The General nodded. “What a coincidence, so do we.”
Michael stared at Tsujimori in stunned silence for a moment before shouting, “You lost them? How do you lose something as big as they are?”
The General shrugged. He had no answer, not even a snarky one.
“Darn it all, find them!” Michael snapped. “I don’t care if you have to drain the whole blasted ocean to do it! Find them before they show up on the mainland!”
With that, the transmission cut out.
General Tsujimori and X exited the conference room. “How do you read that?” the General asked.
“He knows,” X replied. “Somebody tipped him off about Mr. Godfrey.”
“I thought the same. The question is: Who was it?”
“Could be anyone.”
Awkward silence hung in the air. General Tsujimori could feel X’s eyes glaring at him. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “Frankly, I’m offended you would even consider that as a possibility. We concocted this plan together, after all.”
X adjusted the collar on his coat. “Of the two of us, Ishiro, I’m not the one who committed mutiny during the War.”
Tsujimori’s eyes narrowed until they were practically slits. “Well, of the two of us, I’m not the one who wiped an entire island of innocents off the map.”
“My actions were justified.”
“So were mine.”
They stared each other down for a full minute, saying nothing.
“All right, we’re both clear,” X finally said. “Who else do we put on the watch list?”
Tsujimori tapped his chin in thought. “Those rooms are the only places where anyone can make a call to Groom Lake, or anywhere without being seen or heard, and there are only two others on this ship who can get past the card reader.”
“Nancy and Hirata,” X nodded. “Can’t be both of them. We’d have noticed if they were working together. Changes in behavior, making excuses for unexplained absences… It’s got to be either one or the other.”
“Captain Catigiri has served me faithfully since his recruitment,” the General said. “He is no traitor. I trust the man with my life.”
“Personally, I don’t fully trust anyone who doesn’t talk,” X replied. “Besides, I know where Miss Boardwalk’s allegiance lies. I hand-picked her for this job.”
“It could also be Chakra. She has easy access to everything of yours.” Tsujimori shot X an accusatory look. “Very easy.”
X reacted strongly, shoving his gloved finger in the General’s face. “It’s not her!”
“How can you be so certain? She regularly abandons her duties, not to mention the way she acts around you is just unnatural. She hangs on you like lights on a Christmas tree.”
“You were married once, Ishiro, just like me. You know what that bond is like. I saw the way you and Saeko used to look at each other. Would she have betrayed you?”
Tsujimori averted his gaze, his head hanging low as memories of his late wife flooded his mind. As a soldier, he was trained to control his emotions, but this topic always affected him.
God, he missed her.
X picked up on his partner’s growing sadness. “Not that it matters,” he said quietly, realizing he had crossed a line. He offered no consolation, mostly because he was not good at it.
“I’ll concede…that Chakra’s the least likely suspect,” Tsujimori said as he steadied his spirit. “Until we have more evidence, though, I will not rule her out.”
X nodded. “Fair enough, I guess. But I know it’s not her.”
“For your sake, gaijin, I hope you’re right. Losing a spouse for any reason is a pain I wish on no one.”
A young cadet, fresh out of the academy as of the previous month, approached the pair. A look of concern adorned his face. “There you are, sirs!” he said. “We have some new activity.”
The discussion of treachery was tabled, and both men snapped back into action mode. “Activity where?” the General asked.
“We have three potential incidents. First, contact with a research vessel was lost in the vicinity of Rabu Nii. Its name was the Delta, I believe.”
“What?!?” snapped X. “The Navy’s supposed to have ships there specifically to prevent that sort of thing!”
“No clue how they got past the blockade, sir. Must’ve been dumb luck.”
“Blast! What else?”
“Seismic activity outside of Fukuoka is increasing, with the epicenter moving towards the city. Lastly, we detected another swarm of bugs moving towards the town of Boca de Vacca on the coast of Chile.”
The General’s brow furrowed. “Where the Pterosaur nests are.”
X cracked his knuckles as he mentally organized the incidents in order of importance, then he spoke. “We’re heading for Fukuoka anyway, so we maintain that course and stick to our mission. I’ll put in a request for CIGOR to check out Rabu Nii.”
With that, he and the General departed, each heading in opposite directions to prepare themselves for the tasks ahead.
The cadet stood in place, his head darting back and forth between his superiors in befuddlement. “Um… Sirs?” he asked. “What about the swarm heading for Chile? Shouldn’t we do something about that?”
“They’ll be fine!” the General called back.
The cadet’s befuddlement increased. “With all due respect, Sirs, that town has no defense against the bugs!”
“They have the best defense in the world!” X called back.
“But the secrecy!”
“It can’t last forever!”
In 1962, a Russian nuclear submarine had disappeared somewhere off the coast of Japan. The incident had initially been a major point of Cold War contention, with Russia blaming America for attacking and sinking the vessel. For three long months, it looked like this event would be the spark that started World War Three. As it turned out, no evidence was ever found of an attack, and the tension had subsided. The sub was simply declared lost at sea after the investigation was closed, though suspicion of sabotage or a covert act of war remained popular amongst Russian citizens and Soviet officials itching for conflict.
The truth was far less scandalous than the rumors. The submarine had merely sunk due to a freak malfunction in its systems. It was an unfortunate accident, nothing more.
Only one creature on Earth knew where the lost vessel was, and he had gone to its resting place to feed.
Though he knew where it was, he had played no part in the submarine’s fate. He normally did not bother attacking human vessels unless they were stupid enough to attack him first – indeed, he had spent much of his time in the sea saving human vessels from other attackers – but he was a creature that needed energy as much as food to survive, and even two years after the event, the ship’s reactor still had plenty to give him.
This energy had been strange to him when he had first sensed it years ago. It was like fire, and yet at the same time, nothing like fire. It was a primal thing that Earth had not seen in eons, only this type was unnatural. He had no specific name for it, but he knew that the humans made it, and it could make him stronger.
He clenched the reactor in his razor-sharp teeth, floating motionless far beneath the waves as the energy flowed into his body, warming his core. His horns flickered with faint light from within.
He was going to need all the energy he could get in the days to come. So would the others.
Victory over their foes depended on it.
Even suspended in the water so many miles away, he felt the tremors on the land as the dinosaurs made their way towards the cities.
He knew that was where he would go next.
CHAPTER 7
The silent black-and-white image being projected on the screen was one familiar to Richard, as it would be to anyone who viewed it: D-Day, the Battle of Normandy, though presented with greater clarity than Richard had ever seen it before.
He was seated in a darkened room arranged like a very small movie theater, watching
the footage play before him on a ten-foot screen while he dined on a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. Nancy, who had quickly downed a few strips of bacon on the way over, sat on his left, and provided a running commentary for what he was seeing.
“Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” she said. “Most people don’t think about it all that much, but this applies to more than just physics. In fact, human actions can invoke very strange reactions from the environment. The World Wars in particular were especially harsh. You ever notice how heavily edited the footage from D-Day is whenever it’s shown on TV?”
Richard nodded.
“Well,” Nancy continued, “you’re about to see why.”
The view of the battlefield panned quickly, pointing towards the ridge where the German artillery lay just in time to see them explode. It was not from a bomb, though. Even through the occasional grain of the film and jostling of the camera, Richard could tell that the ground had blown apart from below the surface. Through the debris, he could see a large, snub-nosed reptilian head on the end of a long neck snaking outward.
For a few seconds, the scene was nothing but a blurry mess as the cameraman ran for safety. Once he was settled behind one of the many obstacles on the beach, he pointed his camera back at the lumbering behemoth.
Indeed, behemoth was an accurate description. Richard had heard theories that the references to a creature called behemoth in the Bible, specifically the Book of Job, were describing a sauropod dinosaur, and this creature which had been captured on film fit that description to a T. Legs like an oak, tail like a cedar.
The beast paid little heed to the soldiers under its feet. In fact, it looked like a spooked animal which had been rudely awoken and was fleeing for safety.
Richard was amazed at the sight, but Nancy continued speaking in her casual tone as if it were nothing new to her. She had seen this film many times before. “Random incidents like this were how it started,” she said. “In fact, the First World War was what brought the small ones out in the first place. You know how the first contemporary sightings of the Loch Ness Monster were in the Thirties?”
“Of course,” Richard said.
“That’s because all the commotion in Europe disturbed the creatures who were dormant in the lake. But the second war gave us the atomic bomb, and that’s when all hell really broke loose.”
Nancy delivered a quick hand signal to the projection booth behind them, and the reel switched to newer-looking footage, a home movie filmed on super-8 from the look of it. It depicted a suburban American family going on a picnic out in the desert, having a grand old time before the ants ruined it.
Ants the length of boxcars.
“Our action was to split the atom and make a weapon out of it,” Nancy continued. “Earth’s reaction was the Kaiju.”
“The what?”
“Kaiju. It’s Japanese for ‘strange beast’, so we use it as the catchall term for any large, unusual creature who shows up. Those ants are Kaiju, as was the Brontosaurus earlier, and as is this bird.”
With another signal from Nancy, the reel switched again, revealing footage of an Air Force jet suddenly finding its wing shorn off by what looked like a hawk which was every bit its equal in size. The bird clung to the jet as it spiraled, but released it and flew away before it crashed. It was hard to tell if the pilot had managed to eject or not.
Richard set his plate on the floor, too enraptured with the footage for any of his attention to be diverted to eating. “So, you mentioned the A-bomb earlier. Are these things new mutations caused by nuclear tests, or are they prehistoric creatures that were hidden until we woke them up with the bomb?”
“Very good question,” Nancy said. “The answer is yes.”
Another signal, and the reel switched again, this time to a place that looked like the Savanah. The footage of a tyrannosaurus-like beast graphically killing and devouring a hippopotamus made Richard glad he had stopped eating.
“The mutations mostly do their own thing. Unless they’re provoked, rabid, or somehow developed a taste for us, they avoid humans just like normal animals do. The prehistoric ones – those are the dinos and the bugs – are the primary concern for our operation.”
Signal. Reel switch. Silent footage of X and General Tsujimori engaging a horde of dinosaurs on the ground now played on the screen.
“It turns out that resistance to change isn’t a trait exclusive to mankind. The ancient Kaiju don’t like the fact that they aren’t the rulers of Earth anymore, and ever since they resurfaced, they’ve been eager to wipe humanity off the map. That’s where we come in. Operation Red Dragon is an international paramilitary unit forged during World War Two, tasked with keeping the Kaiju under control and, more importantly, hidden from the public by preventing them from getting to any major cities. To that end, we have X and General Ishiro Tsujimori, two veteran super soldiers who excel at killing Kaiju.”
The image vanished as the reel ran out, and the lights came on.
“Lucky for us, most atomic tests are done in isolated areas, like deserts and islands in the Pacific, far from any major cities and high-traffic areas. So it’s been easy to keep most of the Kaiju in line all these years.”
Richard scratched his head. “If your job is to keep all of this hidden, you’ve done a terrible job. Reports of sightings get out all the time. Trust me, I would know. I’ve spoken to the witnesses myself and reported their accounts in some pretty big news outlets.”
Nancy folded her arms. “Indeed you have. And how many of those reports are taken seriously, if I may ask?”
Richard had no answer for that.
“Exactly,” she continued. “The best way to keep a secret is to convince everyone that it’s a lie, then it keeps itself. That was the whole point of things like Project Blue Book. We got a few reputable guys in lab coats to say that something is impossible, and the problem was solved. Of course, we didn’t expect Hyneck to change his tune so easily…”
“Why keep it a secret at all?” Richard interrupted. “What about all the stuff we could learn by studying these things?” Richard pointed at the screen, even though it was blank. “What if the mutations could help us find a cure for radiation poisoning? And imagine the ramifications studying those dinosaurs would have on paleontology! The real things look nothing like the paintings and models in museums!”
“Give the paleontologists a break, Richard. You can only get so much from a few bone fragments.”
“Point taken. My question still stands unanswered.”
Nancy stood and headed for the exit. Richard grabbed his plate and followed as she replied. “There is a philosophy behind it. I don’t necessarily agree with it myself, but it’s what’s kept the conspiracy going all these years. See, Richard, we’re in the middle of a Cold War. Two superpowers armed to the teeth with world-destroying weapons are each trying to prove that they’re the ones in control, and they each have their respective citizens convinced that they are.” They dropped their breakfast plates off on a rolling rack by the kitchen. “It’s an illusion, sure, but it’s kept the world spinning. So long as Capitalism and Communism are run by rational human beings, neither side will want to be the first to cross the line and bring on the apocalypse. The powers that be believe the Kaiju would break that illusion of control, not just for nations, but for mankind itself. The moment Kaiju pass from easily dismissed pseudoscience into undeniable reality, mankind will panic, because it will no longer be the pinnacle of creation, and it’ll give the world governments an excuse to finally launch those nukes they’ve been stockpiling.” She shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t entirely agree with that, but I’m also in no position to argue with it just yet.”
“I don’t know if I agree with it either,” Richard said. “Sure, people would be scared, but you guys can kill the Kaiju. I’ve seen that with my own eyes.”
“We can kill the small ones. The big ones are another matter.”
“Big ones?”
The intercom buzzed to life. “Coastal perimeter reached. All personnel heading for the mainland, please proceed to the main hangar.”
“Time enough to explain that later,” Nancy said in response to Richard’s question. “Right now, there’s someone on the mainland I think you’ll want to meet.”
CHAPTER 8
X was under no illusions about the fact that he was not a normal human being. The experiment which made him a cyborg had seen to that. He was capable of things no other man on Earth could do. During the war, he had been a one-man army serving the Stars and Stripes with his built-in gadgetry and enhanced biology. He had fought in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, and the Axis had learned quickly to fear him. Even the letter that served as his name had struck fear into their hearts. Some Nazis had been executed as traitors for refusing to wear swastikas because the shape reminded them of him. That had helped thin their numbers quite a bit.
If anyone on God’s Green Earth had the potential to let his ego run rampant, it would have been X. With his unparalleled power and rugged determination, he could start a revolution and crown himself immortal king of the world if he wanted to.
Of course, he would never do such a thing. For starters, X had no interest in politics. He was a man of action, born and bred to lead soldiers on the battlefield, not bureaucrats in an office. He was also a man of faith. He may have known how extraordinary he was, but he would never call himself a god.
Especially not when an actual god was living on the ship.
He stood in front of two massive doors, the largest ones on the Akira, behind which resided one of the creatures that could instill humility in the most arrogant of men. He screwed up his courage. Behind these doors resided CIGOR, and it was X’s job to request his services. The same technology that made him a cyborg had been used to bring CIGOR back to full health, so they shared a bond of sorts. CIGOR, however, was not a beast to be commanded like some household pet. He sided with the Red Dragons only because he chose to. Living aboard the Akira was beneficial to both CIGOR and the crew, but he had the right to say no to any request whenever he wanted, for whatever reason, or for no reason at all. If he did, there was nothing anyone on the ship could do about it.
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