Vulcan's Forge

by Jack Du Brul

  “What are you doing to hold them, Shinzo?”

  “As ordered, we’re firing over their heads, but my boys are taking too many casualties to remain passive much longer, sir.”

  “Colonel Shinzo, do you recognize my voice?” the President asked clearly, hiding his exhaustion.

  “I believe so, Mr. President.” The statement was more of a question.

  “Colonel, you’re doing a fine job there, but I want civilian and National Guard casualties at a minimum. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Shinzo said resignedly, knowing this meant losing a lot of his men.

  The noise of the battle increased dramatically. Shinzo turned away quickly as the transmission broke off again.

  The assembled men all turned to Tompkins, who was frustratingly twisting dials and knobs. “I’m sorry, but the transmission was broken at the other end. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “That’s fine,” Admiral Morrison said dryly. “You’re dismissed.”

  Tompkins gratefully hurried from the room.

  “Can we trust him?” Paul Barnes asked. “I mean, he’s a Jap after all.”

  “Shut your fucking mouth, you racist son of a bitch.” Morrison was on his feet the instant Barnes finished speaking. “Shinzo wears the uniform of the United States Marine Corps. You question the integrity of one of my boys again, and so help me Christ I’m going to tear you a new asshole.”

  “Let’s calm down here, gentlemen,” Dick Henna said soothingly. “But Admiral Morrison has a point. We start second-guessing the motivations of our own people and we might as well go home and wait for Armageddon.”

  “I guess it’s started,” the President said slowly. Every man knew he meant a civil war. “The great melting pot has been simmering for two hundred-plus years and it’s about to boil over. Unless this situation ends within a few hours, the news from Hawaii will light a powder keg in every big city in America. It’ll make the Los Angeles riots of 1992 look like Mardi Gras.”

  The President was silent for five long minutes. His most trusted advisors knew he was making a decision that might very well condemn the United States to the bloodiest war ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.

  The compassion they felt for him could not make the decision any easier.

  His shaggy head was bowed over the table and his lips moved silently. Was he praying, or asking advice of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, who was said to wander the White House? He raised his head, his shoulders squaring.

  “Tom.” Admiral Morrison looked the President square in the eye, awaiting his orders. “I want a Tomahawk cruise missile armed with a nuclear warhead launched at the volcano. If there is a Russian sub out there guarding it, it’ll be destroyed by the blast.”

  So it was war. The United States was going to fight and perhaps lose everything democracy had created. Once again race would plunge America into a civil war, but this time there would be no North and South, no Mason-Dixon Line. The boundaries had blurred in the decades since then. Now the battles would be fought in every state and every town.

  “Then order the Kitty Hawk and the Inchon to stand off, suspend all flights, and steam out of the area. I don’t want them anywhere near Hawaii, is that clear? Tell the commander at Pearl to throw down their weapons and surrender the base.”

  A sigh ran through the room.

  “I would rather sacrifice Hawaii than risk a war. Maybe their secession will start a chain reaction and this country will disintegrate, but I’m willing to take that risk. I can’t order our troops to kill Americans no matter what the consequences.”

  Tears ran unashamedly down his cheeks.

  “Sir.” Dick Henna was the first person to speak. “What about Mercer? We haven’t even given him a chance.”

  “Dick, he’s only one man. We’re talking about a massive revolution supported by God knows how many people.”

  “Mr. President,” Henna persisted, “what if he’s right that this revolution is being masterminded by an outside influence? If he can cut that off, there will be no revolt.”

  “I spoke to the Russian president no more than two hours ago, Dick. He had no idea what I was talking about. Mercer was wrong about the Russians being involved. This whole thing was strictly Takahiro Ohnishi’s.”

  “And what if this is something the Russian government didn’t sanction?”

  “That’s a bit too far-fetched for me to believe. This is a massive operation. There’s no way the head of the country wouldn’t know about it.”

  “Ask your predecessors about Iran-Contra sometime,” Henna retorted sarcastically.

  The President ignored the remark.

  “About the Russian government not sanctioning this operation, it may not be that far-fetched,” Paul Barnes said, polishing his glasses.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This afternoon, the body of Gennady Perchenko was fished from a river in Bangkok. If you recall, Perchenko was the Russian ambassador to the Bangkok Accords, the one who outfoxed us into signing away any legal rights to that new volcano.”

  “Was there any indication of foul play?”

  “In my business, there’s never any indication, but I’d stake my career that he was murdered. Also, an informer reported seeing Ivan Kerikov flying into Thailand a few days before Perchenko’s death.”

  “Who’s Ivan Kerikov?”

  “A real cagey KGB operator, sir. My contacts in Moscow tell me that there is a massive manhunt on for him even as we speak. It seems he has a record of working outside the fold and right now he’s under arrest for misappropriation of government funds, equipment, and personnel, and a dozen other charges, including murder.

  “He’s come to the attention of the CIA a few times over the years. He ran a team of assassins and torturers in Afghanistan during the early 1980s and he was somehow connected to the Korean Air jumbo jet shot down in September of 1983. Most recently he took over Department Seven of the KGB.

  “Department Seven is one of those groups we know very little about. They don’t seem to have any active agents or any real goals. They just act as a sort of think tank as far as we can figure. Now, if Perchenko’s death can be linked to Kerikov then we have a definite connection between the volcano and this Department Seven.”

  Sam Becker had been reading the file handed to him earlier, with the photos, and now he looked up sharply. “We have that connection.”

  “What do you have, Sam?” The President caught the strength behind Becker’s voice and drew from it.

  “On Paul’s request last evening, I had the archive sections at Fort Meade pull anything they had on Soviet geologists from the fifties and sixties. The records were sketchy, but we just got lucky.”

  Since its inception, the National Security Agency at Fort Meade was the repository for every scrap of intelligence gathered from around the world. There was more computer power in the sprawling complex than anywhere else on the planet, and it was used to decipher even the most oblique reference or cryptic message from enemy and ally alike. If something had ever been put in print, spoken about over a phone line, or bounced off a satellite, NSA had a record of it. From the personal advertisements in the Johannesburg Star to mundane conversations between two sisters in Madrid to the dying gasps of three cosmonauts who secretly suffocated aboard the Soyuz space station in 1974, it was all stored on the magnetic tapes in NSA’s archives.

  Becker held up his slim file. “This is from the archive director, Oliver Lee. According to Lee, personnel records from a research laboratory near Odessa show that Olga Borodin has been drawing a decent pension from the state since an accident claimed her husband on June 20, 1963. Given the parameters of the search, her name caught Lee’s attention, and after a bit more research he found that the laboratory was part of an agency called Department Seven. It seems the CIA knows more about Department Seven than we do but the connection is obvious. Olga Borodin is the widow of a geologist named Pytor Borodin.”

  “You mean the Russi
an specialist on bikinium?” Henna interrupted.

  “So, Dr. Mercer was right. The Russians are involved, just not their government.” The President was truly shocked. “Kerikov must be the mastermind and Ohnishi merely a pawn. The man’s got balls, I’ll say that much, but knowing this doesn’t help us any. We still have a coup taking place in Hawaii and a valuable resource about to fall to this Ivan Kerikov.” The President swiveled to face Henna. “What do you propose?”

  “Give Mercer until dawn,” Henna said. “If he has a plan, at least give him that much time. You saw from that last transmission that it’s almost dark in Hawaii. Tonight should be relatively calm. The guardsmen don’t have the right equipment for night fighting. If we don’t hear anything by sunrise, continue with your plan, blow up the volcano and surrender the islands to Ohnishi.”

  The President leaned back in his chair for a moment, staring at the soundproofed ceiling tiles, fingers laced behind his head. He made his decision quickly. “All right, I’ll give Mercer until seven A.M. local time, then I want that volcano obliterated.”

  Henna stood to leave the room. Mercer had arrived on the Inchon ten hours earlier and Henna had promised to get in touch with any final news.

  “Dick?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Why do you trust Mercer so much?”

  Henna paused by the elevator door, his arms full of papers and files. “I’m basically a cop, sir, and cops learn to trust their instincts.”

  DESPITE the sophistication of the equipment in the White House Communications Room, Henna spent twenty frustrating minutes waiting for a connection to the Inchon and another ten for Mercer to be tracked down aboard the 778-foot assault ship and brought to the radio.

  “About time you called.”

  “You’ve got until seven tomorrow morning your time,” Henna said without preamble. “So you better have one hell of a plan in that Machiavellian mind of yours.”

  “What happens at seven?” Mercer asked airily.

  “A cruise missile blows up Borodin’s volcano and the President surrenders the Hawaiian Islands without a fight.”

  “Talk about your serious deadlines.” Mercer paused, absorbing this latest piece of information. “Well, I’d best be off, then. Any parting advice?”

  “Yeah. Right now Pearl Harbor is a war zone and we can only assume the rest of the islands are equally inflamed.”

  “I’m surprised it’s stayed calm as long as it has. What else?”

  “We’ve found a definite link between the coup and a Russian KGB director named Ivan Kerikov. He’s the mastermind. He was last seen in Thailand but may be on Hawaii by now. Oh, yeah. I’ve had a team monitoring ham radio operators from Hawaii for the past couple of days. A guy there named Ken Peters, who works for one of the television stations, got hold of one of my people in California. He suspects that one of their reporters, Jill Tzu, may have been kidnapped by Ohnishi. She was doing a real in-depth exposé on him when she vanished.”

  “Dudley Doright to the rescue. What else?”

  “Just that Ohnishi’s mansion is heavily guarded by some real fanatics, so be careful.”

  “Don’t worry, Dick. I have no interest in Ohnishi’s house. He’s just a willing accomplice, not the linchpin.”

  The signal from the Inchon faded. Henna knew that Mercer had cut him off.

  He settled the phone back into its cradle. If Mercer wasn’t going to Ohnishi’s mansion, then where was he going? And if Ohnishi wasn’t the principal in this affair, who was?

  Hawaii

  Evad Lurbud’s senses were so highly tuned that the explosion which echoed across the lawns from the main house rocked him back against his heels as if he had been physically struck. Sergeant Demanov placed a steadying hand on his shoulder.

  “What in the hell was that?” the burly sergeant asked in a whisper.

  “Don’t know,” Lurbud replied curtly, straining his eyes through the night-vision binoculars at the front of Ohnishi’s glass mansion. “I can’t see anything out of the ordinary.”

  Demanov, Lurbud, and two commandos were crouched behind a small stand of flowering rhododendrons placed like an island on the wide front lawn of the estate. The rest of the squad was similarly hidden behind other natural cover.

  They had reached Ohnishi’s as the shadows of twilight began smearing the beautiful grounds. Lurbud’s team had made use of the jungle which surrounded the estate to approach to within two hundred yards of the house, then had dashed across the lawn in a leapfrog technique, moving from small grove to small grove.

  Lurbud and Demanov were no more than fifty yards from the marble porte cochere when the explosion occurred. The sound was accompanied by a flash of brilliant light at the side of the darkened house.

  “I don’t see anyone within the building,” Lurbud said.

  The night-vision glasses allowed Lurbud to see into the glass-walled house, but the main foyer entrance, curving staircase, and the rooms immediately to its left and right were all empty. He was about to signal the men behind him to move forward when a tiny movement within the mansion made him pause.

  Someone was moving across the foyer toward the staircase. The figure was walking cautiously, twisting his body and neck as he peered around. When the man reached the base of the stairs, Lurbud clearly saw the assault rifle tucked under his arm.

  “We’ve got company,” he said tensely.

  Lurbud watched closely as another figure swept into the entrance foyer and scurried up the stairs. “Two so far,” he remarked. “But something’s not right. They look as if they aren’t familiar with the house. It seems strange for Ohnishi’s security to act like that.”

  “Could be standard practice after that explosion,” Demanov suggested.

  “I don’t think so. I think I know why we haven’t seen any of Ohnishi’s personal bodyguards anywhere on the estate.”

  “American commandos beat us here?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Good,” Demanov grunted, and quietly cocked his machine pistol.

  “KENJI, what’s going on?” Ohnishi wailed.

  “There was one contingency you never anticipated.” The revolver in Kenji’s hand was steady. “Just as Kerikov sold you out and you sold out Kerikov, I have done the same to both of you.”

  “I don’t understand, Kenji,” Ohnishi pleaded.

  “It’s really quite simple. Ivan Kerikov hired me eight months ago to act as his watchdog, to report your activities to him.”

  Ohnishi slouched deeper in his wheelchair, his frail neck vanishing into his shoulders as he bowed in defeat. He already knew the rest of what Kenji would say, and the weight of truth was heavy on his wasted body.

  “Kerikov had to maintain absolute command of every aspect of his operation. You were the only player that he did not directly control. That is why he enlisted me, to make sure that he knew what you were plotting.”

  “But I have known you all your life; you are like my son. How? How could you do such a thing?” Ohnishi might have accepted the betrayal, but he still had to know the reason.

  “You know nothing about me except that which I’ve told you. It is true that at the beginning I saw you as my father, as my master, but like any son, I outgrew you. I searched for my own path. Which I found.”

  “Through Kerikov?”

  Kenji’s laugh was without feeling, so mocking that it sounded more like the bark of a rabid dog. “Kerikov is as much a fool as you were, old man. Soon after he approached me with his lucrative offer, I was approached by a group of men that gave me even more.” Kenji related the story of his mother’s enslavement as a “Comfort Girl” to the occupying Japanese army in Korea, his subsequent birth and his sale to his natural father. “I am half Korean, Ohnishi, a heritage that my father tried to bury, but a fact I could never ignore.

  “In the years since Kerikov first approached you, he had to change his plans due to the collapse of his government. Not long ago, but before you began active
ly pursuing this doomed dream of yours, he sold you out to a group of investors. This group bought the volcano that Kerikov promised would make Hawaii a viable nation. What he did not know, or couldn’t know, is that this group of Korean investors then contacted me. I don’t know how they found out about my heritage, but they gave me the opportunity to prove who I really am. From then on, not only was I a spy for Kerikov against you, but also a spy against the both of you for my new Korean benefactors.

  “You had no chance at all. Every move you made was counteracted by one of my allies. You bought weapons from Suleiman el-aziz Suleiman—I betrayed the Egyptian to Kerikov. The weapons that you so hoped for will not arrive. Nor will there be any additional mercenaries. Kerikov asked me to rescue a certain woman from the NOAA ship—I told my allies to have her killed in Washington, D.C. Kerikov forced you to write that letter to the President, intending to hold it over your head. I sent it to the White House, knowing that would lead to the anarchy that now holds these islands.”

  “You sent the letter?” Ohnishi did nothing to hide his astonishment.

  “Oh, yes. Mayor Takamora made a convenient scapegoat, but I was responsible for sending the letter. The volcano was too close to the surface to risk any detection and it was agreed that your letter would act as the best possible deterrent against the American forces finding it. The Ocean Seeker almost foiled these plans, but Kerikov dealt with it with a typical Russian reaction. After he had the NOAA ship destroyed, I knew that the American focus would be on to you and perhaps the Russians if they got smart, but we, that is the Koreans, would never be suspect. The volcano would be ours without ever having created or defended it.

  “It was the perfect triple-cross. While you and Kerikov and the United States quarreled over the Hawaiian islands and the volcano, Hydra Consolidated would take the prize and no one would be the wiser.”