Snyman ran over at a crouch to avoid stray gunfire. “What’s wrong?”
“Look at that! Barely a dent!” Nikoskelainen was exaggerating, but not much. “That charge should have knocked a hole in a battleship!”
“What if we used two charges for every silo?” Snyman asked.
“Then we’d have two dents, not one. Damn! Frosty damn!”
“Well, if they try to fire while we’re here, we can just pitch in a charge when they open the covers.” Snyman keyed his wrist mount. “Assault three point Akita. Break. Snyman here. Change in plan. It looks like we’re staying.”
Earth orbit
ABOARD THE HENDRIK PIENAAR, JANKOWSKIE WHISTLED. “l NEVER
realized how big it was.”
Floating in a stationary orbit 455 kilometers over central Honshu, the modules of huge Yamato Station were the dockyards for Earth’s spacebome traffic.
“What do they have berthed there?” Vereshchagin asked. “Two corvettes, one frigate, and the battle cruiser Mikasa. Also a bunch of merchant ships that I don’t think we need to worry about.”
“Are there other warships that we need to take notice of?” “There are two corvettes flying patterns down low over eastern Siberia. Everything else is at least three or four hours away.”
From the seat next to him, Senior Communications Sergeant Poikolainnen looked up. “They’re beginning to signal us, sir.” The men on the station obviously recognized the ship approaching them as Maya. Unfortunately, Jankowskie could not transmit the ship’s identification code, which remained locked away in a part of the ship’s data base that not even Timo Haerkoennen had been able to crack open.
Once they responded to sound and visual contact from the station, they would be hard-pressed to maintain their masquerade. There was, however, a gambit to try. “Flashing docking lights,” Jankowskie said. Slowly, he began flashing in Morse code the message that the ship had suffered complete communications failure and was requesting permission to dock and await repairs. As the seconds ticked by interminably, communications from the station increased.
“Continue to pretend that we cannot hear them,” Vereshchagin directed. “The next moment or two will be interesting.”
The space station’s duty officer only had a few minutes left to come to a decision. The closer the ship came, the less time the station had to react to an attack.
“Sir, they’re flashing lights back at us. They are asking us to hold position,” Esko Poikolainnen reported.
“Keep coming at a steady speed. Tell them that we have injured men aboard,” Vereshchagin directed.
Minutes passed.
“Sir, they are acknowledging,” Poikolainnen said. “They are telling us to dock in berth two.”
Jankowskie exhaled a sigh of relief. “Fourteen minutes, twenty-five seconds and counting.”
Vereshchagin nodded, imperceptibly. “Begin speeding up when we are twenty-eight thousand meters out. I believe that the correct naval term is ‘flank speed.’ Fire at twenty-five thousand meters. Advise Raul that that is when he should cut free and engage ground targets. I believe that we can handle the corvettes.”
“The Japanese call unsettling events ‘shocks.’ What do you think they will call this one?” Paul Henke asked.
“The Vereshchagin Shock,” Jankowskie volunteered.
“They would never be able to pronounce it,” Vereshchagin said. “This will be the ‘Suid-Afrika Shock.’ ”
At fifteen kilometers out, the Hendrik Pienaar simultaneously sent a stream of charged particles to disrupt the station’s laser batteries and launched a cloud of missiles, including one with a nuclear tip. Altering its vector, the ship began angling away from the station at high speed as the corvette Lightwell Gomani broke free and began descending into Earth’s atmosphere.
Impelled by its rocket motor and the frigate’s velocity, the nuclear missile struck Yamato Station squarely two minutes and nineteen seconds later. A few fractions of a second later, the fusion bottle that powered the station lost its integrity and an explosion eddied through the space where the station had been.
“Inasmuch as we are still alive,” Vereshchagin said a moment later, “we must compliment Lieutenant Reinikka’s calculations.”
“We have suffered severe damage, especially to our sensors,” Jankowskie said, reading off his boards.
“Is this anything we can repair?”
Jankowskie shook his head. “Not really.”
“Then we ought to see about those two corvettes without further delay.”
As the Hendrik Pienaar moved out, Jankowskie paused to torch seven communications satellites along the way.
The New Akasaki Prince Hotel, Tokyo
AT 8:30, COLDEWE TOOK THE JOURNALISTS OUT ON THE ROOF OF
the New Akasaki Prince Hotel and suggested that they look up at the sky.
“What are we looking for?” one of them asked, craning his neck.
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
Coidewe continued discussing the reasons impelling the expeditionary force’s actions while the reporters taped him and improvised commentary. Between questions, he taught them verses to “The Whistling Pig.” As Vereshchagin had recognized years ago, Coidewe made good copy.
Suddenly, one of the four exclaimed, “Look at that!” For a brief instant a bright light flared in the cloudless sky.
Monitoring the communications traffic with one ear, Coidewe said, “That used to be Yamato Station.”
“There were hundreds of technicians there!” the Asahi man exclaimed.
“At the Academy, I was taught that lessons should be beaten into a pupil’s head. Other operations are in progress. In fifteen minutes, you may begin transmitting if you wish to do so.”
In the room below, Corporal Zerebtsov occupied himself by telephoning the banks and government offices on his list and making very realistic bomb threats in hoarse Japanese. He capped off his efforts with a call to the police to report that six armed terrorists were about to seize the Meiji Jingu Shrine. The shrine, built to honor the Emperor Meiji who ended the Tokugawa Shogunate and opened Japan to the world, was a national treasure packed with tourists. It was, of course, several kilometers away from where the real action was taking place.
While Zerebtsov was making calls, the bombs that Meagher and Prigal had set in various wards of the city began going off over a ten-minute span of time. In all, police officers manning neighborhood police boxes reported sixteen explosions followed by the ominous sounds of small-arms fire.
At the same time, Narita Airport, located about thirty kilometers east of Tokyo, was rocked by a series of explosive devices that Lebedyev had dropped from his Sparrow near the runways during the night. Even though the explosions didn’t damage anything, noise and billowing clouds of smoke caused a modest panic. Like the other explosions and threats, this aspect of Vereshchagin’s deception plan attracted its share of attention from the police, who already had their hands full with Gyohten’s assassination.
The Daikichi Sanwa Bank, Tokyo
AT 8:40, TOXIC GAS BEGAN GUSHING INTO THE AIR-CIRCULATION
system of the giant Daikichi Sanwa Bank. Crawling out from under a tarp on the roof, Haerkoennen and Redzup cautiously entered the building.
“Lock the doors. I’ll meet you at the trading desk,” Haerkoennen told Redzup.
Redzup rode the elevator to the ground level. Ignoring the limp bodies around him, including one unfortunate delivery boy, he grabbed the building keys from a guard who was slumped over and locked the front and back doors, pausing only to slap a sign across each door which read, “Temporarily closed by order of the Ministry of Health. Please excuse the inconvenience.”
When he reached the stock-trading desk, Haerkoennen was already sitting in a dead man’s chair furiously entering code. A window on the monitor in front of him was flashing the characters for “next transaction.”
“Eureka,” Haerkoennen said in a voice made tinny by the respirator he was
wearing. “We’re in. All right, financial wizard, give me a hand here.”
Redzup smiled and pulled up a chair. “Well, the first thing we have to get around will be the safeguards they built in to keep employees from generating trillion-yen transactions.” “I’m working on that now,” Haerkoennen said, executing keystrokes. He winked. “Piece of cake.”
Central Tokyo
AT 8:49, THE GAS CYLINDERS HIDDEN IN THE MINISTRIES OF EDUCA-
tion, Finance, and International Trade and Industry hissed into life. Within minutes, the air-circulation and overpressure systems carried the gas to every comer of the three buildings.
At 8:52, two blocks away, Meagher’s and de Kantzow’s minivans circled the massive Ministry of Security Building for the second time.
Prigal eyed the two armed guards lounging outside the entrance and muttered, “I hope this thing is built good.” With his free hand, he put his face shield on and pulled a section of composite matting across his body.
Checking one last time to make sure that the equipment was securely stowed and the body of the policeman was as tightly wedged against the privacy partition as he could manage, Meagher looked at the other five troopers in back and said, “Tuck and brace, squirts! Let’s go, Prigal, ganbarimashoV' Then he leaned over and grabbed his knees to cushion himself.
As he brought his minivan abreast of the ministry, Prigal whipped the steering wheel around, gunned the engine, and drove at full speed straight for the doors. One of the guards mistakenly stepped in front to try to wave him off and was carried like a broken rag doll into the interior of the building.
Prigal ran the van through a security checkpoint, killing two more guards before he finally stopped in the center of the hall. As he did so, DeKe de Kantzow’s blue minivan came crashing through the hole in the door and whipped around to face the other way. The men inside the two minis came pouring out the back and expertly shot up every blackleg in sight exactly as they had done in rehearsals in the mock-up aboard ship.
Gamely, Prigal threw the composite matting aside, scattering fragments of the windshield, and fired half a magazine from his submachine gun at a startled security major who had just raised a finger to admonish him. Within seconds, Meagher’s men had cleared the hall and secured the exits.
Pausing beside the buckled driver’s door, Miinalainen reached through the broken window. Grasping Prigal by the collar, the big man pulled him free.
It was the sort of work that required iron nerve and left no margin for thought, which was the reason that Vereshchagin had selected Prigal.
While de Kantzow’s team covered the main entrance and the main stairwell, Kaarlo Toemvaenen’s team tossed gas grenades and a scattering of antipersonnel devices into the fire escapes. Yelenov’s team began clearing the rooms on the entry level. With little time for niceties, after Miinalainen put an 88mm round through the door, Kiiponos tossed in a half-kilogram charge to make sure anyone inside stayed there. A blackleg who tried to short-circuit the process ended up with a bellyful from Yelenov’s s-mortar.
An elevator grounded and a blackleg major emerged brandishing a pistol in either hand. Confronting Danny Meagher, he put one round through Meagher’s arm and bounced another one off Meagher’s body armor. Meagher calmly shot him four times in the body and twice in the face.
As Yelenov’s people began work on the near side, one curious pedestrian stuck his head through the hole that Prigal’s van had made. Although the trooper guarding the door refrained from shooting him, he was accidentally ignited by the back-blast from Miinalainen’s venturi.
Seconds later, the ready platoon of blacklegs came boiling up out of the first basement level. They ran into a hail of grenades and machine gun fire from de Kantzow, who began swearing in three languages. Meagher immediately diverted men to clean out that level.
After Miinalainen expertly ricochetted three 88mm antipersonnel rounds cut with a time delay around the comer of the staircase, DeKe de Kantzow stripped a twenty-kilogram satchel charge off little Ketlinsky’s back and hurled it down the stairs. The resulting explosion caused the earthquake-proof building to quiver. Filthy DeKe’s team descended to mop up and seal off the second and third basement levels.
As the gas in the stairwells began drifting into the building’s upper levels, the riflemen covering the steps gunned down fugitives. Dirkie Rousseaux got three men with wet towels over their faces.
Meanwhile, Ketlinsky, momentarily distracted from his main mission, finally located the main power cables running underneath the floor. Hauling a rucksack with a thirty-kilogram shaped charge out of his van, he planted it and made the building rock again as the directed force of the explosion knifed through the armored floor and into the basement, cutting power. As the broken cables hissed and sparked, the window-less building’s lights and power went down, and the alarms that had been going off since Prigal crashed the door finally stopped ringing.
Seconds later, the auxiliary generators began to hum. Automatic fuses reset, and the lights flickered back on. Ketlinsky pushed a dead guard away from the security switchboard. Exposing a length of cable, he attached an electronic device to it and touched it off. Seconds later, an enormous power surge ruptured the auxiliary system and plunged the building back into darkness.
As the lights went down for good, de Kantzow yelled, “There’s a whole frosting company down here, and some of them made it into masks! Give me more frosting firepower!”
“Okay, DeKe.” Meagher looked around. So far, Kirponos was the only casualty, and Miinalainen was using the brief respite to bandage his neck and arm.
“Kaarlo, I’m leaving you four men and the machine guns to hold this level. Keep an eye out for Kokovtsov and Thomas. The rest of you squirts come along.” He shouldered a bergen full of demolition equipment and headed down the steps. “Remember, the biggest rats are in the deepest holes.”
MEANWHILE, ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE MITI BUILDING, ABDULLAH
Salchow waited a minute or two for the gas to take effect and then hurried down to the tenth floor, shooting the two men he encountered who were capable of movement. With barely a glance at the corpses in the cubicles, Salchow pulled timed incendiary charges out of his rucksack and scattered them in corners. Running up the steps to the top floor on adrenaline, he hurriedly booby-trapped the four stairwells and slapped shaped charges on the wall above the elevator doors to cut through the cables.
As the elevator cars began dropping one by one into the basement and fire began to take hold on the tenth floor, Salchow took his flak launcher out of the closet and went out on the roof to provide Meagher with covering fire.
Spotting a traffic-control helicopter, he waited for his two compatriots on the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Finance buildings to announce that they were ready, then thumbed his wrist mount. “Recon point four-two and five-two. Break. Abdullah here. Ready. First copter’s mine.”
So saying, he shot the traffic helicopter out of the sky. Moments later, a second launcher on top of the Education Ministry took down a second police helicopter.
Salchow relaxed for the first time. With interlocking fields of fire and access to the tops of the ministries restricted, the three recon troopers were in a position to make life very miserable for the police for the next fifteen minutes or so.
“Recon point four-two and five-two. Abdullah here again. I hear sirens. Keep me covered. I’m going out to snipe at the cops in the street for a few minutes to let them know they’re not wanted.”
Tokyo Central Station, Tokyo
AT 9:01, RESIT AKSU PLACED HIMSELF FIRST IN LINE AT THE FOOT
of the escalator leading to heliport 1. On the pad above, a tilt-rotor that differed only slightly from its military counterpart was disgorging the twenty passengers it had picked up at Narita Airport and preparing to take on twenty more for the return trip.
Aksu passed through the detector. The security guards and the clerk checking tickets waved him on with barely a glance at the wrist mount on hi
s left wrist. As the escalator carried him to the top of the station, he punched a button on his wrist mount and stuck a hand into an interior pocket. When he passed the attendant who was greeting passengers as they boarded, Aksu pulled the pin on a plastic incapacitation grenade and flipped it on the ground behind him. The passengers behind him collapsed. As blue dust wafted in all directions, the horrified guard at the bottom shut off the escalator as the people on it began tilting over like a row of dominoes.
A second or two later, tiny explosions triggered by Aksu’s wrist mount erupted on two concourses. Smoke and tear gas leaking from ruptured trash bins caused pandemonium.
Dropping to the floor of the aircraft to feign unconsciousness, Aksu tossed a second incapacitation grenade forward to make sure of the plane’s crew. The pilot fell forward onto his instrument panel; the copilot, who was starting to come back to see what the problem was, reeled sideways and dropped into a row of seats.
Alerted by Aksu’s signal, a Sparrow appeared a moment later and touched down lightly beside the tilt-rotor. Followed by Kokovtsov, Thomas sprang from the small plane and fired snap shots that dropped two security guards who were just coming over to take a look. While Aksu gently deposited the pilot and copilot on the pad, Kokovtsov prepared for takeoff and Thomas lit a smoke candle to cover their departure. Two minutes and eleven seconds after Aksu popped the first gas grenade, the tilt-rotor took off with Kokovtsov at the controls. Twenty minutes later, security personnel and medical crews were still sorting through the confusion inside Tokyo Station.
Subway police quickly interviewed seventeen eyewitnesses and obtained fourteen statements that bore a slight and largely accidental relationship to what had actually transpired. Before other events attracted attention, the police called the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Security to ask why uniformed military personnel had borrowed an airplane and left one of their own behind.
The response by officials at the MoD can best be described as incredulous. The phones at the Ministry of Security kept ringing.
Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02] Page 35