"Maloney, Mack - Wingman 02 - The Circle War UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maloney Mack)

ZEBRA BOOKS

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Kensington Publishing Corp. 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016

Copyright й 1987 by Mack Maloney

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

Second printing: August, 1988

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter One

The sky was on fire . . .

Brilliant reds, yellows, golds, blues, and greens streaked across the horizon. Waves of color darting in and out, appearing and disappearing like phantoms in the crystal-clear night. The ghostly lights reflected on the ice and tundra below, doubling their intensity. Flying eight miles high and heading due north, Major Hawk Hunter relaxed for a moment to appreciate the mysterious beauty of the Aurora Bo-realis.

The cockpit of the U-2 was cramped Ч odd for an airplane designed to stay aloft for 10 or more hours with a single pilot at the controls. Compared to this, the cockpit in Hunter's F-16 was as big as a living room. But creature comforts and sightseeing were the furthest things from his mind right now. He was only reaching the midway point of his long recon mission. He still had a long way to go.

The U-2 was a spy plane. Long and pencil-shaped, it sported a pair of gooney-bird sized wings Чthe better to fly high and farther with. Normally the airplane was unarmed. But these weren't normal

times. Hunter had jerry-rigged two Sidewinder missiles under the jet's wings in case of the unlikely possibility that he'd meet up with an unfriendly airplane somewhere over the frozen wasteland. He had also installed two 20mm cannon in the ship's nose, though at this high latitude and height, the muzzles tended to freeze up unless he test-fired them occasionally.

A sophisticated camera of his own design peeked out from the bottom of the airplane. It was a combination heat sensitive/infra-red video set up, complete with a small TV screen in the cockpit. Should he see anything strange or threatening on the ground, with the push of a button, its shape and "heat signature" would be captured on special videotape instantly even if the ground was obscured by smoke or snow or darkness. The spy plane was also jammed with eavesdropping equipment, designed to pick up the faintest radio or TV transmission for 50 miles around. But right now, all was quiet across the miles of cold, bleak, barren, uninhabited arctic landscape.

That was fine with him . . .

This was the 50th Чor was it the 51st? Чarctic recon flight he'd made in the past six months. His course never varied. Taking off from his base in southwest Oregon, he would climb to 40,000 feet over what used to be the state of Washington. Then he would skirt part of Free Canada, then straight up Чover the Wrangell Mountains, over the abandoned city of Fairbanks, across the Arctic Circle through to the top of Alaska.

His mission was simple. He was looking for Rus-

sians.

Off Point Barrow, Alaska, a pre-set indicator light blinked on; it was his signal to enter a course correction into the flight computer. Then he put the U-2 into a long arching sweep to the west. Within an hour, he would be over the coast of Soviet Siberia.

It was a lonely but necessary vigilance. He knew any sign of Soviet ships, aircraft or even arctic ground troops could be the advance units of a large invasion force. And if the Russians were coming, they'd be coming through this arctic backdoor. And only Hunter had eyes in this part of the world. He was the sentinel. But so far, in his 50 previous flights, he hadn't spotted a thing.

Hunter had come to both love and dread the long recon flights. He loved them simply because he was flying. The utter starkness of the arctic landscape below fascinated him. But each long journey alone also gave him time to think Чtoo much time. The long hours were a blessing and a curse.

He thought about his country . . .

The United States were victors in World War Ill's battles against the Soviets, but losers in the deception that followed the ceasefire. All it took was a traitorous vice president, who arranged the assassination of the president and his cabinet, then let the Star Wars shield down long enough for a flood of Russian missiles to come over the North Pole and obliterate America's ICBM force while it was still in the ground. The vice president Чwho was later revealed as a Soviet mole Чthen "negotiated" the peace. The result? Now there was no more United States. It was broken up, decentralized and, in the years since,

7

frequently at war with itself.