War of the Sun

by Maloney, Mack;

  “There’s only one possible explanation,” Hunter said. “There has to be some kind of activity going on inside that mountain, as well as under the ground all around the island, something that is so intense, it allows this much heat to reach the surface.”

  “But what could it be?” Toomey asked. “A volcano?”

  “We’re not that lucky, I’m afraid,” Hunter said gloomily. “Look at the pattern of those heat lines. They’re not exactly random.”

  It was true. On closer examination it was apparent that the intensity of heat was actually centered in places: at both ends of the island, as well as in the fog-shrouded mountain valley where the Zero had disappeared. Ringing each heat center was a series of extremely bright red shapes that looked like small funnels.

  “There has to be some kind of industrial activity going on underground all over the island,” Hunter said. “And those aren’t clouds or mist we’re looking at. It’s smoke, or more accurately, smog. Super-pollution. And it’s being vented at all those funnel points which show up as the brightest red. They are, in fact, smokestacks.”

  A leaden silence descended on the small room.

  “I’d say someone’s building something on a grand scale inside and underneath that island,” Hunter said in grim conclusion. “With all that heat and all that pollution, it can’t be anything else.”

  “But building what?” Yaz asked.

  “That’s what we’ve got to find out,” Hunter told them, turning back to the frozen heat frame of the island. “Whatever’s going on, it obviously linked to those Zeros. The one that got away didn’t disappear or crash. Let’s look at that big mountain. It looks like it’s got an old castle on top of it. Notice this dull hot spot on its side. I think that’s the entrance to a hidden airstrip. They could cover it, but they couldn’t prevent the heat from leaking out.”

  Again, those gathered were speechless.

  “Whatever the hell is going on, I think we have to assume it has to do with what is left of Hashi Pushi’s boys,” Hunter said, measuring each word carefully. “And if that’s the case, then I don’t think we can really call our recent mission a success until we find out.”

  “How can that be done?” Wolf asked, speaking for the first time.

  Hunter let out a long, troubled breath.

  “It’s simple, really,” he said. “Even though it’s the last thing in the world that I want to do, I’ve got to go back there.”

  Two hours later, Hunter was strapping into the Harrier.

  The conditions outside were improving as the center of the storm moved off to the south. Still the seas were very high and the winds were blowing at gale force. It was not exactly ideal flying weather.

  But it would have to do. Hunter was in a hurry. He had barely taken the time to shower and jump into a fresh flight suit. He was still eating a sandwich as he was climbing into the jumpjet. The reason for all the rush was simple. Theoretically, the sooner he left for Okinawa, the sooner he would return to the Fitzgerald. Then, again in theory, the Task Force could continue on its way home.

  But now, as Hunter began clicking on his cockpit displays, his instincts were telling him it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  The takeoff itself promised to be an adventure. The crosswinds on the flight deck were far too dangerous for any kind of normal launch, horizontal or vertical. So he had to improvise. His plan was to taxi out to the elevator platform and have it brought up about halfway to the deck level. Then he would do a close-to-true vertical ascent, using the leeward side of the carrier to protect him, if only momentarily, for the first crucial seconds of liftoff.

  After he cleared the ship, however, it would be him against the storm-tossed elements.

  As soon as all his critical systems came back green, he began the procedure to fire up the airplane’s powerplant. The four-man service crew stepped back, covering their faces as the slowly accelerating turbine began to churn out twin clouds of jet exhaust.

  Suddenly Hunter was aware of a fifth person waving at him from below the cockpit. It was Ben.

  With a hand signal from Hunter, the service crew chief wheeled an access ladder up to the side of the Harrier and Ben climbed up. Hunter cut his engine back to standby, lowering the engine’s volume enough so he could talk with his friend.

  “Just dug some old information on Okinawa out of our computer,” he said. “It’s not too pretty.”

  “I don’t expect it is,” Hunter told him. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Apparently even the people living around here think it’s an extremely dangerous place to be these days,” Ben said, reciting from computer printout. “Many people fled there after the Big War, and even before Hashi Pushi came to power. Businessmen. Bankers. Stockbrokers. Crazy men. They stole everyone’s money and had to run. But some didn’t get very far. They say they live in the jungles on Okinawa now. They say they’ve turned wild by now. There are even a few reports of cannibalism, none confirmed.”

  Hunter stared at him for a moment, and then smiled grimly. Businessmen? Cannibals?

  “I also hear it’s a bad place to breathe these days,” he said to Ben.

  Ben had to grin back. “Can it get any crazier?”

  Hunter shook his head. “Don’t ask …”

  They shook hands and Ben was quickly down the access ladder.

  Suddenly Hunter felt the elevator moving upward. By the time it had raised to half level, he had eased the Harrier’s throttle up almost to full power. The wind and rain were soon on him again. He felt the aircraft beneath him begin to strain. Then the elevator stopped. He took a deep breath, patted his chest once, and then let her go.

  The Harrier exploded into the air, its engine blasting out on maximum downward thrust. No sooner was he past the carrier’s deck when he was hit with a gust of wind that spun him around nearly a full 360 degrees. Vectoring the jet’s thrust to reverse, Hunter pulled back on the stick and quickly elevated the nose of the jet up to 80 degrees, almost straight up. Then, just as quickly, he booted the vector thrust to full forward. The Harrier hung there for a long second, battered by the dying winds, drenched in the still-driving rain.

  Then, slowly, it rose up into the blackened clouds, back into the storm that had nearly killed him and at the same time saved his life.

  Yaz was alone.

  Everyone else had left the conference room an hour before—the various ship commanders back to their vessels, Toomey and Ben to check on the condition of their battered air squadron.

  He was rewatching the tape of Hunter’s flight over Okinawa, playing over and over the infrared image of the smoke-enshrouded island. The more he studied it, the more it looked like one big factory, belching heat and pollution, under the cover of natural flora.

  We’re not going home anytime soon, he thought gloomily.

  After watching the Okinawa tape more than a dozen times, he was prepared to shut down the TV system when the tail end of the tape came onto the screen. This segment depicted Hunter’s harrowing dive down through the typhoon, ending with the tremendous crack of thunder, which had also damaged the carrier’s main antenna.

  Yaz was fascinated by the footage—right up until the very end. But then, just before the lightning bolt closed down the cameras for good, he was suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that something wasn’t right about the video. He played it over again and felt the same mysterious sensation, this time almost to the point of nausea.

  “What the hell is going on?” he wondered, his head aching, his stomach doing flips.

  He played the tape a third time, now slowing it down to a crawl just as the lightning bolt made its appearance. It was actually painful to watch, but in the middle of the storm and the rain and the clouds, he thought he saw a flash of what was making him queasy.

  Or did he?

  Terrified, he quickly shut down the system.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, doubling over and doing all he could to prevent himself from vomiting. “I can’t believe it…�
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  Twenty-two

  Okinawa

  SERGEANT DIMITRI KARBOCHEV CHECKED his Rolex watch. If it was working properly, then it was just about high noon.

  “Two hours left,” he thought, adjusting the regulator on the small oxygen tank slung over his shoulder. “Just enough to get to the Great Wall and back.”

  He pushed on, carefully moving down the winding path which led into the mountain valley, his NightScope-equipped Kalishnikov rifle up and ready. At many places the pathway was tangled with dead and dying underbrush, some so thick he had to hack his way through with his machete. He had to constantly remind himself not to overdo it—the more he worked, the more oxygen he would use. The more oxygen he used, the shorter this one-man recon mission would be.

  Once he got down below the thickest smog line, he was forced to use his high-powered search lantern to see his way. Even so, the pollution was so dense in some places he could barely see his hands working in front of him. The path down into the valley was also littered with bones, some seemingly new and even recently gnawed. Others were old and in a state of rapid decay.

  “Nothing lives down here,” he thought, sidestepping the carcass of what might have been a dog. “Not for long, anyway.”

  The further he walked deeper into the smog-filled valley, the more evident the decay in his surroundings became. When the smog was so thick it could hide a noonday sun, anything that grew did so in a high state of malformation. Yet he did see signs of living, breathing civilization down here. Tiny plastic yellow rings were scattered about. About the size of a thimble, they were, he knew, safety washers for oxygen tanks used by the soldiers who patrolled this valley. Whenever a new oxygen tank was used, the yellow safety ring was snapped off. It was typical that the soldiers simply discarded them—and why not? What difference did dozens of plastic rings lying about make in a place which had long ago become an environmental nightmare?

  But Karbochev knew it was also very stupid for the enemy to so carelessly discard their waste, something that the original inhabitants of the island never dared to do. By closely following the trail of yellow plastic rings, a good recon man could easily determine the direction of an enemy force. By counting the number of discarded styrofoam food containers a recon man could determine the size and strength of the enemy unit. By counting the number of discarded throwaway canteens, he could tell just how thirsty the unit was, a good indication of how long they’d been in the field.

  But tracking a small enemy patrol was not on Karbochev’s mind this dirty day. His was a strategic mission.

  He walked for another half hour before reaching the Great Wall. Though its name conjured up visions of the great ancient stone structure in northern China, this wall was not made of bricks. Rather, it was made of weapon emplacements.

  It stretched for nearly forty-four miles around the perimeter of the island, running up and down hills, through small valleys, and along the top ridge of two small mountains. The guns themselves—155mm howitzers, mostly—were aligned in neat, interconnected rows of concrete bunkers, three guns to a site. Each gun barrel had freedom of movement of about 100 degrees, meaning all three guns in any given bunker could lay down an incredibly wide interlocking field of fire, whether it be in close range, or out into the sea.

  In front of each bunker was another line of weaponry: either an antipersonnel rocket launching site, a heavy-mortar revampment, or, in some of the higher areas, a fearsome weapon which could send a stream of napalm-fueled fire a distance of a mile or more. A third line, consisting mostly of .50-caliber machine gun nests, ran in front of it all, and indeed, there were more of these emplacements than anything else.

  When this firepower was factored out over the many miles of the Great Wall, it was clear that anyone attempting an amphibious landing on Okinawa’s smoky coastline would be decimated before they hit the beach.

  Karbochev had surreptitiously visited the Great Wall several times before; his job was nothing less than to get an actual count of the number of massive pillboxes. This was considered military intelligence of the highest by his superiors, but frankly, he never could see the point of it. They did not have the resources to attack the island, or take out the hundreds of howitzers, never mind defeat the enemy that lived underground. Still his officers sent him, and others like him, on these long, uncomfortable covert journeys to gather information, to count guns, as if hoping that someday, by some miracle, the intelligence would be put to good use and the enemy would finally be taken to the sword.

  But Karbochev knew that day was a long way off.

  He completed his recon of the southern tier of the gun line in under thirty minutes. As always, he found concealment to be easy. All enemy troops manning the gun sites were equipped with oxygen gear bulkier than his own. Being weighed down by such equipment did not allow them to do anything but the task at hand. Without any sharp eyes about, Karbochev needed only a large bush or perhaps a good-sized crevice in which to hide while he completed his mission.

  When he added up his totals, they were astounding. He had counted ninety-nine 155-mm guns, three hundred and ten .50-caliber machine gun emplacements, fifty-three long-range flamethrower pillboxes, fifty-one rocket launching sites, and forty-eight heavy mortar revampments. He also counted more than three dozen ammo-delivery cars being driven along the small railroad track that ran the length of the great wall. And this represented barely two miles of the steel curtain.

  “My grandchildren will be too old to fight this battle,” he thought grimly, sealing away the gun numbers in his small hand-held computer. “And so will their grandchildren.”

  He checked his oxygen supply and found he had about forty minutes left. This would give him just enough time to backtrack to the entrance path from which he had come, and head for higher ground.

  Only then he knew would he be able to take off his mask and breathe normally again.

  It was not an hour later when Karbochev heard the frightening mechanical scream.

  He immediately dived into some bushes, his AK-47 up and ready. Within seconds the scream turned into the roar of a jet engine. Then, to his astonishment, he saw the dark outline of an airplane descending through the polluted mist.

  Karbochev immediately recognized the airplane as a jumpjet. Years before, he had become quite familiar with the Yak-38, another VTOL aircraft. But who would be landing such a technologically advanced airplane as this on the woebegotten island?

  He stayed hidden until the airplane floated to a touchdown. But suddenly there was a rustling in the bushes near the landing site. In less than five seconds, a score of island natives had rushed out of the brush and surrounded the strange airplane.

  The pilot emerged from the cockpit to find himself looking down the barrels of a couple of dozen AK-47s, RPGs, bolt-action Springfields, and even a blowgun or two. The pilot diplomatically put his hands up and climbed out of the airplane. The natives closed in on him, and then, speaking in some undecipherable language, the native who seemed to be in charge ordered the pilot to come with them.

  Karbochev followed them for the next five miles as they trekked through the jungle, following trails that only the pilot’s abductors could read. They broke through the heavy smog line and Karbochev was finally able to remove his oxygen mask. Beyond the haze above him, he could almost see the sky turning a smutty blue.

  Throughout the march, the natives would suddenly burst into laughter that shattered the silence of the jungle, a laugh so hideous that it caused hundreds of birds in the treetops to lift into the air, adding their screeching and cawing to the great horrid symphony. This would go on for several minutes and then the jungle would be silent once again.

  Karbochev reached the edge of the village about ten minutes after the natives and the pilot did. Hiding once again in the underbrush, he saw the pilot brought to the center of the settlement where the largest hut was located.

  From this hut an ancient white woman emerged. Her pudgy face was framed by long, flowing gray-white h
air. The woman walked forward and began talking to the pilot. Only then did the pilot take off his helmet and did Karbochev get a good look at his face.

  He was instantly astounded. He thought he actually recognized the man.

  Can it be? he wondered almost aloud. Can that really be the famous pilot they speak of?

  There was no way he could tell—at least, not now. He had to get back to his pickup point or he would lose his ride back to his base.

  Taking a quick set of notes on what he’d seen inside the native village, Karbochev melted back into the woods.

  Aboard the battleship New Jersey

  It was so dark inside the cabin, even the light from the single flickering candle seemed like no light at all.

  Wolf put his hands to his eyes, squeezing them through his mask. It was a useless exercise—nothing could stop the flow of tears running down his face.

  Why was it always this way? he wondered. By what curse had he been condemned to live a life of such brooding and despair?

  He knew part of the answer lay in his longing for home.

  The closer the Task Force had gotten to Japan to carry out the raid, the deeper Wolf had plunged into depression. He knew each mile spent going toward the target area meant he was that much farther from his home in the country once called Norway. Yet as soon as the United American ships had started on the return journey home and the distance between him and his homeland had begun to shrink, the heavy weight on his mind began to ease. The inner clouds of darkness that swirled in his soul dispersed before the wind. He was almost cheerful at one carefully guarded point.

  But now, everything had changed. Now he was not sure which way the wind would blow.

  The storm outside, however, had begun to calm down. The heavy seas which had rocked the massive battleship were now settling down. The rain and wind had subsided. The return of normal conditions allowed the gloomy captain of the battleship to get some much-needed sleep.

  Wiping his face and eyes with a well-soaked kerchief, Wolf stripped off his all-black, Zorro-like caped uniform. Then he blew out the candle, plunging his cabin into near-total darkness. Only then did he remove his mask.