Target: Point Zero

by Maloney, Mack;

  On the top floor of the pyramid was the combat command center itself. It was a large, spare place, filled with radios and computers to assist the humans in the war effort. Next to the war room were the private quarters of the man responsible for running the defense of the city. Part-defense minister, part-mayor, part-dictator, he was known throughout Clocks as the Wehrenluftmeister.

  It was almost midnight when the Wehrenluftmeister came through the door of the war room; he’d just arrived back from the front. He found most of his command staff were asleep; the others were masturbating quietly in the corner. The Wehrenluftmeister dismissed his bodyguards, breezed through the command room and wearily unlocked the door to his private quarters. It had been a very long day; he was absolutely dead on his feet.

  He slipped inside, closing the door softly so as not to disturb anybody. He had barely enough energy to flip on the light—and he wasn’t surprised when it did not come up to full power right away. Electric flow was fluctuating throughout the city this night, just like every other night this week.

  It was just another problem the Wehrenluftmeister had to worry about; the city had experienced a major blackout two nights before, and the lights had been flickering then, too. Soon, he might have to order all electrical devices shut off during certain hours, if only to rest the city’s already-ragged power-generating turbines.

  He threw his helmet and gun on the floor and walked deeper into his spacious, but spartan room. A lighted planning table dominated the middle of the compartment; the Wehrenluftmeister collapsed into the overstuffed chair next to it. He was an enormous individual, tall and hefty—and the chair bent mightily against his weight. It would have been very easy for him to fall asleep at that moment—and be out cold for hours. But sleep was not an option for him now; indeed, it was no more than a sinful temptation. He had so much work to do, it would be hours before he could consider even taking a short nap.

  So, reluctantly, he dragged the chair up to the blinking light table and retrieved a leather packet from his uniform pocket. Emptying out its contents, he was soon looking at three dozen photo negatives with a magnifying glass. To his dismay, more than half of them were solid black; either from bad development or bad imaging. Disgusted, he swept these off the table.

  But when he began examining images that he could actually see, he felt his heart sink even further. They were pictures from the front. Most of them showed the same two ragged set of battle trenches dug deep into the snow and ice at the top of the mountain. Both trenchworks were three kilometers long and they ran almost exactly parallel to one another. In between were blotches of smoky fires and bomb craters, many more in front of the eastern line, the one occupied by Clocks’ Home Guard.

  This alone was a stark reminder of which side was getting bested in the high-altitude, frozen war.

  In fact, close-up photos revealed many breaches had been cut in the Volksdefensfuhr’s lines in the past twenty-four hours. The enemy had brought up more heavy guns during the previous night. They’d been blowing bigger holes in his defenses ever since. Now in a pique, the Wehrenluftmeister swept all the photos away from him—each one had brought more bad news than the one before. Disheartened, he slumped back in his chair. At this rate, his army could not hold out very much longer. Maybe two weeks, maybe three at the most.

  But after that…

  The Wehrenluftmeister closed his eyes—he was praying to go to sleep now, if only to get away from this highly disturbing situation for a few hours. But no sooner had he drifted off when he felt compelled to open his eyes again. When he did, there was a rifle snout hovering just two inches from his nose. A man was standing right in front of him, holding a rifle on him. It seemed impossible. How had he so suddenly and so quietly crept into this heavily guarded room?

  The Wehrenluftmeister began to stand up, but the point of the cold rifle forced him back down again. The figure took a step forward; the bare light from the plotting table finally illuminated his face. The Wehrenluftmeister gasped. The sharp, handsome features, the grown-out mane, the hawkish face. He knew this man—he’d seen his photograph many times over the years, even before the Big War.

  “You’re…you’re…” he began stammering in perfect English.

  “Never mind who I am,” the voice behind the rifle said. “Who the hell are you?”

  The Wehrenluftmeister gulped hard.

  “I am the commanding officer of the defense forces of this city,” he said quickly. “I was hired to protect it from invasion. I have a ten thousand man regular army division at my disposal, plus another ten thousand militia and mercenaries. My command staff numbers five hundred and one.”

  The rifle moved every so slightly towards him. “Are you the good guys or the bad guys?” the voice said.

  The question momentarily stumped the Wehrenluftmeister.

  “We’re the good guys,” he finally replied. “The people who hired me are honorable individuals. This city, their city, was in danger of being invaded. I came to their assistance…”

  “That’s what Hitler said before he stomped Poland,” the voice interrupted.

  The comment exploded in the Wehrenluftmeister’s ears. His face instantly turned crimson red with anger.

  “We are not Nazis, sir!” he shouted, even though the rifle snout was now but an inch from his nose. “Though I can assure you you’ll find plenty of that ilk on the other side of the mountain!”

  A short silence descended on the darkened room. The Wehrenluftmeister shifted nervously in his chair. The rifle moved in again.

  “You’re not an American, are you?”

  “Free Canadian,” the Wehrenluftmeister replied. “My name is Orr. Major Stanley, P. Central European Liberation Forces, Inc.”

  “How much you getting paid?” the voice asked.

  Orr hesitated a moment. “Nothing but food and shelter,” he revealed at last. “For the time being, at least…”

  Only then did the rifle barrel move, its snout disappearing back into the shadows. Then its owner stepped forward again. The Wehrenluftmeister looked up, and saw the face once more.

  He gulped. “So…it is really you?”

  Hunter lowered the gun completely, then casually took a seat on the edge of the plotting table.

  “Yeah,” he said finally, “it’s really me.”

  The Wehrenluftmeister took a shaky glass of water. He still couldn’t believe it. Hunter snapped his fingers and suddenly all the lights came back on.

  “Not going too well up top?” he asked Orr.

  The Wehrenluftmeister pushed what was left of the pile of recon photos Hunter’s way.

  “You’re an expert,” he said. “You tell me.”

  Hunter leaned over the lighting table and began studying the pile of photos himself.

  He had to agree with the Wehrenluftmeister. The images did show a rapidly deteriorating situation. Clocks’ defense forces were getting pounded by heavy artillery the enemy had stacked in the mountain crevices high above the trenchworks. Larger, higher gun emplacements were being worked on as well, even as the battle raged on in the pass below. Once these bigger guns were operational, there would be no defense against them. The troops holding the eastern trenches would be quickly finished. It would be a very cold, very brutal way to die.

  “We’d been holding them off before these big guns appeared,” Orr told him. “But now…”

  Hunter studied another set of photos, these showing the enemy’s trenchworks. The fortifications appeared full, sturdy and heavily reinforced, with plenty of reserve stocks lying in the rear areas.

  “Who are these guys you’re fighting?” he asked Orr. “Are they really Nazis? Or just fake ones?”

  Orr just shrugged.

  “Many of them are German,” he replied. “But many are not. They’re part of a larger army which has been steadily moving east for about a year now, taking over large chunks of the Continent in the process. We’ve been able to slow them down, here, but only because of the mountain. They
are despicably patient, which tells me they are being paid handsomely. But if they get through us, there’ll be nothing to stop them between here and Siberia…”

  Hunter continued studying the photos. “I assume from your title that you have aircraft at your disposal too?”

  Orr laughed bitterly.

  “Well, that’s actually a joke in these parts,” he replied. “We took delivery on an attack squadron about two months ago. We were sure then that with air support, our troops would be able to throw the invaders back over the mountain. But a cruel ruse had been played on us, I’m afraid. Or perhaps it was of some nefarious design…”

  Hunter looked up at him. “What happened? The planes come with no engines?”

  Orr laughed again. “If only that was the problem.”

  He walked over to a file cabinet, retrieved a large brown envelope and tossed it onto the light table. A spread of photos came out. They were pictures of biplanes. Vintage stuff, from World War One and even earlier.

  “What the hell is this?” Hunter asked, almost laughing himself. “You didn’t actually buy these things, did you?”

  “My superiors hired agents who did,” Orr replied soberly. “You’re looking at what was bought for one hundred and sixty pounds of pure gold.”

  Hunter quickly studied all the photos. They showed six Fokker triplanes, two Spads and a Sopwith Camel, ancient flying machines which had fought in the Great War. The pictures themselves looked almost as old as the airplanes.

  “Who sold these to you?” he finally asked Orr.

  The Wehrenluftmeister smiled again, though grimly. He held up a smaller five by five photo; faded and blurry, it looked like it belonged on a wanted poster.

  “This man did,” he said to him, adding, “and if you are who you say you are, you know him, too.”

  Hunter took a long look. He knew him all right. The furrowed brow, the roadmap of a nose, the glint in his eyes revealing a born salesman. His name was Roy from Troy.

  Four

  ONE HOUR LATER, HUNTER and Orr arrived at a small airfield outside the city.

  They had made the short trip from Clocks in Orr’s specially armored Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. Now the Wehrenluftmeister led Hunter to an unguarded warehouse located on the edge of the airfield’s single grass airstrip. It was a dark imposing building with a load of fake snow camouflage on the roof and about six feet of the real stuff on top of it. Orr unlocked the two huge doors and they walked inside. The place was unlit, deathly quiet—and clean. There was no smell of oil, grease or hydraulic fluid, no signs that any work, either maintenance or repair, had taken place inside the place in a long time, if ever.

  In the shadows, Hunter could see nine biplanes, lined up perfectly in a row. A gag insignia painted on the wall above them showed a circus-type pachyderm, standing on two legs waving a flag which read: Witen Proboscidietz-Platz Staffelizen. Almost literally: The White Elephant Squadron.

  Though there was hardly a reason to, Hunter was feeling guilty to a degree. He was quite familiar with Roy from Troy. He’d purchased a number of warplanes from the used airplane salesman just a few weeks ago, during the pivotal battle of Southeast Asia. Hunter knew Roy’s selling operations had spread around the world, but he was amazed they had made it all the way to this snowy little part of the planet. And while Roy had always done right by him, his methods were certainly “unorthodox”—now and in the past. It wasn’t beyond him to sell a bunch of seventy-year-old airplanes to a dot on the map called Clochenspieltz.

  But something inside Hunter was telling him there had to be more to it than that.

  Orr had dug out the contracts surrounding the airplane purchase. One thing in Roy’s defense, the agreement did call for “light aircraft to be used in strafing, scouting and recon operations, capable of operation from rough airfields, low on maintenance and good on gas.” The shadowy line of airplanes Hunter saw before him did appear to fit those qualifications, at least technically. Trouble was, they fit them better almost a century ago.

  Hunter approached the first six planes in line. They were Fokker Dr. Is, the famous triplanes. Stubby yet oddly sleek, they were said to go up like an elevator in flight. These airplanes boasted the distinctive, triple wingspan, thick struts and a heavy-duty undercarriage. Hunter pressed down on the wing fabric; and found little give at all. He gave the wing a tap, it came back as metallic. Suddenly his opinion of Roy’s shady deal got slightly brighter. The wings in this airplane had obviously been reinforced with lightweight metal, probably aluminum. The fuselage had been similarly strengthened, too.

  He walked around to the front of the airplane. If memory served him, the Fokker’s two hundred-plus horsepower engine had been a powerhouse in its day. But now Hunter’s eyes nearly popped when he saw the airplane’s present engine. Sitting in a reinforced basket sunk into the slightly elongated nose was a fifteen hundred-horsepower Packard-built Merlin! This was impossible—the Merlin was the same engine that powered the famous P-51 Mustang. How the hell had Roy’s men put such a big engine into such a small airframe? Hunter was stumped—he just didn’t know. But there it was. Hunter peeked through the engine cowling and saw the motor was in excellent condition. With its bright blue paint and well-oiled components, it looked almost new.

  He had to stop and think about this concept for a moment. A Mustang engine in a Fokker triplane? If it didn’t tear the fuselage apart, this plane could haul some serious butt. Again he grudgingly had to give Roy some credit: the airplane’s redesign was bordering on masterfully improbable.

  He next studied the airplane’s armament. Instead of a pair of rinky-dink .50 caliber machine guns, this baby was boasting a small twenty-millimeter cannon attached by pod to the center of the middle wing. The ammunition load was limited to two hundred ten rounds, but for such an elderly airplane, it still packed an incredible punch.

  His mind spinning, Hunter walked farther up the line; Orr following silently behind. The next five Fokkers were like the first: reinforced, reengined, and rearmed. Three had been further rigged with munition hardpoints under the bottom wing. With the big engine and the light airframe, Hunter estimated the planes could lift at least five hundred pounds in bombs apiece, probably more.

  When they reached the last Fokker, Orr fished a certificate out of a pocket behind the servicing door. It gave very extensive schematics and maintenance instructions, right down to the amount of lubrication suggested for the hinges in the canopy. Rarely had Hunter seen such specific care information for a used bird. Most warplanes these days, old and new, came with little more than how to start the engine and fire the gun. Everything else the owner had to figure out himself.

  The next two airplanes were the Spads, two-winged planes that were similar in size and performance to the Fokker. They, too, had reinforced skeletons and were carrying big Merlin engines. They’d also been outfitted as light bombers, their underwings fitted with five hard-points each, plus two pylons for small weapons pods on the fuselage itself.

  Like the Fokkers, the Spads looked like extremely well-preserved museum pieces—or better yet, exact recreations of the long-gone fighter plane. Hunter was beginning to get the feeling that Clocks actually got a deal on this sale—if they’d been in the market for collectors pieces.

  Aircraft Number 9 was actually a two-seat Sopwith Camel. It was bigger and wider than the other airplanes, with a large radial engine mounted between the two elevated wings. Though obviously intended as a recon platform, this airplane looked to be lovingly reconditioned, too, right down to the brilliant red, white and blue color scheme.

  Hunter was starting to suspect that Roy had raided an aircraft museum somewhere, and then turned over the booty to some master craftsmen who updated the airplanes for sale.

  They looked great, but what could they do for Clocks in their fight against the enemy over the mountain?

  Hunter had turned to ask Orr that very question, when suddenly an oddly familiar sensation washed over him.

  He had to stand
there for a moment and think about it: It’d been a long time since he’d felt like this.

  Then, just like that, he knew: Aircraft. From over the mountain. Coming right towards us.

  A second later he was running. Out of the hangar, out on to the small airstrip. A very surprised Orr was fast on his heels. They reached the center of the field just as the first wave of lights came over the top of the twin peaks; two more were right behind them. Twelve airplanes appeared in all, flying in three chevrons of four apiece.

  It was classic preattack formation.

  “You have air raids here, too?” Hunter yelled over to Orr.

  But the Wehrenluftmeister could hardly speak. His jaw hanging wide open.

  “No, never…” he finally gasped.

  “Well,” Hunter told him, “you’re about to have one now.”

  The bombs started falling on Clocks just two minutes later.

  They came down in strings of twelve, hitting the buildings and the streets and causing huge explosions of red and green as they fell. Bombs from the first wave of attackers leveled the city’s water supply house, its auxiliary electrical plant, a fuel storage facility and one of its banks. The second wave dropped its bomb loads on the heavily populated eastern side of the city. A number of the elegant apartment houses were destroyed instantly, including many shared by militiamen and their families. There were some incendiary bombs dropped in this mix, and now, even as the second wave of bombers departed, many fires were breaking out in the eastern district.

  Greatly lightened of their bomb loads, these four airplanes began a wide turn to the north, one which would bring them right over the airfield. By this time, Hunter had flown up to the top of the field’s dormant control tower, alighting on the roof of the place, his M-16 and a pair of high-powered electronic binoculars in hand. Orr was right beside him, furious that Works had stooped to the barbarism of bombing civilian targets inside Clocks.