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it was only for a few weeks. When a Mid-Ak attack on ZAP was imminent, Hunter put her on a flight to safe Montreal. Then she disappeared.
    He was never the same. The yearning never stopped. There had been plenty of other women since for him. Sexual playmates all. But the thought of Dominique had stayed with him-a very private haunting since he last saw her.
    Once the helicopters and escorts landed back at
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    the Coos Bay base —which was known by all as PAAC-Oregon-Hunter immediately headed for the photo recon unit's very elaborate development lab. Although it was close to midnight, Hunter was glad to find the technicians still working on the infrared video image of the mysterious Soviet jets. It was a painstaking job. Working with a computer that Hunter had helped design, each enhancement of the image took several hours of calculations and programming.
    And each program produced another, more defined video image which had to be electronically "cleaned up," also a long process.
    The techs showed him what they had so far: they had been able to zoom in on the clearest image of the jet so much that they would soon be able to count the number of rivet spots on the jet's midsection. Once this number was established, it was a matter of calculating the overall size and weight of the plane, then using the additional information from Hunter's infrared camera to determine the heat displacement of the aircraft. The techs hoped to match up these figures with previously stored data on Soviet fighter aircraft and come up with a reasonable guess as to what kind of jet Hunter photographed that day. It was intelligence work at its best-long, arduous, but in the end, hopefully fruitful.
    The work looked promising but the technicians told him that a final determination was still about a day and a half away.
    He finally headed home. Though exhausted, he couldn't sleep. He found himself wandering around
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    his huge log cabin —a place he'd built himself. The house sat on a hill which overlooked both the base's runways and the Pacific Ocean. A twin-.50
    antiaircraft battery was located to one side of the structure, the spinning dish of one of the base's operations radar sat on the other. The lodge itself was crammed with radios, electronic gadgetry, a larger, fixed antenna capable of pulling in signals from all around the northern hemisphere when atmospheric conditions were right. Some nights Hunter would sit and listen to the radio traffic for hours, searching for any clue—like a sudden burst of radio chatter—that might tip an impending attack on America from the Soviets to the west.
    The house had no kitchen; he ate and drank at the base. But a well-stocked bar sat in the main living room. Close by was a huge fireplace that heated the structure all too well in the often-damp Oregon climate. Two of the rooms were filled with his books, their topics ranging from advanced aeronautical design to theories on setting zone defenses in basketball. Another room was reserved for weekly poker games at which he hosted the likes of Dozer, The Cobra Brothers, the Ace Wrecking Company pilots, Captain Frost and anyone else with a week's pay to lose. Still another, more private, room featured a waterbed whose dimensions approached those of an aircraft carrier, plus a single control switch which dimmed the lights and activated a continuous tape loop of sweet, electronic music.
    On top of the house he had built a turret in which he installed a moderately powerful telescope. On clear nights he could be found studying the cosmos 45
    through its lens. It was usually an exercise in wishful thinking for him. The most ironic day in his life was the Christmas Eve he arrived at Cape Canaveral to begin training as a pilot for the Space Shuttle, only to find that the Soviets had launched a devastating nerve gas attack on Western Europe and that his F-16 squadron was being activated. Although he had missed the chance to pilot the space ship—just one more thing he