It had been quite a night. He got to know Tracy very well. Also Lacey and Stacy, who joined them later on. They hadn't been with a drug-free male in many months either. Hunter did everything he could to make them happy. He felt sorry for them. They were stranded just like thousands of other Americans were when the war broke out. But in a way, they'd been lucky. Sure, they were stuck with the drug-soaked Travis, but they also had plenty of food, water and booze. In fact the secret base was stocked with enough food and libation for 100 people for 10 years. The Colorado River provided the fresh water.
And, at least at first, Travis had provided the entertainment. Tracy had told Hunter that the officer had used his New York City money to buy 200 pounds of marijuana in Pecos, along with several pounds of opium. The canyon hideout was to be his own little harem, under the guise of some crazy religion. A dream world of nude women, smoking dope and serving his every whim. It worked for a while. At one time all of the girls were smoking 214
opium and Travis was firmly in command. But gradually he sank into his weirdness. Tracy, Lacey and Stacy knew there was life beyond endless drugs and orgies, so they gave up the dope and had been living straight for the past year.
They asked Hunter to get them out, but he couldn't. Not right now anyway. The Lear jet was beyond repair, even for him, and the F-16 was strictly a one-man ship. With all-out war imminent to the east, he could think of no better place to be safe than in the impregnable bunkers. He told them to sit tigh^ for the time being.
As promised, they gave him the black box. Then while Tracy cooked him a meal, Stacy and Lacey turned the dials and pushed the buttons that activated the catapult system. Three hours of boiling water and there was enough steam for a launch.
Now, as he gave them .the thumbs up signal, the three were waving to him sadly. Travis and the others would continue their druggie ways, he knew. But these girls were smart. And pretty. And —for reasons he still couldn't figure out —still bare-breasted. They'd make it, barring unforseen circumstances.
He felt the steam pressure build up under the F-16.
A massive cloud of steam rose up underneath him. He took one last look at the girls as the catapult activated. "Stay safe, girls," he said as the F-16
rocketed forward.
Then he was gone . . .
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Time was running out ...
General Dave Jones sat alone at the enormous lighted table in the War Room at PAAC-Oregon. Before him were stacks of intelligence reports and more than five hundred recon photos including all of the pictures Hunter had taken of the Badlands SAM sites. Other photos were high altitude jobs, shot at great risk by the Texans, on the very edges of the Badlands where the perpetual haze that hung over the placed thinned out enough to take an occasional photo.
The officer had spent most of the past day and night correlating the information with previous intelligence reports —all of which were indicated on a lighted map of the continent that stood in the center of the room. Green cubes represented the Circle Forces, red blocks represented the Russians. The Pacific American armies —the newly dubbed Western Forces — were coded blue with their various volunteer allies colored white. At the moment, the green and red blocks outnumbered the blue and white by a 2-to-1 margin. The wizened officer looked at the photos
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on the table, then at the map stretched out before him and felt a chill go up his spine.
War was fast approaching. He knew it. True soldiers sensed when the real thing was coming, and Jones' body hadn't stopped buzzing since Hunter returned from his one-man mission into the Bads. Now the combatants were making their final preparations. Two great armies —one marching east and the other marching west, were getting ready to collide head on. Soon enough, the land would be covered with the blood of its own. It seemed like such a waste . . .
Just about all the intelligence reports he had were bad news. The Circle armies had solidified their occupation of The Aerodrome and Football City and in doing so, now controlled all the free territories east of the Badlands. The Texans were really feeling the heat. There had been no less than a dozen raids along their border the night before. Once again the Mongols selected isolated townships as their targets, overwhelming their defenders at first, then counting on the air cover by their Russian cohorts for the second fist of a one-two punch. This time the Texas Air Force tangled briefly with the Soviet Yaks over the Red River before driving them away. But 12 more Texas towns lay in ruins, causing the Texans to speed up their full-scale evacuation of their border area.
The Western Forces were desperately trying to mobilize. Those already in the service were being sent east to the Denver forward base by any means possible.
Some were riding in converted tractor trailer trucks, others on the one rail link still operating over
the Rockies. Still others were flying. In all, Jones knew he had to move close to 45,000 men as quickly as possible.
Jones was also arming and equipping thousands of the volunteers who were flooding into Oregon and San Diego bases. Many of them were good fighters—
militia men and freelance border guard troops—and some of them were just able-bodied men who wanted to fight for the cause. Normally Jones would never have considered using them. But the situation was, critical and he had no choice. If they were willing and could aim a gun, they were transported to the front.
And, as always, there were secrets . . .
Ghost Rider was really their only hope, but very few people outside of the PAAC High Command knew of its existence. The team of PAAC scientists and engineers — most of them CalTech people with a few former employees of-gthe pre-war West Coast aircraft manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed helping out
—were working around the clock on the five extraordinary B-ls. Integrating the Ghost Rider system was a bitch, but early on the team had agreed that the one thing they couldn't do was duplicate the five missing black boxes, because each one was different in its own right.
That's why Hunter's mission was so critical.
But one thing bothered Jones even more than the impending war situation.
Something that nagged him, gnawed at his stomach and his psyche. It was one photograph set aside from the others. One of Dozer's guys had found it tacked on the wall of an
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abandoned building they'd searched near Hot Springs, South Dakota. Others began turning up almost immediately.
Jones reached for it again and held it in front of him. It was the damndest thing. He was almost considering not showing Hunter. The photo was the first glimpse they'd had of this mysterious Viktor, yet Jones had immediately recognized him. Quite simply, the man looked like the devil incarnate. He was sitting in a chair in a bare room, leering at the camera. Thin face, pointed beard, strange slicked back hair, dressed entirely in black. Very military.
Very dangerous. Jones knew the evil contained in the man's eyes was without measure. This was the man behind it all. Was he a Russian? Was he an American?
Jones didn't know, and at that point, couldn't have cared less. This was their enemy.
But the strangest thing of all was that sitting beside this Viktor in the photo was none other than Hunter's girlfriend, Dominique.
And she was smiling . . .
f
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Pecos, New Mexico was like a living hell. /
The highway outside the small town was jammed with refugees from Texas fleeing the butchery of the Mongol raiders about a hundred miles to the east. Inside the typical throwback Old West town, a huge gun battle had been raging off and on for the past five days. New Order New Mexico was a so-called Free Territory
—no central government, just every town for themselves. So an-occasional gunfight was nothing new in Pecos. But this one was turning into a small-scale war.
It started with the local sheriff and his small deputized force shooting it out with a band of local criminals, troublemakers and looters. Then everyone who had a gun and a grudge to settle began to take sides. By the end of the second day, it had become impossible to tell who was shooting at whom and why.
The town's two banks had been long ago robbed and many large buildings burned to the ground. The small airport had been bombed, the water supply destroyed and about half the high tension wires
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bringing electricity into the city had been dynamited. What was worse, someone had blown up all seven of the town's gas stations and also a half dozen small oil derricks on the east side of town, leaving blazes that would take weeks to burn out. It made no difference in one respect, though; most everyone owned a horse and soon the equine was the preferred mode of transportation.
And the two Main Street saloons and the whorehouse on Gowano Avenue were still opening and holding packed houses. Liquor seemed to be in unlimited supply as was ammunition. Card games were going on everywhere, a few of which escalated into smaller gunfights. When the bullets started flying, the nonparticipants nonchalantly took cover, waited for the lead to stop, then returned to their drinking and poker and whoring.
Hunter was an odd sight when he first appeared at the swinging doors of the Pecos' Double Star Cafe. Most everyone at the bar and at the card tables turned to look at him, clad in a black flight suit, carrying an M-16 in his hands and his flight helmet on his belt. He purposely strode into the saloon, staring down the few who chose to look at him for longer than three seconds.
Don't fuck with me, his eyes said. No one dared to. The card playing and the drinking started up again almost immediately. Outside another gun battle was in full fury.
Hunter leaned up against the bar and ordered a whiskey, throwing down a dozen real-silver quarters. The bartender, aware that Hunter had overpaid for 222
his drink by about five times, quickly recognized the bribe and asked: "What do you want to know?"
"Scary Mary," Hunter said. "Who or what is it?"
"Depends on which one you mean," the barkeep said in a voice drenched in Western twang. "Got two of 'em. One in town, the other outside."
Hunter downed the whiskey and motioned for another. It was late afternoon.
Several hours before, he had successfully catapulted out of the Grand Canyon and, instead of flying back to PAAC-Ore-gon, he had moved immediately to Location No. 4r He set the F-16 down on a desert strip near the town and had walked in, ducking bullets and dodging running gun battles all along the way.
According to notes left behind by General Josephs, the box could be found
"under Scary Mary." Adding this clue to what Tracy had told him about Travis'
adventures in Pecos, Hunter had to put the pieces together.
"What's the one outside of town?" Hunter asked, swigging the cheap bourbon.
"A big rock," the bartender said, pouring himself a drink. "About 20 miles to the north, near a village called Mary de Vista. Biggest chunk of stone you'll ever see. Mile and a half if you walked around the thing. Might be a meteor, people say, dropped in long time ago from outer space."
"What's so scary about it?" Hunter said, dropping a few more quarters on the bar for a third.
The bartender leaned over to him and poured. "The rock is filled with sink holes and blind cliffs," he half-whispered. "And pumas. And buzzards. And rattlers. And bad spirits. Some people go in, some 223
don't come out again. It's dangerous. The Indians used to call it chimiyo chimayo. Means like 'no hope' or 'no way out'."
Hunter thought it over for a moment. He didn't have the time to go crawling all over a chunk of desert rock —never mind one that was infested with vipers, cougars and vultures and was haunted to boot. And he doubted that Travis did either.
"Where's the other one?"
"The 'other' Scary Mary?" the bartender laughed. "Watch out, pal. It's much more dangerous. Over at the whorehouse. Room 333."
The door to Room 333 burst open, courtesy of Hunter's powerful flight boot.
He was ripping mad. It took him four hours to get the three blocks from the saloon to the whorehouse, so intense was the gunfire in the streets. He had to take a dozen detours and spent most of the time ducked in doorways waiting for the bullet-happy party to pass by. He wound up shooting his way out of a couple tight spots. Luckily his M-16 qualified as heavy artillery in a battle that contained mostly .22s and shotguns.
It was dark by the time he reached the cathouse, and he immediately ran up the stairs to Room 333. A dim bulb provided the only light in the room. He saw only a bed, a dresser, a mirror and a night stand. On the bed was a huge, dark complexioned woman, naked except for a cheap garter belt and stockings. An old cowboy —shriveled up, on his last legs and
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drinking his way through it —was trying his best to get it on with the tubby prostitute. But from what Hunter could see, their size difference made it a physical impossibility.
Not only were gun battles raging outside the whorehouse, people were shooting at each other inside the place as well. It was total bedlam. Just the noise of all the guns going off made it hard to hear anything. Hunter knew he'd have to hurry, before the next gun fight passed through. He had to announce himself quickly so he fired a burst from the M-l/> which ripped away a large section of the room's shabby ceiling. Immediately, the woman sat up, knocking the elderly rustler clear off the bed.
"Well what the fuck do you want?" she screamed at Hunter. He instantly knew how she'd earned her nickname. Her hair was dyed a terrible fright yellow, her eyes sported massive fake eyelashes and her chubby face was painted in.gooey make-up. She must have weighed in at 400 pounds.
"Few years ago. An Air Force guy named Travis came through here," Hunter said sternly. "Gave you a black box . . ."
The woman looked at him strangely. "Travis?" she asked, reaching for a bowl of multi-colored pills that sat on the nightstand. "You mean that crazy flyboy guy with all the weed?"