Barracuda: Final Bearing mp-4

by Michael Dimercurio

  Namuru rushed into the opening, firing at the dim shapes of the inside guards, none prepared for an intruder.

  His eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness as he ejected the spent clip of the weapon and inserted another, the only replacement ammunition he had brought.

  He almost smiled as he saw the missiles in the dim light of the dusty overhead lamps. He stepped over the bodies of four guards for a better look, glancing up to see if he was being followed. So far all was quiet. He only needed another minute.

  Namuru had spent years studying nuclear weapons. He could recognize and identify any production nuclear missile made by any nuclear power, past or present. And the missiles on the dollies in front of him were definitely old Russian SS-34’s — medium-range ballistic missiles. Theater nuclear weapons able to reach any major city within 1500 kilometers. Most of the missile bulk was devoted to warhead rather than rocket fuel, which was why their range was so short. But Tokyo was only 850 kilometers away. It was not enough for him to identify the missile model, however Namuru’s mission was to determine beyond any doubt that they were truly nukes, not just dusty hulks of the old SS-34s, or some unknown conventional model of the warhead with conventional high explosive mated to the SS-34’s rocket stage.

  All nuclear warheads, he knew, emitted neutron radiation.

  Especially an older Russian model. The neutron flux from the plutonium warhead would be enough to cloud a special filmstrip. Namuru stepped over to the weapon body, going through a yellow rope with the three-bladed circular radiation warning sign on it, and attached one of the filmstrips to the nearest warhead, then a strip on the next, and one on the furthest. There were at least twenty missiles in this end of the bunker and there would be no way to have time to test them all. Namuru counted to ten, then pulled the films away, crouching below the weapons. He put each film through a developer and waited another ten seconds, then held the processed film to the light. All three were clouded.

  All three had been exposed to high dosages of neutron flux.

  All three weapons had nuclear warheads.

  Which meant Manchuria could attack Japan and bring her to her knees.

  Which meant that the war would begin in days when the high command attacked this facility.

  Namuru thought he heard a voice. He pocketed the films and ran out the blast door and into the open, amazed that his body could function after the electrical jolt, but then realizing he was operating on pure adrenaline. He ran past the outbuildings to the trees, and beyond to the burnt-out hole in the fence. There was noise now, a rising siren just starting off on the other side of the bunker, gathering pitch and volume until it howled, an old-fashioned air-raid alarm. He heard the roar of truck engines as he dived through the fence opening and made it back to the trees, where he had stashed his vest and leggings.

  He was almost finished.

  * * *

  “So it is true,” General Gotoh said.

  “The weapons?”

  “They are nuclear,” Gotoh said to Kurita as both men watched the screen, Namuru’s view of the missiles clear in his helmet-mounted camera. Namuru had apparently just gotten rid of the film and begun his escape. “Did you see the film? It clouded. Only neutron radiation can do that so quickly. And only nuclear fuel or nuclear warheads would do that. The SS-34s are live, sir.”

  “What happens to Namuru now?”

  “We give him a medal. And we keep watching.”

  * * *

  Namuru got the vest and leggings on and pulled the helmet camera out of the helmet by a coiled thread-thin wire, attaching the tiny camera eye to a limb on a tree, then backing away two meters so that the camera was looking at his face.

  “Phase nine,” Namuru said to the camera. “The weapons are SS-34s, at least two dozen of them. I have confirmed that they are nuclear. My extraction was successful but I am being pursued. This mission is now complete.”

  Namuru listened for a moment, the sirens wailing behind him. He thought he heard footsteps in the underbrush.

  It was time.

  “To the victory of Japan,” he said, and reached to the back of his helmet to pull the T-handle cord, down to his shoulder blade.

  * * *

  Kurita stared at the screen. Namuru’s face was clearly visible, almost like a news reporter at a scene giving a description. The weapons were nuclear, he had said.

  “To the victory of Japan,” Namuru was saying as he pulled something down behind his back.

  On the screen the explosion took Kurita by surprise.

  The detonation was severe enough to cause the transmission to freeze-frame several times as the satellite lost lock over the next second, the frames freezing the specter of Namuru’s head being blown apart by his helmet lined with explosives. The screen shook as the vest apparently detonated, blowing the camera backward until the screen view looked up at the sky, then rolled over to look back toward the damaged fence. In a blur men could be made out running toward the fence, when the screen suddenly became snow and static, the static noise loud.

  The officer at the control screen turned off the display.

  “What happened?” Kurita heard himself say.

  “Major Namuru’s helmet, utility vest and leggings were fitted with explosives to blow his body apart. That way the Manchurians would have no way to identify him as a Japanese, not that their DNA-coding labs could ever match anything we have. The explosives also blew up his equipment so that there is nothing left for them to have that points to us. He was trained to detonate the explosives on camera so that we could verify that his self-destruction was complete. An excellent mission, Namuru did well,” the general said.

  “Next time. General, you might consider warning me that I will be witnessing a man’s death in real time.”

  “Sir, it was not real time — it was on a five-minute time-delay.”

  Kurita realized General Gotoh would never understand.

  But it was time now for Greater Manchuria to understand. Soon they would know that having offensive nuclear missiles, violating the UN ban, so close to Japan would cost them dearly.

  “Call Minister MacHiie. Tell him to convene the Defense Security Council in one hour. Bring a disk of Namuru’s mission but please edit out the last part.”

  “Yes, Prime Minister.”

  “And, General. Make sure your war plan is very carefully thought out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kurita stared at the general for a long moment, then walked out, trying to banish the images of Namuru’s death from his mind, but not succeeding.

  CHAPTER 1

  CHESAPEAKE BAY

  Rear Adm. Michael Pacino settled into the seat of the Sea King helicopter and stared out the window, the beautiful vista of the Chesapeake unwinding beneath him.

  Pacino was only forty-two years old though he felt much older. He was tall, over six feet two, his frame slim but solid. He was still able to wear the uniforms he had worn when he graduated from the Naval Academy twenty years earlier; and from a distance he could be mistaken for a midshipman. Close-up the illusion continued for a moment because his almost gaunt face still had the shape of his youth, his emerald-green eyes sharp and clear, his pronounced cheekbones presiding over a straight nose and full lips. But then the clues to Pacino’s age came into focus — deep lines at the corners of his eyes, crow’s feet from staring out to sea or peering through periscopes, face tanned and leathery and losing the resilience it had once had, as if he had spent years in the sun, though actually the coloring was the result of severe frostbite he had suffered in an arctic mission that had gone wrong. The skin of his hands and arms was likewise damaged. His hair was thick but had turned white, not a single dark pigment remained of the jet-black hair he had once had. Rumor had it that the last mission he had commanded, so highly classified that even some of the brass weren’t cleared to hear about it, had frightened the last of the black from his head. In any event, the effect of his skin, his white hair, and his gauntness made Pacino’
s rank of rear admiral seem less odd, since most men of his rank were twenty years older than Pacino. Pacino’s khaki shirt collar displayed the two silver stars of flag rank, and he wore a gold dolphin pin above his left breast pocket, a plain black phenolic name tag above his right pocket reading simply PACINO, and a white-gold Annapolis ring on his left ring finger.

  In the seat of the big chopper, he wondered what Richard Donchez wanted to see him about. An hour before he had just taken the first bite of his working dinner with his aide, a young lieutenant named Joanna Stoddard, when his secretary came in.

  “Admiral Donchez called from Fort Meade, sir,” the secretary said. “He’s sending a chopper to pick you up.”

  “He say what’s on his mind?”

  “He said he knew you’d ask and told me he wanted to give you an urgent briefing, and that all I could say was Scenario Orange. He said you’d know what that meant.”

  He had been startled to hear Donchez use the term “Scenario Orange.”

  Adm. Richard Donchez — the “admiral” ceremonial now that Donchez was retired from the Navy — was the director of the National Security Agency, which had responsibility for electronic intelligence, whether by eavesdropping, satellite surveillance or any other nonhuman intelligence methods. The CIA had once had its own spy satellites until the Whitman Act reorganized the intelligence agencies, combining the old Central Intelligence Agency with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the new organization called the Combined Intelligence Agency.

  There had been momentum enough in the frenzy of government reorganization that Congress threatened to make NSA part of CIA, but Donchez’s predecessor had called in favors from Capitol Hill and the result was an independent NSA with a meaty budget, a highly skilled staff and magnificent gadgets, among them the Big Bird III keyhole series satellites and several special operations nuclear subs. The subs gathered intelligence by driving close to a subject’s shores and keeping an antenna up to listen for short-range clear transmissions. It was this that made Pacino wonder what NSA Director Donchez was up to. The subs that reported to NSA could be one reason to call for him, since Donchez had to work closely with USUBCOM to deal with his special operations ships. But now that the Dayton was gathering intel in Tokyo Bay and the Cincinnati was doing the same in Port Artom in Greater Manchuria, the current trouble spots of the world, there usually would be little else official that Donchez would come to him about. Which brought Pacino back to the top secret code words “Scenario Orange.”

  Scenario Orange was the classified term for the possibility of war between the United States and Japan. War plans against other nations, even allies such as the UK, were routinely written, scrutinized and fed to a Dynacorp Frame 90 supercomputer for simulation and refinement. Until the tension surfaced between Greater Manchuria and Japan, those war plans would be expected to gather dust for the next half-century, but now things were very different.

  The helicopter shuddered, the engine noises rising and falling again as the chopper neared Donchez’s Fort Meade helipad, the compound nestled in suburban Maryland between Baltimore and Washington. It was getting dark by the time the helicopter made its final approach. The harsh glare of the helipad landing lights flooded into the cabin.

  Even before the pilot throttled down Pacino got up from his seat, grabbed his hat and held it against the rotor wash, waved to the pilots and stepped out into the cold night. His light working khaki jacket was no match for the cold front that had just moved over the area. At least it was no longer raining, he thought as he jogged to the edge of the pad, where Donchez was waiting, an unlit Havana cigar clenched in one hand, a smile crinkling his aging features. Pacino smiled back as he approached.

  Dick Dohchez had been Pacino’s father’s roommate at Annapolis decades before, the two men joining the submarine force together, always home-ported in the same town, usually taking shore duty at the same command. When Pacino was born Donchez and Pacino’s father were both at sea, both under the polar icecap. By the time they came home, Pacino was two months old. His earliest memories of his father always seemed to include Donchez. He remembered countless Saturdays spent on his father’s ship, the two Pacinos visiting Donchez’s boat for a meal. Eventually when Pacino went to Annapolis, his father commanded the Stingray, berthed one pier over from Donchez’s original Piranha.

  When Stingray sank in mid-Atlantic from the detonation of her own torpedo — as the official story had it— Pacino was eighteen years old, a plebe at the Naval Academy. It had been Donchez himself who had broken the news to Pacino that the Stingray had gone down with all hands, and since then the older man had tried to fashion himself as a mentor and surrogate father to Pacino. Yet for twenty years Pacino had distanced himself from Donchez, perhaps, he admitted, linking Donchez to the sinking because he had been the messenger.

  Eventually Donchez had become a rear admiral in command of the Atlantic Fleet’s submarine force, and hence Pacino’s boss during Pacino’s first command tour on the USS Devilfish. Donchez had risen to command the service as Chief of Naval Operations, but afterward had left the Navy. There was nowhere upward to go. Donchez had always had an interest in intelligence work and had confided to Pacino that he wouldn’t mind an appointment to CIA, which had always been tight with the upper echelons of the Navy, largely because of the spy duty that US subs had done in the past. But CIA was the personal fiefdom of Boswell Farnesworth Leach III, one of the previous president’s cronies, not to be replaced for some time. Donchez had been appointed Dirnsa, with the implied understanding that someday CIA would be his. That had been eleven months ago.

  Donchez looked odd in a business suit, the gold braided stripes that once climbed all the way to his elbows now giving way to the Armani material. The last ten years had worn heavily on Richard Donchez, Pacino thought. It seemed each time he saw him Donchez had shrunk, until he was over a head shorter than Pacino. He had grown thinner, his shirt collars no longer acquainted with his neck. Pacino remembered that Donchez’s hairless head had seemed macho, but now that Donchez was older the baldness added to a look of infirmity that worried Pacino.

  Pacino held out his hand to the older man, who pulled him into a bear hug, slapping his back. “Mikey, you look great.”

  “Uncle Dick, how you doing?”

  “Same as always, Mikey. Glad you could come.”

  “My aide mentioned Scenario Orange.” Pacino stated bluntly as they climbed into Donchez’s staff car for the ride to his office. “What’s going on with Japan?”

  “I knew that would get your attention,” Donchez said. “We’ll talk about it inside the building. It’s built against the possibility of eavesdropping. Security is better than the White House.”

  The limo drove through the dense forest of the complex, low brick buildings every few thousand feet giving the impression of a college campus, the resemblance broken by the fences, the security guards and the large antennae following the satellites overhead.

  “Speaking of the White House, sir, how is the new president?”

  “She’s great, Mikey. I mean that. She can be tough, at times too tough, thinks she’s Margaret Thatcher, or maybe she thinks she has to look strong as the first elected female President in the history of the country. But I can work with that. Hell, it’s easier to back down an aggressive commander in chief than put backbone in a weak one.”

  The speech had come almost glibly, Pacino thought. The old man probably got asked that question all the time.

  The car stopped at the front entrance of building 527, Donchez’s new NSA headquarters. The floodlights were on, although it was not yet dark, showcasing the multiwinged building. From the front the protruding entrance wing was a truncated five-story pyramid done in brick and plate glass and copper sheathing, the copper just starting to turn an antique green.

  “The copper reminds me of the Academy,” Donchez said. “The rest is sort of modern without looking like a cookie-cutter office building.”

  Pacino looked at the low wide pyram
id while following Donchez to the doors. The pyramid face was broken by a long row of plate glass set deep into a horizontal groove. The executive suites, Pacino figured.

  “Where the hell did you get budget coverage for this? And it should have taken two years to build and you go from concept to finished building in, what, ten months?”

  Donchez didn’t smile. “Black programs, Mikey. Ultrasecret. We need the security — the electronic eavesdropping systems of our potential adversaries are getting too good, so we got the budget coverage in a hurry. But believe me, we’re getting more than our money’s worth here. You’ll see.”

  * * *

  Donchez’s office on the top floor was even more of a showplace than his Chief of Naval Operations suite at the Pentagon.

  Along the wall were bookshelves filled with dusty volumes and some new books. The wall was covered with framed photographs, Donchez’s old submarines, one showing the icepack with a black submarine conning tower broken through the ice, Donchez standing in front of it wearing arctic gear and a baseball cap with scrambled eggs on the brim — the old Piranha from the 1970s. Model submarines in expensive cases were set in the four corners of the room. Opposite the windows a bar was set behind wood panels.

  Donchez threw out his cigar, pulled a new one from a humidor, walked to the bar and poured three fingers of Jack Daniel’s over ice cubes in the highball glass and waved Pacino to one of the leather chairs, putting the drink on a side table and taking the neighboring chair.

  “How are you, Mikey? I mean with the divorce at the same time you’re trying to get your arms around the Unified Sub Command?”

  Pacino knew he didn’t come up by helicopter to discuss his divorce or how he felt about his job. He was right. Donchez reached into the table between them and pulled out a small keypad, flashing his fingers across it. The room grew dark as the polarized glass of the windows turned the clear glass black. A panel in the high ceiling opened and a screen came down in front of them. The room lights dimmed as a projection television flashed the emblem of the National Security Administration.