“I’ve got to get back to the base,” Curtis cried out.
“Don’t bother,” said Rosanna. “It’s not there anymore.”
PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS
“Hurry up, faster—schnell, schnell.”
Hidaka had no idea whether the helmsman, the sole surviving Frenchman on board, understood him or knew what he was doing. The giant barbarian had sworn up a storm when he’d rushed into the CIC.
Three Indonesians and a German lieutenant commander followed on his heels, all of them pulling up sharply at the sight of the killing room. The Nazi spoke a little English. Just enough to infuriate Hidaka as he tried to explain that he wanted to slow down the movies from the missiles.
They’d pushed the helmsman into Danton’s old seat and the German, whose name tag identified him as Bremmer, relayed instruction in French. It might have been laughable, if the fate of the world weren’t hanging in the balance.
The two Europeans bickered and sniped at each other. More of the screens blinked over to white noise as the missiles detonated. And still Hidaka couldn’t tell whether Danton had interfered with the attack before attempting to murder them all.
The helmsman directed a spray of unintelligible abuse at Bremmer before waving his arms at the main display. Hidaka’s mood went through a swooping series of dives and loops as he saw that the replays were running much more slowly, and that some of the missiles seemed to do exactly as they ought. But others appeared to drive themselves into the sides of mountains or open fields.
“Again, again,” he demanded.
Bremmer relayed the instructions, and the movie was rewound—no, replayed, as he corrected himself.
Keeping a much tighter leash on his emotions, this time he was able to see that about half the missiles had gone off course, but not always to ill effect. One that had been heading for the wreck of the Arizona, possibly drawn by its magnetic signature, suddenly veered away and dived on a cruiser, one he didn’t recognize. Hidaka couldn’t tell what sort of damage was done, but unless Danton had somehow defused the warheads, it still would be considerable.
On other screens, airfields and army barracks were certainly hit. But he counted five windows in which nothing—absolutely nothing—of value seemed to have been targeted. One rocket appeared to land on the beach in front of a hotel. He could only hope that a large number of officers were staying there.
His stomach had knotted itself so tightly, he wanted to be sick. But he would not give in to the convulsions that were trying to force his breakfast back up. He took a deep breath, ignoring the sickly sweet, rancid smell of death. This was going to take a while to work out. But he was supposed to signal Yamamoto the instant they had launched. The grand admiral would already be wondering what had happened.
“Play it again,” he said. “Slowly.”
OAHU, HAWAII
Good luck and bad habits saved Detective Lou “Buster” Cherry. While he’d been on suspension, he’d taken to calling in at a couple of Big Itchy’s bars for a liquid lunch—on the house, of course. He often stayed on for dinner, making selections from the same menu. Even after the Bureau had pulled a few strings to get him back his badge and gun, it was a routine he’d been unable—or unwilling—to break.
So noon found him at one of Itchy’s new joints, a place called Irish Mike’s, where they had those tasty fucking Buffalo wings he loved so much. Apart from beer and whiskey, there was probably nothing else in his bloodstream now. Except nicotine. And he seemed to recall having a doughnut for breakfast sometime last week.
He’d parked himself in the corner of the bar, where he could watch his subjects, some four-eyed Myron and his greasy girl. He wasn’t supposed to pick them up until later, to learn whether they slept together. But after a couple of days on their trail, he’d come to know their routine. Chances were they’d end up at Mike’s for lunch, which gave him every reason to be at Mike’s, too—perhaps even to get there a little early, to set up a comfy surveillance position and to work on his bent elbow. Mike, who was Maori rather than Irish, and whose name was Tui rather than Mike—well, he didn’t like customers who wouldn’t bend elbow with the best of them.
And Buster Cherry was fine with that.
He licked the spice from his fingers and took a long, cold pull on his beer. A Bud. Not his favorite, but times were tough all over. He stared at the table next to his targets, watching some flyboy and his squeeze, a nurse from over at Pearl. That way he could keep his eyes on Myron and the broad without being so obvious about it. Besides, the nurse had bazongas out to Wednesday, and half the mutts in the joint were staring at them, so it was a good cover.
You could tell Myron’s piece of ass was twenty-first, dressed as she was, although he didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes on that score. The feebs had given him some paper on her, and told him to get more. She was a reporter, name of Natoli, and a looker, too, if your tastes ran to foreign ass.
He could tell that Myron—actually, some gimp called Wally Curtis—was boring her silly, which wasn’t surprising. The kid was boring him, too, and he couldn’t even hear them over the jukebox playing some shit piece of nigger music from the future. The seventies, it sounded like. He was getting better at picking the era. This particular tar boy thought Buster was a “sexy thing” and he really believed in “Milko,” whatever the hell that meant. He’d take Glenn Miller or Bing Crosby any day—no matter what they were saying about Bing.
Detective Cherry had just come to the conclusion that he’d grievously miscalculated the amount of beer he’d need to see off the rest of his Buffalo wings when Natoli started screaming at everyone to get down. Nearly twenty years on the job, he didn’t need to hear it twice. That broad moved like she knew a thing or two. He was halfway to the floor, frantically scanning the room for a shooter, reaching for his own piece, when he saw that both she and her boyfriend were under the table, thumbs jammed in their ears, mouths wide open like they were fixing to swap spit or something.
It took a second, but he suddenly caught on.
Must be a bomb.
He got his own ears covered and was emptying his lungs when a cataclysmic roar shook the floor, the bar, the whole of fucking Diamond Head. It was so violent and lasted so long that Cherry thought it might just shake them off the side of the island and down into the sea.
When he was a little kid on the mainland, his old man had taken him up in a clock tower to hear the bell toll twelve. He’d started screaming at the first gong, at the size of it, and the feeling of his insides being shook to jelly. He was back there for a few seconds, until the monstrous rolling thunder trailed off and the sound of a screaming woman cut through the high-pitched whine he just knew he was gonna be hearing all day.
He felt tender inside. Not just his head, which always felt that way, but everywhere, like he was some sort of human fucking cocktail shaker and he’d just made up a couple of hundred daiquiris.
The bar wasn’t nearly as badly fucked up as he expected. He’d thought a bomb might have gone off, but apart from a lot of broken glass and some upturned furniture that’d been knocked over by the patrons, there was remarkably little damage. A lot of people were wailing in pain, though, holding their hands over their ears. But there was none of the grotesque carnage he’d witnessed after the Jap attack last December. No severed limbs or chunks of meat hanging from the trees.
He caught sight of Natoli and Curtis busting out of the front door, and he chased after them without thinking about it.
For such a dive, Irish Mike’s poorly named bar was superbly located. As soon as he stepped outside and his eyes adjusted to the fierce sunlight, he had a panoramic view back along Waikiki toward the harbor. An enormous cloud, looking just like a big mushroom, had swallowed up half of Honolulu. His balls contracted, and ice water filled his gut. He’d heard about those fucking things. They were bad fucking news. Even the cloud could kill you if you breathed it in or let it touch you.
Nevertheless, he was nailed to the spot, co
mpletely unable to move. The whole island seemed to be covered in twisting clouds of smoke. Pearl, Hickham, Schofield Barracks—they were all lost inside the firestorms.
But strangely enough, so were the mountains in the center of the island. And something had obviously exploded with great force a mile or so off Waikiki, where there was nothing but empty water.
“Hey, are you a police officer?”
At first he didn’t realize they were talking to him.
“Hey, you there, are you a cop?”
Cherry looked up stupidly. His targets were walking toward him. He followed their eyes, looking down and seeing his .38 growing out of his hand like a blue metal tumor. It was so much a part of him that he’d forgotten about pulling it.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, knowing that his surveillance was over, if not exactly blown.
“You got a radio? In your car?” Natoli asked. “You still got your car, right? You’ve been following us in that piece of shit for three days now?”
Blown, all right.
“What? Huh? Oh, yeah. Over there.” He waved his gun in the general direction of the car.
“The black Dodge, I know. Do you have a radio?”
“Why?” He couldn’t get his brain out of first gear.
“Just come on,” said the broad. She raised a dust trail, she moved so quickly. When she reached the Dodge, she wrenched open the door with a yank.
“Hey, you can’t do that!” he protested, starting to get his senses back at last. The sound of three gigantic eruptions reached them from the burning maelstrom of Pearl Harbor. He looked away from Natoli and Curtis, but he couldn’t see a thing through the smoke.
“Secondary blasts,” he said to himself, musing that only a cruiser or a battleship going up would sound like that. He saw the gimp playing with his police radio, and then with the car’s own set.
“Get the hell outta there,” he called out.
They emerged from the front of the Dodge, but not because of him.
“It’s fried,” said Curtis. “EMP.”
“What?”
“Electromagnetic pulse. Every piece of wiring on the island is probably fused.”
“Oh,” said Cherry. “That’s bad, right?”
PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS
It wasn’t nearly as disastrous as he had feared. Hidaka had watched the footage over and over again. It seemed that Danton had got to the entire opening salvo. One missile had fallen into the ocean and two more had speared uselessly into a mountain range. But one that had been meant to land on Ford Island had instead devastated Honolulu. Half of the city was probably gone, according to the helmsman.
Of the second launch series, only one had been wasted, flying right over the Fleet anchorage and continuing on for another two hundred miles before dropping into the water. The other Lavals had all found their intended marks, or hit near enough as made no difference.
He turned away from the display to take in the slaughterhouse that was the Dessaix’s Combat Information Center. There had been no time to clean up yet. The dead lay where they had fallen. This was a disaster, but his attack was not, and the next phase of Operation H.I. could proceed.
Hidaka asked Bremmer to organize the Indonesians to police the mess. Then he moved over to the communications station. This, at least, he had been trained to operate, if only on the most simplistic level. As he opened a secure channel to send a compressed burst to Yamamoto, he wondered how best to present what had happened.
There was no point in avoiding the truth.
He began to type.
Dessaix has launched successfully. Some missiles sabotaged, but strike unaffected. Proceed to next phase. tora. tora. tora.
He read the brief note. There would be a torrent of questions from the Combined Fleet, but Yamamoto knew what he needed to know.
The Hawaiian Islands were defenseless, and awaited the killing stroke.
25
MIAMI, FLORIDA
It had been his idea to come down to Miami early this year. Washington was hell, what with everyone staring at them like circus freaks, and Roosevelt was playing both ends against the middle. Hoover hardly knew where he stood nowadays. Under those circumstances, and with a gloomy winter in the offing, a week or two at the Gulfstream had proved irresistible.
They would normally have traveled across the country to vacation in Southern California, for the racing at Del Mar, but he simply couldn’t stand the idea of setting foot on the West Coast again, as long as that power-mad German Jew was running wild out there.
It’s a pity, he thought as he snugged the silk kimono around his sturdy frame. They always made him feel so welcome in La Jolla. He and Clyde had first refusal on Bungalow A at the Del Charro, where the management ensured that everything was perfect. He always had direct phone lines to Washington; three ceiling fans, because he hated what the air-conditioning did to his sensitive skin; new bulbs in every lamp and light socket; two rolls of scotch tape; a basket of fresh fruit; and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s for himself and Haig & Haig for Clyde—gift-wrapped, of course.
The Gulfstream, down in Miami, was fine, too. Staying there meant being able to use his complimentary box at Hileah whenever there was a race. But it wasn’t his first choice, and J. Edgar Hoover was used to getting his way.
“Oh, Clyde,” he said irritably, “go put on the gown I bought for you. You look a terrible sight in your socks and boxers.”
Tolson was barely speaking to him after the argument they’d had at the track, earlier that day. Hoover was certain that Clyde had been flirting with one of the models who was hanging out with Lewis Rosenstiel, calling her “dearie” and “darling” and patting her on the knee and thigh, which were both scandalously exposed, in the new fashion.
Somebody knocked at the door.
He heard Clyde curse under his breath. The man had a stinking temper when he was cross. And to make it worse, much worse, he was also quite drunk tonight. He stomped over to the door, jerked it open, and stood there in his underwear. “What the hell do you want?” he barked.
Hoover couldn’t hear what was said in reply, but Tolson exploded.
“Well, I don’t see that that’s any of our goddamned business!” he yelled. “Probably some thug from California. I understand that’s how they do things in their day. So why don’t you just get back in your little car, and get the hell out of here. I’m sure you can find your way out to the Valley. Just follow the army of perverts.”
That would normally have been the end of if, but Hoover could still hear the low, insistent murmur coming from the front porch. Clyde started screeching again, unintelligibly this time. He sounded positively unhinged, and Hoover grew concerned that he might lash out. He was a big, powerful man, Clyde.
And it might well be someone important at the door. With all their troubles back home, it wouldn’t be very smart to invite even more trouble.
So Hoover grunted with exasperation and the effort of forcing himself up off the chaise after six whiskies and a double helping of dinner at Joe’s Stone Crabs.
He grumbled all the way over to the door. “This had better be good,” he growled when he caught sight of the pale, trembling figure who was standing there. It was an agent, but not one he recognized. He dealt only with the senior staff when he was here in Florida.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the young man stammered, “but we had to contact you immediately, and you left instructions never to call on the phone. The president wants you back in Washington right now. Something terrible has happened.”
Hoover could feel a fine head of steam building inside his head. “We are on holiday—”
“Sir, please,” the agent interrupted, staggering the FBI director with his impertinence. “It’s Pearl Harbor again, sir. And bombs, too, sir. Bombs going off all over the country.”
“. . . Just follow the army of perverts . . .”
Rogas couldn’t help grinning at that. They had something like 140 hours of audio-video taken from inside Hoov
er’s love shack now.
“Fucking army of perverts,” he chuckled. “Madre de fucking Dios.”
The chief petty officer was nearing the end of his observation shift when the FBI agent interrupted Hoover and Tolson. The others were sleeping, and he sent a soft ping to their earbuds to alert them.
The team was located in adjoining suites at the Gulfstream, in a separate wing of the pink U-shaped hotel to the director and his “longtime companion.” Rogas was bunking with marine Corporal Harriet “the Chariot” Klausner, while in the next room a fellow SEAL, Chief Petty Officer Bryan Cockerill, had teamed up with a marine Corporal Shelley Horton, who’d done three years undercover in a previous life on the Baltimore PD. They were posing as servicemen on leave with their wives.
It hadn’t been possible to get a room near Hoover. They were all kept vacant. But the fucking moron stayed in the same luxury suite every time. So Horton and Cockerill had rented it a few days earlier and installed all the microcams before checking out for a short, fictitious scuba-diving trip down in the Keys.
Rogas had no idea where Kolhammer got his intelligence from, but it was good.
Hoover took the exact room the admiral had said he would on the day he was supposed to.
“Admirals”—the Navy SEAL smiled to himself—“is there anything they can’t do?”
“S’up bitch?” asked Klausner, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes as she appeared at his shoulder in the darkened room.
“Dunno,” he said. “Some Bureau dude just fronted Tolson with a story about bombs going off somewhere. You might want to check out Fleetnet if you can get a link.”
The other two roomies, Horton and Cockerill, appeared from next door. There was a door between the suites, which Rogas assumed was normally locked, until some rich mom and dad needed to rent separate space for their kids.
It was late, and the only light in the room came from the screen Rogas was watching. The hotel room was rank with the smell of four human beings who hadn’t been outside for a long time. Room service trays and discarded junk food artifacts lay everywhere, threatening to pile up into a couple of serious garbage drifts. The technical specs for the gig had been minimal. The surveillance rigs and just two data slates to display the take. They needed to be able to break the observation post down for a quick exit.
Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II Page 34
