Mack Maloney
The Circle War
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 Borealis.
The cockpit of the U-2 was cramped — 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 — the 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 — or was it the 51st? — arctic 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 — over 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 Russians.
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 — too 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 — who was later revealed as a Soviet mole — then "negotiated" the peace. The result? Now there was no more United States. It was broken up, decentralized and, in the years since, frequently at war with itself.
This was America under "The New Order."
The devastated middle of the continent — the location of the destroyed-in-place U.S. ICBM force — was now a nightmare of neutron radiation, poison gas and a swirl of strange hallucinogenics-that were spread everywhere when the Russian missiles hit. This was The Badlands, the schism that stretched from the Dakotas to the northern border of the new Republic of Texas.
These events gnawed at Hunter — he was obsessed with hate for those who had had a hand in the destruction of the country he loved. The Russians. The vice president. The turncoat National Guard troops who carried out the New Order to the letter while the regular U.S. forces were overseas fighting real battles.
He hated the air pirates — renegades who now roamed the skies, preying on innocents and attacking the huge air convoys that were the only contact between the relatively civilized portions east of the Mississippi and the West Coast. Ditto the Mid-Aks — the corrupt, fanatical leaders of the Middle Atlantic Conference which grew out of the Mid-Atlantic states. Then there was The Family, the super-criminals who had operated out of New Chicago. Their armies had attacked Football City — formerly St. Louis. But the free-wheeling, independent gambling territory refused to knuckle under to the threats of blackmail and extortion from their unfriendly neighbors to the north. It was Hunter and the air force of rescued pilots he organized, who helped Football City's army and thousands of Free Forces' volunteers defeat The Family's 80,000-strong invading force in a series of spectacular battles.
Both the 'Aks and The Family relied on Soviet help — Hunter was certain of it.
Defeated on the European battlefields and elsewhere, the Russians had a great interest in keeping America fractionalized and unstable. Hunter was a stumbling block in these devious plans. His goal was to reunite the continent — reestablish the democracy that was once the United States. If this dream was to come true, the destabilizing elements in New Order America — and there were plenty of them — would have to be defeated.
After the big war, Hunter had joined a bunch or his ex-Air Force buddies in a group known far and wide as "ZAP." The Zone Air Patrol was the crack air force for the Northeast Economic Zone, the area once known as New England that had become its own country after the New Order went down. But as good as ZAP was, they couldn't prevent the Northeast Economic Zone from falling to the Mid-Aks.
That's when Hunter became a fighter pilot for hire, only later did he get revenge by defeating both the 'Aks and The Family.
Now he was part of the newly-formed Pacific American Air Corps, or PAAC. He and a number of other ex-Air Force and ZAP pilots had established a new air base near Coos Bay, Oregon. They were allied with the Republic of California, a democratic government sometimes known as The Coasters. Together, their charge was to protect the western flank of the continent as far east to the Rockies and up through Alaska. It was a huge responsibility, but they were relatively well-equipped for the job — especially in air power. They had to be. Because once the Soviets recovered from their wartime losses, Hunter and many other freedom-loving people were certain they, or possibly some puppet army, would invade America for real to complete the job they failed to do in Europe.
And that's why he flew these long missions…
His country, its enemies, his past — all these things haunted him during the long, solitary flights. But there was another memory — more personal, that deep down inside him also refused to let go.
Her name was Dominique…
Hours passed. The night got darker. He was over the tip of Siberia when he switched on the plane's eavesdropping equipment. Just like 50 times before — he heard nothing, saw nothing. He stayed on a southerly course for a while, soaring over the Chukchi Peninsula. Then he turned back to the east. The sun was coming up. Soon he was over northern Alaska once again, heading for home.