Barracuda: Final Bearing - Страница 3

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Namuru opened the case he had withdrawn and revealed a thick vest, full of pockets, heavy with explosives and the automatic pistol. He put on the vest and took out equally heavy pocketed pants that he strapped onto his thighs and fastened with Velcro seams. He kept his helmet on, since it contained two cameras, one that gave Yokosuka Center a view of what he himself saw, a second with a fisheye lens focused on his face. He pulled a small folding spade from a utility pocket and covered the smoking ruin of the cockpit and the parachute with earth dug from the rocky frozen ground. He stepped back after a few minutes, sweating despite the chill, realizing the job was far from perfect but still would only be noticed by someone stepping on top of it.

He ditched the shovel, pulled the pistol out of his vest, screwed on the long silencer and snapped a large clip into the gun. He then thrust the piece into a soft holster set into his vest and withdrew high-powered binoculars and a black rubber box with rounded edges about the size of a steno pad. The pad had heavy elastic straps on the back and a removable cover on the front that now revealed a liquid crystal display. Namuru strapped the pad onto his left forearm, then ran a small wire between his watch and the pad, switching the watch into digital compass mode, its satellite receiver turned to the orbiting Galaxy geostationary multipurpose satellite. A thumb pressure on the display turned the unit on, the display flashing a question mark. He raised the pad to his lips and whispered his password, which this hour was “blue.” The display flashed to life, bright and colorful, although the light from it faded to black if the screen were observed even slightly off from directly in front of it at a distance of thirty centimeters. “Nav display, vector to Tamga weapons depot,” Namuru whispered to the pad. An overhead satellite photograph view of a hilly rocky region flashed onto the display, the scene showing an eerie depth from the three-dimensional effect. The green of the trees and ground cover were broken by several roads, a winding rail track and the roofs of several small buildings, with what appeared to be an expansive flat plateau among the buildings. A yellow grid flashed up over the landscape, with a blinking circle on the crest of a hill to the south of the compound. Namuru noted that the circle was within two kilometers of the center of the complex — and since the circle was his own position, he would have an easy hike to the base perimeter. He looked up into the cloudy sky for any sign of the sun, but it was buried in thick overcast.

He made a full turn, looking and listening for observers in the scrubby growth around him. All was quiet. The pad computer aural sensors were tuned to pick out man-made noises and would alert Namuru by buzzing the flesh of his forearm, but until that function proved itself it was not to be assumed that it worked. After a last glance at the pad display, Namuru set off in the direction of the compound.

YOKOSUKA CENTER

“So how will he get through the perimeter fence and security?” Prime Minister Kurita asked, watching raptly as the screen display jiggled and showed Major Namuru walking through the thick trees on the downslope of a mountain leading to the Tamga valley. The view on one panel of the display showed the trees and underbrush approaching the camera; a second panel showed a fisheye-lens view of a puffy-looking face beaded with sweat, the eyes wide and hyper alert; the third panel revealed a grid superimposed on a bird’s-eye view of the valley with a flashing circle nearing a fenceline surrounding a military compound.

“Not a problem,” General Gotoh replied, glancing from the screen to Kurita’s lined face, then back to the display. “Namuru has gas for dogs, a silenced automatic for human guards, shorting cables for electrified fences. We’ve spent six months training him in the use of every security measure we know. He’s consistently penetrated them 78 percent of the time.”

“Seventy-eight percent doesn’t sound like it’s passing.”

“That is against Japanese technology perimeter security,” Gotoh said, typing into a keyboard in front of his control console. “Against gaijin methods, he will be more than the equal of a security detail.”

“Tell me again how he is going to get inside the bunker, if that is what it is.”

“He’ll shoot the guards,” Gotoh said simply, his eyes still on the display, careful not to let a flicker of annoyance cross his face at Kurita’s insistence on covering briefing material over and over.

“Does he have to do that? It would seem to imperil the mission, draw attention to the breakin.”

“True, Prime Minister. But guards of nuclear weapons are trained — conditioned is perhaps a better term — to shoot intruders. They call it Deadly Force Authorization. It means shoot first and forget the questions. The quickest way to penetrate the security around a nuclear weapon is to surprise the guards and kill them. Even then, one’s life expectancy is numbered in the minutes, perhaps only seconds. That’s why Namuru has the cameras. If he’s shot we’ll still have the data.”

“What about the time delay? They might disconnect and destroy his camera before we know what happened.”

“Unavoidable, I’m afraid, sir. But it is unlikely that if Namuru and his gear is captured that the gaijin Greater Manchurians could understand that he is transmitting. By the time they realized it, we would know all that Namuru knew.”

In the panel monitoring Namuru’s view a bush flashed close to the camera, then rolled away to reveal a length of fencing between two trees. The right panel showing the navigation display changed, a graph replacing the aerial photograph, the graph pulsing with circular curves.

“The fence is electrified with high voltage,” Gotoh announced. The view from Namuru’s helmet blurred as he approached the fence. Namuru’s hands flashed in and out of view, attaching a cable to the fence, just before the fireball exploded and the screens again went blank.

* * *

Namuru looked at the fence as his computer pad flickered with the electromagnetic signature of 11,000 volts surging through the aluminum cable braided through the fence. What could be seen through the fence was limited, since there were more trees there and little else.

Namuru snaked out the electrical cables that were in the back of the heavy vest, uncoiled the heavy insulated wires, withdrew the lengths of copper rods half a meter at a time. He screwed the copper rod lengths together, until there was a two-meter-long copper rod, then attempted to force the rod into the ground. It went in halfway, then had to be tapped with a rubber mallet from another vest pocket until the rod was buried in the ground with only five centimeters protruding.

Namuru hid the mallet under a bush. At least after this, he thought, much of the weight he’d carried in would be left behind. He took a cable and attached it to the top of the copper rod with a heavy copper clamp.

The other end of the cable he attached to a large alligator clip, then stepped back to inspect his work. He unfastened the computer pad and digital receiver watch, his vest and his utility leggings so that most of the metal objects were removed from his body. He put on the thick 100,000-volt rubber gloves. His boots were already wrapped in insulating material, one of the reasons his feet were so uncomfortably hot.

He took a deep breath, studying the cable winding through the aluminum mesh fence. The idea was to get his cable attached to the live electrical cable in the fence, thereby grounding the voltage to the copper rod in the earth. The live wire would then short its potential to ground, either tripping the electrical circuit at the generator or melting the wire at the connection to the rod. If he did this right the power would blast through the grounding mechanism and disrupt the entire circuit so that he could cut through the fence. But if he mishandled the operation 11,000 volts of power would pass through his body. That had happened to one of the Divine Wind officers in penetration training. The high voltage had blown off the man’s legs and one of his arms, stopped his heart and left him a smoking wreck. The training chief had cut the power, and the ambulance crew had revived the man, and he had actually lived for two days, the incredible pain of those days carved on his terrified burned features when they had buried him. A horrible way to die, a worse way to live. Namuru prayed, just don’t let it leave me burned and maimed.

He lunged with the alligator clip and hit the high voltage fence cable with it. The fireball had no sound, only a fist of pressure. Namuru saw the light expand to the size of a zeppelin and surround him as it smashed into him and blew him off his feet and sent him flying into the woods.

* * *

“What happened?”

“Looks like he took a shock,” Gotoh said, his voice a monotone. The screens remained blank.

“And he’s dead?”

“Too early to say, sir.” Gotoh had risen to hover over another younger officer at a neighboring console. The officer tapped furiously at a keyboard, stopping occasionally to manipulate a mouse, then typing again.

“We’re addressing the satellite now trying to get Major Namuru’s cameras to work again. If we can reestablish a link with his instrumentation we might be able to determine what is going on.”

The screen flashed a momentary broken image, then went dark again. Gotoh and Kurita waited.

“How long do we wait?”

“The mission brief calls for a four-minute delay before the satellite signals the chip with the poison canister in the major’s abdomen,” Gotoh said.