Target: Point Zero

by Maloney, Mack;

  They set down with a bang and bump, Ben steering the bucking aircraft towards the hardened edge of the narrow beach, kicking up clumps of wet sand and sea-spray in the process. They rolled to a stop in about forty-five feet, a perfect landing. The circling C-5s began drifting away, slowly moving towards the east, where they would wait while Ben and Toomey did their work. Likewise the covering Tornados zoomed up to thirty-five thousand feet They would watch over everything from this height.

  It took about a minute for Ben and Toomey to pull the Flex up out of the lapping shoreline to the drier part of the beach. They did a quick check of both their primary and backup radios—the comm techs on Black Eyes responded in kind. Then Ben and Toomey checked their personal weapons, both M-16F2s. They, too, were in good order.

  They began moving towards the jungle.

  They reached the top of the sandline, climbed a coral rock and stared out at the vast swatch of foliage. The prevailing wind, providing little relief on the hot sun baking down on the vegetation, was blowing with a familiar but vague odor—and herein lay the answer to the mystery of Lolita Island.

  Ben and Toomey climbed down off the rock and walked to the edge of the jungle itself. Toomey reached out and grabbed the longest branch of the first tree he came to. It literally came apart in his hand, covering his fingers with a hot, oozing substance. Ben did the same thing, grabbing a long piece of what looked like elephant grass. It, too, quickly turned into a greenish slime. They began pulling up everything they could get their hands on. Each time, the foliage practically melted away at their touch.

  They finally stopped, looked at each other and began laughing. It was funny, in a very strange kind of way. Mother Nature hadn’t suddenly bestowed the green life on the isolated island; this covering was hardly natural. It was plastic—thin, delicate and extremely real-looking. The foliage, the trees, the bushes, and the fields of grass, were all fake.

  They walked about ten feet into the plastic jungle, the highest plants no more than five feet above their heads. Toomey bent down and began hauling up some of the faux-plants by the roots. It took some doing; unlike their branches, the fake plants were literally cemented into the ground. The fake jungle was standing on a vast platform of recently poured concrete.

  Wa and Toomey weren’t laughing anymore—they were just staring at each other now. The scope of what they were looking at was almost mind-boggling. Somebody—or something—had actually gone through the trouble of lugging thousands of square feet of concrete to the small island, had laid it out in a huge twenty-square-mile pattern, and had taken care to drill literally hundreds of thousands of tiny holes in the drying concrete into which each fake plastic piece of vegetation was placed.

  It was an incredible notion, but after twenty minutes of wading through the stuff, Ben and Toomey were convinced that the whole island was covered this way. Lolita was a huge concrete platform in disguise. The concept was rather frightening.

  They continued walking through the fake jungle, taking pictures and retrieving samples. By the time they returned to the FlexWing on the beach one hour after landing, they were pondering only two questions. One: who had the capability and the resources to build such a massive slab? It was a construction project of enormous proportions.

  The second question was even more intriguing: Why in the world would anyone want to do such a thing?

  Ten

  AS LUCK WOULD HAVE it, the first living, breathing human being Hawk Hunter came upon after three days of driving turned out to be a naked woman.

  It was midmorning. Six hours had passed since he’d crossed the twin peaks. It had been one mountain road after another until, suddenly, a huge crystalline lake appeared between the Alps. About three miles up its shoreline, rising out of the morning mist, there was a city—a real one this time. The map in his head told him he was nearing St. Moritz, the famous Swiss resort. If so, he was no more than a hundred miles from Point Zero itself.

  He’d driven about a half mile along the lake’s shoreline road when he got the feeling—there was at least one person up ahead, and probably many more. Did this mean the city itself was populated? If so, he would have to deal with its residents very discreetly. He didn’t come all this way just to blow the mission on the wrong word said to the wrong person.

  He parked the tanker trucker in a shielded wood and made his way along the edge of the shimmering, pristine lake. Staying deep in the underbrush, while keeping in sight of the road, he soon found himself climbing to the top of a massive outcrop of rock. Fifteen feet below was a small, snow-encrusted beach. And there she was. Swimming, alone, in the frigid waters of an Alpine lake, a beautiful, naked girl.

  She was blond, slight, and doing a languid backstroke about twenty feet out from the shore, totally unaware of his presence. Hunter was distracted for a few seconds, unable to take his eyes off her gently moving form. She was gliding so smoothly through the placid waters, it was exhilarating just to watch her. Her hair was flowing behind her as if in slow motion, her body wet, silky, pert, and hairless. Hunter felt his heart deliver three massive beats. In that one, quick, strange moment, he realized that she might be the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  He quickly shook himself back to the matter at hand; he really had no time for this. He could see the city finally emerging from the thick morning mist about two miles up the shoreline and exuding many signs of civilization. The place was alive, populated—he was sure of that now. But more than warm bodies and naked flesh lay up ahead of him. There was the barest trace of aviation fuel in the air. One sniff and Hunter knew that an airplane of some kind was also close by.

  His attention drifted back to the naked girl—and, still hidden, he found himself taking the outrageous luxury of the next two minutes just to watch her. At first, he tried to tell himself that this “recon” was necessary; after all, shouldn’t he learn everything about her, so he would have some kind of idea exactly what kind of people were up ahead? But in the next breath, he was laughing to himself, not in humor but in surprise. This was not intelligence gathering he was engaging in here—it was blatant voyeurism. He’d seen a million naked women in his time and just about all of them had made him shake. But he usually knew when to turn it off and get his big head thinking again.

  So what was it about this particular girl that was so hypnotic?

  It took him another minute of spying on her before he was able to slap his libido back under control. Obviously he’d been driving too long—this was not like him at all. He had to get closer to the speck of civilization a few miles down the road, that was the important thing. Finally tearing his eyes away from the beautiful vision in the lake, he began climbing back down the small cliff, intent on returning immediately to the tanker truck.

  He’d walked about one hundred yards when something froze him in his tracks.

  He never really heard the shriek—he felt it, just like in his dream. It was high-pitched and so unusual. Even now, he couldn’t tell whether it was in fact a scream or a laugh. But whatever it was, it had come from the direction of the swimming girl. Hunter had to assume she was in trouble.

  He was back up the shoreline and climbing the rock in a flash. Two men had come up in back of the girl just as she’d been getting out of the water. They had forced her to the ground. One was holding her hands and trying to kiss her; the other had jerked his pants off.

  Hunter’s weapon was up in an instant, his laser-sighter pinpointing the pantless man’s left ear. It would have been a clear head shot—but Hunter did not squeeze the trigger. His instincts were telling him this was not the thing to do. Instead, he flew off the high rock, hit the pantless man in midair and kicked him away from the woman. Then he hit the ground, rolled once and managed to deliver a massive punch to the head of the man holding the girl down.

  Both assailants went sprawling. The man without his pants landed ten feet out into the water; the holder had bounced off the base of the rock, cracking his head open in two places. It was over in l
ess than two seconds.

  The woman, still naked, was lying on the ground, astonishment washing across her face. Her eyes locked onto Hunter’s—again he felt his heart deliver three massive beats. She was absolutely stunning. But then, in the course of a microsecond, her face changed from surprise to bafflement. Suddenly, her eyes were not so much emitting relief and gratitude, as trying to ask Hunter: who the hell are you?

  In the meantime, the man thrashing about in the water had regained his footing and was coming back to shore. He was spitting and sputtering, trying to simultaneously hold his aching head, his stomach and his scrotum.

  Hunter grabbed him by the collar, held him straight out in front of him, and perfectly lined him up for another boilermaker punch. But he felt someone pulling on his shoulder. It was the girl. She was right beside him, restraining his arm.

  “Please, mister, don’t,” she pleaded in lightly accented English. “It’s okay. They weren’t doing anything wrong…”

  It was cold in St. Moritz. Too cold.

  The resort city itself was nearly frozen over. It looked like one gigantic glass palace. Every building was covered with ice, snow, or some combination of both. The streets were especially thick with it, dirty but amenable to traction. The sidewalks, too, were encased in ice, though no one had seen them in a while. So much frozen precipitation had fallen on the city, the people got around town through tunnels carved beneath the fifteen-foot perma-layer. Even the rudimentary thermal-power generating plant on the edge of the city was covered in ice.

  Nevertheless, the place was still elegant. Supremely so. If anything, all the ice made the city dazzle—literally. The main streets and those along the lakeshore were lined with old hotels, gambling parlors and eateries. Snakelike tunnels led in and out of their grand black-oak, hand-carved doorways. Yellow-halogen streetlights—they looked like huge candelabras—lit the entire scene.

  And then there was the lake itself. It provided a perfect mirror for the city. It was long and wide—and bottomless. It was so deep, it refused to ice over even in the worst of winter. It, too, looked alive, the clouds of rising condensation mimicking breath. Vain and beautiful, there was no way the lake was going to hide its charm up here. Not with all these lights.

  Hunter was surprised to see so many automobiles making their way around the outskirts of the city. You never really saw cars anymore, he thought. Anyone driving around these days was more likely to be piloting a military vehicle or a truck. But there were some fancy wheels here in St. Moritz: Mercedes, BMWs, some Jags and a few Rolls—they were the chariots of the postwar rich, come back to life in the frozen wonderland. This cheered him to a small degree. If people were back to tooling around in these babies—and getting them fixed and serviced and fueled—well, then that was one more indication, tiny as it might be, that the world was swinging back to normal.

  The streets were filled with people; none of whom appeared to have missed any meals lately. They were robust, healthy, well-clothed in furs and heavy wool, and acting disturbingly happy. Though their eyes went slightly wide at the sight of the big, dirty, double-duty tanker making its way towards their little outpost, many of the citizens nevertheless let out a friendly whoop and a wave as the truck rumbled by. Everyone looked a bit in the cups, too—slightly drunk but enjoyably so.

  The two-mile drive into town was enlightening for Hunter; almost to the point of dismissing the fact that there were three more people squeezed into the cab with him: the beautiful girl and her two would-be assailants. While the perceptive left side of Hunter’s brain was appreciating the beauty and civilization of the frozen city, the cold, analytical right side had continued skewing the three other occupants. Who were they? And what the hell had happened back there?

  The two guys, of course, were getting most of Hunter’s intense, invisible scrutiny. It was a rare day that he misread a situation. Any situation. Something in his neurons almost always prevented this from happening. It was hardly a subtle thing he thought he’d seen developing back on the small beach. It had looked like nothing less than an impending sexual attack.

  But after dramatically breaking the whole thing up, he was simply flabbergasted by the girl’s request that he not beat her two attackers to a pulp—indeed, she insisted that not only were they not doing anything wrong, but that she’d been expecting it, and yes, even asking for it.

  Hunter wasn’t sure exactly what to make of it all—sometimes the wildest truths were the slowest in coming. But as he understood it, he’d stumbled upon an elaborate sexual psychodrama. The girl, beautiful, and naked, swimming alone in the isolated part of the lake, is taken by two sex-starved Nordic types. Not too wild as far as these kinds of fantasies went, he supposed. But still, it was such an odd thing to see acted out, live, in color—and in the frigid outdoors.

  After getting a first pass at the story, he’d kept his mouth shut. He pretended to buy the bizarre explanation for only one reason: the girl. He was even more dazzled by her now. She was frighteningly lovely; eyes, nose, mouth, and cheeks arranged in an unusual yet perfect way on her face, which seemed slightly hidden by cascades of flowing blond hair at all times. Her body—and he had seen all of it up close—would keep a legion of painters employed for a century or two. The breasts were just a little too big for the curvy, trim hourglass frame, her nipples pink and erotically tiny. Her toes and fingers were delicate in their painted pink nails; her grooming habits especially erotic. The whole package was so ne plus ultra, Hunter lost his breath for a moment any time he thought about it.

  She was so gorgeous, he was becoming very concerned, frightened almost of all the time he might now spend thinking about her when he should be concentrating on other things. But who could blame him? Now wrapped in a lambskin jumpsuit and fur-lined boots, she was nuzzled up so close against him, it was all he could do to keep the tanker on the road. He felt like he was dreaming again—except that his dreams, wild as they were, were never this good.

  They finally pulled into the middle of the city where the two hunky wanna-bes departed, each with a sullen kiss to the girl’s cheek and a mumbled promise to see her later. Most of the trip had been silent, but as soon as the mooks left, the girl finally opened up.

  Her name was Chloe. She spoke perfect English, with a lilt of a British accent. She lived in St. Moritz along with a few thousand other privileged souls, most of them the grown children of Europe’s pre-Big War rich and famous. When the conflict started and the world order began to collapse, they had been sent to a secret, exclusively appointed shelter blasted into the side of a nearby mountain years before by the old Swiss government. Here they stayed, in comfort and luxury, until two years ago, when they emerged, found the conditions outside tainted but not deadly, and repopulated the dazzling city. In other words, everyone here was wealthy, incredibly wealthy. And safe. Supply shipments were frequent there was no lack of water or booze and they were protected by a handful of unseen, highly paid armies deployed in the mountains around them.

  The whole concept fascinated Hunter in a perverse kind of way. It gave new meaning to the word extravagance. He had entered a place that seemingly had no worries. The people had five divisions watching over them, plenty of food, fuel, and creature comforts, plus startling views, and a postcard environment. What a way to spend the time while the still-chaotic world tried to get its act back together.

  As it turned out, Chloe was actually more interested in Hunter than in talking about herself. Who was he? What was he doing here? Where was he staying? And what was with the big, dirty truck?

  He found himself stumbling over the simplest answers—it had been a long time since he’d been so tongue-tied. She was genuinely friendly, warm, and just oozing with sensuality. Without even having to ask, she volunteered to get him fed, lubricated and into a warm room. Hunter found himself accepting everything she offered, without thinking twice about it. How things change, he thought. He hadn’t any intention of stopping anywhere along the way to Point Zero. If the city had be
en abandoned or if it hadn’t existed, he would have kept right on driving. After all, he was racing the clock to a certain extent.

  But whenever she spoke, he could resist none of what she said. So under her direction, he parked the truck behind a large chalet he would come to learn was hers and they went inside. The place was monstrous—multi-windowed, with a breathless Alpine setting at each turn. A fire was already roaring in the huge hearth; a bottle of wine was already chilling. Chloe excused herself momentarily, only to reappear after changing into a fresh snow-suit. It was so tight, with a neckline so dramatically plunging, Hunter didn’t have to look twice to capture the whole effect.

  Yes, this is trouble, he thought as she led him to the couch located next to the largest, most impressive window and poured him his first glass of wine.

  Big trouble.

  A mile downtown, in a huge, ornate lodge which overlooked St. Moritz’s crystal lake, a grand celebration was just beginning.

  Nearly a thousand people were on hand, dispersed in small groups over the lodge’s seven floors, drinking, talking, eating, flirting. Two-thirds of them were women, all of them no less than gorgeous. No one looked over thirty; no one really looked over twenty. Everyone was expensively dressed and extensively bejeweled. Champagne was flowing like the Alpine rivers in springtime.

  The celebration was for the New Moon. It was now nearly eight in the evening and the lunar sphere, big, fat, and orange, was just peeking over the jagged Matterhorns to the east. Everyone stopped what they were doing for a moment and gazed upon the ascending ball. Then a few words were said, and a short neo-New Age song was performed and after that, everyone went back to partying. This was a monthly event, and just one of several parties held in the lodge during the lunar month. The quarter-moon and the half-moon were also celebrated with luxurious and intoxicating gatherings.

  High-stakes gambling always provided the centerpiece for these events and no one took the art of wagering more seriously than the two men presently sitting at the main poker table on the second floor of the lodge. They tried to make it into St. Moritz every New Moon, providing they could talk their way through one of the many heavily armed security checkposts. Like the hundred or so other lucky out-of-towners on hand, they enjoyed mixing with the natives, getting good food, good booze and maybe good sex. But mostly these two were anxious to win some money at the tables.