Target: Point Zero Read Free

winning in a military sense meant little to him. He seemed bent on one thing: creating havoc and misery on a planet that needed no more of either.
    And now he was in space.
    It was this thought alone that was driving Hunter faster than the five hundred and two cubic-inch engine under his truck’s hood. Big as the place was, he’d not been able to find any jet fuel for his G-5 anywhere in Star City—even worse, he had wasted many hours in trying. He did, however, find this truck, with all its stale gasoline, and had laid claim to it immediately. That had been two days ago. He’d been driving like a madman ever since.
    He’d only been a few hundred yards away from the pad when the Zon went up—he’d emptied a clip from his M-16 into it as it rose into the heavens. But if he had caused any damage to the damn thing, he’d found no evidence of it later. The shuttle went straight up and then over, just like it was supposed to, quickly disappearing from his view. It was a flawless launch and now he had no doubt that the Zon was up there, somewhere, traveling around the earth, carrying at least one pair of eyes that were looking down on the battered planet and thinking of more insidious ways to fuck it up.
    But in firing his M-16 at the launching Zon, Hunter had had more in mind than just shooting it down. By tracking the trajectory of his bullet stream against the trajectory of the rising spacecraft, he’d been able to calculate the Zon’s acceleration, its rate of climb, its angle of flight and apparent attitude, and hence, its expected point of departure from Earth’s atmosphere and its insertion into orbit. From this, Hunter had determined the Zon’s probable orbital status and flight path. If he had added everything up correctly, the Russian shuttle was 127.550 miles above the earth, flying an orbit that brought it roughly fifty-one degrees above the equator and forty-two below.
    From all this, he’d come up with a coordinate, a spot on the map he’d termed Point Zero. It was located more than two thousand miles west of Star City, somewhere deep in the Swiss Alps. From this place, he’d determined, he’d be able to see the Zon go over as many as seventeen times in one clear twenty-four-hour-period, including dusk, night or even early daylight, if he could get high enough, at the right angle and know exactly where to look. In that was born his current plan. If he could get to Point Zero, and take these observations, or even see the Zon go over just once, Hunter hoped he’d be able to learn something very important about the spacecraft: when it would be coming back down to Earth—and where.
    If all this was made known to him, then he’d vowed to be on hand wherever the Zon landed, and personally deal with Viktor, once and for all.
    It seemed like a fool’s quest though.
    The two thousand-mile dash in the beat-up Benz tanker alone qualified for some degree of madness, never mind expecting to find a near-mythical spot from which he could look into outer space.
    But Hunter was always doing things like this. His intellectual capabilities were beyond quantum, his adventuresome spirit more intense than anyone who’d passed before. He was, no argument, the best fighter pilot who’d ever lived. He was possibly the best military strategist to ever come along as well. His mind was not simply some kind of an organic supercomputer: it corrected supercomputers. His ability, in flight, to anticipate the realities of the human-combat-flying experience was eerie. He knew trouble was coming anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes before it actually arrived, a rather frightening talent. But most importantly, he was also a cosmically lucky man: he’d fought in nearly a dozen armed conflicts in the last five years—and had come through all of them with hardly a scratch. All the smarts in the world couldn’t explain that.
    But his goals were also immense. He wanted no less than a world in which every human being was able