War of the Sun

by Maloney, Mack;

  Thirty-one

  IT WAS MIDNIGHT.

  High above the slowly-cruising Task Force, a full moon was painting the sea with a pale orange glow.

  The four ships were moving southwest at ten knots; each vessel was on complete radio silence, with all but essential lights doused.

  This was why the service crew for Hunter’s Harrier was working under the relatively-weak illumination of ordinary flashlights. They had brought the specially-adapted jumpjet up on the side elevator, its fuel tanks topped, its wings heavy with four Sidewinder missiles, its recon cameras full of fresh film and video. Hunter had helped the crew get the airplane flight-ready. Now he was sitting in the rather spacious AV-8F cockpit, bringing up his avionics and snapping his flight controls on line.

  He had a dual mission tonight, both halves of equal and critical value.

  Although he had related to those gathered in the CIC conference room his thoughts on how best to do the shoestring Okinawa operation, if his hand was held to the fire, he would have been hard pressed to call it “a plan.” It was more a notion. A theory. But like all theories, it had to be tested. That’s why he was preparing to launch on such an eerily quiet and still night.

  But once again, Fate would momentarily intervene.

  He was about halfway into his engine preflight checklist when he saw the launch officer walking briskly across the dark deck, giving Hunter the “cut” signal.

  What the hell is this, he thought, putting his startup procedure on hold.

  Hunter popped the canopy and the officer was up the access ladder in a matter of seconds.

  “Captain Wa wants you to hold up, Major,” the officer told him. “He says it’s urgent.”

  Hunter sat there for a moment, wondering what could possibly be so important that Ben would want him to delay his mission.

  The officer seemed to sense this. “It’s Captain Yastrewski, sir,” he quickly added. “Something’s happening down in sick bay.”

  Not a minute later, Hunter was coming through the door of Yaz’s intensive care unit.

  The room was dark, just as it had been the several times Hunter had come to sit beside his comatose friend in the past few days. But this time there was a crowd of people inside.

  It took him a few moments to realize that Ben and JT were standing over in the corner, purposely hidden in the shadows. Two doctors were hovering over Yaz’s bed, the flaps of his plastic oxygen tent having been tied back with tape. One was leaning right over Yaz’s body, his ear pressed to Yaz’s lips.

  “What the hell is going on?” Hunter whispered over to Ben and JT.

  “Ask the Bones brothers,” JT said, pointing to the doctors.

  Hunter walked over to the bed and did just that.

  “We’re not sure what has happened,” one of the doctors told him in a hushed voice. “But in some small way, he may be coming out of it.”

  Hunter felt a surge of positive energy go through him. Yaz was a tough guy, someone who’d gone through a lot in the past two years. He was also a very close friend. The hopeful news, although small, lifted Hunter’s spirits a notch.

  But soon enough, his good feeling dissolved into one of bafflement. He could see Yaz’s lips moving—but was he really trying to say something?

  The doctor leaning over the bed finally straightened up and shook his head.

  “This is the damnedest thing,” he said. “Believe it or not, people are usually conversational when they come out of comas. But all he keeps saying is the same word, over and over.”

  “Well—what the hell is it, doc?”

  The doctor shook his head.

  “It’s weak and barely audible,” he said. “But it seems to me that he keeps saying something like: ‘Victory…’”

  Ten minutes later, Hunter was back in the Harrier, waiting as the thrust from his VTOL engine built up to takeoff power.

  As if he didn’t have a hatful of things to worry and wonder about, now he had another. Previously the doctors admitted they had no idea why Yaz had gone into shock; now they were admitting they had no idea why he would come out of it just to repeat the same word over and over again.

  Victory? The word itself was a strange choice. Was it the ranting of a man whose brain activity was admittedly out of whack?

  Or was Yaz somehow trying to tell them something?

  Hunter just didn’t know.

  He saw the go-light flick on, courtesy of the deck crew chief. It was time to launch.

  With these thoughts in his head and a tap to the breast pocket, Hunter popped the Harrier’s brakes. In less than a half second, the strange airplane was rolling down the deck, using a short takeoff roll to conserve fuel.

  It rose slowly, banking to right as it did so. Then, once it was clear of the carrier, it accelerated quickly and disappeared into the night.

  Thirty-two

  Okinawa

  THE KNOCK AT HER private chamber door shattered the last peaceful dream the woman once named Mizumi would ever have.

  She rose from her bed and lightly powdered her small, naked body. There was another knock which she completely ignored. She began her teakettle and slowly climbed into her cherry-red blossom gown.

  For the first time in a long time, she actually felt good. Strong. Powerful. These were new and strange sensations.

  She was finally coming to understand what was happening to her—it was easier once she realized that there was nothing she could do to stop it. So why not surrender to it?

  It was simple, really. It all came down to the fact that she, as Mizumi, had no destiny—not anymore.

  Rather, it was the destiny of another that she had been selected to fulfill.

  She poured her tea and knelt down on the bamboo mat next to her tiny stove. Numbers suddenly filled her head; where did they come from? Airplanes. Production in the underground airplane factory had tripled in the past forty-eight hours. Slaves. Her minions redoubled their efforts to put more slaves on the assembly lines of the great machines. They were even using Chinese and Koreans in key spots now—something unheard of before.

  Now, on this evening, she knew they were truly ready. Within the week she would unleash a firestorm of conquest on the rest of the Greater East Asian Pacific, and eventually beyond. All of the vital resources Nippon needed to fulfill its destiny would soon be theirs again. Anyone of a lower race who was not enslaved would soon be dead. It was as elementary as that.

  There was another knock.

  “My Lady, the ceremony is about to begin …” a nervous voice from the other side called out. “We must go very soon …”

  Gathering her gown around her, she finally went to the door and opened it. Two officers of the Imperial Guards sent to escort her to the main hall were waiting outside.

  “Which one of you was doing all the knocking?” she asked.

  “It was I,” one of the officers nervously answered.

  “It was too loud.” Turning to the other officer, she simply said, “Shoot him.”

  The other soldier immediately raised his sidearm, put it against his comrade’s throat, and squeezed the trigger, just as the hapless officer croaked out the words “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” the woman said as she stepped over the lifeless, and practically headless, body.

  Petrified to the point of numbness, the remaining officer led her along the long stone passageway and into the center of the mountain. The route was lined with soldiers of her Imperial Guard; each one snapped to attention as soon as she passed.

  Finally she reached her destination, the access doorway to the largest chamber in the subterranean complex, Underground Hangar Number One.

  “Open it,” she hissed at the three soldiers manning the doorway.

  They immediately did so, and the woman once known as Mizumi, and now the Supreme Warlord of the Asian Mercenary Cult, stepped out onto a balcony that overlooked the vast Hangar Number One.

  Three thousand pilots, each with a face made red by the hundred
s of torches used to light the gigantic cavern for this special ritual, leapt to their feet and began to shout for her over and over again. The screams fell into a chant that grew louder and louder as the pilots were swept up into a blood-lust frenzy. Their short symbolic samurai swords were now drawn, and with each thundering call of Aja! thousands of these swords would stab through the air toward her. She smiled, and the pilots screamed even louder.

  With a slight raising of her hand, each pilot’s rabid cheering immediately ceased. The chamber instantly fell into silence.

  Then she spoke, and as she did so, she knew that the simple native girl that she once was would be lost forever.

  “My warriors!”

  The pilots again screamed her name in delirious joy.

  She raised both hands to quiet them once again.

  “My warriors,” she began, “you are already gods without earthly desires. I am proud of you!”

  On cue, silk that covered the hundred long tables that ran through the hangar were lifted off to reveal thousands of individual hachimakis, the sacred white headcloths of samurai warriors of old. Each of these hachimakis was folded to emphasize the infamous insignia of the Cult: three red dots forming a triangle within a larger circle.

  To the rhythmic beating of a hundred drums, every pilot stepped forward, bowed, and took a hachimaki. Each one also took a small black-and-white photograph of Aja to be worn next to his heart. In turn, each left a tiny black lacquered box containing his nail clippings and a lock of his hair. When this ritual was completed, the drums ceased.

  “You have been given a beautiful and wondrous opportunity to die,” she began again. “You shall fall like the sensuous blossoms from a radiant cherry tree. It is the way of the warrior.”

  With that, each of the pilots solemnly tied his hachimaki around his forehead and then stood at attention.

  “May your death,” she commanded, “be as sudden and clean as the shattering of crystal. You are all heroes.”

  Rigid in attention, these pilots, to a man, could feel tears well up. While many bravely fought it, soon almost all of the three thousand faces were stained by tears.

  The woman clapped her hands twice and all six doors of the giant freight elevators opened, one precisely after another. The first elevator revealed a sumptuous feast, cooked to perfection. There were roast pigs, venison, pheasant, quail, duck, caviar, fruits, vegetables, and every imaginable dessert. The second elevator contained gallons upon gallons of liquor: whiskey, wine, sake, and beer. The third contained nearly a quarter ton of drugs; China White heroin, Lebanese hash oil, amphetamines, cocaine.

  But it was the last three elevators that made the pilots’ mouths water. Over a thousand naked female slaves, ranging from teenagers on up, stood tranquilized into submission, all ready to be ravaged by the hungry “gods” who stared wild-eyed at them.

  For a moment it seemed to her that time had stood still. She could no longer hear the pilots’ screams of adulation. She could only see the thousand slave girls, shivering in anticipation of their 3-to-1 fate. By tradition they were all Korean.

  Wasn’t she, not so long ago, just like one of them? she thought. Innocent? Sheltered? Protected?

  Impossible, she quickly decided, pushing the thought out of her mind. That must have been just a dream. She willed herself to have absolutely no emotion toward the slave girls. She knew who she was. She was Aja—Supreme Leader of the Asian Mercenary Cult.

  It was foolish to have thought anything else.

  Once again she clapped her hands twice. Once again the huge chamber fell silent.

  “Let the seven days of the ‘Celebration of Death’ begin,” Aja ordered, “and then, my heroes, you will fly away like sparrows, and await me in the Greater Place.”

  With that, she turned and left the balcony to the screams of lust and joy below.

  Little did she know that sixty-five thousand feet above her, a bird of prey was watching.

  Even from this height, the island of Okinawa looked like a smudge of soot in the midst of an emerald-green sea.

  Hunter buttoned the top of his flight suit; it might have been his imagination, but flying at this height, he found the Harrier’s cockpit rather chilly. He was already more than 15,000 feet above the recommended ceiling for the jumpjet, but he was sure the airplane could take it.

  He reached a coordinate he’d previously determined was the exact center of the long, thin crooked finger of an island. At that point, he put the jumpjet into a hover and threw all his camera pods’ lenses to open.

  Now, putting the Harrier into a slow 360-degree spin, Hunter studied the main screen on his cockpit panel.

  It was showing an enhanced infrared image of the smog-clogged island. Just like his first quick sweep over the place, this IF image showed the enormous heatwave emanating from the underground aircraft factory, and specifically rising out of the massive opening to the hidden airstrip located halfway up the mountain. Also easy to spot were the dozen or so vent shafts, the pipes which brought all the dirty air to the surface of the island.

  But now Hunter was looking for what he was certain would be far more subtle sources of heat, those indicating any smaller entrances to the otherworldly underground factory. He found a few, most about the size of a typical road tunnel, wide and high enough to accommodate a truck, but that was it.

  He was heartened by what he didn’t find. Except for the huge maw that served as the entrance to the hidden airstrip, no other opening was large enough to accommodate aircraft.

  He turned his attention back to the airstrip opening. It was located about halfway up the northeastern side of the 1500-foot Shuri Mountain. Just above it was an artificial cliff overhang that jutted some fifty-five feet out from the side of the mountain and served to anchor the Cult’s elaborate camouflage net. Above that was another series of smaller cliffs leading all the way to the summit where the remains of Shuri Castle had long ago crumbled.

  Once again, Hunter was encouraged by what he didn’t find. There were no indications of heat at the top of the mountain itself, meaning the Cult had little or no presence on the peak. Even better, there were few defensive weapons arrayed on the mountain itself, the Cult choosing—and rightly—to concentrate its ribbons of massive gun emplacements on the lowest line (or “first line”) of what would be considered the high ground. Indeed, the highest indications he could see of any weapons activity was at about the same elevation as the airstrip opening, and most of these were on the opposite side of the mountain.

  He was now batting two-for-two.

  His third objective, however, would most likely prove to be the toughest pitch. He switched off his main IF detector and then snapped on a jerry-rigged detection device of his own concoction. He’d nicknamed it the Juice Machine. What it did was locate surges in electricity, based not on heat sourcing, but on tiny electromagnetic measurements.

  With this device he was concentrating on the miles of Cult gun emplacements ringing the smoggy island. Every gun down there had one thing in common: some kind of power supply. By activating the Juice Machine, Hunter was provided with an enhanced image of the powerline network stringing the guns together. The readout picture of the thousands of separate yet interwoven power lines looked like nothing less than a massive coil of spaghetti strands.

  This information would take more processing, but on first glance Hunter was encouraged by what he saw. By studying the routes of the power line trunks, he would be able to determine not just the weapon type, but also its range, and most important, the limits of its fields of fire.

  He stored as many as fifty separate images of the Juicer’s readout into his main flight computer, and then finally took the Harrier out of its nosebleed-high altitude hover.

  So far, so good, he thought, putting the jumpjet into a steep power dive.

  Now for part two.

  Sergeant Andrei Kartoonov was in the middle of a late tea break when he heard the noise.

  He was taking a rest beneath the decayin
g limbs of a Pacific cypress tree, his camouflage uniform, his carefully painted face, and the dark night rendering him all but invisible to anyone more than a foot away. Starting out at midnight, he’d been on the trail toward the Great Wall for two hours now, and like his superior, Lieutenant Karbochev, who also frequently came this way, he had stopped slightly above the thick smog line to take a blow and prepare to descend into the polluted atmosphere of the valley below.

  The noise had started as a high-pitched whine, and seemed so far off in the distance, he’d just assumed it was coming from the aircraft factory deep in the bowels of the mountain.

  But the noise gradually got louder, and it was soon evident that it was drawing nearer to him. Carefully repackaging his mess kit, he slipped the safety off his AK-47 and waited. His field of view included a large, irregularly-shaped plateau of sorts which the trail skirted off to the right as well as a grove of red banana trees off to his left. He activated his rifle’s IF scope and scanned the tree grove. He immediately got heat readings on six individuals who were hiding in the high brush at the base of the trees.

  At that moment, the high-pitched whine grew into a loud, throaty roar. He searched the dark sky and was startled to see a speck of smoke and flame hurtling almost directly at him.

  What was this? A comet? A meteorite?

  It took Kartoonov a few moments to realize the object was actually a jumpjet, coming in for a high-speed vertical landing.

  He crouched down further into his hiding spot and watched the VTOL airplane drop like a rock; it was going so fast, he was convinced it was going to crash. Only when the strange airplane got to a hundred feet above ground did its pilot gun his engines, in effect slamming on the brakes. Suddenly its speed was decreasing faster than its altitude, and by the time it was twenty-five feet above the ground, it was almost into a hover. It finally touched down without the slightest bounce, and with a great deal less noise than if it had made a typical jumpjet vertical descent.

  He wasn’t surprised to see the six individuals who’d been hiding in the tall grass come out to meet the airplane. Obviously he was watching a predetermined rendezvous.