Target: Point Zero (6 page)

The engine grumbled to life on the second try. Orr strapped himself into the rear gunner’s seat—there never was any question as to who would be going along with Hunter on this, the first aerial recon flight of the Clocks Air Force. On his lap, the
Wehrenluftmeister
had two large cameras, a box of mice and a fully clipped M-16 rifle.

The overall defense of Clocks had many problems, but one of the most serious was the lack of battlefield reconnaissance. Previous recon photos had been taken by intrepid militiamen who had climbed the peaks
above
the battle zone and pointed their cameras down. This was a brave, but rarely successful means of gathering usable intelligence. There was really only one good way to take pictures of a battlefield—that was to fly over it.

And that’s exactly what Hunter had in mind.

He took about ten seconds to familiarize himself with the plane’s controls, not that there were more than five of them. Then, with the engine up to peak, the oil pressure zooming and Orr buckled up in back, he gunned the plane’s oversized powerplant and started rolling down the frozen-hard airstrip. With the cheers of a dozen Clocks soldiers urging them on, the old airplane roared off into the frigid morning.

At last, the White Elephant Squadron was in the air.

Up they flew, almost straight up. Past the morning mist, through the pall of smoke still hanging over the city and into the low, wintry clouds. One thousand feet, two thousand. Three…Hunter was pouring the rpms into the big Wycoming and it was responding without so much as a cough. The Sopwith was old, but it flew neat, powerful and clean. By the time they broke through the top cloud layer forty-five seconds later, Hunter was in love with the reconditioned airplane.

He turned it over and they were soon looking up at the massive twin mountains. It was an illusion of flight that things appeared smaller from the air than from the ground. But not now. The twin Matterhorns looked tremendously big and impossibly high. Hunter pulled back on the plane’s stick and sought to climb even higher. The engine began screaming, the cold air rushing madly against his face as they rose another one thousand feet. Still, the peaks seemed miles above them.

Then the wind whipping between the mountains caught the bottom of the biplane. Suddenly they were going straight up and twice as fast. It was all Hunter could do to keep the twin wings level; he finally resorted to steering the plane
with
the wind, back and forth, like a gyrocopter. Yet even with their enhanced speed, it still took another minute to reach the top of the mountains.

When they finally did clear them, it was like climbing out of a dark hole. The sky above the peaks was bright, clear—and cold.
Damned
cold. The air temperature had plummeted by more than fifty degrees Fahrenheit during the wild ascent. The Sopwith was still performing like a dream, but Hunter and Orr, sitting in open cockpits, were very quickly freezing up. The plane’s heater was working, and waves of irradiated air were washing through the cockpit, but they did little good. Within thirty seconds, both Hunter and Orr began to collect rows of long, sparkling icicles on their hair, noses and beards.

He banked again, putting the Sopwith’s nose slightly off true south. Below them now were the trenchlines that made up the craggy, Alpine battlefield. It was amazing. Looking up from Clocks, the mountain conflict appeared troublesome but remote, a perpetual stream of flame with a cloud of smoke hovering above it. But from this height, looking down onto the trenches, it was easy to see just how nasty this little war had become.

There’d been so much bombardment going on between the two sides, the snowcap in the pass between the mountains had actually melted in some places. Much of the frigid, two-mile-long battlefield was now covered with a layer of soot, rock and dislodged dirt. The whole area had become distinctly lunar—if it snowed on the Moon, this is what it would look like.

As they approached from five hundred feet, Hunter could clearly see the lines of riflemen and machine gunners on both sides firing madly at each other. The combined fusillade was solid and continuous. So, too, the flare from mortars, small cannons and multiple-rocket launchers. From this altitude, Hunter could tell it was crowded in ditches, on both sides. To his eyes, it seemed like every last one of the ten thousand men currently fighting for Clocks was jammed into the front line of trenchworks someplace. The combined body heat was enough to cause a fine mist to rise above the ditch.

He swung the biplane back to the north, edging closer to the enemy lines. Just as Orr’s blurry recon photos had revealed earlier, the trenches dug by the Works army were larger, longer, more elaborate and more interconnected than those built by Clocks. Orr had been right—the invaders
were
taking their time executing this battle. Their network of ditches alone must have taken months to create.

Hunter steered the Sopwith into a huge updraft, it carried them up another five hundred feet in just a matter of seconds. His attention was drawn away from the battlefield and to the valley on the other side of the mountain. It was strange—he’d assumed Works was just like Clocks: a collection of Alpine-style houses and buildings, surrounded by grand snowcapped mountains. But Works was hardly like Clocks. Rather it looked like a city that had been transported from another, more industrial part of Europe and plopped down in the middle of the Alps. A handful of slate gray buildings dominated its center; they were surrounded by stalks of thin, spiraling skyscrapers. An extensive network of walkways and people-trams connected these buildings, giving the impression that the city was enshrouded in a gigantic spider’s web. Swarms of small helicopters were flying around everywhere, keeping an eye on things.

Metropolis
—that’s what it looked like. Not the home of Superman, but the city in the movie of the same name by Fritz Lang. Eerie, stark and mechanical. There was nothing warm or inviting about this place.

“Where Nazis go to die,” Hunter thought.

He banked back left and returned to the business below. Orr was snapping away madly with his cameras now, delighted that for the first time, Clocks was getting an accurate assessment of the enemy’s disposition of forces, weaponry and supplies. But just from what Hunter had seen, it was obvious that the invaders had twice the men, twice the weapons and apparently all the time in the world to wear down their enemies.

This was not a good situation.

Giving in to a rare temptation, Hunter decided to shake things up a bit. He suddenly dropped the Sopwith into a screaming dive, plunging towards the Works lines. Much to his pleasure, many enemy soldiers began scrambling out of their trenches, so sure they were that he was going to open up on them. Instead, Hunter yanked the plane’s choke lever, causing the big engine to backfire, further terrifying the Works soldiers. It was almost comical to see them running in every direction. Hunter was glad that Orr was capturing the whole thing on film.

He finally pulled up from the prank, banked left and found himself clear on the other side of the mountain, very low over the rear area of the enemy line. The roads leading up the peaks on the Works side were packed with supply trucks and fresh troops. Hunter put the biplane into another steep dive. The enemy soldiers on the roads scattered just as quickly as their comrades had in the trenches. Though they’d seen him coming, not one of them attempted to fire back at him. Everyone on the Works side of the mountain seemed to be more interested in finding cover than fighting back.

Hunter looped around and was soon back over the Works army trenches again. Orr had depleted two-thirds of his film load by this time; there was just enough for one final photo pass. But just as Hunter was banking to do this, the hair on the back of his head suddenly began to curl. Instantly his eyes became fixed on a point halfway up the southern peak, about two miles from the end of the Clocks left flank. It was a large cave, possibly man-made, and located in such a way that everything within was bathed in perpetual shadow, except its precipice. Poking out from this darkness, Hunter could see the long metallic snout of something big, something mean.

A cloud of vapor poured out of his mouth.
Jessuzz,
he breathed. Is that really a gun?

It
was
a gun. Actually a huge cannon, the tip of its wide barrel giving only a hint of its massive size. It had to be at least a 205-millimeter barrel, a gargantuan piece of long-range artillery. Yet from its semihidden position, it was all but invisible to the Clocks troops in the trenches. Hunter jinked the plane closer towards the opening—he could see much evidence of construction going on deeper inside the cave. He pointed the gun out to Orr who, slack-jawed and frigid, used the very last of his film shooting the big emplacement.

The gun was not yet operational, thank God. But when it was, Hunter had no doubt it would be able to easily lob shells not only onto the unprotected soldiers but onto the city of Clocks itself. Combined with the enemy’s heavy aerial bombardment capability and its stronger position in the trenches, it seemed like only a matter of time before they overwhelmed the defenders.

With this chilly thought in mind, Hunter finally turned the Sopwith over and began going down again, back towards the embattled city of Clocks.

T
HEY LIT THE EVENING
fires early that day in the
Rootentootzen.

A large calf had been partially butchered around noon. It was now cooking slowly over the spit inside the tavern’s enormous hearth.

There had been a change-out of units up on the mountain just after dawn. Seven hundred fresh soldiers and militiamen had reached the trenches, relieving a similar number of cold, hard, battle-weary troops. They now had forty-eight hours of warmth, food, drink—and if they were lucky, sex—waiting for them before they had to climb back up the peak again.

Many of these soldiers were now just arriving back in Clocks, having endured the long, slippery six-hour trip down the mountain. At one time, earlier in the war, returning troops would first report to the muster halls on the west end of town, where they would be formally released for their forty-eight-hour liberty. Not anymore. Some soldiers leapt from their troop trucks just as soon as they came in sight of the notorious southside of the city, intent on storming their favorite beer hall, chow palace or brothel. Many others dropped off further along the way, too. For most of the remaining soldiers though, the only slightly less disreputable
Rootentootzen
was the tavern of choice.

It was now three in the afternoon, but thick clouds and heavy snow had turned the early afternoon as dark as dusk. Even the streetlights had blinked on—not that it made any impression on the patrons crowded inside the
Rootentootzen.
The
faux
-oompah music was blaring, the stew was crackling and the beer was flowing. Soldiers returning from the fight heard tales of the harrowing air raid the night before, and most especially, about the wreck of the He-111 out on the northern plain. The downed airplane had been the object of study and inspection by many of the townspeople this day. The rumors said the
Wehrenluftmeister,
Colonel Orr himself, had shot down the enemy bomber; others claimed it fell to the guns of a “super-mercenary” who’d just recently come to town. Some lips, those most doused by ale, dared to breathe that this helpful stranger was none other than Hawk Hunter himself.

But few people believed this—why would the Wingman come to little old Clocks? Still the talk of Hunter perked up at least some ears inside the bar, especially those belonging to the half dozen men sitting at the far corner table. Eating from a single cauldron of stew and nursing a small pitcher of beer, they’d been inside the beer hall since early morning, talking quietly and keeping to themselves. Such behavior was not unusual for the
Rootentootzen;
with so many hired guns in town, the sight of six strangers spending all day in a bar was more the norm than the exception. These men
were
mercenaries—but not for Clocks. They were airmen for the Works
Luftstaffel;
they’d arrived rather ungraciously in the Heinkel bomber now sitting wrecked out on the city’s north plain.

The six aviators had escaped their crash with remarkably few wounds—cuts, bumps and bruises, mostly. It was a tribute to the skill of Franz, the bomber’s pilot and senior officer. It was his idea to come here, to one of the most popular taverns in the city, in order to hide out. With the police still scouring the backstreets and the surrounding countryside looking for them, he believed their best plan was to conceal themselves in plain sight. There was no better place to do that than the
Rootentootzen.

A few gold coins found in the pocket of the dead copilot had bought them their meal and the precious pitcher of beer, and they were keeping warm. But they had many problems facing them. They desperately had to get back to Works, though this desire came not from any sense of patriotism or loyalty. The air crew were all Germans, but they were also paycheck warriors. They’d been promised a half pound of gold apiece to take part in the bombing raid on Clocks. That substantial bounty still lay on the other side of the peaks.

And now this talk of Hawk Hunter was upsetting them. Three of the airmen had fought in America with the Fourth Reich XX Corps two years before. During the first few months of that conflict, it was taken for granted that Hawk Hunter had been killed in the opening battle of the war. That assumption came back to haunt the Fourth Reich in spades. When Hunter eventually showed up and began leading the American effort, it was the beginning of the end for the Nazis’ Amerika adventure. In the series of battles that followed, the Fourth Reich was soundly defeated by resurgent American forces. So many Fourth Reich soldiers had been taken prisoner the Americans had no choice but to ship them all back home in disgrace, adding yet another inglorious chapter to German military history.

It was no surprise then, that the mere mention of the Wingman would make the three airmen nervous.