It was an ambitious plan, and not without risk - though, as it turned out, most of those risks were political.
Project EarthFirst had been hotly debated on the floor of the United Nations. Some of the smaller countries unfriendly to the West had actually tried to stop the project through political pressure, debate, and even an oil embargo.
The actions of these rogue nations came to a head when an Iranian-backed terrorist group tried to sabotage the joint Japanese/French space launch. The bomb the terrorists planted at the launching pad was discovered before it detonated, and French security teams captured the terrorists and interrogated them.
Three days later, French warplanes and cruise missiles struck Tehran, slaughtering many high government officials and doing a considerable amount of damage to Iran's infrastructure.
The punitive actions taken by the French military frightened the rogue nations, and no further terrorist action was taken against Project EarthFirst. Even the debates in the UN General Assembly became more civil - if not more civilized.
In the end, when faced with extinction, most nations put aside their petty squabbles and pledged full cooperation. It was the closest thing to a united world as humanity had come, though it was far from a utopia.
As Dr. Mishra moved through Mir, shaking hands and listening to words of support and encouragement from scientists and cosmonauts from a half-dozen nations, he still harbored secret doubts.
As the swarm approached Earth, Dr. Mishra's observations revealed that there was something strange about the largest asteroid. It behaved like no other space rock recorded in the annals of astronomy. The asteroid moved when it shouldn't have. It spun for no apparent reason. And lately it had seemed to have developed a mind of its own.
Other scientists had explanations for the weird behavior, but none of their answers satisfied Dr. Mishra. The problem vexed him so much that in the last several days he'd even experienced a series of colorful nightmares - featuring a golden dragon with three heads on long, snakelike necks.
Sigmund Freud would have a field day with that image, the astrophysicist thought wryly.
Dr. Mishra pushed aside his misgivings as a handsome young Russian cosmonaut floated toward him, his right hand outstretched in greeting. Dr. Mishra was introduced to Captain Yuri Sheglova, chief cosmonaut aboard the Mir station.
The two men shook hands warmly.
* * *
At his office at Nellis, Colonel Krupp reviewed the daily information brief supplied to him each morning by the Pentagon.
Surprisingly, the news was almost all good.
The swarm of Kamacuras had been totally destroyed. Though the seeds of new creatures still fell out of the sky inside the swarm's meteors, teams of scientists had discovered a way to detect them on the ground. Trained soldiers retrieved the rocks that contained the alien DNA.
There were reports of a new outbreak of Kamacuras in South America, but the Chilean government seemed to have the situation well in hand. Images of tiny Cessna A-57 Dragonfly fighters bombing swarms of Kamacuras in the jungles were broadcast daily.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, Varan had disappeared just as suddenly as it had appeared. The strange airborne creature had not been seen since destroying an isolated village in the Sierra Madre.
Most kaijuologists suspected that Varan might have gone into hibernation once again, in some remote freshwater lake, or even under the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean.
Meanwhile, the flying creature that an Athabaskan shaman dubbed Rodan had taken refuge deep in the Canadian forests along the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg. All commercial and private boats and aircraft had been banned from the area.
Though there were fears that the kaiju would destroy all life in the lake or devastate the forest, Rodan had, thankfully, not taken any more human lives. For the present, the Canadian government was taking a "wait and see" attitude toward dealing with the creature.
Another bit of good news concerned Dr. Emiko Takado, one of the survivors of Godzilla's destruction of the Kongo-Maru. The young kaijuologist was recovering in a Tokyo hospital, and would be released in a few days. Colonel Krupp recalled meeting Dr. Takado - and her fiance, a famous Japanese photojournalist - at a scientific conference the previous year. He was happy that she was okay.
But the best news of all was that Godzilla had not been seen or heard from since the U.S. Navy's attack less than a week ago. While nobody was about to go out on a limb and say that Godzilla was dead, hopes were high.
So far, Godzilla's resurrection and possible destruction were still top-secret, pending confirmation of the kaiju's ultimate fate. Colonel Krupp was impressed that the military had kept a lid on Godzilla's third coming for this long, not to mention hiding the sea battle from the general public. That secret would end just as soon as one of those ships reached a U.S. port!
The colonel sat back in his chair and sighed.
Yes, Krupp thought with a warm glow of satisfaction, things are almost returning to normal...
* * *
In times of trouble, the vast majority of human beings rise to the occasion and do their best for themselves, their neighbors, and their fellow man.
Then there are those who stumble and fall in the face of adversity, not because they didn't try, but because they lacked the strength or tenacity to weather adversity.
Finally, there are those members of that tiny segment of humanity whose only concern is for themselves, who seek to profit from chaos and the suffering of their fellow humans through legal or illegal means.
Three such men were assembling on a tiny wooden pier in North Moose Lake - fifty nautical miles from Lake Winnipeg - just before daybreak on a foggy Saturday morning.
Mist still rose from the lake's surface as the men loaded a twin-engine seaplane with extra fuel, tools, guns and ammunition, and a few special provisions.
At the end of the pier, near a battered jeep Cherokee, a short, stocky man with bushy eyebrows watched the others. He was a French-Canadian ex-convict named Claude, and he was the pilot and leader of the group.
Claude grimaced and took another gulp from a tiny flask while the others loaded the aircraft. The seaplane, stolen by Claude a week before and hidden under a tarp here on North Moose Lake, bobbed in the calm waters.
Last night, before he went to bed, Claude painted over the serial numbers on the airplane. He didn't want to leave the authorities any clues in case his airplane was spotted.
"What's with the fishing stuff?" the youngest member of the group, a youth with shoulder-length blond hair and a fine beard, asked. He pointed to a couple of rods and reels, and some fishing tackle, piled haphazardly on the wooden dock.
The third man in the group, a hard-faced roughneck with bulging muscles and a tattoo of an anchor on each forearm, smiled. His grin revealed a gap from a missing front tooth.
"If we get caught by the Army, We tells them we were only hunting for a fishing spot, eh?" he explained.
The younger man grinned and nodded. "That's brilliant, man," he said, brushing his long hair from his face. The youth, a fugitive from the United States who had fled north after a failed bank robbery, looked at the muscular man in open admiration.
Unseen by the other two, Claude rolled his eyes.
Idiots, the French-Canadian thought. And how do you explain the automatic weapons? Do you tell the military you were going to hunt bears?
Claude was smart enough to know that if they were caught, no explanation they offered could possibly matter. The authorities weren't stupid. They would know just what Claude and his gang really were. Looters and pirates.
When the aircraft was loaded, Claude crossed the pier and closed the baggage compartment. Then he climbed into the cabin and checked the instruments one last time before starting the engines. As the propellers caught and began to spin, the other two men clambered aboard, arguing over who would get the front seat. The tattooed man won.
Just as the sun was breaking over a tall Line of pines, the twin-eng
ine aircraft raced across North Moose Lake and struggled into the sky like a bloated seabird. As the airplane lifted off, the whine of its overworked engines dislodged another predator from its nest. A hawk rose from the forest and took to the air.
"Man," the youth whistled from the back seat. "We barely made if off the ground."
The muscular man was too busy finishing the contents of Claude's flask to hear his friend.
Claude smiled. This aircraft is much too heavy, and it will be even heavier when we are done looting, he thought. Fortunately, I have a plan.
Claude glanced at the muscular man sitting next to him, and gauged his weight at over two hundred pounds. Dead weight, he thought, chuckling.
"What's so funny?" the tattooed man said in a surly voice.
"I am thinking of the booze I can buy with the loot we are going to steal," Claude replied. The other two men laughed, too.
Claude banked the plane sharply and headed for Lake Winnipeg's western shore. The town of Grand Rapids and the brand-new luxury resort hotel at Long Point had both been hastily evacuated by Canadian authorities after Rodan arrived.
Ripe for the picking, Claude thought. And good places to start. Later we can move down the coast and hit some of the smaller communities.
Claude had heard that there were people living on the shores of Lake Winnipeg who refused to be moved. They had remained behind to protect their homes and property.
Well, he shrugged, that is why I brought the guns and these two louts along. Claude didn't like to dirty his hands with messy things like murder.
As the aircraft flew over the rugged landscape, the pontoons brushed against the tops of some tall pine trees. Inside the cockpit, the youth in the back seat yelped fearfully. "Can't you fly this hunk of junk any higher?" the young man cried.
Claude shook his head. "The Canadian Army has banned all flights in this area," he replied. "They are afraid that the giant bird will take to the air again. I am flying low to avoid their search radar.
"Yeah," the tattooed man added. "Yesterday the government threw out of the country a British reporter who tried to get aerial photos of Rodan! Were livin' in a state of emergency, kid!"
Indeed we are, Claude thought as he deftly guided the aircraft through valleys and between trees. But at least they aren't shooting looters... yet.
Because he had to fly so low, and zigzag so much to avoid hitting trees, the flight to Lake Winnipeg took almost forty-five minutes. Finally the airplane broke from between two hills and swooped over Winnipeg's tranquil waters. Still, Claude kept the airplane flying at a low altitude and close to the coast. He didn't want to be spotted by the military.
"How's it feel to be a pirate, kid?" the tattooed man asked the youth. "Just like Long John Silver, eh?"
The American looked puzzled. "You mean that guy who sells fish and chips is a pirate?" he asked.
The tattooed man shook his head. "You're thinkin' of Arthur Treacher's," he replied.
"Shut up!" Claude cried. "I'm trying to fly the airplane." These idiots are giving me a headache.
The two men sank into a stony silence. They both feared the fiery French-Canadian man.
The aircraft flew on and dipped lower, until the pontoons were almost skimming the surface of the lake. In the distance, Claude could see the gray line of a deserted highway.
"Give me that map," he demanded. The tattooed man reached for the folded paper between them. But before he could retrieve the map, he was interrupted by a startled cry from the backseat. He turned and saw it too.
Struck dumb, the tattooed man reached out and grabbed Claude's shoulder. The French-Canadian man was taken by surprise and lost control of the aircraft for an instant.
"Don't do that when I'm flying!" Claude barked angrily. But the tattooed man's hand didn't leave his shoulder. Instead, his grip tightened.
Irritated, Claude turned and looked behind him. That's when he saw a gigantic prehistoric bird of prey with a reddish brown hide, a crest of horns on its head, and a wingspan of over 400 feet flying directly behind their seaplane, and gaining on them.
As Claude watched in numb horror, Rodan opened its massive, toothless beak and cackled.
"Dive!" the tattooed man cried.
"Turn around!" the young man in the back seat squealed.
"No!" Claude screamed.
Then Rodan's beak snapped shut on the twin-engine seaplane. The force of its jaws broke the aircraft into pieces. The three men, along with the cockpit, were swallowed up by the creature, but the better part of the wings and fuselage, including the fuel tanks and the engines, dropped into the forest. The debris struck the ground with a tremendous explosion.
The gallons of extra fuel that the looters carried spread fire over a wide radius. Within minutes, the flames stretched across the wooded area, sending wildlife scurrying for their lives.
A half an hour later, over a hundred acres of Manitoba's virgin forest were burning out of control.
Rodan, disturbed by the flames, and unsatisfied by its paltry meal, took to the air once more in search of new prey. And once again, Rodan headed south, toward the border of the United States.
18
DEATH FROM
THE SKY
Sunday, June 13, 1999, 2:23 A.M.
The Gulf of Mexico
355 miles southeast of Galveston, Texas
The Texas Star was riding high in the calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The massive supertanker, a "ULCC" - ultra-large crude carrier, in oil industry lingo - was empty. The two million barrels of crude oil it had carried from South America had been pumped into a tank farm on the Texas coast. Now the ship was returning to Venezuela for another load of South American crude.
The Texas Star had been busy lately. The short-lived embargo of Middle Eastern oil increased United States dependency on South American product, and the Star; along with her sister ships the Texas Queen and the Texas Belle, had been making continuous runs from North to South America, and back again, for the past six weeks.
The crew was overworked, but Captain Charles Dingle ran a tight ship, and things were still going smoothly.
At 0200, Captain Dingle had turned over his vessel to the night watch. First Mate Scott Howard, a ten-year veteran of the South American run, had taken the bridge.
Night on the Gulf was calm and peaceful, unlike life on shore lately. What with monsters appearing out of every corner of the globe and rocks from space threatening to destroy the earth, life on dry land was getting nuttier all the time, First Mate Howard thought as he gazed into the darkness.
The bridge of the Star was antiseptic white, and all the surfaces gleamed. Over twelve hundred feet from stem to stern, and fifty feet across, the ULCC was one of the largest ships in the world. But despite her size, the crew and officer compartments were cramped, jammed inside the raised superstructure on the extreme end of the ship's stern. The other nine-tenths of the vessel was taken up by the ship's huge oil containers.
The flat deck of the supertanker was covered with cargo pipelines for pumping the oil ashore. At the very center of the deck was a heliport. Right now, a chopper from the corporate fleet was secured to the deck.
The supertanker traveled at a leisurely eight knots an hour. Because of her tremendous size, the Texas Star needed at least a mile to come to a complete stop, and the ship's turning radius was equally absurd. The supertanker needed computers to navigate and radar to avoid collision.
First Mate Howard came up behind the wheelman and glanced at the compass and the navigational computer's readouts. The ship, he duly noted in the log, was on schedule and on course, so he went to his command station on the bridge. He listened to the radio chatter from Coast Guard and civilian shipping, then switched over to AM radio.
Mariachi music blared out of the radio. Howard quickly twisted the dial. He settled on a country music station out of Galveston; he leaned back in his chair, and listened to Garth Brooks sing about standing outside the fire.
Suddenly, the pea
ceful night turned to chaos.
There was a tremendous crash that rocked the massive ship. Then the lights dimmed and the whole supertanker listed to port, throwing sleeping men out of their bunks onto the steel decks.
On the bridge, First Mate Howard was tossed to the floor. The sailor at the controls, who was standing in front of the huge glass windows, clung to the wheel. Suddenly, the thick windows shattered, and rushing winds and splinters of sharp glass filled the bridge. The blue of the collision alarm echoed throughout the craft.
"What happened?" the first mate cried, picking himself off the tilted deck. But the wheelman did not answer. He clung to the wheel with one limp hand, and the first mate saw a river of blood running across the spotless white floor.
Howard leaped to the wheelman's side and clutched the man by his shoulders. The first mate eased the stricken sailor to the deck as more blood washed over his shoes.
With mounting horror, Howard saw that the sailor had been hit by a shard of glass. The piece, bigger than a carving knife, had struck him in the throat, severing the carotid artery.
The wheelman's eyes slowly closed. He was already dead.
First Mate Howard remembered his duty to the ship. He reached up and pulled the throttle, cutting the power to the huge five-bladed screw propeller. The ship was still listing to port, so Howard grabbed the mike and demanded a damage report.
At that moment, Captain Dingle, in a robe and slippers, dashed onto the bridge. He halted and visibly paled when he saw the sailor lying in a pool of blood.
"Collision?" the captain asked.
First Mate Howard shook his head. "There's nothing on radar," he replied.
"Then what -"
But the captain did not finish the question. He was interrupted by a thunderous, shuddering roar of rage and confusion that echoed throughout the corridors of the ship.
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