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he was probably as Russian as his name indicated, where he came from was still a mystery. One rumor had it that he was a major in the Soviet KGB before the war. Another said Viktor was part of the so-called Peace Committee that had imposed the bogus New Order on the hoodwinked American populace. Either way, it made him a mortal enemy of Hunter's.
    Now this Viktor character was said to be calling the shots and that the other members of The Circle were listening. One thing that gave him his power was money. Apparently Viktor had a lot of it. One of The Circle's first actions was to put a bounty on Hunter's head. But the group also had amassed great quantities of military supplies, spending freely on the wild and dangerous arms black market in South America and in parts of Soviet-occupied Europe.
    But what was worse, Fitz had told Hunter that The Circle was actually starting to manufacture weapons. This was very disturbing news. In the past, since The New Order came to force, the warring factions on the American continent relied on armaments left over from the pre-war days and not destroyed in the similarly bogus "disarmament" frenzy that swept the continent after "peace"
    was restored. Because a lot of equipment was destroyed, there was a limited amount to go around —a blessing really, as it imposed a kind 41
    of finite cap on the number of weapons available on the continent. The costs of these weapons also made buying them on the black market an expensive proposition. But now, if The Circle started making new weapons, this delicate
    "arms control" balance would be dangerously upset. According to Fitzgerald, the weapons being made by The Circle were presently limited to imitation M-16s and ammunition. But he knew, as did Hunter, that it was only a matter of time before The Circle moved into making more sophisticated armaments.
    So Hunter saw two problems: the bizarreness that seemed to be sweeping the countryside and the obvious rise of the dangerous Circle. Maybe St. Louie was right. Maybe the whole fucking continent was becoming haunted . . .
    But even with all of these reports troubling him, it was a more personal matter that, deep down, bothered him most. Before St. Louie and Fitz flew off at the end of the confab, to leapfrog into Free Canada for their refueling stop, Hunter had asked the Irishman if his spies had any word on Dominique.
    Ever since she had disappeared in Free Canada after a flight Hunter had put her on landed safely in Montreal, Fitz had assigned two of his best men to try to find the woman. Nearly two years had passed since, and they had come up with complete dead ends in all that time. Sadly, Fitzgerald had to report to Hunter once again that he had no news. Dominique was nowhere to be found.
    These troubles wrapped Hunter in a mental cold blanket that lasted the entire flight back. Dominique. Always his thoughts were absorbed with her. Hunter 42
    was a strikingly handsome young man; his looks, fittingly hawk-like in youth, were now more like an eagle as he reached his mid-20s. He was tall—taller than most pilots —and sported a shock of golden, sandy hair, usually worn long. He was a genius (first certified at the age of three), an athlete, had a sense of humor, though usually taken as quiet on first meeting. He had never experienced any trouble attracting women —from his days at MIT (where at 15, he was the youngest student ever admitted into that institution's aeronautical doctorate program) and before, all the way through his USAF and Thunderbird days. But no woman—before or since—had ever affected him like Dominique.
    They had met in a deserted French farmhouse where both had sought shelter during the wild days after the war had ended in Europe. They had spent one night together; he woke in the morning to find her gone. But later, she had come looking for him and found him at the ZAP base on Cape Cod. In what seemed to be a dream to him now, they had lived happily together at the base. But