Target: Point Zero (27 page)

They had flown into early afternoon when they saw a huge mountain range off on the eastern horizon. This, Hunter knew, was the Makrans, the southern terminus of the old Iranian territory. Over these peaks was the country known these days as Greater Pakistan. He brought the big Bear down to thirty thousand feet, below a cloud layer that had wrapped itself around the Makran range. Right behind him, Baldi was working the airplane’s rudimentary radio, trying to get through to the United American Expeditionary Forces in Vietnam, or even UAAF headquarters back in Washington. But it had been a futile quest so far for the man from Malta. The Bear’s communications set was so underdeveloped Baldi was having a hard time just picking up radio transmissions coming from land directly below the big bomber, never mind connecting a call halfway around the world. With commendable patience though, he never stopped trying.

Chloe was sitting in the copilot’s seat, fully awake now, still buzzing from their sudden bombing of the runway at Uruk. The importance of their strange mission was growing on her with each passing hour. She was gravely studying the terrain below them, eyes peeled for anything even resembling a runway. Whenever Hunter would glance in her direction, he would feel an odd jolt of pride run through him—this mixed with the usual wave of testosterone that pumped inside him and anyone else any time they looked at her. It was as if she was growing up, maturing right before his eyes.

It was good having another pair of peepers, for the terrain below them changed dramatically after they passed over the Markan range. Most signs of the desert wilderness were gone now—the Markans were simply the beginning of hundreds of miles of high snowcapped mountains, rugged hills and deep valleys. Though rather chilling, Hunter again welcomed the switch in topography. The wild desert terrain could hide just about anything: cities, villages, secret military bases. Everything but a runway of any size. Below them now was nothing but vast, oddly majestic, mountainous desolation. Lifeless. Empty.

Then they came to Karachi.

Hunter knew something was wrong more than one hundred miles out.

He’d felt a vibration start up from deep within him; in seconds it was doing a slow buzz around his brain. Karachi was the capital of Pakistan; had been since the country’s birth. But there was a large military base located about five miles from the city that rivaled downtown Karachi in size and scope. The place was known as Ras Muari Rim. It was a large, five-runway installation built by the Americans from which not-so-secret bombing raids could be launched against Soviet troops fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Its landing strips could handle anything from fighter-bombers to B-52s to C-5s and bigger.

But Ras Muari Rim also had another distinction. Its longest runway had been extended in the 1980s, not by the U.S. military, but by NASA of all people. It seemed that Karachi, though thousands of miles from Cape Canaveral, was actually fitted as an emergency landing spot for the American shuttle should it have to come down shortly after launch.

As such, it was more than large enough to handle the Zon.

But as Hunter brought the huge bomber over the city now, to his surprise he couldn’t even locate the huge base at Ras Muari Rim. Below they could see miles and miles of houses—hovels really, shacks plopped down anywhere they could fit. This was no surprise, this is what most of Karachi always looked like. But in the area where the Ras Muari Rim was supposed to be, they could see nothing but people—swarms of humans, with numbers in the hundreds of thousands, maybe even more. They were covering the military base like ants, blotting out any evidence of buildings, facilities or the runways themselves.

“This is great!” Baldi exclaimed as he peered down at the patch of humanity covering the air base. “That air strip is more blocked than the last one. Even more fouled than my own in Valletta.”

Baldi was right—but Hunter was feeling very uneasy about all this. There were almost a million people huddled below them—and from the looks of it, no one was in the city itself. Were the people living on the base refugees from the capital just five miles away? If so, why had they retreated to the air base, while a much closer commercial airport lay directly on the outskirts of the city, apparently empty?

“I don’t like this,” he murmured. “It seems so…unnatural.”

He looked over at Chloe and then at Baldi. The terrified look coming across the Maltan’s face said it all. He was just getting over his fear of flying, now he knew Hunter was going to reignite it in him again.

“I think we’ve got to go down there,” Hunter told them. “Something tells me all is not right here…”

Five minutes later, Hunter set the big Bear down on Karachi airport’s north-south runway.

They ran into no opposition during their sharp descent; no sign of interceptors, no SAM radar indications. Hunter taxied the huge bomber over to the largest terminal, shut down the airplane’s four huge engines and then sat there, welcoming the silence after hours of hearing the Bear’s quartet of prop-jets.

“There’s no one home,” Chloe said innocently.

“So we can leave?” Baldi asked hopefully.

Hunter was shaking his head. “Why would there be so many people crowded into the air base just over the hill and no one here?”

“What difference does it make?” Baldi asked him. “The big runway is crowded, the Zon would not set down there. Just crushing the bodies would screw up the spacecraft, no?”

“It would,” Hunter replied. “But that won’t stop Viktor or his goons. If they have to use that runway, they’ll clear those people out of there—and use any means to do it.”

Baldi thought about this for a moment, then nodded in grim agreement. “He killed hundreds of my people,” he said disgustedly. “Why would he stop at thousands? Or hundreds of thousands?”

“Exactly,” Hunter replied grimly.

Baldi took a long look out the plane’s nose window. The airport
was
completely empty. No planes, no vehicles, no signs of life at all.

“So what do we do?” he asked.

“We find out why everyone is crowded onto the military base,” came the answer—not from Hunter, but from the sweet lips of Chloe.

“That’s exactly right,” Hunter said with a brief grin.

She
was
learning fast.

They climbed down out of the bomber; Hunter and Baldi armed with M-16s, Chloe carrying a flare pistol.

It was now getting close to midafternoon and the sun was beating down with its worst heat of the day, Baldi had his gun up and ready for anything. But Hunter knew there wasn’t anyone around in the immediate area. They walked through the empty terminal and out onto the service road that was once a highway leading in and out of the place. It, too, was deserted.

There was a line of vehicles parked outside the terminal—old-fashioned military jeeps painted yellow and redesigned to serve as taxis. Many of them still had keys in their ignitions and gas in their tanks. It was as if everyone just disappeared from the airport one day, leaving in a rush and never coming back.

Hunter reached into one of these taxis and twisted the key to the right. The engine started immediately.

“I hope my driver’s license is still valid,” he mused as they climbed in.

Minutes later they were speeding along the empty thoroughfare, heading into the center of Karachi itself. Like the airport, the sprawling city was utterly deserted. There were vehicles still in the streets, the traffic lights were still blinking and the electricity was still on. But there were no people, alive or otherwise.

“This is so strange,” Chloe opined. “This place looks okay; why
would
everyone leave?”

They continued through the downtown business district and into the residential area. There was no way to adequately describe these living conditions other than to say they were slums. Blocks and blocks of dilapidated apartment buildings, shacks and covered alleyways. The sun beating down did little to ease the smell rising from these places. All three of them in the jeep found themselves holding their noses. Even the stale air inside the bomber was better than this.

Hunter turned off one particularly crowded backstreet to an avenue that was slightly wider, slightly less congested, and they found the first clue why Karachi was empty.

It was a huge crater sitting right in the middle of the main street. There was water at the bottom of it, covering what looked to be about two dozen skeletal corpses. The hole was at least a hundred feet across and probably half that deep.

“Jessuzz,” Baldi gasped. “What the hell is this?”

“Is it from a bomb?” Chloe asked.

Hunter was shaking his head. “Not a bomb,” he said, carefully studying the dimensions of the hole, and its slightly irregular shape. “It was caused by a shell, something shot out of a gun.”

Chloe’s hand went to her mouth. “A gun?” she asked. “What kind of a gun could do this?”

Hunter replied with a grim shrug. “A damn big one,” he said.

They steered around the hole—and came to another. It was about a block away and located in the exact same spot on the roadway as the first one. They drove around this one, too, only to find another and another and another. In fact, there were more than a dozen huge craters in the avenue, perfectly lined up as if they’d been dropped with the help of a plumb bob.

“This gun is somewhere in the two hundred fifty maybe even two hundred eighty-millimeter range,” Hunter said, not quite believing it himself. The biggest gun he’d ever heard of was the two hundred eighty-millimeter atomic cannon, a weapon built specifically to lob nuclear-tipped artillery shells for distances up to twenty miles. There had been rumors for years that someone here in the approaches to the subcontinent had developed a monster gun, a supergun, that could fire a shell up to one hundred miles.

Did such a gun exist? And was it somewhere in the neighborhood of Karachi?

They finally found their way out of the slums and onto the four-lane highway which headed southwest, and in the direction of the Ras Muari Rim military air base. The roadway was completely clear of any traffic, moving or otherwise. This was no surprise either: there was a neat line of gigantic shell craters running parallel to the raised highway, too.

They came to the top of a hill and Hunter stopped the jeep at the crest. The roadway led into a valley and the Ras Muari Rim air base. Gazing down at it now through the afternoon haze, all three of them felt their jaws drop. The air base was literally crawling with people—thousands upon thousands of them, huddled together in a clump of humanity that stretched from one end of the base to the other.

Chloe especially lost her breath at the sight of it. It looked like a hive of ghastly insects, crawling and unreal, like from a dream. She nearly got sick just looking at it. Baldi too became physically upset.

“People cannot live like this,” he said through gritted teeth. “People
should
not live like this.”

Hunter dug out a large kerchief and tied it around his mouth and nose. The smell from the slum was bad enough; the odor coming from the air base was close to overwhelming.

They began driving again, and gradually they came to realize that the enormous shell craters spread out from the highway and enveloped three sides of the air base’s northern end. From there back, the airstrip was protected on all sides by the high mountains. Things began falling into place now. The empty, somewhat battered city, the crowded air base, the miles of pock-marked landscape.

That’s when it hit Hunter. The air base was crowded with the liquid mass of humanity for one reason: it was apparently the only place in the area not in the reach of the mysterious monster gun.

They drove another mile—and then the highway suddenly disappeared. A huge shell crater had severed the artery; several more had destroyed the elevated roadway for the last mile into the air base. It looked like a huge beast had come along and stomped the highway down.

At the abrupt end of the roadway they found an armored vehicle dug into a concrete blast shelter so thick, Hunter imagined it would take nothing less than an atomic shell to take it out. They drove up to this small fortress very carefully, weapons plainly in sight, with their chambers open and empty. Three soldiers were manning the lonely outpost. They were Caucasians; possibly Dutch or Belgian. They stared at the approaching jeep, mouths open in surprise. One of them held up his hands, indicating that the jeep should stop. Hunter immediately complied.

“Mon ami!”
he called out, hoping the men would understand him. They did.

“What are you doing here?” one of them yelled back, sounding authentically puzzled. “This is a very dangerous area.”

Hunter hesitated a moment, pondering the question. He really had no good answer.

“We set down back at the airport,” he explained, rolling the jeep to a stop about ten feet away from them. “We’re on our way to…”

Suddenly he stopped talking. His ears had picked something up. Trouble was on the way. The strange thing was, the soldiers felt it, too. Suddenly they were diving back into their heavily reinforced bunker.

The next thing he knew, Hunter was dragging Chloe out of the jeep and running full sprint with her towards the thick fortification. Baldi was right on their tails. From the swarm of humanity below them they heard a very distinct gasp. Then the air was filled with an awesome whistling noise and a crack that sounded like thunder.

The huge shell hit three seconds later.

It came down less than five hundred feet away from them, kicking up so much dirt and dust that the day suddenly turned to night.

Hunter was thrown about six feet into the air, crashing into the top of the bunker and coming back down twice as fast as he went up. Luckily he had his bone dome on and he was able to hang onto Chloe. They landed in a heap on top of the soldiers, with Baldi coming down on top of them. They all lay there for a few seconds, dazed, confused and nearly blinded by the clouds of dust thrown up from the blast. Hunter’s eyes were the first to clear—when he looked out of the shelter’s lone light slit, he saw another shell crater as big, if not bigger than the others, had just swallowed up another chunk of already battered terrain.