"Maloney, Mack - Wingman 07 - Skyfire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maloney Mack)

And now for the last several weeks-or was it actually the last several months?-she had been locked up in this bleak tower somewhere in the wilderness of western Canada, held for no single logical reason, just a million and a half illogical ones.

Dominique's eyes were now wet with dirty tears. She was convinced she would die in this place, guilty of the twin sins of pride and stubbornness. Oddly enough she found herself strangely resigned to it.

But ... if only she could see Hunter again, just for a few minutes, to finally say the words that she had failed to say on that foggy airfield.

She knew she would never have that chance, though. For her captors were so conniving, and their hideout so

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isolated that she had come to believe that even Hunter couldn't find her now.

She stumbled back to the window for a final glimpse of the mountains and the blue sky beyond before the sun set.

In the dull red and darkening sky she saw the contrails of an airplane cut across the distant horizon. It wasn't unusual to see airplanes flying over the desolate part of Free Canada, lonely contrails of cross-country long-range cargo craft, flying way up at forty-five thousand feet and higher, some of them going directly right over her head.

So this, the new plane and the trail of ice particles its engine was leaving behind, held her interest only briefly. She started to turn away from the window . . .

But then something made her glance up a final time.

Suddenly she saw the airplane turn sharply into a zigzag pattern. Then it began sculpting a sky-writing pattern with ice crystals from its tail.

Puzzled, she watched as slowly but steadily, the white-and red-tinged streaks left by the jet formed a giant "W" in the sky.

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Chapter IWo

Like a column of ghosts, the small band of soldiers moved silently through the deepening gloom of the forest.

Although the men were weighted down with assault weapons and heavy backpacks, their footsteps made no sounds on the soft yet crusty snow-covered forest floor. Steadily, purposefully, they advanced through the growing darkness.

They reached the edge of a small clearing and the group's leader held up his hand. The men behind him froze in place. Looming in front of them, in the center of the frozen glade, lay the huge, battered fuselage of a C-141 Starlifter.

"I'll be damned," the group's leader, a Free Canadian Air Force major named Frost said. "It does exist. . ."

His second in command was up and beside him in a second.

"That definitely looks like our C-141, Major," the lieutenant said, pulling a small notebook from his uniform pocket. "Serial two-three-four-double zero-five?"

Frost confirmed the same numbers were painted on the twisted, ice-encrusted tail section of the wrecked cargo plane.

"The big question is," he went on, "how in hell did it get here?"

It was a question right out of a bad sci-fi movie script: Gigantic Air Force cargo plane found sitting in the middle of a small field that was bordered on four sides by tall pine trees that, judging from their height, had sprouted

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about the time of Columbus.