The fusion reactor was quite small, the first of America’s experiments in nuclear fusion. It was no more than 20 feet high, shaped like a giant metal donut in a frame of pipework and valves and electrical wiring. The control console was a white upright cabinet, no bigger than a Space Invaders game, with five power-indicator dials, and a circular screen to indicate the build-up of nuclear energy. The Tengu had already flicked down a whole row of switches, and the fusion reactor was beginning to hum as it built up the extraordinary charge of power necessary to raise its internal temperature to 100 million degrees Celsius.
Skrolnik came banging along the catwalk, followed by six armed policemen and the scientific director of the Three Arch Bay complex, a young but balding man with hornrimmed glasses as heavy as Clark Kent’s.
“He’s tampering with it, for God’s sake,” shouted the scientific director. “He’s started it up!”
“Cut the power, then!” snarled Skrolnik.
“I can Y! If I shut off the power now, the whole damned thing will go unstable!”
“Shoot him!” Skrolnik directed his officers. “Blow his goddamned head off!”
“No!” insisted the scientific director. “One stray bullet, and the whole reactor could blow up!”
“Well, what then?” screamed Skrolnik in utter frustration.
“Go, Maurice,” said Jerry in a gentle voice. “Go kill him.”
Everybody watched in morbid fascination as Maurice strode purposefully along the catwalk and down the steps which led to the main floor of the reactor room. The Tengu, at the reactor’s console, neither saw nor acknowledged him, but he must have sensed that he was there, since both of them were possessed by the same evil spirit. Different manifestations of the same spirit, invoked for different reasons–after all, like the demons of Christendom, the devils of Japan were legion–but the same fundamental spirit. The atmosphere within the nuclear-reactor hall crackled with evil and with the huge power of the fusion reactor, as it steadily amassed incredible power.
“Kill him!” shouted Jerry, and Mack leaned over the rail of the catwalk and yelled, “Sic him, Maurice!”
El Krusho stepped forward and seized the Japanese Tengu by the neck. His bruised and lacerated muscles bulged with power as he wrenched the Tengu’s head this way and that, and then twisted the Tengu’s arms around behind his back. But the Tengu, for all that he was lighter and less muscular then El Krusho, had been an Oni adept when he was alive; and as El Krusho tried to claw back his head and break his neck, he twisted powerfully around, and threw El Krusho against the metal staircase.
El Krusho lurched to his feet again and tore into the Tengu with the madness of a wild animal.
He dug his fingers into the Tengu’s wounds, and ripped yards of red muscle away from the Tengu’s bones. He butted the Tengu repeatedly with his skull, and at last the two of them became locked together in the clinch which, in Oni, is known as the Fatal Embrace. It is one of the few slow moves in Oni, a twisting together of arms and backs which can be fatal to either antagonist, or both.
J There were three or four minutes of grunting strain, as the Tengu pulled against El Krusho and El Krusho pulled back. Then, with enormous effort, El Krusho staggered to his feet, carrying the Tengu on his back like the carcass of a slaughtered bull, and walked with him, step by agonized step, out of the reactor hall and out toward the huge pool where spent nuclear fuel was kept submerged, prior to reprocessing.
The pool hall was as cold and echoing as a swimming pool. Beneath the deep-turquoise water, lit by underwater floodlights, stood rack after rack of tubular steel where the fuel rods were stored.
At the very edge of the pool, El Krusho and the Tengu wrestled and chopped and grappled with each other. The Tengu at last seized Maurice by the neck and flailed him from one side to the other, howling with a weird echoing howl that sounded as if it had come from hell itself.
There was a moment of physical ballet, a moment of strain and tension and ultimate pain. Then both of them, Tengu and El Krusho, toppled and fell into the radioactive pool.
Mack and Jerry stood by the edge, watching the two figures claw at each other beneath the surface, their bodies distorted by the water, a huge burst of bubbles rushed to the surface from El Krusho’s lungs, but still neither of them came up.
It was then that Skrolnik came through and urgently touched Jerry’s arm. “Listen,” he said, “the reactor’s gone out of control. It’s like a runaway train. The director doesn’t think he’s going to be able to control it.”
Jerry looked down into the depths of the pool, where El Krusho and the Tengu were struggling their last among the racks of plutonium and U-235. He could already feel the deep hum of the fusion reactor reverberating throughout the building. He glanced at Mack, and then at Skrolnik again.
“Hiroshima,” he said. “That’s what this is all about. Goddamned Hiroshima.” He felt a crunching of broken porcelain in his pocket, and realized it was the cricket cage.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
At 8:27 P-M., the sun rose over San Juan Capistrano, just south of Los Angeles. The explosion of the reactor at Three Arch Bay was exactly similar to the detonation of a hydrogen bomb, since the release of neutrons caused by the fusion of the reactor led to fission of the plutonium and uranium waste in the used-fuel pool, and the discharge of violent radioactivity.
The evening turned to daylight as an immense white fireball ascended thunderously into the sky, and then hung there, rumbling, glowing with malevolent heat and power. A young starlet who was prancing out of her car on Santa Monica Boulevard was immortalized in the glass of the Palm Restaurant window. A famous producer who was drinking his tenth collins of the day looked southward from his Bel Air balcony when he first saw something flashing, and was evaporated where he stood.
Within seconds, a roasting wind blew through Garden Grove and Anaheim and Lakewood, turning Disneyland to fiery wreckage, melting the dummies in the Hollywood Wax Museum, melting human beings, too. Dreams and reality both died that day. Reels of movies waiting to be edited at Twentieth-Century Fox and Universal Studios flared up in seconds.
David Sennett was watching television when he heard the first crack and rumble. Then a terrifying flash filled the room, and the drapes billowed out as if a hurricane had caught them.
“Oh, Dad,’’ he thought. He knew what had happened. “Oh, Dad, Oh, God.”
The End
Contents
BOOK ONE BURNED DOVES
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BOOK TWO BLAZING EAGLES
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
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