“Who are you?” he asked her a second time—but again, there was no reply. The girl simply turned away and resumed staring at the barely lit candle. Her sobs sounded like they were being emitted through an echo box. Kurjan raised his gun and moved on.
He stepped into the living room and here he found another girl, wrapped up protectively in the arms of an older man. Kurjan could not see his face in the dark, but when he moved closer and a crack of lightning lit the room, he was astonished to see the man was someone he knew quite well.
“Frost?” he asked incredulously. “Is that really you?”
Frost looked up at him; his face, too, was pale and almost transparent in the eerie light.
“I… don’t know,” he whispered back to Kurjan. “I’m really not sure.”
Startled and very spooked now, Kurjan backed away from his friend and found himself at the bottom of the rickety stairs, which led up to the second floor. An uncharacteristic tremor went through him. He’d been in combat many, many times; he’d faced death and had survived on more occasions than he cared to remember. But never had he felt so rattled as he did at this moment.
Somehow, he found the strength to begin climbing the stairs.
At the top was a hallway with four doors. The first he knew led to the master bedroom, the one next to it was the same room in which he’d slept many times before this place had become haunted. He toed open the door to the master bedroom, expecting to see nothing less than a gateway to hell on the other side. Instead, he found two more girls in bathing suits, sitting on opposite sides of the old brass fourposter. There was an unmoving figure lying beneath the covers of the bed; the pair of young girls seemed to be tending to it.
Kurjan stepped forward and pulled the covers down a bit. Instantly he fell back in horror and astonishment. Lying on the bed, ghost white and unmoving, was Stan Yastrewski, the man everyone called Yaz.
“My God…” Kurjan gasped, confused and shaking at this assault on his good senses. “Is he… is he dead?”
The two girls looked up at him, and then they began to cry, too.
“Not yet,” they answered, in unnerving unison.
His mind reeling, his stomach suddenly turning, Kurjan backed out of the room and stumbled down the stairs. He didn’t even look to see if Frost was still on the couch nearby. He headed for the front door instead, intent on leaving this place before he became a prisoner of its peculiar horror.
With shaking hands he opened the front door. A crack of lightning revealed a face looking in at him. He jumped back once again, his heart pounding as if it would leap out of his chest. His gun dropped to the floor. His hands were shaking so badly now he could no longer hold it.
That’s when he realized that the face looking in at him belonged to Dominique.
Her hair flowing weirdly in the strong winds, her skin dry despite the driving rain, she beckoned to him to come out onto the porch with her.
Somehow, Kurjan found the gumption to comply.
“I am not surprised you are here, Major,” she told him, her voice audible in the gale, though she sounded like she was just barely whispering. “You have always been gifted in matters such as this…”
Kurjan just stared back at her. With her long, flowing white robes and beautiful hair, she looked more like an angel than a ghost.
“Dominique,” he was finally able to gasp. “What is happening? What are you doing out here?”
She shook her head, turned, and sat back down on the same battered couch he and Hunter had shared with her during those long, lazy, perfect days so long ago.
“I am waiting,” she finally replied, her voice drenched in sadness and grief, “for someone else to arrive and tell us all.”
Twenty-two
In Orbit
IT WAS NOW VERY crowded in the crew compartment of the Zon spacecraft.
Jammed in between all the clutter and instruments and wires and trash were Cook, Elvis, Geraci, and the two teenage girls taken off the abandoned Mir space station. Everyone was asleep, victims of exhaustion and a filtering system which was releasing much more carbon dioxide into the spacecraft’s atmosphere than would be considered normal. The craft’s back-up filters were working overtime, trying to keep the CO2 below a dangerous level—and right now, they were doing the job. But as with everything aboard the crude spacecraft, the crew knew the filters could fail at any moment. Then they’d really be in a fix.
Floating above them all was Hawk Hunter. He, too, was asleep, but for reasons other than tiredness or low oxygen in the blood. Hunter was getting his first real sleep in nearly 72 hours because his powerful inner psyche was telling him this was what he should do.
The events of the past 24 hours had been significant. If Viktor was not aboard the Mir, then he must be somewhere else, somewhere bigger and better defended. Somewhere secretly located in orbit, because aside from the Mir and Zon, there wasn’t supposed to be any other place up here where humans could survive, nor was there any way they knew of for Viktor to get back down to earth.
Just as they had set out to find the Mir, now they had to find this new place. This secret place.
Hunter was sleeping to recharge his batteries. Before he drifted off, after leaving the Zon in the capable hands of Ben and JT, Hunter had set his mind into a kind of automatic review mode, a recalling of all significant events which had happened before and during the trip so far which might lead them to the secret place in orbit.
There were few clues. During his days in Viktor’s capture, Elvis had flown five Zon flights. Carried inside the cargo bay during these trips, Elvis recalled seeing materials and tools, battery packs and oxygen tanks. Each time he gained orbit, the cargo bay was unloaded out of his sight, however; in his rather prolonged and dazed state, he’d simply assumed these materials were being hauled into orbit in order to fix the Mir.
But their examination of that orbiting antique had proved this assumption to be wrong. The Mir hadn’t had any kind of refurbishing or revitalization in a long, long time. The place was basically a shell inside by the time they got aboard her. A shell with minimum power and just enough oxygen being pumped and repumped to keep four people alive. Those four were the two teenage girls and the two spacemen Hunter and Elvis had fought outside the space station. In subsequent interrogation of the girls, Hunter and the others had learned that they’d been aboard the Mir for at least four months.
They had originally come aboard as part of Elvis’s fourth space flight, though he’d not seen them en route. Their role in space had mirrored their role on earth. Orphaned and addicted, the girls had provided Viktor II with hours of perverse sexual amusement and drug-taking, a kind of time-killing hobby he’d acquired while his minions did his bidding up here in the zero-gravity environs of space. But some time in the recent past, the superterrorist had either tired of all this or had gotten scared. The girls said they’d come to after a particularly heavy night of fricking and snorting to find Viktor and most of his people gone from the Mir. That was about six weeks before, coinciding with the UAAF’s capture of the Zon on Lolita Island in the South China Sea.
Only two guards remained on the Mir and the girls said they’d fucked them strictly out of boredom. When Hunter and Elvis informed the girls that the guards were now gone, they were overjoyed.
Now these girls were part of the crowd on the Zon, and while it did cut down on the living space for everyone else, no one had yet complained. Floating around in the Zon was always a matter of bumping into things: overhanging equipment, hatchways, door locks, and especially, fellow crewmen. Bumping into one of the young, beautiful girls made the crowded conditions bearable, especially since they insisted on staying topless, and when sleeping, cuddling up together in a still life of living, breathing, and floating zero-gravity erotic art.
These thoughts, too, wafted through Hunter’s mind as he drifted off to sleep. Once deep into REM however, his brain shifted into overdrive. His dreams, complicated and highly detailed, passed before his ey
es like the episodes of an old movie serial. Here he was, chasing Viktor across the frozen wastes of eastern Europe. Here he was, on top of a Swiss alp, watching the Zon go over and plotting its eventual reentry path. Now he was fighting the hordes of airplanes sent by Viktor to protect the last runway on earth capable of landing the Zon; now he was shooting down all those airplanes.
Visions of wild sex now enter Hunter’s dreams: a blonde, thrashing this way and that, in a darkened room that is both hot and cold. She is denying him and satisfying him at the same time. She is laughing, then crying. A bare candle lights her face. The sound of the wind rages in the background. A huge, fiery snowball is falling out of the sky. Hunter is suddenly home, back on the Cape, at Skyfire. The blonde is smiling down at him. He opens his eyes, expecting to see Dominique’s face, only to find it is Chloe, the girl he met while chasing down Viktor—the girl he’d fallen head over heels for, the girl he’d left atop the sacred peak in the Himalayas, the girl he’d promised to return to, once this space flight was over…
Yes, his dreams were about secrets, and secrets usually led to questions. Could he find Viktor’s secret hiding place? Should he leave Dominique for Chloe? What could be more important than those two things right now? How about this one: exactly how much longer did he have to live?
That last thought had the potential to turn this dream into a nightmare—and only JT’s shaking him awake saved him from that fate.
“Hawk! Hawker, old buddy,” JT was yelling at him. “Wake up! You ain’t going to believe this…”
One minute later, Hunter was awake and up on the flight deck, staring out the front windshield in disbelief.
They had found Viktor’s hiding place—that much, at least, was certain. At the same time, they’d finally discovered how the space mines had been laid out for them.
But still, looking out the window, his mouth hanging open in astonishment, Hunter couldn’t believe what his eyes were telling him. Was he still dreaming? Was this real? Could a huge snowball really catch fire and fly through outer space?
What he saw hanging in space about 15 miles away was nothing less than a gigantic swastika. It was on a virtually identical orbit path as the Zon and turning slowly on the spokes of its twisted cross. It looked monstrous and overwhelming—and completely unreal.
“Christ, where did that come from?” Hunter gasped. He’d never been quite so astounded.
JT and Ben felt the same way.
“‘When’ might be the better question,” Ben replied. He handed Hunter the long-range binoculars. “Take a closer look,” he urged.
Hunter did, and immediately he knew what Ben was getting at. The space station was made not of lightweight aluminum or thin stainless steel, as one might expect. It appeared to be constructed of heavy metal sections, hundreds if not thousands of them, quite clearly welded into place, like the plates on a battleship. In fact, that was exactly what the overall construction reminded Hunter of—a battleship, in space, something built circa 1940. Even in the middle of the twisted extensions, there was a large observation-deck structure that looked very much like the bridge of a World War II-era ship. The gaggle of antennas and receivers and space periscopes looked very much like what would be found on the Graf Spee or the Bismarck.
Hunter took his eyes off the binoculars and looked over at his two colleagues.
“This is happening, right?” he asked them, just to make sure. “We’re not dreaming or having hallucinations because of high CO2?”
“It looks real to me…” JT breathed, taking the spyglasses and zooming in on the strange structure again. “Damn real…”
“It’s registering on the radar,” Ben offered. “Coming back like it weighs a thousand tons.”
Hunter turned back and just stared out at the monstrosity. Ben was right: the question wasn’t really how, but when.
The truth of it was, this thing looked like it had been up here in orbit for many, many years.
“Can we really believe,” Ben began saying, “that… Werner Von Braun and those cats were able to put something this big into space—back in the 1940s?”
“And it stayed a secret,” JT added, “for this long?”
Hunter shook his head, mesmerized by the gigantic rotating swastika. It did seem impossible. Even if by some wild leap of the imagination the World War II-era Nazis—the Third Reich, Hitler and his gang—had been able to lift all these materials into orbit, using secret, more powerful boosters than the V-2s, how could this thing have possibly been flying up here all this time and stay hidden? How did none of the old NASA astronauts see it? Or the Russians cosmonauts? Or the hundreds of telescopes, big and small, and their astronomers, professionals and amateurs, back on earth?
No, these things were impossible, just like a giant fiery snowball flying through the heavens. There had to be some other explanation.
But what could it be?
Hunter looked at his two friends and they stared back at him. He didn’t even have to ask the question.
“It beats me,” Ben said. “It would have been the biggest and most well-kept secret of all time if this thing has been up here for more than fifty years. Even if they were somehow able to mask it from appearing from earth—which is impossible, in my opinion—the conspiracy to keep it quiet would have to be huge, carrying over several generations, and I just can’t imagine everyone involved—astronauts, military types, politicians, or whatever—keeping quiet about it all those years.”
“But the damn thing looks so… so fucking old,” JT blurted out, in characteristic abruptness.
Ben went below and roused the others. Soon the flight deck was crowded with five other people: Cook, Geraci, Elvis, and the two girls, who everyone had taken to calling Six and Eight.
Geraci above all just couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The engineer in him wouldn’t let the reality of the situation sink in.
“It’s got to be a prop, or something,” he kept saying over and over. “A fake, put up here to confuse us.”
“Well, it’s doing a good job of that,” Cook chimed in.
Hunter let Elvis take his place close to the front windshield.
“What do say, King?” he asked him. “Ever see it up here before?”
Elvis was shaking his head slowly from side to side.
“Not in a million years,” he finally replied. “That I would have remembered.”
Hunter passed the binoculars to him. “Recognize any of that stuff?” he asked. “The steel plates? The bolts? The girders?”
But Elvis never stopped shaking his head.
“I doubt if I ever lifted any of that stuff up here,” he said. “It all looks so heavy, it would have taken hundreds of NASA shuttle flights to lift it all. Certainly not in the five missions I flew in this piece of crap…”
Everyone moved aside and allowed the girls to get a better view.
“How about it, ladies?” Hunter asked them. “Ever see it before?”
Both teenagers shook their heads.
“You mean we were living in that crummy tin can and everyone else was floating around in that?” Eight said indignantly. “It looks like an old hotel—up here in space!”
“I agree with the G-man,” Six said, taking a long look through the binoculars. “I think it’s a fake. No one ever mentioned this to us before…”
Hunter retrieved the spyglasses and trained them on one of the twisted appendages. Sure enough, there was a crowd of space junk lashed to the sides of the last module. Old satellites, discarded booster rockets, even a couple of old NASA capsules, unmanned experimental prototypes launched into orbit before the human astronauts began coming up. Now it was clear they were being swept up by the huge space station and converted into orbiting space mines.
In contrast to the huge revolving swastika as a whole, this little operation looked very real.
“Do you think they know we’re out here?” Ben asked. “I mean, if we can see them, they can see us, no?”
“Probably,” JT
replied. “But what can they do? It ain’t like they can come out after us or shoot at us or anything. Can they?”
But suddenly Hunter felt his inner psyche start vibrating.
“We might have spoken too soon,” he said, retrieving the spyglasses again.
Sure enough, a hatchway on one of the modules at the end of another twisted arm had opened, and now small objects were drifting out of it. Hunter zoomed the electronic glasses up to full power—and nearly dropped them, again so surprised by what he saw.
Without a word he passed the glasses to Ben, who took a look and had the same reaction.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ben said. “Now I know this has to be a joke…”
Busting at the seams, JT yanked the glasses away from Ben and took a look for himself.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he breathed. “Komets?”
That’s exactly what they looked like: Messerschmitt Me-163 Komets, a type of German wonder-weapon rocket plane used by the Third Reich at the tail end of World War II. Incredibly, they appeared to have been adapted for space use.
“This is just too much,” Ben was saying. “Those things were barely able to fly during the war. How in hell could they get way up here?”
There was no easy answer for that one. The only thing that was certain was that six of the stubby, rocket-powered fighter planes had just come out of the module, each one carrying some kind of large muzzle-heavy weapon under its wings.
And now they were heading right for the Zon.
Hans Schikell was sick and tired of being in orbit.
He hated the food, hated the air, hated being weightless all the fucking time. He was German and by blood this meant he didn’t enjoy the same things other people did. But for Schikell, all this flying in outer space stuff was for the birds.
He especially hated flying inside the cramped little Komet 363, but that’s what he was doing. He was the flight leader for the half dozen Komets sent out to investigate the large spacecraft which had been spotted approaching the Himmel-zwischenraum-Rang, which was the grandiose name for the huge, spinning swastika and could be loosely translated into “Heavenly Space Station.”
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