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  “So what’s the bad news?”

  Hunter took several seconds before replying.

  “Well, as you know, Elizabeth Sandlake got away,” he said. “And Fitz’s intelligence boys think Juanita Juarez did, too.”

  Jones shrugged; he knew all about both women. Elizabeth Sandlake, the brilliant but unbalanced woman, was the mastermind behind the castle’s operations. And Juanita Juarez, the incredibly beautiful but murderous ally of Duke Devillian, had somehow become Sandlake’s second in command.

  “There’s no doubt that both escaped?” he asked.

  “None whatsoever,” Hunter said. “Fitz and his guys checked and double-checked all the prisoners and all the enemy KIA’s. No one fits their descriptions.”

  “Damn …” Jones whispered. “Those are two ladies I’d rather not have running around loose.”

  Hunter nodded grimly. “And then, there’s my airplane …”

  Jones searched his friend’s eyes and thought he detected the slightest hint of their moistening. He knew that next to Dominique, Hunter’s F-16XL was the most valuable thing in the world to him.

  “Do we have any idea how or where they took it?” Jones asked, knowing the question was pointless.

  Hunter shook his head no and leaned back in his seat. He quickly drained his glass of beer and poured another.

  “Don’t worry,” Jones told him. “We’ll get it back. It may take a while—but we’ll do it.”

  Hunter just shrugged and unconsciously sank lower in his seat. Once again, Jones watched his friend’s face carefully for several moments as they drank in silence. Finally, he spoke again.

  “But I must say, I’m a little puzzled by your reaction, Hawk,” the senior officer said. “Frankly, I thought you’d go storming out of here, hot on the trail of both Miss Sandlake and your airplane …”

  Hunter smiled wanly and stared across the barroom for a long time before responding.

  Finally he said: “I guess that’s what most people would expect. And believe me, there’s a part of me that wants to do exactly that.”

  “But?”

  “But not this time,” Hunter said, turning back to the general.

  The Wingman took a deep breath and washed it down with a long swig of beer.

  “General, we’ve been through a lot together in these past few years.” he continued. “You know me as well as any man alive. You know how I feel about this country. You know I’d never stand by and let anyone trample on what it stands for.”

  Jones nodded, sensing what was to come.

  “We’ve fought and won a lot of battles,” the pilot went on. “And I know that the country isn’t entirely safe yet. But the way things are right now … well, speaking frankly, sir, I just don’t think you need me anymore.”

  For the briefest of moments, Jones was stunned.

  “Hawk, your country will always need you,” Jones told him, immediately realizing that this was one battle he was not going to win.

  “And I will always need it,” Hunter replied. “But you already have plenty of good men out there: Fitz. St. Louie. Ben and JT. Crunch and Elvis. The Cobras. All of them. Plus the Free Canadians. They’re more than capable of carrying the ball …”

  Hunter took a long swallow of beer to fortify himself. He’d been practicing this speech for days.

  “Plus, things have finally settled down,” he continued. “For the first time since the Big War, there’s no major threat out on the horizon. Our borders are secure. The air pirates are practically extinct. We don’t have to worry about Devillian and his kind anymore.”

  “That’s all true, Hawk,” Jones replied. “But, speaking not so much as a friend but as an objective observer, you know that with your skills and savvy, you’re about as close to irreplaceable as anyone can get.”

  “No man is irreplaceable, General,” Hunter said quickly. “Someone will just have to step in and take over my duties.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I’ve decided it’s time for me to retire,” Hunter just about blurted out. This wasn’t going as smoothly as he would have liked. Still, he pressed on. “And this time I mean it. I have to keep my promise to Dominique and to myself. I’m just not going to risk losing her again.”

  Jones had seen it coming. Over the years, he had often listened to Hunter talk about that day in the future when America would be free again, when he would be able to leave the battles and the bloodshed behind and begin a more peaceful life with Dominique.

  Now that time had come.

  Hunter ordered another pitcher of cheap beer and the two men continued to drink quietly for another few minutes. Then Jones finally broke the silence.

  “What the hell,” the officer muttered in resignation. “I could try and talk you out of this, Hawk, but I know it would be useless. And the truth is, I can’t really say that my heart would be in it.”

  Hunter managed a brief smile, though not without some difficulty.

  “Thanks for understanding, General,” he said.

  They made a spontaneous toast, a quick meeting of their beer glasses as if to seal the end of an era.

  “Where will you be going?” Jones asked him after draining his glass.

  “Back to Cape Cod,” Hunter said, fully smiling for the first time. “Got a place all picked out. It will be perfect for us.”

  Jones reached across the table and grasped his friend’s hand. “There are a lot of things I could say right now,” the senior officer told him. “But I’m not going to embarrass both of us. Just promise me one thing.”

  “Name it, General …”

  “Wherever you go, stay in touch,” Jones said. “For a couple of reasons. First, because myself and a lot of other guys don’t want to lose track of you.”

  “And the second reason?”

  Jones bit his lip. “Because,” he said, “if the time comes—and I pray it doesn’t—that this country is in real danger again …”

  Hunter held up his hand and cut the general off.

  “Don’t worry, sir,” he said. “If that happens, you’ll know where to find me.”

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Oslo, Norway

  GORS SVENSON UNCAPPED THE bottle of expensive whiskey and nervously poured a quarter of its contents into a pure white porcelain beer mug.

  “If this bottle doesn’t do it, maybe another will,” he thought, closing his eyes. He drained the mug in five painful gulps.

  The whiskey burned its way down his gullet and tore right into his bloodstream, seemingly bypassing his stomach and liver. Still, its inebriating properties did nothing to dull the ache deep inside him.

  “Why did I do it?” he mumbled. “Why?”

  He had only to open his teary eyes to get his answer. Sitting before him on his large oak office desk were thirty large burlap bags, all of them filled with gold.

  He swiveled his chair away from the booty and turned to stare out the large picture window behind his desk. The vast workyard that stretched nearly a mile before him was deserted now. No cranes rolled, no welding machines blazed, no steel was being set in place. Instead, a cold, damp rain was coating the place in a thin and treacherous skin of ice.

  “Hell is freezing cold,” Svenson heard his drunken lips say. “Lucifer is never warm enough …”

  He coughed out a pathetic laugh and took a deep gulp of whiskey—this time directly from the bottle.

  For the briefest of moments he forgot exactly when he had dismissed his army of workers. As part of the deal, seven thousand men and women—skilled laborers not easily found in anarchic, post-World War III Europe—had simply been told to leave. Fired. Let go.

  Was it a day ago that he had so cruelly surprised them? Or a week? Or even longer?

  He couldn’t remember, and that actually made him feel a little better. Maybe drinking away his troubles—his all-encompassing guilt—was the answer.

  But it only took another hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in his chair and a
closer look at the bags of gold to remind him exactly the time and reason of his bizarre action. It had been two weeks ago, and the seven thousand people had marched out of the workyard, stunned that they no longer had a job, frightened that they were being cast out into the uncertainty of the lawless, chaotic, six-month-long Scandinavian night.

  Just who had he betrayed? Svenson wondered drunkenly as he deeply chugged from the whiskey bottle again. His country? Not really—the old, well-defined democratic Norway had ceased to exist with the first exchanges of the Big War. Now this part of Norway was little more than a name—a cold dark place where highwaymen, terrorists, and bandits ruled the countryside’s long night and where a man without a job meant a man without money to buy food and clothes and fuel for his lights. Where a man without a job could not afford a gun and ammunition to protect himself and his loved ones.

  So then, had he betrayed his own family? Again, not really. The thirty large bags of gold—probably more money than in all of the rest of southern Norway combined—was more than enough for him, his wife, and their four children to live in opulent comfort for the rest of their lives. That is, if the guilt didn’t get them first.

  No, the object of his betrayal was no one other than himself. What he had sold—the secret designs exchanged for all this gold—had been the fruit of his labor for the past ten years. His plans, his innovations, his sacrifices.

  Sold away not for the good of his fellow man but simply to the highest bidder, someone who would most definitely not use the knowledge for the betterment of the human condition.

  Quite the opposite, in fact.

  It was that piece of knowledge, the nagging kernel of undisputed truth that his secret innovative designs would ultimately lead to more death and destruction in a world that needed not one more iota of either, that now led him to push aside the nearly empty whiskey bottle and retrieve a smaller one, this one containing fifty sleeping pills.

  Thirty bags of gold, thirty pieces of silver, he thought. What was the difference?

  Euthanasia was practically a tradition in Scandinavia—suicide only slightly less so. And in the end, Svenson had turned out to be a traditionalist.

  Now, as he began gulping down handfuls of sleeping tablets, one last thought crossed his mind.

  “From one gloomy place to another,” he whispered, his lips already turning blue and numb, “I now, like a coward, go …”

  Chapter Eight

  Cape Cod

  Eight months later

  HAWK HUNTER GATHERED HIS shoulder-length hair up under his hat and once again faced the strong easterly wind.

  It was up to about twenty miles per hour now, he figured, gusting to 25 or even 30 mph on occasion. That was just fine with him—the brisk ocean breeze was a pleasant relief to the eighty-five-plus temperatures of the late June day.

  He gulped down a cup of ice water and returned to the matter at hand, the large field of long grass before him. Reaching down, he plucked up a single blade of the long bright green grass and gently laid its bottom end against his tongue. With a wide smile of satisfaction, he noted its sweet taste.

  Not too long now, he thought.

  He studied the dimensions of the field. It would take another two days at the most, he figured. Then, if the weather stayed dry, he would cut it down—all twenty acres of it—bundle it, and sell it.

  “Probably get five small bags of gold,” he said aloud with no small amount of pride. “Maybe six, if it dries real quick …”

  The strong wind once again blew off his baseball cap, and this time, a kind of reverse gust nearly carried it right over the edge of the cliff. Retrieving the cap just inches from the precipice, he gazed down at the wave-battered rocky shore some hundred and fifty feet below. Then, irresistibly, he stared out at the vast Atlantic Ocean beyond. He had already lost two of his favorite hats in that fashion—blown by a gust out to sea where they might or might not float into someone else’s hands. Now he was down to his last hat, and it would be a big problem should he lose it.

  Once again gathering up his long hair and placing the cap—it was a fading Boston Red Sox chapeau—more securely on his head, he breathed in deep of the ocean air and let the afternoon sun bake his face.

  This is the life, he thought again. This is what I’ve been waiting for.

  His hay farm was on the edge of Nauset Heights, a place located just above the crook in the elbow of Cape Cod. The twenty-acre, roughly rectangular plot sat on a long, high cliff that stretched for five miles on either side. This put him smack dab in the middle of an extraordinary piece of the famous cape’s topography. Few places on the mostly flat, sand- and windswept cape were tall enough to merit the name “heights.” Nauset was one of them.

  But the location of Hunter’s small farm was unique in many other ways. To the east was an awesome view of the deep-blue Atlantic; to the north, the family of inland islands of Eastham. To the south was the long, thin green-and-beige finger of Nauset Beach, doing its best to hold back the sea from overflowing into Pleasant Bay and the Chathams beyond.

  But to Hunter’s mind, it was the view to the west that made this place so special.

  Few places on America’s continental East Coast offered the unique vista of the sun rising out of the sea in the morning and setting over the water, Pacific-style, at the end of the day. Because of its elevation and location east of Cape Cod Bay, the view from Hunter’s farm featured both.

  No wonder the previous owner had named the place, “SkyFire.”

  He gulped the last of his ice water, checked the dryness of his soil once again, and satisfied that all was right with his crop—and therefore with his entire world—walked back toward the farmhouse.

  It was small, just small enough. Six rooms, a pleasantly dilapidated porch on three sides, big root cellar, and an attic large enough to hold his two telescopes. Next to the house was a pair of barns. One, the biggest, held his modest arsenal of farm equipment: a rake, a bundler, a cutter and twine caddy, all pulled at various times by his cranky tractor. The hay was stored in the loft, where it coexisted both with a small family of bats and a larger brood of cats. He was also able to squeeze his trusty Chevy farm truck into the barn, as well as the rare 1969 Harley-Davidson 1000SP motorcycle that he was forever working on.

  In the small garage attached to the barn he kept his Corvette.

  It was a 1983 model, white with chrome reverse all round, black leather interior, and the somewhat-standard 454 cubic-inch engine. Although it would not have been his first choice for year and model (a black ’66 ragtop would have done nicely), Hunter had grown to love the ’83 Vette. He had bought it two months before, from a barely honest marketeer in Boston, a man recommended to him by the agent who had sold him the farm. Surprisingly, other than the to-be-expected clutch problems, the car had run very well.

  The second smaller barn was about a hundred feet from the first, it being the most isolated structure on the farm. Unlike the breezy farmhouse and the larger barn, this building was locked up tight—sealed against water and the salt air—and was ringed with a half dozen nearly invisible security systems.

  Hunter rarely visited this barn—his psyche had tabbed it the black sheep in the otherwise happy conglomeration of buildings that made up his place. It contained no farm tools or hay or bats or cats. Rather, its walls held in memories—they being in the form of one, extremely souped-up but now never-used AV-8BE Harrier jumpjet.

  Hunter hadn’t flown in nearly six months, and to his surprise, he didn’t miss it. Life on the farm had provided him with a myriad of pleasant distractions: Would the hay get too much rain or not enough? Should he cut one cord or two of wood to fuel the wood stoves that kept the farmhouse warm during the winter? How many cans of homegrown tomatoes were enough for a year? What would the price of kerosene be in the fall?

  His days were now filled with the calculations of the earth—good and bad acres, the number of earthworms per square foot, the acidity of his soil—so many, in fact, that he had b
een able to sweep aside the numerics of flying a fighter jet. Weapons load, fuel available, and time-to-target were numbers now buried as deeply in him as the turnip roots in the farmhouse’s cellar. And the way things were going, those numbers and the memories they ultimately represented—war, misery, death—would stay buried, possibly never to see the light of day again.

  Two hours passed.

  Hunter was in the barn, shooing away a squad of kittens from his disassembled motorbike when he heard the back door of the farmhouse squeak and open.

  He turned and saw her and immediately felt a pleasant chill run through him.

  She was carrying two cups of tea on a tray and a small jar that he knew contained cognac—their ritual drink for watching the sun dip down over the bay. She was barefoot. A long white, almost see-through linen dress clung to her slim yet well-curved figure. Her shoulder-length blond hair was gathered into two hastily arranged ponytails.

  Good God she’s beautiful, he thought.

  Even now, after all this time, the sight of Dominique could take his breath away.

  “You’re a little early, aren’t you?” he kidded her as they met just outside the barn door. “The sun doesn’t begin to go down for at least another hour.”

  “Now you are complaining?” she asked in her slyly pouting French-dipped English.

  He didn’t answer—instead, he kissed her, causing a minor spill of hot water from the teacups onto her delicate fingers.

  “Too-il-a-belle?” he asked, casually wiping the tepid tea from her hands.

  She shook her head. “You have burned me with the tea,” she said. “You have insulted me, and now you are trying to compliment me—with bad français?”

  “OK, you win,” he said, taking her arm and gently leading her to their west field, a place where she grew strawberries. “In fact, you always win …”

  Once they reached the small unplowed field, they sat on the splintered wooden bench and she poured a splash of cognac into their half-full teacups. Time passed and the day cooled off. They held hands and drank the slightly spiked tea, and Hunter tried to get Dominique to laugh at just one of his jokes with no success.