It was dark by the time he reached the cathouse, and he immediately ran up the stairs to Room 333. A dim bulb provided the only light in the room. He saw only a bed, a dresser, a mirror and a night stand. On the bed was a huge, dark complexioned woman, naked except for a cheap garter belt and stockings. An old cowboy — shriveled up, on his last legs and drinking his way through it — was trying his best to get it on with the tubby prostitute. But from what Hunter could see, their size difference made it a physical impossibility.
Not only were gun battles raging outside the whorehouse, people were shooting at each other inside the place as well. It was total bedlam. Just the noise of all the guns going off made it hard to hear anything. Hunter knew he'd have to hurry, before the next gun fight passed through. He had to announce himself quickly so he fired a burst from the M-16 which ripped away a large section of the room's shabby ceiling. Immediately, the woman sat up, knocking the elderly rustler clear off the bed.
"Well what the fuck do you want?" she screamed at Hunter. He instantly knew how she'd earned her nickname. Her hair was dyed a terrible fright yellow, her eyes sported massive fake eyelashes and her chubby face was painted in.gooey make-up. She must have weighed in at 400 pounds.
"Few years ago. An Air Force guy named Travis came through here," Hunter said sternly. "Gave you a black box…"
The woman looked at him strangely. "Travis?" she asked, reaching for a bowl of multi-colored pills that sat on the nightstand. "You mean that crazy flyboy guy with all the weed?"
"That's the guy…" Hunter said quickly. Outside the particularly intense gunfight was going full tilt.
"God damn asshole he was!" the woman shouted. "Owes me money. He comes into town a few years back. He buys dope. He takes his piece of me. He doesn't pay. Instead, he gives me this box, with a red light blinking on it.
Then he's gone. Vamoosed. So I got this box with a red light. Hey that's my business, so I put it in my window. To help my customers know I was… available."
Hunter had guessed right. This was the monster Travis had wrestled with.
Suddenly the gunfight outside got louder and closer. He could hear several explosions going off just a few blocks away and screams coming from the street outside the room's window. Inside the house, bullets were ricocheting off the walls down the hallway. Scary Mary however seemed oblivious to it all.
"So where's the box?" Hunter said.
"Well, Jesus, aren't we in a hurry?" she quickly lit a cigarette, swallowed a handful of pills then pushed herself up off the bed. Unlike the scenery in the Grand Canyon, Hunter had no trouble averting his eyes as the big woman bent over and reached underneath her mattress. Seconds later she came up with the box, its red light still blinking.
"Here you go, fella," she said, handing him the precious black box. "That's been holding up this bed for more than a year now. Don't need no sign anymore.
Everyone knows where I am."
Hunter took the box and for the first time smiled. He reached into his pocket and gave her a handful of real quarters. "See ya, Mary. Take care of yourself," he said.
She looked at him as he was about to turn and leave. "Hey, hold on," she said, squinting her eyes to get a better look. "Aren't you that 'Wing Man' fella everyone's always talking about? The guy with the famous airplane? You look just like him."
Hunter smiled again, leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Then he was off, running down the hall, dodging stray bullets as he went.
Hunter landed at the Denver airport early the next morning after being directed there from New Mexico. Jones met him in the base's makeshift situation room, taking possession of the two additional black boxes and making arrangements to get them to Eureka immediately.
Then they sat over a pot of coffee and talked. Both knew instinctively it was the last time they'd be able to have a normal conversation for a while.
"We know we can't destroy all the SAMs right now," Jones told him. "But we have to act, to get them to start thinking defensively."
Hunter's mind flashed back to the Big War.
"We're up against the same type of thing as in Western Europe," he said. "The Soviets had superiority in men and weapons, just like now. But we beat them not so much on the front line, but behind the lines. We went after the rear echelons. Their supply dumps. Their means of communications. There wasn't a bridge left standing between Paris and Moscow by the time we were through.
They definitely had the quantity but we had the quality. We forced them into a fight near Paris and they had no back-ups. No supplies. No way to get their reserves through. We kicked their asses.
"It's really no different now. Between them and the Circle ground forces, they've got us on numbers. But all the time I was flying over the 'Bads, I kept thinking: 'Where the hell are their rear areas?' The answer was, they didn't have any. Nothing between the eastern edge of the SAM line and the Circle troops moving east.
"That area is like a limbo now. No civvies, that's for sure. But plenty of bridges, highways, railroad tracks. Lines of communications they're counting on to move the Circle troops on."
Jones thought for a moment, "What you're saying is that if we can get in there, behind the SAM line and in front of the advancing ground troops, we can make it difficult for them."
"Exactly!" Hunter said. "We'll force them to fight somewhere, but only after we've taken our measure of them."
Thus, the strategy for beating the Circle was born…
It was time to go. Hunter had to load up his F-16 and make arrangements to meet a Free Canadian Air Force tanker plane over Saskatchewan to get the fuel needed to make the long trip to New York City.
But Jones had one more subject to discuss. He pressed the photograph of Dominique and Viktor into Hunter's hand, expressing total mystification of what it all meant. But Hunter seemed to totally block out everything. Jones would never forget the transformation that came over the pilot as he studied the photograph. Hunter's mouth narrowed and his fists clenched in rage. A new color roared into his face — a crimson associated with an adrenaline rush. His whole body began to vibrate, as if some inner strength was threatening to burst out of him. But it was Hunter's eyes that got to the senior officer.
Normally blue, they seemed to turn almost white with anger…
What seemed like an eternity later, Hunter looked up from the photo and said to Jones: "I'll be back…"
Then he walked briskly from the room and toward his F-16, carrying the crumpled photograph in his hand…
Chapter Twenty-two
Dawn broke unevenly over the Badlands that next day. There were rain showers extending from central Nebraska on up to the Canadian border. At the same time, Kansas and Oklahoma had clear, if typically hazy, skies.
For the Russian soldiers stationed at the large missile site concentration near Broken Bow, Nebraska, the day began as any other. They were on the edge of the bad weather, it had rained during the night, but had stopped just before first light. This meant that all the tarpaulins that had been placed over their missiles when the rain started the nigh before had to be taken off and the missiles literally wiped down. But this would not happen before a dull hour of calisthenics at five in the morning, followed by an even duller fare for breakfast. Then would come the daily political lecture that followed th morning meal — an assembly that all the soldier loathed. Most of them had been hidden away in th Bads for nearly a year and thus had been hearing th same boring Marxist indoctrination day after day week after week. But in the lock-step regimen of the Soviet Armed Forces, the daily speech would be held as planned. Only after that would the missiles be attended to.