Target: Point Zero

by Maloney, Mack;

  Viktor never stopped smiling. “Yes, well, just call me when you get back over there…”

  With that he began spinning the girls again.

  Having no other choice, the man stepped fully into the airlock now and with his last living movements, pulled the door shut and soiled himself at the same time. A moment later, Viktor and the girls heard a huge whooshing sound as the forward airlock door was opened and the crewman was sucked out unprotected into the airless void of space. Oddly the sound was very reminiscent of a toilet being flushed.

  Viktor sat back and spun the two girls away from him again.

  “Sounds like they’ve finally corrected their plumbing problem over there,” he said, with a laugh.

  Fifteen

  The Island Of Malta

  IT WAS JUST AFTER dusk had fallen when the air raid sirens began wailing again above the city of Valletta.

  The citizens of the small capital city of Malta almost routinely scrambled for the nearest bomb shelters now. As always, the women were frightened and the children crying. Members of the Malta Self-Defense Forces were racing through the streets, hustling stray civilians into the dozens of safety dugouts lining the main streets of the city, then pressing on to their battle stations along the ring of AA sites surrounding the embattled capital.

  The bombers appeared overhead about a minute later. This was the fifth raid today and still, the Maltese military didn’t know who these attackers were, where they were coming from, or why they were bombing their small, island-state. Sheer location had put Malta in harm’s way for literally thousands of years; its population had endured bombings of all types and sizes over the millennium, but usually they knew who wanted to kill them and why.

  This time though, they didn’t have any idea.

  The bombers themselves offered few clues as to the identity of the people flying them. There were twelve aerial attackers this time. They were Tu-95 Bears, old Soviet-built monsters whose sole claim to fame was endurance; more than anything else, Bears were known for their ability to stay in the air for up to sixteen hours at a time, without refueling.

  Spread out into chevrons of three each, six of them flew right over the center of Valletta itself, dropping tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs indiscriminately on military and civilian targets alike. The return fire from the network of AA guns located throughout the city were quickly at full-roar—but a combination of the Tu-95s’ speed and height made it almost impossible to draw a bead on them. Even worse, the six other bombers taking part in the attack had fired a spread of AA-56 radar-homing missiles at the main AA defense battery just south of the city, destroying it utterly and killing most of its crew.

  The first six bombers were thus able to dump their weapons loads and get away scot-free. No sooner had they departed over the southern horizon, when the second wave turned towards the city. At this point, Valletta’s air defense unit took to the sky. Roaring mightily off Valletta airport’s extra-long runway, they rose for the fifth time of the day to meet the mysterious attackers head-on. The problem was the city’s meager air force totaled exactly three airplanes, none of which was built to perform as a jet fighter. Two were CASA C-101 Aviojets, airplanes actually built as unarmed trainers. The third plane was an ancient A-7 Corsair, a reliable little machine that was nevertheless designed as a ground attack bomber, not an interceptor.

  Rising high over the airport, the three jets valiantly made a straight line for the oncoming Bears. Each plane was armed, but just barely. The A-7 was carrying a nose-mounted cannon, normally used for ground strafing; the trouble was, it had taken part in four previous interceptions today and was so low on cannon rounds, it had enough for one pass, no more. Even worse, the Avio trainers were sprouting lowly .35 caliber machine guns, the likes of which hadn’t been seen on any airplane of import since the 1950s.

  Though outgunned, the three jets attacked the formation of Bears with ruthless, almost insane abandon. The trainers went in first, trying to force their relatively weak shells into some crucial part of one of the bombers, hoping a lucky hit might damage the attacker, kill its pilots and even bring it down.

  But this was wishful thinking—and everyone involved, from the fighter pilots, to the people inside the bombers to the people watching it from the ground knew it. The Bears were going way too fast for any of the puny machine gun fire to do any good. The trainers both made one long pass, but by the time they’d pulled up to roll over to start another, the second wave of Bears was already dropping its bombs.

  This was when the A-7 arrived. With its more powerful but nearly depleted gun, its pilot, an Italian mercenary, aimed for the lead bomber, opening up with his cannon at less than one hundred yards. It was a brave but ultimately fatal thing for him to do. The cannon shells—all thirty-five of them—found a target in the cockpit of the Bear, they killed the airplane’s copilot outright, and mortally wounded two of the gunners. But in keeping his plane steady in order to make every shot count, the A-7 pilot dangerously exposed himself to the lethal rear guns of the Bears flanking the leader.

  These weapons were cannons, too, and they had no shortage of ammunition. Two converging streams of fire caught the A-7 right across its tail, blowing off its pipe and rear stabilizers. The little jet went nose over, half its fuselage blown away. It came down right in the middle of the city, plowing into a building that moments before had been hit with a string of bombs from the attackers. The A-7’s explosion only added to the growing carnage. The bomber, less its copilot and two gunners, continued on its bombing run, then banked hard left and quickly flew away.

  Within two minutes, all twelve attackers had disappeared over the horizon.

  The all-clear sirens blared about five minutes later, and once again, the citizens of Valletta emerged from their shelters to see their beautiful city had been further reduced to rubble by the brutal, mysterious enemy. It was clear almost immediately that this bombing had been particularly devastating: the city’s main market place had simply vanished. The main power station had also been hit, as had the island’s desalinization plant, a place where nearly eighty-percent of the fresh water on Malta was processed. The main road heading into the city had also been cut in a dozen places, and the main fire station was itself ablaze.

  The weary citizens stood in shock and horror as they watched the flames above their city rise higher into the night, knowing they had no means of fighting them anymore. The proud city could not withstand much more of this. In one day, nearly two-thirds of Valletta had been reduced to ruins.

  Now, as the Maltese made their way back to their houses, praying that they were still standing, they heard the blare of air raid sirens again. Many thought it was some kind of malfunction at first. The bombing raids had been interspersed by at least two hours throughout this long, tragic day. No one could believe the bombers were coming back again so soon.

  But they were. Way out on the western horizon, another half dozen Bears appeared. Their engines going full out, their noses were aimed right for the heart of the burning city. The remaining two airplanes of the city’s air force had already landed—they were both low on fuel and there was no way they could gas up and take off to counter this new threat. Even the exhausted AA teams were nearly too weary to load and fire their guns again.

  It appeared that this raid might deal the killing blow to the crippled city.

  But then, appearances could be deceiving.

  All the city’s civilians were quickly shoved back inside their bomb shelters, so only the remaining defense forces saw what happened next.

  The six Tu-95s were painted in dark blue sea camouflage this time. They were coming out of the west, right out of the last of the setting sun, the shiny tips of the forward nacelles gleaming in the fading, golden light. As always they were flying in two chevrons of three apiece. As always, their bomb bays were filled with HE and incendiaries.

  No one saw anything strange at first. The AA crews on the western edge of town, those protecting the airport, w
ere the closest to the action—and they saw only a single, bright flash. The next thing they knew, one of the Bear bombers was going down. Its engines screamed wildly all the way to the ground—one mile, straight down, ending with a mighty crash on the city airport’s main runway about two thousand meters from the forward AA position.

  The gun crews had no idea what had happened. It was almost as if they had shot down the huge bomber themselves, yet they had not fired their gun. Nor had any of the AA batteries in the area. Maybe one of the bomber’s weapons went off prematurely inside the bomb bay.

  Or maybe it was something else.

  The five remaining Bears continued on, slowing their speed to two hundred knots and assuming their predrop profiles. Suddenly, there was another flash; the air rumbled with another huge shock wave a second later. At that instant, the Bears were passing through a particularly thick pall of smoke rising from previous bomb damage. It was as high and dense as thundercloud cumulus. Many witnesses saw all five Bears go into this man-made overcast—only four came out.

  The second huge Bear fell out of the sky five seconds later, crashing into the center of the airport’s longest airstrip, its west-to-east runway, skidding along the ground and slamming into a large nearby docking facility. The resulting explosion was so tremendous, it threw a mushroom cloud of both smoke and steam high above Valletta’s west beaches.

  Now the AA batteries all around the city opened up. The four remaining bombers pressed on; their only reaction to losing two of their monstrous colleagues was to spread out their formation slightly. The rear gunners on two of them were firing their weapons—the tracer rounds lit up the darkening sky. But what were they shooting at? As far as anyone on the ground could tell, the sky was empty except for the four oncoming bombers.

  The lead Bear was crossing over the last beach and was now pointed straight towards the center of the city, the last major section that had yet to be burned. Suddenly this airplane veered sharply to the right; again the turbulent air was filled with the screams of four huge turboprop engines. The Bear nearly tipped over; only at the last moment did the bomber’s pilot somehow recover flight and yank the big plane back to level.

  But just as quickly, it began to go over again—and this time the pilot could not recover. The plane flipped on to its right wing, blowing out both engines and hideously bending the tail. It skidded about a half mile to its right before inverting and plunging into the sea. There was no explosion this time, no violent eruption of smoke or steam. The airplane simply went into the sea and sank, a quick, frightening death.

  A few seconds later, fire crews in the middle of town saw a very strange airplane pass over. It was very low and both its engines were smoking mightily. Its tail section was in tatters, not from being shot out, but from the effects of the incredible strain put on the airframe. The plane itself was almost unidentifiable; strange things were hanging from beneath its wings; they, too, were broken and in pieces. But those who saw it best—an AA crew situated on top of Valletta’s city hall—would later say they were sure the strange aircraft was actually a large seaplane.

  There were only three bombers left now—and they turned away, abandoning their bombing runs and passing over the burning city without dropping anything except their extra fuel in order to make an even faster getaway.

  Not a minute later, everything was quiet again. The skies above Valletta were empty and only the smoke and flames from below were blocking out what was left of the brilliant sunset.

  The commander of the Malta Self-Defense Forces was a man named Doomsa Baldi.

  A large individual with an all-black camo suit and a wild head of hair stuffed underneath an antique-looking World War One helmet, he was sifting through the wreckage of what was left of his headquarters when he got the message that a strange plane had landed nearby.

  It was just a few minutes after the aborted bombing raid and Baldi’s first thought was that one of the attackers had landed at the city’s huge airport, perhaps to surrender. But two of the bombers had crashed at the airport—its extra-long runway was now quite unusable.

  “An airplane has landed?” he asked the young officer who’d brought him the report. “Where? How?”

  “Down on the west beach,” the officer replied. “The pilot says he’s an old friend of yours.”

  Baldi was out of the wreckage and into the officer’s jeep in a matter of seconds. They drove like madmen through the chaotic burning streets, passing many knots of confused citizens, who were both relieved and curious as to why no bombs fell onto their city this time. By the time they reached the beach, there was already a crowd of soldiers, medical personnel and civilians mulling around by the shoreline.

  Baldi’s driver practically drove a wedge into them. Quickly, he pulled up to the edge of the water.

  That’s when Baldi saw the seaplane.

  It was bobbing around about thirty-five meters offshore. It appeared to be in such bad shape, he couldn’t believe the thing had ever been airborne, never mind landed here. Its wings were bent and broken, its tail section was all but gone. The engines had taken so much strain and had run so hot, they looked like they were melting. Every window in the plane was either shattered or blown out completely.

  A small door at the rear of the airplane had popped open and eventually two figures climbed out. The tide was going out and it was an easy walk for the two to make to the shore. Baldi was out in front of the crowd now, squinting through the rising night fog and the leftover smoke, trying to see just who was claiming to be an old friend of his.

  Oddly the crowd recognized Hunter before Baldi did. First there was a collective gasp from both soldiers and civilians. Then the crowd broke out into a spontaneous cheer. This was no ordinary pilot who had taken on the force of bombers with the battered seaplane—this was the best pilot in the world.

  The Wingman himself had saved their city from further destruction.

  And he was an old friend of Commander Baldi. Three years before, Hunter and the crew of the disabled aircraft carrier USS Saratoga had stopped over at Malta on their way to the Suez Canal to thwart Viktor’s planned invasion of the eastern Mediterranean.

  Now they greeted each other warmly, Baldi putting a bone-crushing hug on Hunter. The Maltese commander couldn’t believe he was really here, in the flesh. He pointed at the seaplane and then towards the airport where two of the enemy bombers were still burning fiercely.

  “You?” Baldi gasped. “How…?”

  Hunter just shrugged and offered a quick explanation of what happens when one airplane disrupts the airflow in front of another. If the turbulence catches the second airplane just right, that airplane will go into a stall and most likely crash.

  “It’s simple, when you really get down to it,” he concluded.

  But Baldi wasn’t listening—not really anyway. Neither was anyone in the crowd of civilians or the band of soldiers standing at the water’s edge. Bombers, bombing, and why planes crash were suddenly secondary to them now.

  They were all too busy looking at Chloe.

  Sixteen

  NIGHT FELL SOMEWHAT PEACEFULLY on the burning city of Valletta.

  Most of the major fires were out by eight P.M.; most of the injured were attended to by nine. Soup lines had been set up in the middle of the main square, an almost-festive attempt to get a hot meal into the battered civilians and weary defenders before the deepest chill of night arrived. Extra ammunition was dispersed to the outlying AA batteries; fresh crews were moved up, too.

  Inside a tavern next to the bombed-out headquarters of the Malta Defense Forces, Hunter sat with Baldi and several officers and guards from his command staff. They were all slurping from vast bowls of soup, taken right off the line just outside. The only executive privilege Baldi was able to finagle was a flask of red wine. Each man had a huge cup of this vino in front of him.

  Hunter and Baldi reminisced about their brief, but adventurous meeting several years before. Then Hunter spoke about what he’d been u
p to since they’d last met. Many of his exploits were known to Baldi already; tales of the Wingman still went around the world on a regular basis. Still the Maltese commander enjoyed listening to the inside dope right from the lips of the man himself.

  Of course, they were all curious as to what had brought Hunter back to Malta.

  Though he trusted Baldi and his men completely, Hunter gave them an intentionally obscure explanation as to how he came to find himself on the picturesque Mediterranean island via the Swiss Alps. “A secret mission to St. Moritz” was the extent to what he told them. His aim was not to mislead, rather he didn’t want to jinx the plan he’d started conjuring up on top of Point Zero. It was much too early for him to reveal all its elements, even to himself.

  “It’s been a very peaceful time here, surprisingly,” Baldi told him of the last three years on Malta. “Lots of stuff has been going on around us. Big civil war in Italy. Fighting up around Palermo. And then there’s a situation down in Tunisia. But here, they leave us alone. Thanks to you and your British friends, that is. Your reputation remained behind long after you sailed away. It’s protected us, ever since…”

  Hunter nearly snorted in his soup. He eyed the smoldering buildings right outside.

  “Well, it ran out damn quick, didn’t it?”

  Baldi just shook his head. “This is a complete mystery to us,” he said. “The bombers showed up at six in the morning and came over four more times after that. We knew they were mercenaries right away—we just didn’t know who they were working for. And still don’t. They didn’t seem so intent on destroying the city as they were at making it burn. There was a real terror element to it.”

  “Any other suspicious activity around lately?” he asked Baldi. “Any spy planes flying over? Black ships offshore?”

  Baldi shook his head firmly no.

  “Our air force is weak but they do an excellent job watching everything around us,” he said. “If someone was sizing us up, for invasion or whatever, we would have known about it. This, this firebombing, came right out of the blue.”