“So no one but Hideki Suma can launch the Kaiten Project,” Stacy said in relieved surprise.
“A situation his henchmen are working like hell to correct,” answered Meeker. He glanced around at the MAIT team. “But congratulations are still in order, you pulled off a winner. Your efforts effectively shut down the Dragon Center, causing the Japanese to reprogram their prime and detonate systems, and giving us enough time to put together a plan to destroy it once and for all.”
“Which, if I’m not sidetracking your lecture,” said Pitt quietly, “brings us back to Dennings’ Demons.”
“You’re quite right,” acknowledged Meeker. He hesitated while he sat on a desk. Then he began cutting toward the heart of the briefing. “The President was willing to lay his political life on the line and sanction a nuclear strike against the Dragon Center. But he called it off when word came of your escape. Your operation bought him some time, not much, but enough to accomplish what we’ve planned in the few hours we’ve got left.”
“You figure on setting off the bomb inside the B-Twenty-nine,” Pitt said, his eyes half closed in weariness.
“Not exactly.” Meeker sighed. “It will have to be removed and placed a short distance away.”
“Damned if I can see what damage it will cause to an island almost forty kilometers away,” Giordino muttered.
“A group of the finest oceanographers and geophysicists in the business think that an underwater atomic blast can take out the Dragon Center.”
“I’d like to know how,” Stacy said as she swatted at a mosquito that had found one of her bare knees.
Meeker refaced the blackboard. “Major Dennings could not have known, of course, that his aircraft crashed into the sea and fell to the seafloor close to a perfect location to remove a serious threat to his country forty-eight years later.” He paused and drew another jagged line that traveled under the sea bottom from the plane to Soseki Island and then curved southward. “A section of a major Pacific seismic fault system. It travels almost directly beneath the Dragon Center.”
Nogami shook his head doubtfully. “The center was constructed to withstand a major earthquake and a nuclear strike. Exploding an old atomic bomb, providing it can still detonate after five decades under saltwater, to cause a shift in the fault would prove a wasted effort.”
“Dr. Nogami has a sound argument,” said Pitt. “The island is almost solid rock. It won’t sway and shift during a heavy shock wave.”
Meeker said nothing for a moment, only smiled. Then he swung the axe. “No, it won’t sway and shift,” he repeated with a fiendish smile, “but it will sink.”
63
ABOUT FIFTY KILOMETERS northeast of Sheridan, Wyoming, as the crow flies, just south of the Montana border, Dan Keegan sat on a buckskin quarter horse searching for signs of trespassing hunters. While washing up for supper he had heard the distant rumble of two gunshots and immediately told his wife to put his fried chicken in the oven to warm. Then he gathered up an old Mauser bolt-action rifle and saddled up his favorite riding horse.
Hunters who ignored his fences and no-trespassing warning signs were a constant source of irritation to Keegan. Less than two months back a stray shot had dropped one of his herd’s calves. The hunter had fired at a six-point buck and missed, his bullet carrying over a slight rise and striking the calf almost two kilometers distant. Since then, Keegan wanted no part of hunters. They could just damn well shoot on somebody else’s property.
Keegan followed a trail that ran along Hanging Woman Creek. He never knew where the name came from. The only woman he recalled being hanged in Wyoming was Ella Watson, known as “Cattle Kate.” Prominent ranchers under the guise of vigilantes had strung her up for rustling in 1889. But that event occurred along the Sweetwater River, three hundred kilometers to the southwest.
The rays of the setting sun were intensified by the biting cold air, painting the surrounding hills in glowing yellow-orange tones. He came out onto a flat plain and began studying the ground. Keegan quickly picked up the tire tracks, following them from a spent shell casing to a rash of booted footprints and a pool of blood soaking the sandy soil. The hunters and their fallen game were gone.
He was too late and mad as hell. To drive a car on his range, the trespassers must have either cut his fence or shot off the lock on the gate across his private road leading to the highway. It would be dark soon. He decided to wait until morning to send one of his ranch hands to ride fence and check the gate. He mounted up and turned the horse for home.
After riding a short distance, he reined up.
The wind carried the faint sound of an automobile engine. He cupped one ear and listened. Instead of retreating as he thought the hunters had done, the sound grew louder. Someone was approaching. He urged the horse up the slope of a small mesa and scanned the flatland below. A vehicle was speeding up the road, trailing a cloud of dust.
He expected to see a pickup truck or a four-wheel-drive emerge from the brush bordering the road. When it finally came close enough to recognize, Keegan was surprised to see it was an ordinary car, a brown four-door sedan, a Japanese make.
The driver soon braked and stopped at an open spot in the road. The car sat there for a few moments as the dust drifted over the roof and settled onto the range grass. The driver slipped from behind the wheel and opened the hood and leaned under for a few moments. Next he walked around to the rear of the car, raised the trunk lid, and lifted out a surveyor’s transit. Keegan watched in curiosity as the intruder set the transit on a tripod and aimed the lens at several prominent landmarks, jotting down the distance readings on a clipboard and comparing them on a geological map that he spread on the ground.
Keegan was experienced with a transit himself, and he’d never seen a survey conducted like this. The stranger seemed more interested in merely confirming his location than in establishing a baseline. He watched as the man casually tossed the clipboard into the underbrush and stepped to the front of the car and stared at the engine again as if hypnotized by it. Only when he seemed to shake himself from his thoughts did he reach inside the car and pull out a rifle.
Keegan had seen enough to know the trespasser was acting too strange for a county surveyor who was out to shoot a little game on the side, and certainly not while dressed in a business suit and knotted tie. He rode his horse closer, coming up quietly behind the stranger, who was intent on trying to insert a shell into the rifle, an act that seemed foreign to him. He didn’t hear Keegan approach from his rear. Any sound from the hooves of the horse was muffled by the soft earth and dry grass. Keegan reined in when he was only eight meters away and eased the Mauser from a leather case tied to his saddle.
“You know you’re trespassin’, mister?” he said, resting the gun in the crook of one arm.
The driver of the brown car jumped and wheeled around, dropping a shell and banging the gun barrel on the door. Only then did Keegan recognize him as an Asian.
“What do you want?” the startled man demanded.
“You’re on my property. How did you get in here?”
“The gate was open.”
It was as Keegan thought. The hunters he’d missed had forced the gate. “What are you doin’ with a surveyor’s transit? Who do you work for? You with the government?”
“No… I’m an engineer with Miyata Communications.” The English was heavily Japanese-accented. “We’re scouting a site to set up a relay station.”
“Don’t you fellas ever get permission before you run around private property? How in hell do you know I’ll let you build one?”
“My superiors should have contacted you.”
“Damn right,” Keegan muttered. He was anxious to return home for supper before daylight faded. “Now you better move along, mister. And the next time you want to drive on my land, you ask first.”
“I deeply regret any inconvenience.”
Keegan was a pretty good judge of character and could tell by the man’s voice he wasn’t the leas
t bit sorry. His eyes warily kept focusing on Keegan’s Mauser, and he seemed edgy.
“You plan on doing any shootin’?” Keegan nodded at the highpowered rifle the man still awkwardly gripped in one hand, muzzle wavering toward the darkening sky,
“Target shooting only.”
“Well, I can’t allow that. I have cattle roamin’ this section. I’d appreciate it if you’d pack up your gear and leave by the way you came in.”
The intruder acted agreeable. He quickly broke down the surveyor’s transit and tripod, placing them in the trunk of the car. The rifle he placed in the back seat. Then he came around to the front of the car and peered under the open hood.
“The engine is not running properly.”
“Will it start?” Keegan asked.
“I believe so.” The Japanese surveyor leaned in the window and turned the ignition key. The engine fired and idled smoothly. “I go,” he announced.
Keegan failed to notice the hood was lowered but not latched. “Do me a favor and close and wrap the chain around the gate behind you.”
“I will gladly do so.”
Keegan threw him a wave, slipped the Mauser back in its case, and began riding off toward his ranch house, a good four kilometers away.
Suburo Miwa gunned the engine, turned the car around, and headed down the road. Meeting up with the rancher in such desolate country was unforeseen, but in no way jeopardized his mission. As soon as he put two hundred meters between the car and Keegan, Miwa suddenly slammed on the brakes, leaped out, snatched the gun from the back seat and raised the hood.
Keegan heard the engine revolutions die and he turned and stared over his shoulder, wondering why the car had abruptly halted.
Miwa held the gun tightly in sweating palms and aimed the muzzle until it was only a few centimeters from the compressor of the air conditioner. He had volunteered for this suicidal mission without reservation when asked because he felt it was an honor to give his life for the new empire. Other considerations were his loyalty to the Gold Dragons, the promise made by Korori Yoshishu himself that his wife would be well taken care of financially for the rest of her life, and the guarantee his three sons would be accepted and funded through the finest university of their choice. The inspiring words of Yoshishu as Miwa departed for the United States ran through his mind one last time.
“You are sacrificing for the future of a hundred million of your country’s men and women. Your family will honor you for untold generations. Your success is their success.”
Miwa pulled the trigger.
64
IN A MILLISECOND, Miwa, Keegan, the car, and the horse were vaporized. An enormous brilliance of yellow light flashed and then became white as it burst across the rolling ranch land. The shock wave followed like a vast invisible tidal wave. The fireball expanded and seemed to grow and lift from the ground like the sun rising over the horizon.
Once the fireball broke free of the ground and surged into the sky, it became fused with the clouds and turned purple from glowing radiation. It sucked behind a great swirling stem of radioactive soil and debris that soon formed into a mushroom cloud that soared to thirteen kilometers, only to eventually fall wherever the winds carried the pulverized dust.
The only loss of human life was Keegan and Miwa. Scores of rabbits, prairie dogs, snakes, and twenty of Keegan’s cattle were killed, most of them by the shock wave. Four kilometers away, Mrs. Keegan and three hired hands suffered only cuts from flying glass. The hills shielded the buildings from the worst of the blast, and except for a few shattered windows, there was little damage.
The fiery explosion left behind a huge crater a hundred meters wide and thirty meters deep. The dry brush and range grass ignited and began to spread in a great circle, adding black smoke to the brown dust cloud.
The dying shock wave echoed through the hills and canyons. It shook houses and swayed trees in the small surrounding cattle and farm towns before rumbling over the Custer battlefield at the Little Bighorn, 112 kilometers to the north.
In a truck stop outside Sheridan an Asian man stood beside a rental car, ignoring the people talking excitedly and wildly gesturing toward the rising mushroom cloud in the distance. He peered intently through binoculars trained on the cloud that had risen out of the evening gloom and was now high enough to be illuminated by the glow of the sun fallen below the horizon.
Slowly he lowered the glasses and walked to a nearby telephone booth. He inserted a coin, dialed a number, and waited. He spoke a few soft words in Japanese and hung up. Then, without even a glance at the cloud boiling through the upper atmosphere, he got in his car and drove off.
The blast was recorded at seismograph stations located around the world. The closest to the epicenter was the National Earthquake Center on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. The seismographic tracings abruptly bounded back and forth across the graph recorders, alerting geophysicist Clayton Morse to an earth movement as he was about to knock off for the day and drive home.
He frowned and then ran the data through a computer. While his eyes remained locked on the computer monitor, he dialed Roger Stevenson, the director of the center, who had called in sick that day.
“Hello.”
“Roger?”
“Yes, speaking.”
“God, you sound terrible. I didn’t recognize your voice.”
“The flu has really knocked me out.”
“Sorry to bug you, but we just received a strike.”
“California?”
“No, the epicenter is somewhere around the Wyoming-Montana border.”
There was a brief silence. “Odd, that area is hardly classed as an active quake zone.”
“This one is artificial.”
“Explosion?”
“A big one. From what I can tell on the intensity scale, this one reads like it’s nuclear.”
“God,” Stevenson muttered weakly, “are you sure?”
“Who can be sure about these things,” said Morse.
“The Pentagon never held tests in that part of the country.”
“They haven’t alerted us to any underground testing either.”
“Not like them to conduct testing without alerting us.”
“What do you think? Should we check it out with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?”
Stevenson may have been laid low with the flu, but his mind was perfectly healthy. “Leapfrog the system and go to the top. Call Hank Sauer, our mutual friend at the National Security Agency, and find out what in hell is going on.”
“And if Sauer won’t tell?” asked Morse.
“Who cares? The main thing is we’ve dumped the mystery in his lap, and now we can go on watching for the next big one due in California.”
Sauer didn’t tell what he didn’t know. But he recognized a national emergency when he heard one. He asked Morse for additional data and immediately passed on the information to the Director of Central Intelligence.
The President was aboard Air Force One flying to a political fund-raising dinner in San Francisco when he received the call from Jordan.
“What’s the situation?”
“We have reports of a nuclear explosion in Wyoming,” answered Jordan.
“Damn!” the President cursed under his breath. “Ours or theirs?”
“Certainly not ours. It has to be one of the bomb cars.”
“Any word of casualties?”
“Negligible. The blast took place in a lightly populated part of the state, mostly ranch land.”
The President was fearful of posing the next question. “Are there indications of additional explosions?”
“No, sir. At the moment, the Wyoming blast is the only one.”
“I thought the Kaiten Project was on hold for forty-eight hours.”
“It is,” Jordan said firmly. “There hasn’t been enough time for them to reprogram the codes.”
“How do you see it, Ray?”
“I’ve talked to Percy Nash.
He thinks the bomb was detonated on site with a high-powered rifle.”
“By a robot?”
“No, a human.”
“So the kamikaze phenomenon is not dead.”
“It would seem so.”
“Why this suicidal tactic now?” asked the President.
“Probably a warning. They’re reasonably certain that we have Suma, and they’re hedging their bets by trying to fake us out of a nuclear strike while they desperately struggle to reprogram the detonation codes for the entire system.”
“They’re doing a darn good job of it.”
“We’re sitting in the driver’s seat, Mr. President. We now have every excuse in the world to retaliate with a nuclear strike.”
“All too true, but what solid proof do you have that the Kaiten Project isn’t operational? The Japs might have pulled off a minor miracle and replaced the codes. Suppose they’re not bluffing?”
“We have no hard evidence,” Jordan admitted.
“If we launch a warhead missile on Soseki Island and the Dragon Center controllers detect its approach, their final act will be to signal the bomb cars to be detonated before the robots can drive them to isolated destinations around the country.”
“A horrible thought, Mr. President. Made even more so by the known locations of the bomb cars. Most of them are hidden in and around metropolitan cities.”
“Those cars must be found and their bombs neutralized as quickly and quietly as possible. We can’t afford to have this horror leak to the public, not now.”
“The FBI has sent an army of agents out in the field to make a sweep.”
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