by JE Gurley
He felt the throb of the pump-jet propulsor through the deck. The commander was pushing his boat’s engines for every rpm he could squeeze out them in pursuit of the Kaiju. Shortly before they had rendezvoused with the Mississippi, the Kaiju had turned south, submerged, and increased its speed to 130 knots. The sub’s top speed was 30 knots. Catching it was impossible, but still they followed. Its straight-as-an-arrow path would take it near several island chains, but Walker was betting on Australia as its goal. Brisbane and Sydney were on the east coast of Australia; Melbourne and Adelaide were on the south coast. All were heavily populated. Hobart on the island of Tasmania south of Melbourne was Australia’s main navy base. All would present tempting targets for an alien invader set on creating turmoil and chaos
As Walker’s passed through the overcrowded forward crew’s quarters on his way to the galley, he avoided looking at the faces of the passengers. He had suffered their heartfelt thanks too many times since boarding the sub. Their gratitude made him uncomfortable. He did not think he deserved it. Huddled in rows of sleeping cubicles stacked three high on each side of a narrow corridor, they looked like forgotten people filed away in a cabinet, their only separation from the hubbub and noise of submarine life a flimsy curtain.
He found Talent in the galley drinking coffee. Here, the air smelled of caffeine, fresh baked bread, and grilling meat, masking the odor of perspiration, engine oil, and the smell of fear permeating most of the sub. The clatter of pots and pans in the background was more subdued than the sounds of battle. They drowned out the sound of the engine room, but the throb of the pump-jet propulsor was a constant pulse felt through his feet and his elbows resting on the table.
Talent glanced up from his coffee as Walker sat down. A half-eaten sandwich sat on a plate in front of him. The sight of the sandwich roused a low growl in Walker’s stomach, but like Talent, he didn’t have much appetite in spite of his gnawing hunger. Talent was a complete mystery to him. He considered himself a good judge of men, but Talent kept his thoughts to himself, and Walker had trouble reading his stolid face.
“So you’re going after this thing, huh?” Talent asked.
Walker wasn’t sure if he detected awe or disbelief in Talent’s voice. “That’s my job.”
Talent gazed at him over the rim of his cup with dark brown eyes edging on black that looked as if they had seen too much pain and suffering. The despair seemed to spill from the corners of his eyes onto his high, ruddy cheekbones. “Business is too good. Maybe you’d better find a new line of work.”
Walker suppressed a smile and took a sip of his black and bitter. The boat’s coffee was strong with no cream or sugar, just as he liked it, but it was a little too cold from sitting in the pot. “It comes with the uniform. Have you ever served in the military?”
Talent shook his head, swishing his long, black hair, now freshly washed and tied back in a ponytail. He had discarded his bloodstained clothing for a set of utilities. The blue coveralls donated by a sailor was a bit too large for his lanky frame, but then submariners tended not to run six feet tall. He still wore his Stetson and cowboy boots. Walker also noticed Talent had retained his kukri in its leather sheath at his waist.
“I’m not much of a joiner,” Talent answered.
Walker had met many men like Talent, never seeking responsibility but accepting the heavy burden of decision making when circumstances thrust it upon them. He had interviewed some of the survivors. They all spoke glowingly of Talent’s courage and his assumption of command when order had broken down on the ship. They were not as kind in their descriptions of the ships’ officers.
“You’re handy with weapons.”
Talent shrugged. “I know guns.” He chuckled. “I have a talent for them. People, I’m not so good with.”
“I understand you were headed to Australia.” He wondered if Talent was aware that Australia was the Kaiju’s likely destination as well.
Talent’s face soured and he shook his head. “It doesn’t much matter now. I thought I could run away from the trouble, but I was wrong. You can’t hide from these things. They’re like a haboob, an Arizona sand storm, relentless and overwhelming. Anyone caught in one is going to come away dirty.”
Walker knew what Talent meant. He felt dirty. Crawling around in a Kaiju’s guts did that to a man. It left a cloying, alien stink that you could not wash off.
“No, you can’t hide. They’ll keep coming until we learn enough about the aliens to stop them.” Walker paused for a moment, hiding his indecision behind another sip of too cool coffee. “My team is going inside this Kaiju to deliver a poison.” He watched for some reaction from Talent, but his face remained expressionless, as if he already knew Walker’s mission. “I’m down two men on my team with few prospects for replacements. Want to tag along?”
Talent set his cup on the table and leaned back in his seat regarding Walker with a wry smile on his face. “You trying to recruit me, Major Walker?”
“Something like that. I don’t know that the brass will agree with me. If you refuse, I won’t think badly of you. You’d be a fool to come really.”
Talent chuckled. “You suck at selling.”
Talent’s laid-back attitude was beginning to put Walker more at ease. He decided he liked the Arizonan. “I won’t shit you, Talent. I got the job because I know more about what to expect inside a Kaiju than most men would care to know. It is my considered opinion that we’ll probably all die.”
Talent didn’t react to Walker’s pronouncement of doom. Instead, he said, “Your captain doesn’t share your enthusiasm.”
Walker nodded. Talent didn’t miss much in his quiet observations. “He’s young and hasn’t lost men under his command before. Some calls are hard to make.”
“Meaning you’re not afraid to send men to their deaths.”
“I’m not afraid to lead men to their deaths if I think the results are worth the price.”
Talent nodded his head, as if he had already made that same assessment of Walker. He leaned forward in his seat, pushed his sandwich aside, and folded his arms on the table. “My people, the Tohono O’odham, call me Lobo, Lone Wolf, because I don’t play well with others.” By the slight upturn in the corner of his lips, Walker believed Talent secretly enjoyed his status as an outsider. Talent paused for a few seconds before continuing. “Sometimes you have to go with your gut instinct. One day when I was young and restless, I went to see a makai, a medicine man, in Ak-Chin. He looked more like an old alcoholic uncle than what I imagined a medicine man would look like, but everyone said he was the real deal. He studied me for a while as I sat in front of him eager for advice. He mumbled a few prayers, and then told me I was born lucky. As it turned out, he was right about that. He also said I would gain a warrior’s heart. He might be right about that too, although it’s too soon to tell.”
Talent sighed softly and sat back in his chair. His expression became somber, as if the words were difficult for him to say. “He finished by telling me I would die a warrior’s death. Maybe it’s time to see if he was right about that too.”
“So you’ll come?”
“Did you know I’m worth three million dollars?”
The abrupt change in topic confused Walker. He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”
“It’s true, but if these Kaiju take over, it won’t buy a can of beans. Hell, maybe I can mount a bleached Kaiju skull over the door of my hogan on the reservation to ward off evil spirits. Yeah, I’ll go.”
Walker eyed the bandage around Talent’s left wrist. “How’s the hand?”
Talent flexed it and smiled. “Good to go.”
“Good. I’ll see that you’re properly equipped.”
“I want a BFG.”
“The biggest friggin’ gun you can handle.”
“Good, it’s settled. If I’m going to meet I’itoi, the Great Spirit, I want to go with a Kaiju scalp on my belt.”
For a brief moment, Walker saw Talent as the fierce red warrior he con
sidered himself. “It’s not settled yet. The commander has to give his permission.”
Talent’s face became harder. “I don’t think he can stop me, unless he wants to toss me in the brig. When are we jumping off?”
Walker rose from his seat, satisfied he had made the correct judgment call on Talent. “I’ll let you know later. We’re rendezvousing with the freighter that answered the Radiant Princess’ distress call to transfer the survivors, and then we’re going Balls to the Wall after the Kaiju. I have a hunch it will make a few stops for harvesting, but it has a big head start. Get some sack time. Once we’re inside the monster, it’ll be wall-to-wall trouble.”
“It beats sitting and waiting.”
The sub’s 1MC speaker rang out five bells – 2, 2, and 1.
“1730 hours,” Walker said. “By this time tomorrow we should know something more.”
He left Talent to speak with Commander Murdock. He would have to summon all his persuasive powers to convince the sub’s captain to go along with his request. It was unorthodox, one for the books, but strange times called for strange methods. He felt Talent’s presence on the mission would be critical. It was nothing tangible, nothing he could point to as a definite reason to allow Talent to go. It was pure gut instinct. Now, he had to express his convoluted reasoning to Murdock without sounding crazy.
Commander Murdock was in the control room, looking as if had not slept in a couple of days, poring over a chart of the Coral Sea. He glanced up at Walker as he entered. His eyes were dark and rimmed by deep shadows. His wrinkled brow had gained a few more furrows overnight.
“That was a Bravo Zulu on the passengers, Major,” he said.
The commander’s unexpected praise stung Walker. “Twenty-eight passengers out of what, four thousand? More of a Charlie Foxtrot, sir. It was a clusterfuck from the time we hit the deck until the time you plucked us from the sea.”
“It wasn’t your fault you were too late, Major. You deployed as soon as we got the SOS.”
“It didn’t matter much to the people we left aboard ship.” He didn’t try to hide the bitterness in his voice. His mind supplied pleading faces to the possibly hundreds of passengers who had gone down with the ship, hiding from the Kaiju creatures and praying for a rescue that had been too little too late. He aimed none of his recriminations at the commander. Murdock had risked his career in ordering the rescue mission. Walker placed the blame squarely on his own shoulders. He had been too cautious, too slow.
“You saved who you could. The ship was sinking when you arrived, swarming with Wasps, and the Squid came back to finish the job they started. You saved twenty-eight people who would have certainly died if you hadn’t gone. I’d call it a heroic effort even if it didn’t go as well as expected. I’m getting some flak for even making the attempt, but that’s my problem. Now, tell me more about these Squid. They’re new.”
Murdock’ interest in the creatures was understandable. They had sunk two nuclear submarines and a cruise ship. “My encounter with them was brief but deadly. They’re more difficult to kill than Wasps, faster and more intelligent. Mark Talent is the man you need to debrief on the Squid. He named them. Hell, he attacked one with a machete.”
“He’s got balls, for sure,” Murdock said.
“I could use him.”
Murdock became more pensive. “I can loan you a couple of good men, Major. I have several in Security. Allowing a civilian on a fire team mission …That’s risky.”
“With all due respect, sir, sailors are trained to fight from the deck of a ship or a battle station, not a stand up, face-to-face firefight like S.E.A.L.S. Besides, you’re going to need all hands on deck when we catch up with the Kaiju.”
Murdock frowned. “If we can. The damn thing’s doing better than 200 knots. If it doesn’t stop or slow down, it’ll reach Australia days before we can make contact with it. We’ll lose another hour transferring the passengers to the Amata Maru, a Japanese freighter bound from Guam to Tuvalu.” He grimaced. “That can’t be helped.”
Walker saw that the thought of the additional lives lost while they pursued the Kaiju troubled Murdock. He was sure the commander was thinking, as he was, that if he hadn’t attempted the rescue of the cruise ship passengers, Walker’s team could have been in place inside the creature by now. However, it was a moot point. No one was going to leave helpless civilians adrift at sea.
“Can we rendezvous with any seaplane in the area that can expedite our insertion?”
“Negative. Australian military forces are preparing for the Kaiju, and anything we have is well north of us. Most local civilian air traffic is grounded because of the Wasps. The Wasps have formed a moving hundred-mile-diameter defensive perimeter around the Kaiju. No drones can get close to it. We’re relying on satellite imagery to track its position.”
Walker glanced at the chart on the table, a map of the South Pacific and the Coral Sea. Murdock had drawn a straight line from the Radiant Princess to Brisbane, Australia and marked circles around Vanuatu and New Caledonia, both neatly bisected by the line.
“You think Brisbane is its destination?”
“With a population of over two million, it presents a tempting target. From there, it’s less than five-hundred miles south to Sydney. I think the aliens learned a valuable lesson during the last Kaiju attacks. We were quickly able to bring all our resources to bear on the three creatures on land. America was one country with one mission. Now, on the sea with each nation insanely adamant about retaining the sanctity of its national borders, it’s more difficult to hit it with any concentrated, cooperative effort. If the aliens succeed in securing a large remote island, like Australia, and defend it with a ring of submersible Kaiju, they could establish a base on Earth to strike out at any continent, any coastline.”
The commander tapped his finger on Australia. “That’s why they use Kaiju, to wipe out the indigenous population of a planet and create havoc. If we fail to stop this one, the aliens can send dozens, maybe hundreds of Kaiju and control the world’s oceans, eliminate international sea trade, and create an almost untouchable base of operations. Half the world’s population would starve within a year.”
He traced his finger along the circle around Vanuatu. “If the Kaiju has a weakness, it’s its insatiable appetite. It could reach Brisbane and level the entire city before we could get close to it, but I believe it will stop in Vanuatu and maybe New Caledonia to harvest humans. God help me, I’m praying that it does.” He grimaced as he dragged his finger along the length of islands of the Republic of Vanuatu; then, slammed the edge of his fist on New Caledonia, rattling the illuminated glass below the chart. “That’s where we’ll catch it and kill it.”
Walker wished he shared the commander’s optimism, but he had seen too many alien surprises to feel such high confidence. They were playing catch-up, not a great place to be when dealing with a formidable foe. However, killing the Kaiju was his mission, and he would do whatever it took to accomplish it.
“You get us there, Commander, and we’ll kill it.”
Murdock stared at Walker for a long moment that made him slightly uncomfortable. “About your request to take Talent with you, I don’t think I can allow a civilian to take the risk. Admiral Holston would have my stripes. My authorization of the Radiant Princess rescue mission did not go over well. I’m sorry, Major. I’ll get you and your team there if I have to melt the reactor doing so.”
Walker detected a touch of hesitancy in the commander’s voice. He knew Walker’s team needed every advantage he could give it, but allowing a civilian to participate went against his training.
“Commander, I took a civilian into Kaiju Nusku, Doctor Rutherford. He had fewer skills to offer than Talent, and yet he proved invaluable in defeating the creature. Talent is willing to go. He knows the risks. I have a gut feeling about him. I think he’ll prove useful.”
“I’m sorry, Major. Talent goes with the other passengers.”
It was blow to Walker’s gut. He
did not know why the commander’s refusal hit him so hard, but he knew that somehow his chances of completing the mission just dropped.
Murdock turned to Lieutenant Commander Dobbs. “Lieutenant, will you please show the major our delivery vehicle?”
Walker arched an eyebrow at the XO, as Dobbs escorted him to the amidships airlock. “I assumed we would use the DSRV, and then swim in with as little noise as possible.”
Dobbs smiled. “I think you’ll like this S.E.A.L. Delivery Vehicle. The Globemaster dropped them off with the drums of K-2, two new MK-10 SDVs. Each one holds eight men or its equivalent in cargo, travels at 25 knots, and runs on brushless electric motors. It’s almost undetectable on sonar.”
Walker smiled. “It will make getting our equipment there a bit easier.”
“The Navy aims to please.”
Dobbs opened the hatch leading to the decompression chamber for the air lock. Inside sat two, twenty-foot long, black and white orcas.
“What the hell?” Walker exclaimed, as he eyed the two killer whales.
Dobbs laughed. “Whoever dreamed this one up decided using orcas as camouflage might allow you to sneak in. I guess they didn’t realize the Kaiju is eating everything it encounters, including plankton and schools of fish.”
“I’ll give them an A for effort.”
Dobbs pointed to a latch on the side of the vehicle near the orca’s left pectoral fin. “This releases the cowling. There’s a quick release handle inside to jettison the entire cowling in an emergency.” He pressed the latch and lifted the side of the orca. Inside, four tightly packed seats spaced just wide enough apart to allow men wearing SCUBA gear took up the forward section of the vehicle, with tie down straps for cargo in the rear. A simple joystick with attached throttle controlled both the motor and the dive planes and rudder. “I’ll leave you to get some sack time. I need to check in with Navigation.”
As Dobbs left, Walker rubbed his hand along the smooth, rubberized surface of the fake orca. The material’s dimpled surface was composed of thousands of tiny, multi-faceted projections that rendered the SDV almost invisible to sonar, the latest in stealth technology. If the vehicles allowed his team to slip undetected past the Kaiju’s defenses, he could put up with the cramped quarters. Free swimming from the sub was too slow and exhausting, leaving them vulnerable when they arrived.
