Barracuda: Final Bearing - Страница 5

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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.