Target: Point Zero (29 page)

At the end of fifteen minutes of searching, the only thing Hunter could find was an ancient weather map which showed in rather unsophisticated relief the mountainous areas north of the city. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing. He quickly committed the map to memory, folded it up and put it inside his boot pocket. Then he went back outside.

But right away, he knew something was wrong.

The Bear was about halfway out to the runway; it appeared to be moving fine. The weather was clearing up a bit; this, too, was helpful.

But something was buzzing in his ears, something that indicated big trouble.

Hunter did a long look around and then it hit him: Chloe was nowhere to be seen.

An instant later, he was running. Out to the taxiway, where Van Dam and his men were standing.

“Where is she?” he asked the Dutch colonel anxiously. “Where’s Chloe?”

Van Dam was instantly confused. “She’s not with you?” he replied, astonished.

A second later, Hunter was jumping into the stolen taxi, revving its engine and jamming it into gear. Baldi was just barely able to jump in with him.

Chloe was not at the airport anymore—Hunter could feel it. So with a screech of tires and a shower of dirt, he tore off towards the only other place she could be: the crowded air base.

If anything, the place looked more crowded once night had fallen.

The smoke from tens of thousands of fires rose above the overcrowded camp, making it look like a dreary brown blanket was hovering a hundred feet overhead. The wildest of thoughts were streaking through Hunter’s mind. Who knows what Chloe was up to now, he thought. He could feel his chest tighten up. He’d been so proud of her in the past few hours, slaving under the illusion that he had opened her eyes a bit to what the real world was like. Now, all he could wonder was which group of Dutch soldiers was she servicing? The guys at the entrance to the horrid camp? Or those guarding the headquarters?

Hunter peeled onto the base, scattering those few individuals who had the strength to move. As before, the crowd of starving people parted slowly, weakly, as the taxi passed through. Hunter was trying to look in all directions at once. Maybe Chloe was doing some of the people right here in the camp. Maybe she’d found a young husky buck in the swampy pool of a million people who could muster up enough strength to give it to her good, one last time.

It took them ten long minutes to drive the length of the runway; there had been no sign of Chloe. They reached Van Dam’s headquarters, and found a squad of a dozen soldiers standing guard outside. Hunter eyed them angrily; they returned his glare with looks of confusion. Why was he mad at them?

Hunter jumped out of the jeep even before it stopped moving—Baldi had to jam the thing back into the parking gear and engage the brake. By this time, Hunter had dashed past the amazed soldiers and into the HQ itself.

He was expecting to see anything: twelve guys lined up, waiting to take their turn on Chloe. Or maybe she was doing all of them at once. But the place was practically empty. A few hungry soldiers manning the small radio sets, another couple guarding the meager Dutch arsenal.

No orgy. No Chloe.

He went back outside; Baldi was questioning the soldiers standing guard. Not one of them had seen her—or so they claimed.

Hunter was back into the jeep in a second. Once again, Baldi had to make a mighty leap to get onboard before he roared away. Now they were traveling through the crowd again. Hunter’s anxiety level was rising like never before. He had to sort through nearly one million people to find her—all while time was running out on his mission schedule. Had it been just about anyone else, he would have probably left her behind.

But she was hardly just anyone else.

He was now heading for a small outpost of Dutch peacekeepers located on the northern end of the runway, close to where the big gun’s shells were able to come crashing down. Almost on cue, there was a screech above the refugee camp. Instinctively everyone who was able to move fell to the ground and covered their heads. The shell hit three seconds later. It shook the earth violently for the next half minute. The tremor was so deep, it caused many of the fires to collapse and go out. The weak cries of the refugees rose and mixed with the pall of smoke permanently in place overhead.

But none of this stopped Hunter, even for a moment. He kept driving, slowly but steadily, even as the thousands of people were dropping to the ground all around him. The jeep had kicked once as the shock ran through the moist, disgusting terrain; but Hunter simply downshifted and kept going.

They reached the small outpost—it was two tanks hidden beneath a forest of cut-down trees. There were ten Dutch soldiers on hand, and unlike the others at the HQ, they weren’t all that surprised to see Hunter drive up.

Once again he was out of the jeep in a shot. He ran up to the sergeant of the guard, an enormous Nordic type with a face full of scars. Just her type, Hunter thought.

The man couldn’t speak English, and Hunter was too agitated to start spewing Dutch. So he stood there and pantomimed Chloe’s shape, her hair and her pretty face.

The sergeant got it right away. He smiled, displaying a mouth full of bright white teeth. Yes, one of his men had given her a ride to the camp about an hour ago. Hunter was furious.
Where is she?
he growled at the man. The sergeant shrugged and then pointed in the general direction of the mob. Hunter just shook his head sadly—his first intuition had been right. Chloe was screwing the natives.

He plunged into the crowd, firmly but humanely making his way through the pathetic multitude. The people looked at him like he was from another world. A tall pale stranger dressed all in black, wearing a strange white bowl on his head adorned with yellow thunderbolts. He was suddenly aware of many babies crying at once. Mothers screaming, men weeping. Why all this commotion? Did Chloe have an audience?

He finally moved towards a particularly tight knot of people—this was where all the noise was coming from. In the middle of it, he thought he heard Chloe’s distinctly melodic voice.

He was less polite this time as he forced about a dozen of the toothpick people aside and broke inside the circle.

That’s when he found her.

She was in the middle of the crowd of people. But she had all her clothes on, her hands were dirty and her hair was actually out of place in spots. She had a small bundle in her arms; she was hugging it tightly. Hunter had to take a closer look before he realized that it was a baby, just born apparently, it was that small.

And then Hunter saw that many of the people around Chloe were crying. He took an even closer look. The baby was not breaming.

He stood there, almost paralyzed, as a man appeared and quickly dug a shallow hole in the debris-strewn ground. With great care, Chloe laid the dead infant into the grave and helped push the dirt back on top.

Then she stood up, hugged the grieving mother and father and turned away. That’s when she saw Hunter. Their eyes met. His were downcast with pure, unadulterated shame. Hers were filled with tears. All of a sudden, he felt a million miles away from the frozen dreamland of St. Moritz.

She quickly ran to him, embraced him tightly and cried on his shoulder for two minutes, nonstop.

Then, finally, he led her out of the crowd.

T
HE BEAR FINALLY TOOK
off at eighteen hundred hours—6 P.M. exactly.

The sun was just going down behind the mountains to the west, casting a giant shadow over all of Karachi and the overcrowded air base nearby. But there was still light, way above the tops of the peaks, and this is where Hunter headed as soon as the big bomber’s wheels left the ground.

It had been a brief but somber farewell with Van Dam and his men. They agreed that if the big gun was destroyed, they would guide the refugees back home, and once the runway was cleared, they would crater it beyond repair. But no matter what happened, they knew Hunter would not return.

We’ll wave when you go over,
the Dutch colonel told him. Hunter wished them all luck and promised to do everything he could for them.

Now the huge airplane was rising out of the darkened valley, heading towards the last of the sunlight. No one inside the bomber could bear to look back. This was like taking the last plane out of Hell. But they knew that the memories of the horror and degradation they’d seen at Ras Muari Rim would stay with them forever.

Hunter did his best to get his mind back on other things. Despite their steep ascent, the stripped-down bombed-up biplane was still hanging tightly to the right wing. The wash from the two great propjets was just passing over the top wing of the Gnatsnapper, actually causing a kind of calm area around the biplane.

So far, so good,
Hunter thought.

They reached an altitude of fifty-five hundred feet before finding the sun again. As soon as those last dying rays of light hit the huge snout of the airplane, Hunter leveled it off and put the big Bear into a wide orbit. Okay, they had made it up here, intact—but still, they had no time or fuel to screw around. Both Chloe and Baldi had their noses pressed up against the cockpit glass, straining their eyes in the fading light, trying to find any evidence of the big gun.

“If only they fired it, right now,” Chloe declared. “The flare from such a monster would guide us right to it.”

But the big gun remained silent. Perhaps the people who were using it had seen the Bear take off, or maybe they’d received a report from one of their spies who did. Or maybe the ghostly gun crew was simply eating its supper. Either way, Hunter & Co. would not have their help in finding the big gun.

But as it turned out, they didn’t need it.

Hunter turned the huge airplane towards the north and west, following his instinct, the rough trajectory of the shells that had fallen on the city, and the scant information provided to him by the crude weather map.

But it was Baldi who spotted it first.

“I don’t believe this…” he gasped, his breath fogging up the cockpit window.

Chloe saw it, too. “How strange!” she cried.

Hunter was quickly squirming in his seat, craning his neck in an effort to see what they did.

“What?” he pleaded with them. “What is it?”

Chloe reached over and guided his line of sight down and away from the clutter of controls on the Bear’s contact panel.

“Way out there,” she told him. “See it? Through all those clouds?”

Finally, Hunter did.

It was a peak about forty-five miles north of the city, bordered on two sides with mountains slightly taller than itself. With their enormous shadows, and the way the light was hitting its top, damn if the peak didn’t look like a two-mile high Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Hunter had to blink a couple times. Maybe the fumes inside the shitbucket Russian bomber were getting to him—getting to them all. This thing just didn’t look real.

The peak was either rounded off or had been artificially flattened. A crack on its south face perfectly mimicked a dinosaur’s mouth, craggy and snarling, with rows of teeth. Long lines of fallen rock formed its small, raptor hands. Its enormous spine stretched to the next mountain over; a small range to the east provided the gigantic, coiled tail. Two smaller mountains at its base looked like its huge feet. It all combined to give the illusion of a huge dinosaur, hunched over, as if ready to strike.

It was one of the damnedest things Hunter had ever seen. Was this a natural formation? Or had someone taken the time to blast out the enormous relief, as a kind of Jurrasic Mount Rushmore? It was impossible to tell. If it was man-made, then it could only be described as too ambitious, too bizarre. But if it was artificial, then Nature was certainly playing a grand joke on everyone who lived in the region.

“It’s frightening!” Baldi gasped.

“It’s art!” Chloe exclaimed.

“Either way, enjoy it while you can,” Hunter told them, turning the huge bomber towards the strange formation. “Because it’s not going to be around much longer…”

It was pure luck that the small, camouflaged AMX scout car reached the top of the hill just as the huge Bear bomber was beginning its bombing run.

Four mercenaries were crammed inside the scout; they were part of a small army of hired troops approaching Karachi from the north. This force, made up of Afghans, Chechins, and assorted
jihad
warriors, was known in the region as
wazi bugti-kalat,
literally “the raghead warriors.” They had been hired by a Persian combat-broker to attack the old Pakistani capital and seize the Ras Muari Rim air base located on its outskirts. Not even the Wazi’s officer corps knew why they were being paid to blitz the Paki city and its air facilities. All they’d been told was the city was practically undefended and opposition from unarmed citizens would be nil. This would be an easy job.

The main column of the Wazi army was now moving down the old Dwina highway; they would soon be within forty kilometers of Karachi itself. A mixed infantry/light-armor force, the Wazis specialized in quick response and “clean operations,” leaving no survivors or witnesses. This was why they were paid almost double the normal wages for hired guns operating in this part of the world.

The AMX scout car had been sent ahead to check the road to Karachi for any obstacles or mines. In strictest confidence, their commanders had also told them to keep an eye out for a huge gun said to be operating somewhere in the area. Though there was no reliable information on this supposed weapon, the Wazi’s intelligence service had heard that another mercenary group, the hated Turkish Star, Inc., was being paid by a group of wealthy Ubekis to pummel Karachi for one hundred days and nights, apparently in return for a long-simmering feud between the two territories. They might be fulfilling their contract by using some kind of huge weapon. Though the owners of Wazi had been intentionally vague about how this big gun might affect their own operation, they assured their command staff that the shelling, if there was any, would not affect the most important part of their job—that was, seizing and clearing the huge Ras Muari Rim air base.