Barracuda: Final Bearing - Страница 4

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“How long has it been?”

“We were already on a five-minute delay from real time when the major got hit with the electricity. We saw it three minutes ago. I’d say Major Namuru has another sixty seconds before the computer aborts the mission and calls down to the chip to inject the poison.”

The screen flashed, then held. The camera view from Namuru’s helmet stared straight up at the sky, the boughs of two trees breaking the featureless clouds. The face-monitoring camera came up next. Namuru’s face was burned on the left side, his eye gone, the flesh seared and melting. His right eye was shut and swollen.

“Prime Minister, I don’t think we should wait for the mission computer. We should abort now. Namuru’s gone.”

Kurita stared at Namuru’s burned and disfigured face.

“I agree. General.”

Gotoh gave the order to the officer on the control console, who nodded and made the commands as if they had nothing to do with killing a fellow officer.

“The signal is out, sir,” the officer reported.

“He’ll be dead in thirty seconds if he isn’t already,” Gotoh said.

Kurita looked up at the screen. “We need another plan. We still must find out if Len Pei Poom has nuclear weapons. He could be targeting Tokyo even now.”

* * *

Namuru was burned from the inside out. His flesh felt hot and running on his left side, his face aching and puffy. His whole body ached, he couldn’t move. He concentrated for what seemed hours trying to move his right hand, finally able to move it upward. In the next ten minutes he used the hand to lift himself so that he was sitting up. He couldn’t see out of his left eye. He reached for his face and felt the burned flesh, hard and crumbling.

He crawled through the brush to find his watch and the computer pad. When he found them, the computer pad had melted into a puddle of plastic. The watch was also destroyed, the satellite above having given the signal to abort the mission. Which meant that his poison capsule should have been released and he should be dead.

Except that the electrical fireball must have fried the chip inside him. But if there had been enough power to kill the chip, there might have been enough to fracture the poison canister. It could be leaking even now, he thought. He had only hours to live — but then that was the whole idea of this mission.

He managed to stand, shaking when he finally made it. He took some water from his vest, then tried to put it on. It was too heavy and he was too weak. He would have to go in without it. He bent over the vest and pulled out the pistol, a spare clip, the two gas bottles, a small collection of electronic boxes and a small pack of film, then adjusted his helmet, wondering if the cameras were still operating. The circuits checked out — he should still be transmitting. He wondered if there was anyone on the other end. He stepped slowly toward the fence, saw the blackened hole the fireball had blown in it. He crouched down, walked through and limped to the trees, his strength coming and going erratically.

With the computer pad gone, he was operating on memory. The satellite photo had pictured a wide flat mound of earth, the kind used to conceal an underground bunker. The earth mound would be behind two rows of outbuildings from where he was, just beyond the trees. Moving through the trees to the far edge, he saw the outbuildings and began walking unsteadily through the exposed ground to the cover of the buildings. If the cameras weren’t working, the mission was over.

The two black dogs running silently toward him were within ten meters before he saw them with his one eye.

* * *

“Prime Minister! General!”

The lieutenant from the command center, Gotoh saw.

“Sir, the major. He’s alive. He’s inside the compound—”

“General, what happened to the poison?” Kurita asked.

“I’m not sure, sir. Perhaps the electrocution damaged it.”

“What else could fail on this day,” Kurita mumbled.

The two men hurried back to the command center, returning to the control corner they had abandoned minutes before. The left screen was unsteady with the blur of movement, the transmission fading in and out, the software freezing the image rather than allowing the display to go black during the short transmission interruptions.

During one short interruption Kurita saw the frozen image of the exposed fangs of a large black dog leering angrily at the camera as it lunged. The eyes were red and furious, the mouth hungry and lethal. Kurita unconsciously felt his throat.

* * *

The dogs had gotten too close. If he had still been able to use the computer pad, the motion detector would have alerted him to the animals ten seconds before, but that was in the past. In an adrenaline rush he grabbed a gas bottle with each hand, aiming as best he could with only one good eye, the streams of gas jetting out at the dogs in a loud blast, a white cloud forming around him. He clamped his mouth shut, hoping he could keep from inhaling the gas. The lab techs had assured him the nerve gas was active only on animals, not humans, but after seeing it demonstrated, he wondered. The dogs, already flying through the air to get to his throat, were dead before they hit him, the two bodies knocking him to the ground, the sounds of the dogs’ gasping expulsions of breath in his ears as their bodies spasmed through reflex nerve actions.

Namuru got up, replaced the bottles in his belt and withdrew the automatic pistol. He was within ten meters of the objective now, the hump of earth covering the suspected bunker rising over his head. The slope of the dirt was too regular to be natural. There was definitely something buried here. Namuru closed the clump of trees at the edge of the earth embankment and had a momentary impression of the two armed guards in their helmets and flak jackets. Namuru sprayed them with a single silenced burst from the pistol, more than two dozen Teflon-jacketed rounds exploding inside their bodies. He had shoved the pistol into his belt, the barrel scalding hot, while the guards were still on their feet, slowly collapsing to the ground. As the two liquid thumps came from their impact with the earth, Namuru cradled the keypad entry box in his hands.

The keypad required a password numeric sequence be entered to open the blast doors of the bunker. Namuru pulled the cover off, reached into his belt for the electronic boxes, none of them bigger than a matchbook, and selected, the proper one. He placed the box over the number pad, hit a button on the face of the box and waited. Twenty seconds later a small crystal display blinked as the box talked to the keypad. Finally the keybox surrendered, the heavy steel blastdoor groaning as it moved its rusted mass, one panel sliding right, the other left, opening into the darkness of the bunker. As it opened, Namuru pulled the pistol from his belt and dropped the electronic box, which was already sizzling and melting into a self-destruct sequence.

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.