"Hardly the word that leaps to mind," Pitt muttered while swilling a glass half filled with tequila, lime, and ice from a bottle he'd carried from Washington. He wore swimming trunks and a NUMA T-shirt.
His long tan legs were propped on the back of the chair in front of him, his feet in leather sandals. "A garden spot on the outside, maybe, but with a monster lurking inside."
"You think Suma's nuclear arsenal and detonation control center is under the island?" asked Frank Mancuso, who was the last of the five team members to arrive at the South Pacific Information Gathering and Collection Point.
Penner nodded. "We're sure of it."
Stacy reached out and touched the sheer palisades climbing almost vertically from the sea. "There's no place to dock ships. They must have brought in construction equipment by air."
"How was it possible they built it without our spy satellites detecting the activity?" Weatherhill wondered aloud.
With a smug expression of pride on his face, Penner lifted off a section of the sea that ran from the island to the thick edge of the table. He pointed at a tiny tube running through the gray plaster. "A tunnel,"
he explained. "Suma's engineers constructed a tunnel that begins under the deepest subterranean level of Edo City and travels ten kilometers to the coast, and then another fifty beneath the seafloor to Soseki."
"Score one for Suma," said Pitt. "Our satellites didn't spot any unusual movement because the earth dug from the tunnel was removed along with that excavated during the building of the city."
"A perfect cover," said Giordino, bordering on a pun. He straddled a chair and stared pensively at the scaled model. He sat cool in cutoff jeans and nothing else.
"The longest bore in the world," said Penner, "exceeding the one the Japs built beneath the ocean from Honshu to Hokkaido."
Weatherhill shook his head from side to side in amazement. "An incredible undertaking. A pity the effort wasn't put to a more peaceful purpose."
As a mining engineer, Mancuso could appreciate the enormous problems involved in such a massive project. "Working only from one end, it must have taken a good seven years," he said, highly impressed.
Penner shook his head negatively. "Working around the clock with newly designed boring equipment, Suma's engineers finished the job in four."
"All the more fantastic knowing it was accomplished in total secrecy." Stacy's eyes had never left the model since its unveiling.
Penner now lifted off a section of the island, revealing a miniature labyrinth of passageways and rooms, all spreading like spokes from one large spherical chamber.
"Here we have the interior layout of the facility. The scale may be slightly off, but I did what I could from the rough sketches Jim Hanamura got through to us."
"I think you did a sensational job," said Stacy, admiring Penner's handiwork. "The detail is so precise."
"A lot is pure guesswork, but Kern put a design and engineering team to work and they drafted the dimensions pretty close to what we expect from the original." He paused to pass out a stack of folders to the four MAIT team members in the hut. "Here are the plans of the Edo City end of the tunnel and the control center as expanded and detailed by Kern's people."
Everyone unfolded the drawings and studied the layout of the facility that represented the worst threat the free world had faced since the Cuban missile crisis. No one spoke as they traced the passageways, memorized the labels describing the rooms, and examined the dimensions.
"The center must be a good three hundred meters below the island's surface," observed Mancuso.
"There's no airstrip or dock on the island," Stacy murmured in concentration. "The only entry is by helicopter or from Edo City through the tunnel."
Pitt drank the last of his tequila. "No way in by sea unless the assaulting force were professional mountain climbers. And at that, they'd be picked off by Suma's defense systems like ants crawling up a white wall."
"What are those buildings on the surface?" asked Weatherhill.
"A luxury retreat for Suma's top management. They meet there for business conferences. It also makes an ideal location for secret meetings with politicians, government bureaucrats, and underworld leaders."
"Shimzu's painting showed an island barren of plant life," said Pitt. "Half the island appears covered by trees."
"Planted by Suma's landscape people over the past twenty years," explained Penner.
Mancuso scratched his nose thoughtfully. "What about an elevator between the retreat and the control center?"
Penner shook his head. "Nothing showed on the plans. We can't risk penetration down the shaft if we don't have a location."
"An underground facility of this scope requires outside ventilation."
"Our engineering team believes several of the houses within the resort area are dummy covers for air vents and exhaust ducts."
"We might give that a try." Weatherhill laughed. "I'm good at ducts."
Penner shrugged. "Again, not enough information. It's possible air is pumped in from Edo, and the foul returned and vented along with the city's outflow."
Pitt looked at Penner. "What are the chances Loren and Diaz are held prisoners on the island?"
Penner gave an unknowing shrug. "Fair to good. We haven't tracked them down yet. But resortlike accommodations on an impregnable island would certainly make an ideal safe house to hide hostages."
"Hostages, yes," said Stacy, "but under what terms? No word of Congresswoman Smith and Senator Diaz has been heard since they were abducted."
"No demands have been received," explained Penner, "forcing the President into a wait-and-see game.
And until we can provide him with enough intelligence to make a judgment call on a rescue operation, he won't give the order."
Giordino gazed at Penner with a small air of contemplation. "There must be a plan to trash the joint, there's always a plan."
"We have one," replied Penner, committing himself. "Don Kern has created an intricate but viable operation to penetrate and disable the center's electronic systems."
"What kind of defenses are we talking about?" inquired Pitt. "Suma wouldn't sink heavy effort and money into the eighth wonder of the modern world without protecting the hell out of it.
"We can't say with any accuracy." Penner's eyes swept over the island model with a look of concern.
"We do know what security and military technology is available to Suma, and must assume he's installed the best sensory gear his money can buy. Exotic radar equipment for land and sea detection, sonar sensors for underwater approach, laser and heat detection ringing the perimeter of the shore. Not the least of which is an army of armed robots."
"And lest we forget, an arsenal of hidden surface-to-sea-and-air missiles." This from Pitt.
"It won't be an easy nut to crack," Weatherhill said in a classic understatement.
Giordino looked at Penner, amused, curious. "Looks to me like an assault by at least five Special Forces assault teams, preceded by an attack of naval carrier aircraft and a bombardment by a strike fleet to soften up the defenses, is the only way anybody's going to get inside that rock."
"Either that," Pitt tagged, "or a damn big nuclear bomb."
Penner smiled dryly. "Since neither of your suggestions fits into the practical scheme of things, we'll have to use other means to do the job."
"Let me guess." Mancuso was acid. As he spoke he gestured to Stacy, Weatherhill, and himself. "The three of us go in through the tunnel."
"All five of you are going in," Penner murmured quietly. "Though not all by way of the tunnel."
Stacy gasped in surprise. "Frank, Timothy and I are highly trained professionals at forced entry. Dirk and Al are marine engineers. They have neither the skill nor the experience for a tricky penetration operation. Surely you don't intend to send them in too?"
"Yes I do," Penner insisted quietly. "They are not as helpless as you imply."
"Do we get to wear black ninja suits and flit through the
tunnel like bats?" There was no mistaking the cynicism in Pitt's voice.
"Not at all," Penner said calmly. "You and Al are going to drop in on the island and create a diversion to coincide with the entry of the others from Edo City."
"Not by parachute," Giordino groaned. "God, I hate parachutes."
"So!" Pitt said thoughtfully. "The great Pitt and Giordino the magnificent fly into Hideki Suma's private resort fortress with bugles sounding, bells ringing, and drums beating. Then get executed samurai style as trespassing spies. Kind of taking us for granted, aren't you, Penner?"
"There is some risk, I admit," Penner said defensively. "But I have no intention of sending you to your deaths."
Giordino looked at Pitt. "Do you get the feeling we're being used?"
"How about screwed?"
With his partisan eye Pitt knew the Director of Field Operations wasn't acting purely on his own authority. The plan had come from Kern with Jordan's approval and the President's blessing on top of that. He turned and stared at Stacy. She had "Don't go" written all over her face.
"Once we get on the island, what then?" he queried.
"You avoid capture as long as possible to distract Suma's security forces, hiding out until we can mount a rescue mission to evacuate the entire team."
"Against state-of-the-art security, we won't last ten minutes."
"No one expects miracles."
Pitt said, "Well?"
"Well what?"
"We fall from the sky and play hide-and-seek with Suma's robots while the three pros sneak in through a sixty-kilometer tunnel?" Any hint of irritation, incredulity, and despair was contained with great force of will by Pitt. "That's the plan? That's all there is?"
"Yes," Penner said, self-consciously avoiding Pitt's blazing stare.
"Your pals in Washington must have drawn that brilliant piece of creativity out of a fortune cookie."
In his mind, Pitt never doubted his decision. If there was the slightest chance Loren was held prisoner on the island, he would go.
"Why can't you simply cut off their power source on the mainland?" asked Giordino.
"Because the control center is entirely self-sustaining," replied Penner. "It has its own generating station."
Pitt looked at Giordino. "What do you say, big Al?"
"That resort have geishas?"
"Suma has a reputation for hiring only beautiful women," Penner answered with a faint smile.
Pitt asked, "How do we fly in without being blown out of the sky?"
Penner smiled a smile that seemed to portend something good for a change. "Now that part of the plan has an A-number-one gilt-edge rating for success."
"It had better," said Pitt with ice in his opaline eyes. "Or somebody's going to get hurt real bad."
<<44>>
As Penner had suggested, being shot down in flames was not a likely prospect. The ultralight power gliders that Pitt and Giordino were to fly off the landing pad of the U.S. Navy detection and tracking ship Ralph R. Bennett looked like pint-sized Stealth bombers. They were painted a dark gray and sported the same weird Buck Rogers shape that made them impossible to see on radar.
They sat like alien bugs under the shadow of the ship's giant box-shaped phased-array radar. The six-story-high system was composed of 18,000 antenna elements that collected a wide range of intelligence data on Soviet missile tests with an incredible degree of accuracy. The Ralph R. Bennett had been pulled away from its mission near the Kamchatka Peninsula by presidential order to launch the power gliders and monitor activity in and around Soseki Island.
Lieutenant Commander Raymond Simpson, a man on the young side of thirty with sun-bleached blond hair, stood next to the men from NUMA on the open deck. There was an air of capable toughness about him as he kept a tight eye on his maintenance crew, who swarmed around the tiny aircraft fueling tanks and examining instruments and controls.
"Think we can manage without a check flight?" Pitt asked.
"A piece of cake for old Air Force pilots like yourselves," answered Simpson lightly. "Once you get the hang of flying while lying on your stomach, you'll wish you could take one home and keep it for your personal use."
Pitt had never laid eyes on one of the odd ultralight craft until he and Giordino landed on the ship by an Osprey tilt-motor aircraft an hour before. Now after only forty minutes of class instruction, they were supposed to fly them over a hundred kilometers of open sea and make an injury-free landing on the dangerously rugged surface of Soseki Island.
"How long have these birds been around?" Giordino queried.
"The Ibis X-Twenty," Simpson corrected him, "is fresh off the drawing boards."
"Oh, God," groaned Giordino. "They're still experimental."
"Quite so. They haven't completed their testing program. Sorry I couldn't have given you something more proven, but your people in Washington were in an awful rush, insisting we deliver them halfway across the world in eighteen hours and all."
Pitt said consideringly, "They do fly, naturally?"
"Oh, naturally," Simpson said enthusiastically. "I've got ten hours' flying time in them myself. Super aircraft. Designed for one-man reconnaissance flights. Powered by the very latest in compact turbine engines that provide a three-hundred-kilometer-per-hour cruising speed with a range of a hundred twenty kilometers. The Ibis is the most advanced power glider in the world."
"Maybe when you get discharged you can open up a dealership," Giordino said dryly.
"Don't I wish," said Simpson without feeling the barb.
The skipper of the radar ship, Commander Wendell Harper, stepped onto the landing pad with a large photo gripped in one hand. Tall and beefy with a solid paunch, Harper's bowlegged gait gave him the appearance of a man who had just ridden across the Kansas plains for the Pony Express.
"Our meteorology officer promises you'll have a four-knot tail wind for the flight," he said pleasantly.
"So fuel won't be a problem."
Pitt nodded a greeting. "I hope our reconnaissance satellite came up with a decent landing site."
Harper spread an enlarged computer-enhanced satellite photo up against a bulkhead. "Not exactly O'Hare Airport in Chicago, the only flat spot on the island is a grassy area measuring twenty by sixty meters."
"Plenty of room for an upwind landing," Simpson injected optimistically.
Pitt and Giordino moved in and stared at the amazingly detailed picture. The central feature was a landscaped garden clustered around a rectangular lawn that was only open from the east. The other three sides were thickly bordered by trees, shrubbery, and pagoda-roofed buildings with high curved bridges leading down from open balconies to an Oriental pond at one end.
Like condemned men who'd just been told they had a choice of being hanged on the gallows or shot against a wall, Pitt and Giordino looked into each other's eyes and exchanged tired cynical smiles.
"Hide out until rescued," Giordino muttered unhappily. "Why do I get the feeling my ballot box has been stuffed?"
"Nothing like arriving at the front door with a brass band," Pitt agreed.
"Something wrong?" asked Harper innocently.
"Victims of high-pressure salesmanship," Pitt replied. "Someone in Washington took advantage of our gullible nature."
Harper looked uneasy. "Do you wish to scrub the operation?"
"No," Pitt sighed. "In for a dime, in for a dollar."
"I don't mean to crowd you, but sunset is only an hour away. You'll need daylight to see your way in."
At that moment, Simpson's crew chief came over and informed him the power gliders were serviced and ready for launch.
Pitt looked at the fragile little aircraft. Calling it a glider was a misnomer. Without the strong thrust of its turbine engine, it would drop like a brick. Unlike the high, wide wing of a true ultralight, with its maze of wires and cables, the airfoils on the Ibis were short and stubby and internally braced. It also lacked the ultralight's canard wing that resisted stalls and spins. He was
reminded of the adage about the bumblebee as having all the wrong features for flight, and yet it flew as well as, if not better than, many other insects that Mother Nature had aerodynamically designed.
After finishing their preflight check, the flight crew stood off to the side of the landing pad. In Pitt's mind they all wore the look of spectators at an auto race anticipating a crash.
"Maybe we can land in time for cocktails," he said, pulling on his helmet.
With routine calm Giordino merely yawned. "If you get there first, order me a vodka martini straight up."
Harper incredulously realized that glacial nonchalance was the highest state of emotional nervousness these men were capable of displaying.
"Good luck," he said, offering both men a firm handshake. "We'll monitor you all the way. Be sure to activate your signal unit after landing. We'd like to tell Washington you came down safely."
Pitt gave him a wry smile. "If I'm able."
"Never a doubt," Simpson said, as if cheering the home team. "Mind you don't forget to set the self-destruct timer. Can't make the Japs a gift of our ultralight technology."
"Goodbye, and thanks to you and your crews for looking out for us."
Giordino touched Pitt on the shoulder, gave him an encouraging wink of one eye, and without another word walked toward his craft.
Pitt approached his power glider and eased in from the bottom through a narrow hatch in the fabric-covered fuselage and onto his stomach until his body fit the contours of a body-length foam rubber pad. His head and shoulders were elevated only slightly higher than his legs, elbows swinging free a centimeter above the floor. He adjusted his safety harness and belts that strapped across his shoulder blades and buttocks. Then he inserted his outstretched feet into grips on the vertical stabilizer and brake pedals, and then gripped the stubby control stick in one hand while adjusting the throttle setting with the other.
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