The Harrier hovered just above the castle, dodging a wide assortment of AA fire, as Hunter searched for a landing place. Because the Harrier was so versatile, any reasonably flat surface would do. Yet, in the midst of the gunfire, the explosions, and smoke, finding such a place wouldn’t be easy.
Still, Hunter was nothing if not lucky, and within seconds he spotted a semiprotected ledge jutting from the side of the mountain, about a hundred yards from the castle’s front gate.
It would take a landing of pinpoint accuracy, since the ledge was only twenty-five feet wide. Any slight miscalculation would send the Harrier hurtling down the side of the cliff and into the forest several hundred feet below.
Gingerly, Hunter eased the Harrier into position. Once he was as close as he was ever going to get, he took a deep gulp of oxygen and activated the jumpjet’s direct vertical thrusters. A few seconds later, he set the aircraft down exactly in the center of the tiny ledge.
It took him only a couple of seconds to secure the jumpjet, leap out, and start for the castle gate. On the way, he donned a gas mask. He was carrying his trusty M-16—filled as usual with tracer rounds—as well as several grenades and a small cannister of the SX-555 knockout gas.
Reaching the battered, burning gate, he found nothing less than a full-scale battle in progress. Gas-masked soldiers on both sides were firing at each other from point-blank range. Some of them had resorted to brutal bayonet engagements, others had tossed their guns aside completely and were struggling in hand-to-hand combat with their foes. All the while, the sky was aflame with streaks of AA fire and air-to-ground rocket launches and the roar of the dueling jet fighters high above.
It looked all the world like a scene from a B movie about a war between alien armies on a far-off planet.
Darting quickly through the gate and into a huge courtyard, Hunter moved along the edge of the fighting, stopping every few feet to add his tracer-laden machine-gunfire when and where it was needed. Within a half minute, he was able to ease his way toward an opening on the far side of the courtyard that seemed to lead into the castle itself.
Once he’d battled his way to this opening and turned the corner, however, he found two Guardians in his path, their rifles raised. Before they could get off a shot, Hunter dropped them both with the butt of his M-16. The first man was out cold, his jaw shattered and mangled from the sudden blow. The second man, suffering from a busted nose and choking on a mouth full of broken teeth, struggled to his knees and shakily lifted his weapon. But once again, Hunter was too quick. He expertly batted the rifle out of the man’s grasp and slammed him back onto the stone floor of the courtyard.
Leaning over the fallen soldier, Hunter instantly jerked off the man’s gas mask. Then, jabbing the muzzle of his rifle against the man’s forehead, he barked through his own gas mask: “The woman prisoner—where is she?”
The soldier’s eyes were wide with fear, but he said nothing, shaking his head as he spit out more teeth. But Hunter had no time to dally. The hand-to-hand fighting was getting worse, as was the automatic gunfire from both sides. The dogfight between the Hinds and the Seasprays was also intensifying, as was the battle between the UA jets and the enemy Phantoms.
So Hunter quickly lowered the M-16, pressed it against the man’s groin, and screamed: “Talk!”
The fear on the man’s face turned to sheer horror. Although he was a professional, well-paid, killer-for-hire, there were some things more precious to him than gold.
“Up there,” he blurted out through bleeding lips, pointing toward a tower rising from the far corner of the courtyard. “She’s up there …”
“That’s better,” snarled Hunter. A sharp punch to the man’s jaw combined with the fog of SX-555 gas to knock him unconscious.
Hunter continued through the smaller courtyard until he reached the small door leading into the main building of the fortress. Bursting inside, he raked the main hallway of the castle’s entrance with his M-16 tracers, causing the defending Guardians to take cover. This respite proved long enough for the American and Free Canadian troops to smash their way in through the main doors of the castle, carrying the sharp firefight into the corridors of the fortress itself.
The fighting now became particularly vicious in this main hallway. No sooner had the allied forces burst in when the opposing troops were hurling flash grenades and smoke bombs at them with wild abandon while their companions filled the air with a storm of ricocheting bullets.
Hunter added his tracer stream to this hail of lead as he slowly zigzagged his way across the main hallway and toward a long ornate set of marble stairs. Scrambling up this staircase, he reached the first landing and found it split off into two adjoining passageways—one leading up, the other leading down.
Crouched behind a thick marble post off to one side of this landing, firing away with a huge Browning automatic rifle, was his good friend, Catfish Johnson, along with a dozen of his men.
“Glad to see you made it, Hawk,” Johnson told him, managing to shake his hand and yell above the racket of the ancient yet still-powerful BAR. “Where you heading?”
Hunter nodded toward the passageway that led up to the castle’s tower. “I’m pretty sure Dominique is up there.”
At that point, a squad of Free Canadian troopers came running up the other passageway, Major Frost in the lead.
“That way leads down to the dungeon,” Frost told them after quickly greeting Hunter. “We broke in through the subbasement, blew down a wall, and trapped a bunch of these Guardians down there. At least temporarily …”
Despite the nonstop gunfire, the constant blinding light of flash grenades going off, and the generally ear-splitting racket of warfare, Hunter turned to his friends and said: “Things seem to be under control here … I’ve got to get going … got things to do.”
He started to move past them and toward the hallway that would bring him up to the tower when Frost reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder.
“There’s something you should know, Hawk,” he yelled. “We spotted an airplane way down in that dungeon. A bunch of these goons were pushing it out of the back and toward that road on the other side of the mountain.”
Hunter shrugged anxiously. “So?”
Frost took a quick deep breath. “It was your airplane, Hawk,” he said deliberately. “Your F-16 …”
Hunter immediately became frozen to the spot.
“My airplane?” he asked, dumbfounded. “Here?”
The F-16XL. It seemed like an eternity since Hunter had climbed into that familiar cockpit, savored the reassuring touch of those customized controls, felt the surge of excitement as his skill and energy blended with the raw power and unmatched aerodynamic technology of the remarkable aircraft. They said that in his hands, the XL was the greatest jet fighter in the history of aerial combat.
And in a flash, he remembered the sickening feeling, like a vicious kick in the gut, that struck him when he first learned the XL had been stolen. It was before his trek with the Freedom Express—a mission that required the capability of the Harrier to land on a flatcar—that he had stored the one-of-a-kind F-16 at Andrews Air Force Base. Yet, despite the heavy guard, the airplane vanished, spirited away by a faceless enemy.
He had vowed to search to the far ends of the earth, if necessary, to find that legendary airplane and reclaim it. And now, it was here, within his grasp once again.
“Now listen to me, Hawk,” Frost told him grimly, knowing full well the implications of what he was about to tell his friend. “Say the word and you, me, and ten of my guys will go and get it. It’s not in the plan and it will take time. But we’d have to do it right now.”
In the infinitesimal time frame of a nano-second, Hunter realized the horrible irony of the moment. Down one hallway he would find his treasured airplane; up another, the only woman he had ever really loved. If he went after one, the other would surely be lost again—most likely forever.
And there was no way to rescue both.
>
Oddly, the gist of an old saying came into his head. “I found two roads … and it was the road not taken that made all the difference.”
But as it turned out, Hunter didn’t hesitate more than a heartbeat.
“We’ve got to stick to the plan” he told Frost.
Then without another moment’s loss, he jumped up and ran into the passageway that would lead him to Dominique.
Chapter Five
WITH THE SOUNDS OF gunfire and flash explosions echoing off the thick marble walls, Hunter raced down the dark passageway until he came to a door that he hoped led into the base of the fortress tower.
The smell of SX-555 was so thick inside this part of the passageway, Hunter quickly lowered his gas mask again. Then, shoving a fresh clip of ammo into his M-16, he opened the door. There was a set of narrow stone steps on the other side that spiraled upward. Moving quickly but quietly, Hunter started taking the stairs two at a time. As he climbed, a hauntingly familiar feeling seized him. It had happened a number of times in the past few years—that powerful sense of destiny … as if he were being propelled by unseen forces along a preordained path. But where was that path ultimately leading? What about the road not taken?
Despite his almost mystical powers of intuition, that answer remained tantalizingly beyond Hunter’s grasp.
And now, fate had intervened again. All the twisted threads of his life over the past few months suddenly had come together on this desolate mountainside in the midst of the Canadian wilderness … his missing F-16, the demented Duke Devillian, the gorgeous but deadly Elizabeth Sandlake … and his beloved Dominique. All here, witnesses to—or victims of—a thoroughly undivine day of judgment.
After the first few dozen steps, the twisted stairway grew even narrower, until it was barely wide enough for two people to pass each other. Like a bad dream, the gloom of the tower deepened into total darkness, and Hunter was forced to start feeling his way by running his hands over the rough stone walls on either side.
He had climbed about two hundred steps when suddenly he halted. His famous built-in “radar system”—actually his keenly developed ESP powers—warned him that something was waiting around the next bend in the stairway. Slowly, he eased his way forward in the darkness, and sensed rather than saw the person standing in front of him. He lunged, and the two bodies collided and began tumbling down the steps, locked in a deadly struggle.
Despite the near-total darkness, Hunter managed to reach up and jerk off his opponent’s gas mask. Then, holding the struggling soldier in a viselike grip, he waited for the SX-555 knockout gas that was blowing through the tower stairway to take effect. It took thirty long seconds, but eventually the thrashing subsided, and the body went limp. Pulling out his penlight, Hunter shined its narrow beam into his opponent’s face and realized for the first time that he had been wrestling with a woman.
Stepping over his fallen foe, the Wingman resumed his climb. He judged that he was at least halfway up the tower by now.
Halfway to his Dominique.
She had watched, first with fear and then with growing hope, as the battle swirled above and around the castle.
From the narrow window at the top of the tower, she couldn’t identify the attacking forces, although she caught a glimpse of a couple of airplanes that somehow looked familiar. She almost let herself believe that the invaders were coming to rescue her, that the W she had seen in the sky really was proof of Hunter’s presence and not just a trick of her tormented mind.
But then, just as her hopes were rising higher than ever before, her cell door crashed open, and a gang of six fashionably dressed female guards burst in, rifles raised.
One of the women, her voice sounding both drugged and desperate, hissed at Dominique: “Don’t think your friends will save you, my lovely little thing. They’re not going to get here in time.”
Another of the Amazonlike women then stepped forward and grabbed Dominique by the hair.
“In fact,” she told her harshly, “we’re here to waste you. But not before we get a little of this …”
The guard suddenly ripped the front of Dominique’s gown down to her waist and began crudely squeezing her lovely, heaving breasts. Exhausted and depleted beyond words, Dominique nevertheless attempted to fight back. But two more of the women grabbed her and then two more. It was hopeless. On the verge of unconsciousness, she collapsed, unable to prevent the gang of women from savagely fondling her private parts.
In the meantime, a strange odor began to leak into the tiny room. Despite her condition, Dominique sniffed it and felt her panic rise up yet another dizzying notch. Was this poisonous gas? But in another instant she knew it made little difference. She might as well die now, she thought, rather than endure the rape and then get shot.
But her assailants smelled the gas, too. They immediately stopped ravaging her body and quickly covered their noses and mouth with kerchiefs, hoping the cloth would keep out the mysterious gas.
“Enough of this stuff,” one of the women shouted through her improvised mask. “We’ve got to finish this and get out of here …”
Her companions quickly agreed. The leader then picked up her AK-47 assault rifle, cocked it, and pointed it straight at Dominique’s heart.
Dominique braced herself for the bullet, in the instant between life and death regretting that she never would see Hunter again. Not in this life anyway.
But the shot never came.
Instead there was a loud commotion near the cell’s entrance and a sudden burst of white smoke. Instantly everything went fuzzy in front of Dominique’s eyes, but she was vaguely aware of the woman with the gun suddenly slumping to the cell floor, the rifle making a loud rattle as it struck the hard surface. Behind her, the other guards also fell like dominoes, their limp bodies forming a twisted line back to the massive cell doors.
Standing in that doorway was a tall, broad-shouldered figure surrounded by the fog of white gas and with a head that looked like it belonged to a grotesque, giant insect.
Immediately Dominique thought she was hallucinating. She struggled to remain conscious, struggled to remain sane—but it was no use. She was fading fast, and had no strength to resist when the creature walked over, bent down, and picked her up.
The last thing she remembered was how gentle this monster seemed to be.
Ten minutes passed before Dominique opened her eyes again.
She gradually came to realize that she was being carried to some unknown destination, the change in light telling her that she was outside the castle.
She could also still hear the fighting in the background and armed creatures—all them with the same kind of grotesque head as the one carrying her—seemed to be everywhere. She was also vaguely aware of what looked like hundreds of airships streaking overhead, filling the sky with cannon fire and missiles.
Finally, the giant insect man lifted her into a small cabin of some kind … No, it was the cockpit of an airplane. Her head was starting to clear now. She blinked back the dirt and tears and gas, and begged her eyes to focus properly. When they did, she suddenly realized that the grotesque head on the person who had carried out of the castle and put her into the airplane really was just a gas mask. And now the man was removing it.
With a sudden rush of unbearable joy an instant later, Dominique found herself staring into the face of Hawk Hunter.
“Hi, honey.” he said to her, almost sheepishly. “Are you OK?”
Chapter Six
Washington, DC
HUNTER POURED A GLASS of beer for himself and one for the man across the table from him, General Dave Jones, Commander in Chief of the United American Armed Forces.
The two old friends were sitting in a bar located in the Washington, DC, suburb of Georgetown, not too far from Jones’s headquarters. It was three days after the titanic battle at the Alberta fortress.
The general spoke first.
“Well, Hawk, what’s on your mind?”
Hunter took a swallow of
beer and then passed a hefty-sized document to Jones. “First of all, sir, these are the follow-up battle assessments from the operation …”
Jones lit a cigar, and took a swig of beer between the opening puffs. He perused the first few pages of the document and said: “I suppose I’ll have to read all this eventually. But can you give me the bottom line?”
Hunter refilled both their beer glasses. He could have recited the seventy seven-page battle assessment report word for word if Jones had wanted him to. It was all in there: the sound defeat of the castle security forces at the hands of the United Americans and their Free Canadian allies; the capture of hundreds of various criminals and terrorists including the unbalanced Nazi leader, Duke Devillian.
Also included were Devillian’s subsequent confessions, as well as the locations of the last of his fascist organization weapons caches—undefended supply dumps and storage facilities that were being hit by United American fighter bombers at that very moment. The report ended by detailing the astonishingly low casualty figures for the friendly forces.
“Officially, the operation was a success,” Hunter said.
“And unofficially?”
Hunter frowned slightly and took another sip of beer.
“Unofficially, I’d have to rate it about sixty to sixty-five percent successful …” he replied.
Jones relit his cigar, and waved his way through the resulting cloud of smoke.
“But why?” the senior officer asked. “We wiped out most of the forces holding that castle. We captured Devillian and we’ve been launching air strikes on the last of his empire ever since …”
Jones paused for a puff on his stogie and a swig of beer.
“And you got Dominique back,” he said, his voice lower in volume a notch. “And that certainly was a critical thing.”
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