Authors: Mack Maloney
One wall was covered with cases of bottled whiskey, 2,700 fifths in all. Another wall was similarly hidden by kegs of “Greed,” a lethal combination of 150-proof rum and 99-proof whiskey which reminded some people of both mead and grog, hence the name. On the wall furthest from the ladder, three clear plastic vats were hanging. These held about 500 pounds each of Pooch’s own recipe for “Scratch,” a volatile mixture of cocaine, meta-amphetamine, and XTC. In the fourth corner stood two huge wooden barrels, each containing 200 pounds of pure China white heroin, just set out to dry.
Pooch stood back and cast an admiring eye on this treasure trove of mind alterants, all of it produced by his own hand, most of it nonfatal if used wisely.
The two visitors seemed unimpressed by Pooch’s stash, though. With a sniff, they noted that the China White wasn’t really that white and the mixture of coke, speed, and XTC was a rather amateurish combination. The whiskey smelled bad, and the Greed, well, they didn’t so much as take a whiff of it.
“But it is guaranteed to do the job,” Pooch insisted, hurt that the pair was downgrading what was his life’s work these days. “Or your money back…”
The two Asian men laughed slightly at this, though not because they were amused.
“Additionally,” one said, “this isn’t nearly enough for our purposes.”
Pooch thought his ears needed cleaning. Before them were close to a ton of drugs and hundreds of gallons of liquor.
“Jeezus, how much do you guys want?” he asked them.
They laughed again and then led Pooch out the lower hatch door from the storage area. From here they stepped out onto the beach just below Pooch’s home. It was now nighttime and the horizon was studded with stars.
“Take a look,” one of the men ordered Pooch. “Out there.”
Pooch was becoming very frightened now but felt it wise to go along with these two.
He squinted his inebriated eyes to the far horizon, and sure enough he could see first one, then two, then three, then a half dozen ships’ lights blinking through the early evening haze. Even with his poor eyesight he could see the vessels were massive. The dark silhouettes of huge guns were also quite apparent.
Now a chill ran down Pooch’s spine and up again. The Asian men. Their red braided collars. Their brash behavior. And now the huge warships anchored offshore. All these things combined to make his worst fear come true. Just as he’d suspected, the two men were from the hated much-feared Asian Mercenary Cult.
He turned back to the men to see one was now brandishing a razor blade.
“Your puny collection is far too small for us,” the man said with a sinister grin. “But we will take it anyway.”
Pooch could hardly speak at this point. “Take it, yes,” he stuttered. “For free. As a gift. From me…”
“You’re very kind, old man,” the razor-toting stranger said. “But not kind enough…”
In the flick of his wrist, the men slashed a hole in Pooch’s neck just an inch above the jugular. Pooch bellowed, but his cry was cut short when the man savagely cut him again across his right cheek and then again above the left eye.
The wounds were ghastly and very bloody—and that was the point. The men knocked Pooch to his feet and kicked him twice in the stomach. Then one pulled out a small walkie-talkie and was soon speaking to someone aboard the nearest battleship. The brief conversation ordered those aboard to come ashore to raid Pooch’s underground vault for drugs and liquor.
This done, the men picked up Pooch and carried him kicking and screaming to the small motor launch they’d hidden beneath the reeds near his beach house. Fighting the growing waves, they quickly puttered to a point about 200 yards offshore. The launches from the lead battleship passed them now, on their way in to steal Pooch’s supply. There were sneers and laughter as these men saw what their colleagues had done to Pooch—and realized what they were about to do.
At about 300 yards out, they slashed the writhing Pooch again, tearing long gashes in his arms, legs, and chest. None of these wounds would prove instantly fatal—that was the whole point. Pooch was screaming—he hated being on the water as much as he hated getting sliced—but his cries were drowned out by the sound of the small navy of motorboats moving in from the battleships toward shore.
Finally the two men grew tired of cutting Pooch; now it was time to go for the kill. Taking handfuls of the old man’s blood, they leaned over and wrung it into the water. Then they waited. Not a minute passed before they saw the telltale fins of a fast-approaching school of hammerhead sharks.
At this point, they picked poor Pooch up by his hands and feet and sent him screaming into the water.
“Drugs kill, old man,” one yelled at him, as the sharks began taking chunks from his body.
“And drinking is bad for your health,” laughed the other as Pooch, what was left of him, was carried below the surface. Seconds later, only an oily slick of blood and a few pieces of ragged clothing remained.
Their entertainment over, the two men restarted their launch’s engine and headed back to the closest battleship.
They still had much work to do tonight.
In the Earth’s Orbit
O
NE HUNDRED AND FORTY THREE
miles high, passing directly over the island of Saint Ann’s at 17,500 mph, Hawk Hunter was strapped into a zero-G holding harness, sound asleep.
He was dreaming, too. Of solid food. Of his F-16XL fighter. Of the fiery launch that had put him in orbit. Of the girl named Chloe. Of his girlfriend, Dominique.
He’d been in orbit for three days now. He and five others had blasted off from Cape Canaveral in the heavily refurbished Russian-designed Zon space shuttle exactly 71 hours before. And even in slumber, Hunter knew he would never be the same again.
In all his years of flying—and he was widely regarded as the best fighter pilot ever—nothing had matched that 22-minute ascent through the cloud layer above Florida, across the Atlantic, and eventually into orbit. The Zon, a crude cookie-cutter copy of the old American space shuttle, bucked and bronked the whole way up. At one point it was shaking so badly, Hunter and the others had clasped hands, so sure were they that the Zon was about to break apart in the upper reaches of the atmosphere and kill them all.
But somehow the spacecraft had held together and attained the magical speed of 17,500 mph, or roughly 7 miles a second, the velocity needed to break out of the earth’s gravity. And it had deposited them here, shaken, into orbit, safe and in one piece.
In surviving this, the most hair-raising experience of his life, Hawk Hunter had had an epiphany. Flying jets faster, higher, and better than anyone had been only a warm-up, a precursor to this, the ultimate high-flight.
This
was what he’d been working for all along;
this
had been his goal. Not so much the act of flying, which was, in exact terms, simply a way of fooling gravity. What Hunter had wanted all these years was to be
free
of gravity. To break those surly bonds completely—not just in his kick-ass fighter at Mach 2 or 3, but in a monstrous spacecraft: huge liquid-fuel tank, solid-rocket boosters, awesome shuttle engines, all combined for more thrust than what he’d summoned up in his many years of driving jets. Flying airplanes was just the first step to flying in space. He was convinced of that now—just as he was certain the Wright Brothers had been convinced of it way back when.
But this was not just a free ride in space.
There was a mission up here for them to fulfill. And a desperate one at that. The supercriminal, world-feared terrorist Viktor II was up here somewhere, too. This was his space shuttle they were flying, captured in a spectacular battle on the South China Sea island of Lolita, where Hunter, through many machinations and twists, had forced it to land.
He’d been chasing Viktor II for many months now, ever since the superterrorist had ignited separate wars in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean. An embodiment of everything evil in the world, Hunter was determined to catch the devilish-looking war criminal and put an end to his reign of terror once and for all. Hunter had even gone so far as to vow to kill Viktor II with his bare hands if he had to. It was a promise he was still intending to keep.
The catastrophic world war which had put the earth into its present chaotic position was now five years past. From the ashes, a new kind of pursuit of freedom had arisen. Not the old, cobbled-together, illusory freedom that politicians had bandied about in the years leading up to World War III—no, this was real freedom, real liberty, politician free. And it was not just for those who were fortunate enough to be born into the prosperous areas of the planet. This was worldwide freedom, individual driven, based on the concept that all men were created equal and therefore should be treated that way—might they sink or swim, do good or bad.
This new concept was at the heart of the determination of Hunter and his allies of the United American Armed Forces. It had taken them four long years to rid the U.S. continent of those who had imposed an unequal peace at the cessation of hostilities of the last great war. Gone now for the most part were the left-wing terrorists, the far-right white supremacist armies, the Nazis, the Mid-Aks, the organized crime families, the air pirates, the greedy opportunists, the agents of disinformation and discord—all of them taken on and defeated by the United Americans, all of them now on the outside looking in.
In the last year or so, the United Americans had found themselves fighting offshore, first on some of the very same Pacific islands where their great-grandfathers had fought during World War II, and then in the haunted jungles of Vietnam, where their grandfathers and fathers had also spilled blood.
Now they were in outer space, doing the same thing.
More than any other, it was Hawk Hunter who had led the forces of freedom in these campaigns, and it was he who was at the helm of this new expeditionary force. As with much of his life, times of great joy were frequently spliced into times of great peril. He loved flying in space—yet he was here to find and eliminate the world’s most dangerous criminal. He loved the freedom from gravity, the total unshackling of earth, yet he’d left behind two very personal entanglements. One was named Chloe. The other was named Dominique.
It was perhaps not so ironic anymore that his relationship with Dominique had started in the cold, dark aftermath of World War III. He’d met her during his long, lonely march back across Europe once the fighting had ceased, staying with her in an abandoned farmhouse before moving on, eventually getting back to the States and having her walk back into his life again soon afterward. Beautiful, blond, erotic, and widely lusted after, they had been together ever since, unmarried and with no children, but bonded by real love and the passion of the times.
Dominique was now at their farm on Cape Cod, the place called Skyfire, waiting, he supposed, as she always did, for him to finally return home for good. That had been Hunter’s dream, too: that all of the fighting and wars and intrigue would finally be over with and he could simply go home and be with the woman he loved.
At least, that had been his dream before he’d met Chloe. This had happened barely a few months ago, while he was making his way through the Swiss Alps in search of a key tracking station being used by Viktor II and the orbiting Zon spacecraft. That Chloe was naked when he first set eyes on her, bathing in the frigid waters of an alpine lake near Saint Moritz, only increased the magnitude of the lightning bolt that struck him that day. The way she was, what she believed—it filled him up inside so much, he’d been tempted just to quit the whole hero business and settle down with her right then and there.
But duty called and she became entangled and he wound up rescuing her from the clutches of Viktor’s minions and together they had tracked down the last possible landing site for the Zon, thus forcing the climactic battle which gave the United Americans a working space shuttle, but not the prize they were after, Viktor II himself.
Now, for the first time in his life, Hunter was torn between two women, both beautiful, both smart, both patient. Both willing to be with him for the rest of their lives. And neither one knew about the other. Yet.
No wonder he liked it so much in space.
Hawk woke up to find the still-sleeping form of Elvis Q floating by him.
One of the original United Americans, Elvis Q had just escaped several years of captivity by Viktor’s allies, a time during which he’d been brainwashed
and
taught how to fly the Zon spacecraft. Now that he was back in the fold, he was probably the most rabid Viktor-hater among them all, if that was possible.
Also on board and floating nearby were Jim Cook of the elite JAWS special ops unit, and Frank Geraci of the famous NJ104 combat engineers. Both were close allies of Hunter. The only ones awake up on the flight deck at the moment were JT Toomey and Ben Wa, two of Hunter’s oldest friends.
Hunter had been asleep for only an hour or so when his deep inner sense told him to wake up. The same extrasensory perceptive ability that made him the premier fighter pilot of his day worked when he was out of the cockpit as well. Now a vibration rising up inside him told him he had to get up, get alert. Trouble was on the way.
Sure enough, the intercom inside the crew compartment came on not two seconds later.
“Flight deck to Hunter,” JT’s very distinctive voice crackled. “You’d better get up here, Hawk, old boy, on the triple…”
It was a short float up from the crew compartment to the flight deck of the Zon.
Three days in space had acclimated Hunter and the others to the quirks of zero-gravity. Drifting along weightless was a very pleasant experience; it was almost like sex—Hunter just could not get rid of the feeling that this was how man was supposed to be.
But when you had to get somewhere in a hurry, you had to bring one of Isaac Newton’s laws into play: once a body is in motion, it tends to stay in motion. It was amazing how little muscle power it took to propel oneself across the crew compartment or up to the Zon’s flight deck. Hunter just gave himself a tap of the boots and he was spinning like a bullet toward the overhead hatch and the flight deck beyond. It was the slowing down part that could be painful. Usually a well-placed shoulder or even a preemptive kick of the boot would do the trick. Hit the right place on the ladder or the compartment wall and you had the equivalent of brakes. Miss it by a centimeter or two and you’d wind up with a space bruise, painful and long-lasting.