In what way?”

“An airplane has been scuttled at its center,” the terrified crewman reported. “A large one—possibly an American cargo craft. Several large holes have also been blown into the middle of the strip. We cannot land under those conditions…”

The two young girls bounced off the top of the ICEM and came down right in front of Viktor’s face. He tickled them both and sent them on their way again.

Then he turned his attention back to the prone crewman.

“So, get someone to repair the strip,” he said simply.

The man bowed lower. “We cannot, sir,” he whispered, absolutely petrified now. “The damage to the runway is so severe, we cannot fix it in time for our return. Plus…”

The man would stumble over the next few words—badly.

“…plus, there is no one on hand to do the repairs,” he finally spit out. “We know of the damage only through a routine photo pass. In fact we have not had any contact with anyone at Star City in nearly three days.”

Again Viktor was forced to pay attention to the man.

“No contact?” he asked. “For three days?”

“It’s true, sir,” the man replied. “Apparently everyone left the city right after we launched, because…”

Viktor’s foot suddenly came up under the crewman’s jaw, kicking him hard. The next thing he knew, the crewman was face to face with Viktor, so close he could smell the man’s perfume-like body odor.

“…because?” Viktor sneered at him.

The crewman gulped hard. His life was beginning to flash before his eyes. “Because, according to the last confirmed radio transmission, there was a rumor…a story, really, or some kind of panicked intelligence report…that…”

Viktor’s devilish grin turned to a scowl.

“Speak!” he shouted at the man.

“Because there was talk that…well, Hawk Hunter was seen in the area…”

The crewman was floating nose to nose with Viktor now. He was so frightened he believed he could feel the heat rising off Viktor’s face.

“Hawk Hunter?”
he asked in a whisper. “In Star City?”

“Yes, sir,” the crewman croaked.

Viktor began to say something but stopped short.

Instead he pulled the girls close to him again, nibbled on their breasts and then let them go. This was his way of thinking.

“Well, if the runway is fouled,” he whispered to the man finally. “Let us set down at one of the alternate sites. How many are available?”

Still shaking, the man reached inside his suit and handed Viktor a list.

“These are the secondary bases we can secure quickly,” he told him. “I can leave this with you, and you can select.”

Viktor took the list from the crewman and finally released him from the tip of his toe. The crewman immediately floated back down to the bottom of the ICEM.

After a few short moments, he looked up and gulped.

“Will that be all, my lord?”

Viktor looked down at him, then up at the spinning girls.

“Not quite,” he said.

With the wave of his hand, he brought the two girls down towards them. He whispered something into one girl’s ear and then let them go again.

They both swam the length of the ICEM and descended before the mystified crewman. Soon they were running their hands up and down his neck, shoulders and pelvis. With Viktor’s approving nod, they began unzipping the crewman’s spacesuit, taking extra care to unleash the fasteners around his crotch area.

It took about three minutes to get it off him completely, the crewman being totally confused as to what was actually going on. Now standing in nothing more than a spaceman’s version of long underwear, the girls began plunging their hands down his PHFP, the “personal hygiene flap panel.” The crewman found himself floating backwards as their knowing fingers reached and squeezed his most sensitive of areas.

He’d heard much about sex in space—how it was supposed to be ten times as intense as back on Earth, a secret kept well hidden by NASA during the American shuttles’ heyday. He was beginning to believe this was all true, when suddenly he saw Viktor raise his right hand. The girls immediately stopped squeezing him and slowly floated away. The crewman looked at Viktor, who was smiling devilishly.

“All right, that will be all,” he told the man.

The crewman bowed deeply. “Yes, sir…” he said, still confused, but anxiously pulling himself towards his floating spacesuit.

“I said,
dismissed…
” Viktor roared at him.

The crewman froze in place—and gently floated to the ceiling.

“But sir…I must get into my…”

Viktor just stared at him.

The crewman’s eyes grew wide with fear.

“Sir…I need my suit to go back out…”

Viktor was slowly shaking his head side to side. The girls both let out a gasp.

“Dismissed…” Viktor said again.

The man began to cry. Slowly he drifted back to the airlock. With trembling hands, he yanked the hatch back and put one foot inside.

Then he turned back to Viktor—tears flowing off his face and into the perfume-saturated cabin atmosphere.

“Mercy, sir?” he asked, all life gone out of his voice. “I am needed to run things in the main ship…”

Viktor never stopped smiling. “Yes, well, just call me when you get back over there…”

With that he began spinning the girls again.

Having no other choice, the man stepped fully into the airlock now and with his last living movements, pulled the door shut and soiled himself at the same time. A moment later, Viktor and the girls heard a huge whooshing sound as the forward airlock door was opened and the crewman was sucked out unprotected into the airless void of space. Oddly the sound was very reminiscent of a toilet being flushed.

Viktor sat back and spun the two girls away from him again.

“Sounds like they’ve finally corrected their plumbing problem over there,” he said, with a laugh.

The Island Of Malta

I
T WAS JUST AFTER
dusk had fallen when the air raid sirens began wailing again above the city of Valletta.

The citizens of the small capital city of Malta almost routinely scrambled for the nearest bomb shelters now. As always, the women were frightened and the children crying. Members of the Malta Self-Defense Forces were racing through the streets, hustling stray civilians into the dozens of safety dugouts lining the main streets of the city, then pressing on to their battle stations along the ring of AA sites surrounding the embattled capital.

The bombers appeared overhead about a minute later. This was the fifth raid today and still, the Maltese military didn’t know who these attackers were, where they were coming from, or why they were bombing their small, island-state. Sheer location had put Malta in harm’s way for literally thousands of years; its population had endured bombings of all types and sizes over the millennium, but usually they knew who wanted to kill them and why.

This time though, they didn’t have any idea.

The bombers themselves offered few clues as to the identity of the people flying them. There were twelve aerial attackers this time. They were Tu-95 Bears, old Soviet-built monsters whose sole claim to fame was endurance; more than anything else, Bears were known for their ability to stay in the air for up to sixteen hours at a time, without refueling.

Spread out into chevrons of three each, six of them flew right over the center of Valletta itself, dropping tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs indiscriminately on military and civilian targets alike. The return fire from the network of AA guns located throughout the city were quickly at full-roar—but a combination of the Tu-95s’ speed and height made it almost impossible to draw a bead on them. Even worse, the six other bombers taking part in the attack had fired a spread of AA-56 radar-homing missiles at the main AA defense battery just south of the city, destroying it utterly and killing most of its crew.

The first six bombers were thus able to dump their weapons loads and get away scot-free. No sooner had they departed over the southern horizon, when the second wave turned towards the city. At this point, Valletta’s air defense unit took to the sky. Roaring mightily off Valletta airport’s extra-long runway, they rose for the fifth time of the day to meet the mysterious attackers head-on. The problem was the city’s meager air force totaled exactly three airplanes, none of which was built to perform as a jet fighter. Two were CASA C-101 Aviojets, airplanes actually built as unarmed trainers. The third plane was an ancient A-7 Corsair, a reliable little machine that was nevertheless designed as a ground attack bomber, not an interceptor.

Rising high over the airport, the three jets valiantly made a straight line for the oncoming Bears. Each plane was armed, but just barely. The A-7 was carrying a nose-mounted cannon, normally used for ground strafing; the trouble was, it had taken part in four previous interceptions today and was so low on cannon rounds, it had enough for one pass, no more. Even worse, the Avio trainers were sprouting lowly .35 caliber machine guns, the likes of which hadn’t been seen on any airplane of import since the 1950s.

Though outgunned, the three jets attacked the formation of Bears with ruthless, almost insane abandon. The trainers went in first, trying to force their relatively weak shells into some crucial part of one of the bombers, hoping a lucky hit might damage the attacker, kill its pilots and even bring it down.

But this was wishful thinking—and everyone involved, from the fighter pilots, to the people inside the bombers to the people watching it from the ground knew it. The Bears were going way too fast for any of the puny machine gun fire to do any good. The trainers both made one long pass, but by the time they’d pulled up to roll over to start another, the second wave of Bears was already dropping its bombs.

This was when the A-7 arrived. With its more powerful but nearly depleted gun, its pilot, an Italian mercenary, aimed for the lead bomber, opening up with his cannon at less than one hundred yards. It was a brave but ultimately fatal thing for him to do. The cannon shells—all thirty-five of them—found a target in the cockpit of the Bear, they killed the airplane’s copilot outright, and mortally wounded two of the gunners. But in keeping his plane steady in order to make every shot count, the A-7 pilot dangerously exposed himself to the lethal rear guns of the Bears flanking the leader.

These weapons were cannons, too, and they had no shortage of ammunition. Two converging streams of fire caught the A-7 right across its tail, blowing off its pipe and rear stabilizers. The little jet went nose over, half its fuselage blown away. It came down right in the middle of the city, plowing into a building that moments before had been hit with a string of bombs from the attackers. The A-7’s explosion only added to the growing carnage. The bomber, less its copilot and two gunners, continued on its bombing run, then banked hard left and quickly flew away.

Within two minutes, all twelve attackers had disappeared over the horizon.

The all-clear sirens blared about five minutes later, and once again, the citizens of Valletta emerged from their shelters to see their beautiful city had been further reduced to rubble by the brutal, mysterious enemy. It was clear almost immediately that this bombing had been particularly devastating: the city’s main market place had simply vanished. The main power station had also been hit, as had the island’s desalinization plant, a place where nearly eighty-percent of the fresh water on Malta was processed. The main road heading into the city had also been cut in a dozen places, and the main fire station was itself ablaze.

The weary citizens stood in shock and horror as they watched the flames above their city rise higher into the night, knowing they had no means of fighting them anymore. The proud city could not withstand much more of this. In one day, nearly two-thirds of Valletta had been reduced to ruins.