Death Orbit Read Free

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.

Three
    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