Vulcan's Forge

by Jack Du Brul

  Knowing Rice couldn’t leave his seat or contact any other aircraft or ship, Mercer ducked down until he could look into the cargo hold of the Sea King. There were five men in the 160-square-foot hold.

  They were Navy SEALs, the best trained commandos in the American military, perhaps in the world. They sat in stony silence, oblivious to the noise of the chopper or the wind buffeting them from the open hatch. Like a computer that only works in a binary system of ones and zeros, the commander of the SEALs regarded Mercer as threat or nonthreat. His fathomless eyes were the bright blue of glacial ice. They held Mercer’s for the fraction of a second it took him to categorize Mercer as nonthreat and turned away indifferently.

  Mercer had never felt such an aura of utter malignance in his life than that surrounding these men. Rice was right to call them cargo. To call them passengers would be admitting they retained a trace of humanity.

  He went back up to the flight deck and took his seat, donning his headset.

  “See what I mean?” Eddie grinned. “Me, I’ve got no problems with Hawaii, in fact I’d love a Mai Tai, just give me a target destination and I’ll get us there. Oh, you didn’t need to smash up our radio, you know.”

  “Yeah, why’s that?”

  Rice smiled crookedly. “The call I received about two minutes before you boarded. Seems my commander was contacted by the director of the FBI. Said he thought you’d pull a stunt like this and the SEALs would be a compromise between your plan and the President’s. Those SEALs back there are under orders to follow you. He told me they might come in handy tonight.”

  Mercer laughed so hard his guts ached. “That son of a bitch,” he said admiringly. “No wonder he’s the director of the FBI. My first hijacking and the victims turn out to be willing accomplices. Sorry about pulling the gun on you.”

  “Ain’t nothing. I was born in South Central. Wasn’t the first time it’s ever happened. Probably not the last, either.”

  An hour and a half later, the Sea King blasted along the northern coasts of the Hawaiian islands, her watertight hull no more than fifty feet above the crashing surf, her sixty-five-foot rotor blades less than one hundred yards from the towering cliffs. Mercer had spent much of the flight in the cargo hold with the SEALs, poring over the plans to Kenji’s estate and forming a battle plan. By the time the Sea King cleared the coast, all of them were satisfied that the assault could be pulled off successfully.

  Back in the cockpit, Mercer could see lights, the concentration on Rice’s face, but he also saw a slight trace of enjoyment too.

  Maui and Molokai and the Big Island were behind them and now they skirted the northern coast of Oahu. Mercer thought about the dead whales found there only a month ago—the start of this whole chain reaction. Amazing how such an inane event sparked one of the greatest crises America might ever face.

  “Do you have the coordinates?” Rice asked, his eyes never leaving the moon-bathed waves below.

  Mercer read the coordinates of Kenji’s estate from the map provided by Dick Henna. Eddie Rice punched them into the navigational computer, waited as the machine processed them, then glanced at the readout. Banking the helicopter, he lifted her over the cliffs and headed inland. The moonlit scenery below them was a gray blur, the Sea King beating through the sky at nearly 140 knots, at times below tree top level.

  Mercer trusted Rice’s flying implicitly. He had no choice.

  They rocketed over mountains only to plunge down the other side, the helicopter never more than a hundred feet from the ground.

  “Ever done flying like this before?” Mercer asked, trying to act casual though his knuckles were white as he gripped the seat.

  “Sure,” Rice replied. “ ’Course that was in Iraq, where there weren’t as many mountains or trees or buildings to smear against.”

  Mercer tightened his grip.

  “You ever done anything like this before?” asked Rice.

  “Sure,” Mercer mimicked Rice’s deep baritone. “ ’Course that was in Iraq, where there weren’t any wise-ass pilots.”

  Rice laughed, then yanked the helicopter skyward to avoid a tall stand of trees thrusting up from the jungle.

  As the terrain flattened out, Rice began to whistle. Mercer recognized the song as Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” He knew exactly how Eddie felt.

  “We’re about ten miles from your coordinates,” Rice announced a few minutes later.

  “Okay, the target is a compound in the middle of an old pineapple plantation. There will be a clearing about two miles north. It used to be an equipment storage area when the plantation was operational. There’s an abandoned shed on its southern edge. We’ll land there.”

  Rice didn’t reply. He was watching the ground below. The low jungle canopy retained a semblance of regimentation from when it had been planted fields. He slowed the chopper to thirty knots.

  “There,” he said, spotting the clearing as he crabbed the helicopter to starboard.

  Mercer saw the open ground a moment later, an area of about an acre; the abandoned metal building stood at its far end, the corrugated roof sagging in the middle.

  “Ugly country in thirty seconds,” Mercer said into his microphone, informing the SEALs in the cargo hold.

  Rice used the last scrap of jungle cover before bursting into the clearing. The rotors kicked up a cloud of fine dust, cutting visibility down to nothing. He landed the big chopper by feel alone, settling her as close to the building as possible. Had there been paint on the huge storage garage, the Teflon rotors would have scraped it off.

  By the time Mercer jumped from the chopper, the SEALs had already secured the building and the surrounding area. There was no one else in the vicinity.

  The air was hot and incredibly humid; Mercer’s clothing stuck to his body like a clammy film and the chirping of insects sounded unnaturally loud after his hours in the chopper. He buckled his combat harness around his lean waist, cinching the shoulder straps so they were snug but not binding. After pulling his MP-5 from the duffel, he threw the empty bag back into the chopper and turned to Rice.

  “You know what to do?”

  “I’ll wait here until you contact me.” Rice held up a miniature walkie-talkie given to him by one of the SEALs. “If I don’t hear anything by five a.m., I’m outta here.”

  “Right.”

  Mercer looked at his watch, 9:35. In nine and a half hours the President would unleash the nuclear warhead and destroy the volcano two hundred miles north. A few minutes after that, Hawaii would become an independent country.

  MV John Dory

  Although she was forty feet under the surface, the John Dory still felt the turbulence above that rolled her about fifteen degrees port and starboard. The radio operator clutched at a ceiling mounted support as he waited to gain Captain Zwenkov’s attention. Zwenkov was once again in muted conference with the weapons officer, going over the firing solutions for the vessel’s bow-mounted Siren missile for the tenth time.

  “Captain,” the radio man interrupted, “flash message received from the mainland.”

  Zwenkov turned, cocking one bushy eyebrow in question.

  “The message read ‘green,’ repeated for five seconds, sir.”

  “Very well.” Zwenkov glanced at his watch. 2200 hours.

  This was the eleventh such message he’d received. He’d expected the “red” code by now, authorizing him to launch his missile, but it had not come. If it didn’t come until the next scheduled contact in two hours, he would barely make it to the Hawaiian coast before dawn to extract the commandos.

  “All right, Weapons Officer, one more time if you please.” And they ran another plot for the nuclear missile.

  EVAD Lurbud collapsed the portable antenna and powered down his radio. Using his mangled left hand had caused a bright wave of blood to seep out from under his hastily applied bandage. He let the pain wash over him, gritting his teeth to keep from screaming.

  That he had survived four hours since the attac
k on Ohnishi’s house was due mainly to his extensive KGB training. That he had survived the destruction of the house itself was little short of a miracle.

  Once the bombs had detonated and the glass house had begun to shatter, Lurbud’s dive under the table on Ohnishi’s breakfast balcony had saved his life. The table had protected him from the exploding glass. When the main structure of the house tumbled, the balcony had fallen outward, carrying Lurbud with it. He landed on the lawn forty feet below, astonished to find himself alive. But by no means had he escaped unscathed.

  His right shoulder joint had dislocated and his legs, torso, and face were severely lacerated by shards of glass. His right eye had been punctured so that the clear fluid within leaked down his face and dripped into the collar of his battle jacket.

  With such massive injuries, the body’s main defense is to go into shock. But there are many forms of shock, depending on the strength of the person. As endorphins and adrenaline coursed through him, Lurbud struggled to remain conscious and focused. After nearly twenty minutes, Lurbud began to move. Slowly at first, he raised himself onto his hands and knees, then to his feet. All that remained of Takahiro Ohnishi’s palatial home were heaped piles of shattered glass and an empty skeleton of tubular struts. Lurbud staggered into the debris to search for the radio that would link him to the John Dory.

  Where the scything weight of the falling building had sliced through a victim, the mound of glass was stained crimson by gallons of blood. In the dim moonlight, the blood looked black, but Lurbud could tell that dozens of such bloody piles dotted the charnel ruin.

  Systematically he checked each body, scraping off the accumulated glass with the butt of his weapon to expose a recognizable portion. Korean and Russian alike had been diced so finely by the shards that easy identification was impossible.

  With only fifteen minutes to spare before his next scheduled contact with the submarine, he found the bloody mass that had once been his radio carrier. Of the man, there was little more than strips of flesh, but the radio, in its armored plastic pack, had survived the cascade undamaged.

  Propped against the sanguine heap, Lurbud made his first broadcast, repeating the word “green” for five seconds. Finished, he fell back against the pile, shards and chips digging into his flesh unnoticed.

  Fighting the exhaustion brought on by the battle and loss of blood, Lurbud tended his wounds, winding a bandage around his mangled hand and gently mopping his sightless eye socket. To dull the ache growing in his skull, he shot a full syringe of morphine into his arm from the medical kit the radio man had also carried.

  He recognized immediately how one could become addicted to the drug. Despite the pain clawing at his tortured body, his spirits had never been better. He felt buoyed and knew that he would survive to have his revenge against Kenji. All else faded in importance to him; the submarine, the volcano, even his own condition, as long as he could have his revenge. The van that the Russians had used to get to Ohnishi’s estate was only a mile or so away. He could drive to Kenji’s house and make him pay dearly for the suffering he’d caused.

  Lurbud was lucid enough to know that he had to continue to make regular calls to the John Dory. Their action, if he failed to report, would surely jeopardize his chance at revenge on Ohnishi’s former assistant.

  It had taken him nearly two hours to stagger and crawl to where the van was hidden, his mangled body leaving a vivid trail of blood across Ohnishi’s estate. The fifteen-mile drive north had taken another hour and a half; he had to stop about every ten minutes to allow his graying vision to return to normal.

  Now he lay in a shallow ditch no more than one hundred yards from Kenji’s home, peering at it through night-vision binoculars. The view dimmed and blurred from pain and effects of the morphine as he strained to focus his one functioning eye.

  The sprawling two-story house was not nearly as grand as Ohnishi’s, but it was very impressive. Constructed of dressed stones coated in beige stucco, the two main wings of the house spread from the central entrance like the blades of a boomerang. Each second floor window was a pair of French doors that opened onto narrow wrought-iron balconies. The fire-baked barrel tile roof and the expansive lawns betrayed the home as a former plantation from a bygone era.

  A separate guest house sat on the other side of an Olympic-sized pool from the main structure. After making his latest report, Lurbud knew that he had two hours to concentrate on Kenji. He was professional enough to realize that in his condition, he was no match for the Japanese killer. He had to plan carefully. Kenji’s martial arts skill would render anything less than a long-range rifle shot useless. Therefore a diversion was needed to bring the Oriental out of his home and within range.

  Lurbud slithered further into the ditch to get a better view into the rooms and hoped that something would present itself.

  Hawaii

  Way Hue Dong was the head of Hydra Consolidated, the Korean consortium that had bought the volcano from Ivan Kerikov. His grandson, Chin-Huy, sat at Kenji’s desk smoking a fragrant Romeo y Julietta cigar. He was young, not much past twenty, but he possessed the eyes of an old man, eyes that had seen many things in the service of his family. When his grandfather had ordered him to lead the fifty-man contingent of troops to Hawaii, Chin-Huy had not questioned, merely obeyed.

  His family had sent him and his older brothers to some of the most dangerous places on earth in search of profit. Whether it was poached ivory from war-torn Angola or stolen artifacts from the ravaged jungles of Central America, the younger members of the family had responded with vigor and initiative.

  This mission, though potentially dangerous, had proved quite easy for young Chin. His local contact, Kenji, had done much of the work necessary to ensure that the family would not be bothered when they seized the volcano. Chin’s men held the airport under the auspices of Hawaii’s more fervent national guardsmen and few had had to be used at Pearl Harbor to incite the assembled students to open fire at the military compound. The only difficulties had been at Ohnishi’s house, where more than twenty of his men had been cut down by a failed commando strike, presumably American.

  All in all, Chin’s role had been minor. All that remained now was confirmation from the mining ship en route to the volcano that its target was in sight. That would not take place for another ten hours or so. Once his family had possession of the volcano, Chin would recall his troops, making sure that their withdrawal would bring a swift end to the state’s unrest. The violence now gripping Hawaii served only a limited purpose. Once the volcano was secure, it was best that the islands quieted.

  “Your rewards will be great, Kenji. What do you plan to do with them?”

  Kenji did not like the young man sitting languidly in his chair. Chin was brash, uncouth, and obnoxious.

  “Do not speak too quickly; everything is yet to be settled.”

  “That commando team fell for your ruse perfectly—they attacked the wrong house, just as you planned.” Chin waved his cigar in a dismissive gesture. “The volcano is within our grasp, surely you no longer worry.”

  “Ivan Kerikov believed that the volcano was within his grasp and Takahiro Ohnishi believed that Hawaii was within his, too. Both men were wrong. I will not believe that we are successful until the mining vessel anchors at the volcano site.”

  “Ach,” Chin said, then launched into another story of his own bravery in the face of adversity.

  He had told Kenji nearly a dozen such stories earlier in the afternoon, before Kenji had set out to murder Ohnishi. Chin’s tales of bravado had a whining tone to them, as if daring Kenji to doubt them. Since Chin had not volunteered to lead his troops in the assault on Ohnishi’s mansion, Kenji needed no proof of the boy’s true character. Kenji had grown weary of the stories and the boy, yet listened as if rapt. It was expected of him.

  Chin summed up, “If I could survive that and still keep the diamonds with me the whole time, surely I will get us out of this.”

  Kenji tightened his
fists at his sides. He could disembowel Chin with his bare hands without raising a sweat and the idea was a pleasurable one, but he had to maintain his composure. His grandfather held Kenji’s fate after he escaped Hawaii and he wouldn’t jeopardize that for the mere pleasure of killing the boy.

  “All operations are different, surely you know this. Because you survived many in the past does not mean you are protected in the present.”

  Though not chastened by Kenji’s comment, Chin remained silent.

  Kenji was content to lean against the paneled wall of his study, arms now crossed over his chest, watching Chin smoke his cigar. His years of training had taught Kenji to remain impassive no matter what the situation around him. The tension within him would make a weaker man pace, but Kenji simply stood, quiet and dangerous.

  “What of the woman,” Chin said, breaking the minutes long silence, “the reporter you have in the gardener’s shed?”

  “What about her?”

  “She has refused to help us; surely it is time for her to die.”

  “Yes, maybe it is,” Kenji said sadly.

  “I will do it,” Chin volunteered. “I want her first.”

  “Take her,” Kenji replied casually, masking a sense of hurt.

  At first, Kenji had entertained thoughts of taking Jill Tzu with him. There was something in the defiant beauty of the woman that made Kenji want to dominate her. Maybe it was because she knew of his Korean birth? He knew that she would never willingly be with him. Of course she could be drugged, like that American woman he’d rescued a week ago.

  But Kenji knew that that was not a solution. Jill had to be eliminated, yet he had not been able to bring himself to do it. Chin’s lurid request was the perfect opportunity. Jill would die, but her blood would not be on his hands.

  Chin pulled his small feet from the desk and slammed them against the carpeted floor. Kenji expected him to skip from the room like a spoiled child granted his favorite wish. Instead, Chin swaggered out, eyeing Kenji in an adolescent attempt at domination.