Target: Point Zero Read Online Free PDF

me they are being paid handsomely. But if they get through us, there’ll be nothing to stop them between here and Siberia…”
    Hunter continued studying the photos. “I assume from your title that you have aircraft at your disposal too?”
    Orr laughed bitterly.
    “Well, that’s actually a joke in these parts,” he replied. “We took delivery on an attack squadron about two months ago. We were sure then that with air support, our troops would be able to throw the invaders back over the mountain. But a cruel ruse had been played on us, I’m afraid. Or perhaps it was of some nefarious design…”
    Hunter looked up at him. “What happened? The planes come with no engines?”
    Orr laughed again. “If only that was the problem.”
    He walked over to a file cabinet, retrieved a large brown envelope and tossed it onto the light table. A spread of photos came out. They were pictures of biplanes. Vintage stuff, from World War One and even earlier.
    “What the hell is this?” Hunter asked, almost laughing himself. “You didn’t actually buy these things, did you?”
    “My superiors hired agents who did,” Orr replied soberly. “You’re looking at what was bought for one hundred and sixty pounds of pure gold.”
    Hunter quickly studied all the photos. They showed six Fokker triplanes, two Spads and a Sopwith Camel, ancient flying machines which had fought in the Great War. The pictures themselves looked almost as old as the airplanes.
    “Who sold these to you?” he finally asked Orr.
    The Wehrenluftmeister smiled again, though grimly. He held up a smaller five by five photo; faded and blurry, it looked like it belonged on a wanted poster.
    “This man did,” he said to him, adding, “and if you are who you say you are, you know him, too.”
    Hunter took a long look. He knew him all right. The furrowed brow, the roadmap of a nose, the glint in his eyes revealing a born salesman. His name was Roy from Troy.

Four
    O NE HOUR LATER, HUNTER and Orr arrived at a small airfield outside the city.
    They had made the short trip from Clocks in Orr’s specially armored Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. Now the Wehrenluftmeister led Hunter to an unguarded warehouse located on the edge of the airfield’s single grass airstrip. It was a dark imposing building with a load of fake snow camouflage on the roof and about six feet of the real stuff on top of it. Orr unlocked the two huge doors and they walked inside. The place was unlit, deathly quiet—and clean. There was no smell of oil, grease or hydraulic fluid, no signs that any work, either maintenance or repair, had taken place inside the place in a long time, if ever.
    In the shadows, Hunter could see nine biplanes, lined up perfectly in a row. A gag insignia painted on the wall above them showed a circus-type pachyderm, standing on two legs waving a flag which read: Witen Proboscidietz-Platz Staffelizen. Almost literally: The White Elephant Squadron.
    Though there was hardly a reason to, Hunter was feeling guilty to a degree. He was quite familiar with Roy from Troy. He’d purchased a number of warplanes from the used airplane salesman just a few weeks ago, during the pivotal battle of Southeast Asia. Hunter knew Roy’s selling operations had spread around the world, but he was amazed they had made it all the way to this snowy little part of the planet. And while Roy had always done right by him, his methods were certainly “unorthodox”—now and in the past. It wasn’t beyond him to sell a bunch of seventy-year-old airplanes to a dot on the map called Clochenspieltz.
    But something inside Hunter was telling him there had to be more to it than that.
    Orr had dug out the contracts surrounding the airplane purchase. One thing in Roy’s defense, the agreement did call for “light aircraft to be used in strafing, scouting and recon operations, capable of operation from rough airfields, low on maintenance and good on gas.” The shadowy line of airplanes Hunter saw before him