“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would Sandecker abort the mission after Pitt had successfully removed the bomb from Dennings’ Demons?”
“He wouldn’t, unless Pitt had a serious accident and was unable to complete the detonation.”
“Then it’s over,” the President said heavily.
When Jordan replied, there was the hollow ring of defeat in his voice. “We won’t know the full story until the admiral makes contact again.”
“What is the latest on the search for the bomb cars?”
“The FBI task force has uncovered and neutralized another three, all in major cities.”
“And the human drivers?”
“Every one a diehard follower of Suma and the Gold Dragons, ready and willing to sacrifice their lives. Yet they put up no resistance or made any attempt to detonate the bombs when FBI agents arrested them.”
“Why so docile and accommodating?”
“Their orders were to explode the bombs in their respective vehicles only when they received a coded signal from the Dragon Center.”
“How many are still out there hidden in our cities?”
There was a tense pause, and then Jordan answered slowly, “As many as ten.”
“Good God!” The wave of shock was followed by an intolerable fear and disbelief.
“I haven’t lost my faith in Pitt,” said Jordan quietly. “There is no evidence that he failed to prime the firing systems in the bomb.”
A small measure of hope returned to the President’s eyes. “How soon before we know?”
“If Pitt was able to adhere to the timetable, the detonation should occur sometime within the next twelve minutes.”
The President stared at his desktop with an empty expression. When he spoke, it was so softly Jordan could barely make out the words.
“Keep your fingers crossed, Ray, and wish. That’s all that’s left for us.”
72
AS THE ACID COMPOUND reacted on contact with the saltwater, it slowly ate through the timing plate and attacked the barometric pressure switch. The action of the acid on the copper switch soon created an electrical charge that shorted across the contacts and closed the firing circuit.
After waiting nearly five decades, the detonators at thirty-two different points around the core of the bomb then fired and ignited the incredibly complicated detonation phenomenon that resulted in neutrons penetrating surrounding plutonium to launch the chain reaction. This was followed by fission bursting in millions upon millions of degrees and kilograms of pressure. The underwater gaseous fireball bloomed and shot upward, breaking the surface of the sea and spearheading a great plume of water that was sprayed into the night air by the shock wave.
Because water is incompressible, it forms an almost perfect medium for transmitting shock waves. Traveling at almost two kilometers a second, the shock front caught and overtook Big Ben as the vehicle forged across the trench slope only eight kilometers distant, a good four kilometers short due to the vehicle’s agonizingly slow passage through the mud. The pressure wave pounded the huge DSMV like a sledgehammer against a steel drum, but it took the blow with the unyielding toughness of an offensive lineman for the Los Angeles Rams blocking a tackler.
Even then, as the energy shock and raging wall of swirling silt washed over the DSMV, shuttering all visibility, Pitt felt only jubilation. Any fear of failure was swept aside with the explosion. Relying blindly on the sonar probes, he drove through the maelstrom of sediment on a juggernauting course into the unknown. He was running on a long ledge that ran midway down the long slope, but his progress was only a few kilometers faster than it had been on the steeper grades. Adhesion between the tractor belts and the mud was only marginally improved. Any attempt to drive the great mechanical monster in a straight line became impossible. It skidded all over the slope like a truck on an icy road.
Pitt fully realized his life hung by an unraveling thread, and that he was in a losing race to escape the path of the coming landslide. The chance of his being overtaken was a bet no self-respecting bookmaker would turn down. All fear was detached, there was only his stubborn determination to survive.
On the surface, unseen in the darkness, the plume of spray rose to 200 meters and fell back. But deep in the fault zone below the bottom of the trench, the shock waves forced a vertical slippage of the earth’s crust. Shock followed shock as the crustal fracture rose and fell and widened, creating a high-magnitude earthquake.
The many layers of sediment laid down for millions of years shifted back and forth, pulling the heavy lava of Soseki Island downward as though it was a rock in quicksand. Cushioned by the soft, yielding sediment, the great mass of the island seemed to be immune to the initial shock waves during the first minutes of the quake. But then it began to sink into the sea, the water rising up the palisade walls.
Soseki Island continued to fall until the underlying layers of silt compressed, and the floating rock mass slowed its descent and gradually settled on a new level. Now the waves no longer crashed against the base of the cliffs, but broke over the jagged edges and lapped into the trees beyond.
Seconds after the explosion and the ensuing seismic blows, an enormous section of the eastern trench wall shuddered and bulged menacingly. Then with a great thundering roar, hundreds of millions of tons of mud slid away and plunged to the bottom of the trench. An incredible pressure wave of energy was generated that rushed toward the surface, forming a mountainous wall of water below the surface.
The indestructible tsunami was born.
Only a meter in height on the open surface of the sea, it quickly accelerated to a speed of 500 kilometers an hour and rolled westward. Irresistible, terrifying in its destructive power—there is no more destructive force on earth. And only twenty kilometers away, the sinking Soseki Island stood directly in its path.
The stage was set for disaster.
The death of the Dragon Center was imminent.
Tsuboi, Yoshishu, and their people were still in the defense control room tracking the southerly course of the crippled C-5 Galaxy.
“Two missile strikes, and it’s still flying,” Yoshishu said in wonder.
“It may crash yet—” Tsuboi suddenly broke off as he sensed rather than heard the distant rumble as Mother’s Breath exploded. “Do you hear that?” he asked.
“Yes, very faintly, like the faraway sound of thunder,” said Koyama without turning from the radar display. “Probably from a lightning storm echoing down the ventilators.”
“You feel it too?”
“I feel a slight vibration,” replied Yoshishu.
Kurojima shrugged indifferently. The Japanese are no strangers to earth movement. Every year more than a thousand seismic quakes are recorded on the main islands, and a week never passes when Japan’s citizens do not notice the ground tremble. “An earth tremor. We sit near a seismic fault. We get them all the time. Nothing to worry about. The island is solid rock, and the Dragon Center was engineered to be earthquake resistant.”
The loose objects in the room rattled faintly as the bomb’s dying energy passed through the center. Then the shock wave from the shift in the suboceanic fault slammed into the island like a gigantic battering ram. The entire Dragon Center seemed to shake and sway in all directions. Everyone’s face registered surprise, then the surprise gave way to anxiety, then the anxiety to fear.
“This is a bad one,” Tsuboi said nervously.
“We’ve never felt one this intense,” Kurojima uttered in shock as he pushed his back and outstretched arms against a wall for support.
Yoshishu was standing quite still as if angered by what was happening. “You must get me out of here,” he demanded.
“We are safer here than in the tunnel,” Koyama shouted above the growing tumult.
Those who were not holding on to something were thrown to the floor as the shock wave tore beneath the lava rock, undulating the deep sediment below. The control center was jolted more savagely now as the island shi
fted back and forth during its descent into the mud. Equipment that wasn’t bolted down began to topple over.
Tsuboi pushed himself into a corner and stared numbly at Kurojima. “It feels like we’re falling.”
“The island must be settling,” Kurojima cried in fright.
What the horrified men in the Dragon Center did not know, could not have known, was that the titanic bulk of the tsunami was only two minutes behind the shock waves.
With Pitt on manual drive, Big Ben slugged tortuously through the mud, sliding ever closer toward the floor of the trench. The tractor belts constantly lost their hold, sending the DSMV sideways down the grade until their leading edges piled up the silt, dug in, and regained their grip.
Pitt felt like a blind man driving the tractor in a blind world, with only a few dials and gauges and a screen with little colored words to guide him. He weighed his chances, sizing up the outside situation as it was revealed by the sonar-laser scanner, and came to the conclusion that so long as he was still mired in sediment his only escape was by a miracle. According to the calculations by the geophysicists, he had not traveled nearly far enough to escape the predicted reaches of the landslide.
Everything depended on finding firm ground or rock structure that was stable and would resist tearing away from the wall of the trench. Even then, his toughest hurdle was the trench itself. He was on the wrong side. To reach the safety of the Japanese shore, he would have to drive the great vehicle down into the bottom and up the opposite slope.
He did not see, his scanner could not tell him, that there was no hard ground or shallow slopes for the DSMV to claw its way up to flat terrain. If anything, the great fracture in the seabed deepened and curved southeast, offering no chance of escape for over eight hundred kilometers. And too late, his scanner revealed the mighty seismic landslide flaring out across the eastern bank of the trench, much as sand spreads when falling through an hourglass, and closing on him at an incredible rate of speed.
Big Ben was still battling through the soft ooze when the avalanche caught up to it. Pitt felt the ground slipping away under the vehicle and knew he’d lost the race. The sound of it came like the roar of a cataract in a tiled room. He saw death’s finger reaching out to touch him. He just had time to tense his body before a great wall of mud engulfed the DSMV and swept it end over end into the black void far below, concealing it under a burial shroud of featureless ooze.
The sea looked as if it had gone insane as the mighty bulk of the tsunami towered into the night, forming a raging frenzy of destruction. It sped out of the darkness, rising ever higher as it came in contact with the island’s shoals, the sheer magnitude of its power beyond human belief.
As its front slowed from friction at meeting the rising bottom, the water in its rear piled up, lifting with fantastic speed to the height of an eight-story building. Blacker than the night itself, its crest bursting like fireworks with the fire of phosphorescence, its roar slashing across the sea like a sonic boom, the mammoth nightmare reared up like a mountain summit and flung itself against the defenseless island’s already sunken palisades.
The stupendous wall of death and devastation crushed and swept away every tree, every stick of organic growth, and the resort buildings above the island like toothpicks in a tornado. Nothing made by man or nature resisted the catastrophic force longer than an eye blink in time. Trillions of liters of water obliterated everything in their path. The island was pushed under even further as if by a giant hand.
Much of the tsunami’s astronomical power was sapped from the onslaught against the land mass. A counter surge was created in a kind of backlash that sent the major force of the wave back into the vastness of the ocean. What energy was left of the westward thrust passed on and struck Japan’s main island of Honshu, the wave having dropped to a one-meter coastal surge that caused some damage to several fishing ports but no deaths.
In its wake the tsunami born of Mother’s Breath left Soseki Island and its Dragon Center drowned under a turbulent sea, never to rise above the surface again.
From deep under the island the aftershocks went on. They sounded like the rumblings of heavy gunfire. At the same time, countless tons of black water gushed through the air vents and elevator shaft, pressured by the enormous weight from above. Rivers spurted from fractures opened in the concrete roof and by widening fissures in the overhead lava rock from the stress forces brought on by the sinking island.
The entire Dragon Center was suddenly filled with the noise of water cascading from above. And behind that noise was the heavier, deeper thunder of water exploding into the rooms and corridors of the upper levels. Impelled by fantastic pressure, the flood plunged into the heart of the complex, shoving a great blast of air ahead of it.
All was confusion and panic now. The full realization by the hundreds of workers that they all faced certain death came with sickening suddenness. Nothing could save them, there was no place to run to escape the inundation. The tunnel had been split apart as the island shifted downward, sending the sea pouring through the tube toward Edo City at the other end.
Tsuboi’s ears rang from the air pressure. A great roaring sound came from outside and he recognized it as a wall of water ramming its way toward the defense control room. He had no time to react. In that instant, a sudden torrent of water burst into the room. There was no time to run, to even shout. In his final moments he saw his mentor, the evil old archcriminal Yoshishu, shot away from the column he was clinging to like a fly from the spurt of a garden hose. With a faint cry he disappeared in a rush of water.
Rage dominated all of Tsuboi’s other emotions. He felt no fear of pain or death, only a rage directed against the elements for denying him the leadership of the new empire. With Suma and Yoshishu gone, it would have all belonged to him. But it was only the fleeting hallucination of a dying man.
Tsuboi felt himself being sucked out and swept into the flow of water rushing through the corridor. His ears stabbed with agony from the pressure. His lungs were squeezed to the bursting point. And then he was thrust against a wall, his body crushed.
Only eight minutes had elapsed since Mother’s Breath had exploded, no more. The destruction of the Dragon Center was terrifyingly complete. The Kaiten Project no longer existed, and the island the ancients knew as Ajima was now only a mound beneath the sea.
73
FOR THE PRESIDENT and the vastly relieved advisers on his National Security Council, the news of the total elimination of the Dragon Center was greeted with tired smiles and a quiet round of applause. They were all too exhausted for any display of unrestrained celebration. Martin Brogan, the CIA chief, compared it to waiting all night at the hospital for his wife’s first baby.
The President came down to the Situation Room to personally congratulate Ray Jordan and Don Kern. He was in a jubilant mood, and fairly beamed like an airport beacon.
“Your people did one hell of a job,” said the President, pumping Jordan’s hand. “The nation is in your debt.”
“The MAIT team deserves the honors,” said Kern. “They truly pulled off the impossible.”
“But not without sacrifice,” Jordan murmured softly. “Jim Hanamura, Marv Showalter, and Dirk Pitt—it was a costly operation.”
“No word on Pitt?” asked the President.
Kern shook his head. “There seems to be little doubt that he and his Deep Sea Mining Vehicle were swept away by the seismic landslide and buried.”
“Any sign of him from the Pyramider?”
“During the satellite’s first pass after the explosion and upheaval, there was so much turbulence the cameras couldn’t detect any image of the vehicle.”
“Maybe you can spot him on the next pass,” the President said hopefully. “If there is even the slightest chance he may still be alive, I want a full-scale rescue mission mounted to save him. We owe Pitt our butts, and I’m not about to walk away from him.”
“We’ll see to it,” Jordan promised. But already his mind was tu
rning to other projects.
“What news of Admiral Sandecker?”
“His surveillance aircraft was struck by missiles launched from the Dragon Center. The pilot managed to make a safe wheels-up landing at Naha Air Field on Okinawa. From initial reports, the plane was shot up pretty badly and lost all communications.”
“Casualties?”
“None,” answered Kern. “It was a wonder they survived with little more to show than a few cuts and bruises.”
The President nodded thoughtfully. “At least we know now why they broke off contact.”
Secretary of State Douglas Oates stepped forward. “More good news, Mr. President,” he said, smiling. “The combined Soviet and European search teams have uncovered almost all of the bomb cars hidden in their territories.”
“We have MAIT team to thank for stealing the locations,” explained Kern.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t help much on our end,” said Jordan.
Kern nodded. “The United States was the main threat to the Kaiten Project, not the European alliance or the Eastern Bloc countries.”
The President looked at Jordan. “Have any more been found within our borders?”
“Six.” The Central Intelligence Director grinned slightly. “Now that we have some breathing space, we should track down the rest without further risk to national security.”
“Tsuboi and Yoshishu?”
“Believed drowned.”
The President looked pleased, and he felt it. He turned and faced everyone in the room. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “on behalf of a grateful American people, who will never know how narrowly you saved them from disaster, I thank you.”
The crisis was over, but already another had erupted. Later that afternoon, fighting broke out along the border of Iran and Turkey, and the first reports came in of a Cuban military Mig-25 shooting down a United States commercial airliner filled with tourists returning from Jamaica.
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