Finally he reached the end of the long, deep tunnel. Pausing before the door to her place, he took a deep breath and then knocked twice.
She opened the door a second later.
Zuzu had seen her up close only once before and now he was struck by just how young she was.
“You are late,” she said in an odd, lilting voice, one that suggested she wasn’t entirely in control of her faculties.
Zuzu bowed deeply and attempted to babble an apology.
“Please, none of that,” she said, her sinisterly subdued voice cutting him off. “Time is of the essence. Please begin.”
Zuzu took another deep breath; he’d spent the entire night before memorizing the report. Now he would have to repeat it verbatim.
He began slowly, moving carefully from point to point, boasting of the accomplishments that his men and machines had squeezed out of the thousands of slave laborers who toiled deep within the bowels of the island, and passing quickly over the small tidbits of bad news.
“In less than three weeks,” he said, getting to the heart of the matter, “we will have manufactured, fueled, and armed a total of two thousand, five hundred A6M Zeros—this number, as you know, was our Great Leader’s goal.
“I might add that Hashi Pushi’s masterful plan of manufacturing the planes of the 1940s continues to be brilliant. The marriage of these simple designs to our super-efficient technology has enabled us to mass-produce on a scale that would have been unthinkable if we had only undertaken the production of jet fighters.”
As Zuzu was giving his report, he was aware that the woman was slowly circling him. She was now halfway around the room and directly in back of Zuzu. This made him even more nervous.
“I am also pleased to note,” he continued, hoping his voice would not betray his concern, “that our experimental division has reported success in remanufacturing an Me 262 jet fighter, a Luftwaffe design. We call it a Sukki—we would be honored to give it to you as our gift.”
The woman was now standing directly behind him.
“Gifts do not impress me,” she whispered from behind his left ear. “I am concerned only with progress. You say all our airplanes will be ready in three weeks?”
“That is correct,” Zuzu answered. “We are currently working at all-out capacity.”
At that moment he felt something small and cold against the skin of the soft spot behind his left ear.
The woman firmly gripped the pearl bead at the end of an eight-inch hatpin that she had taken from a fold in her gown, a hatpin whose point was what Major General Zuzu now felt.
“Three weeks is too long,” she whispered in his ear, “Two weeks is too long. What is the problem? Why are there delays? Are your workers lazy?”
Before Zuzu could answer, she calmly forced the hatpin about an inch deep into the base of his skull, thoughtfully wiggling the end as she did so.
“Two centimeters more and I will pierce your brain,” she continued whispering to him. “An additional inch further and you’ll be brain damaged for life. Two inches and you will die. Can you understand all this?”
Zuzu was twitching almost uncontrollably by this time, his underpants instantly becoming soiled. The pain at the base of his skull was unbearable, yet he dared not move. He tried to speak, but all he could manage was a series of high-pitched squawking sounds. The woman thought this was funny. She began to laugh, a deep, throaty masculine laugh that made Zuzu tremble even more.
“Shall I put you out of your misery, Major General?” she asked Zuzu in a hushed tone more suitable for lovers about to co-mingle.
Zuzu managed to shake his head no.
“Then I ask you again,” she said, still whispering. “How soon will you be ready?”
“We … can be … ready in … forty-eight hours,” Zuzu managed to gasp, his mouth quickly filling with blood. “Even sooner on your orders.”
The woman withdrew the bloody pin, licked it clean, and then smiled.
“Forty-eight hours will be fine,” she cooed.
Twenty-seven
Over the Pacific
JT TOOMEY WAS AT the wheel of the creaking airplane. Beside him, serving as co-pilot and navigator, was a Free Canadian officer named Kenny Hodge.
Their airplane was ancient by any measurement. It was officially called an ASR Mk 1 “Seagull.” The ASR was for air-sea-rescue—in other words, it was a seaplane. Its single engine was placed atop the wing, which was elevated six feet above the long thin boatlike fuselage on a heavy-duty pylon. The wing itself was thin and flappy, with a stabilizing float strut at each end. The tailplane rose up at a 45-degree angle, with tailfins that looked like Mickey Mouse ears.
Over all, the airplane was the ugliest contraption Toomey had ever laid eyes on.
Just where it came from, he had no idea. It was found stored away in the bottom of the Fitzgerald, significantly in crates marked “ballast.” The crew of the Fitz had put it together just prior to the mission, but had never test-flown it because of higher priorities. Now it was up to Toomey and Hodge not only to give the plane its first test flight in almost five decades, but also to perform a very important mission with it.
That mission was to find Wolf.
The last anyone had seen of the mysterious ship captain, he was lowering himself in one of the New Jersey’s high-speed recon boats. He left no word as to where he was going, or why, or whether he was ever coming back. He simply wrote a message to his executive officer, telling him in effect to carry on. Then he disappeared into the wide-open Pacific.
Though this had happened around 1900 hours, the xenophobic New Jersey officers waited more than three hours before contacting the Fitzgerald. Only then, when Wolf did not return, did they inform the Task Force command with a request to launch a search plane.
With the strike jets on board the Fitz in such sorry shape, the old Seagull was the only aircraft that could do the job. It could stay airborne for nearly seven hours on relatively little fuel and thus could cover large sections of ocean. The only trouble was that no one was certain the Seagull was put together correctly. In the rush to commence the search, there hadn’t been time to make sure every screw was tightened and every wire properly attached.
Launching the fifty-year-old seaplane also became an iffy situation. Having no wheels or surface landing gear, the service crew had little choice but to lower the thing off the side-flight elevator, and then hold it steady while Toomey and Hodge clamored down the auxiliary walkway and climbed into it. Takeoff had been tricky in the still-turbulent seas, but once they were airborne, the Seagull behaved as well as could be expected.
Now Toomey was bored out of his mind.
They’d been flying for four hours over the dark expanse of the Pacific Ocean and had seen not a single sign of Wolf.
“How far could he have gone?” Hodge asked Toomey about once every half hour.
As with most things, it came down to numbers. The boat Wolf had taken boasted a top speed of 34 knots and a high fuel capacity. He’d been missing almost five hours before they got word on the Fitzgerald and organized the search. Toomey and Hodge had been looking for him for another four hours. That meant he should be within a three-hundred-mile radius or so.
The trick was, which direction?
“This is fucking ridiculous,” Toomey kept saying over and over again, almost like a mantra. “This guy’s so weird, he probably doesn’t want to be found.”
Though Toomey respected Wolf’s military prowess, and appreciated his skills as a military commander, he had always given the costumed Scandinavian a wide berth. People like Toomey just didn’t take to people like Wolf; they were, in fact, exact opposites. In his opinion, the dark, brooding, eccentric Norseman—the man Toomey had once dubbed “Mister Shitty Day”—had an attitude problem. What was the point of living if every day you felt you had to make it one long drag? The Socket Philosophy was that life was what happens between episodes of booze, broads, and laughs. Why not enjoy it? Will it really make any di
fference in the end?
Then there was the whole thing with Wolf’s costume: all black, the Batman cape and the Zorro-type mask. Many times Toomey had asked Hunter why Wolf wore the weird threads; each time Hunter told him that he honestly didn’t know.
“This guy must’ve read too many comic books growing up,” Toomey muttered to Hodge, as they switched over to the next search grid. “Someone once told me those Scandinavian comic books are really bad. Really fucked up.”
“You’re right,” Hodge replied. “I hear they are very fucked up. Or is that their movies?”
They were getting near to the end of their fuel range. Another half hour and they would have to turn it around and head back to the Task Force.
They settled on one last grid, sweeping south by southwest for ten minutes, then north by northwest for another ten, and then ten minutes to the northeast. But both pilots knew if they didn’t spot evidence of Wolf in that time, the chances that the strange man would ever be found dropped dramatically.
Hodge saw it first.
It was the outer ring of an enormous glow off the southwestern horizon, so bright it could have mimicked a sunrise.
Toomey put the Seagull into a steep climb to get a better visual angle on the light. From 20,000 feet the glow looked like the brightest of auroras, enough to turn night into day. It was so intense, Toomey imagined he could feel its heat coming right through the cockpit window.
“Somebody is definitely cranking out a lot of juice over there,” he said. “We’ve got to at least get a better look.”
He put the Seagull into a steep bank and then dived, almost straight down until he was barely a hundred feet above the water. Then he leveled off, gradually decreasing altitude until he was barely twenty-five feet above the surface, and headed for the bright, eerie glow.
Then he had a sudden thought.
“Do we have any weapons on board?” he asked Hodge.
The co-pilot stared back at him. It was the first time the subject had crossed their minds.
“Damn, I don’t know,” Hodge finally said.
Toomey took another look at the fast-approaching glow. It was getting brighter and looking more ominous by the second. He thumbed Hodge to the back of the airplane. “You better check.”
It took about a minute for Hodge to go through every supply compartment inside the old plane, a time in which the Seagull had drawn within six miles of the glow. He had just about given up when he looked in the airplane’s first-aid compartment and found an M-16 with four clips of ammo.
He reported the find to Toomey, who told him to bring the gun forward. But he had a funny feeling it wasn’t going to be anywhere near enough.
They were about two miles out when they discovered the source of the intense illumination. The glow was being thrown off by hundreds of giant movie-set arc lights that had been installed all over a chain of small islands, turning a square-mile area into something the equivalent of a night ballgame.
And what they lit was mind-boggling.
Shipyards, at least two or three of them, were on each of the five islands that made up the chain.
Row upon row of dry docks ringed these islands, obviously churning out vessels in an around-the-clock operation. Dozens of ships already built were assembled in the islands’ large mutual harbor. There must have been four or five dozen of them.
But the most frightening thing was the kind of vessel being built here.
“Christ,” Toomey swore, “they’re all battleships.”
It was true. Not only had they stumbled onto the largest shipbuilding facility imaginable, it was also one that seemed devoted to turning out enormous battlewagons.
And neither man had any doubt that the gigantic ships were being built by the Asian Mercenary Cult.
They flashed by the five islands at top speed and about a mile and a half out. Banking back to the north, Toomey got down even lower and closed to within a quarter mile of the islands. He was hoping that the blinding glare of the enormous lights would actually shield him from unfriendly eyes.
As they shot past again, they both noticed that something didn’t appear right within the harbor. It took them a few moments to figure out just what that was.
“They’re all moving,” Toomey finally said. “They’re moving like crazy.”
It was true. Many of the battleships in the harbor were actually under way and moving. But what was weird was that they weren’t moving in any precise pattern, as one would expect capital ships to do. Instead, they seemed to be moving very haphazardly, almost as if …
“As if they’re being attacked,” Toomey said.
“Attacked? Those monsters?” Hodge exclaimed. “Who would be attacking them?”
Unlike his good friend Hunter, Toomey did not believe in ESP, clairvoyance, synchronicity, or any other kind of cosmic junk. Yet now, something deep inside his gut was telling him to investigate closely the strange activity of the battleships, even though doing so would mean risking both their lives, either to hostile fire or dwindling fuel.
“Get that gun ready,” he told Hodge, who was strapping in even tighter to his seat. “We might need it.”
Toomey knew the only way they could do this and get out alive was quick and low—and with maximum surprise. He put the Seagull down to barely ten feet off the surface of the bay and gunned the gangling bird’s engine. As it was still an hour before dawn, he had no sun in front of which to hide.
He chose the next best thing.
Exploding out of the glare of a long bank of lights, the Seagull was suddenly sweeping through the weaving battleships, getting so close to some that the pilots could see the astonished faces of the crew members as they flashed by.
Most of the battleships were moving in the center of the islands’ mutual bay, and that’s where Toomey was headed. They began seeing muzzle flashes coming from the islands themselves, and instantly Toomey had the Seagull twisting and turning around dozens of tracer trails and small cannon explosions. At the same time, he was trying to take in as much visual information about the place as possible.
Suddenly Hodge was grabbing him on the arm. “Look! Over there … Jesuzz…”
Toomey saw it seconds later. In the middle of the frantically moving battleships, there was a tiny but speedy motorboat weaving crazily around the harbor. Incredibly, some of the battleships were maneuvering in order to get out of its way, while others were trying to get a proper angle and distance from which they could fire on it.
But this was not the most astounding aspect of this bizarre confrontation.
“God damn, is that him?” Toomey yelled as they roared right over the top of the motorboat. “Is that Wolf? …”
It was Wolf. He was standing behind the motorboat’s controls, cape whipping behind him, frantically steering with one hand and madly firing a machine-gun of some kind with the other. It was classic ants versus elephants. The ships were too big to get a bead on the motorboat, yet Wolf was firing on them with a puny MG.
“He’s gone fucking nuts,” Toomey yelled, “He’s totally flipped out.”
They both knew this was a knifefight the ant would eventually lose. Because once just one gun on one ship got a fix on the motorboat, it would blow it and Wolf to pieces.
That’s why they had to go back and try to save him.
Toomey put the Seagull into a gut-wrenching, rivet-popping turn. Soon they were screaming back into the water-tossed fray. Toomey knew he had about enough time to overfly the motorboat once, then set the Seagull down as close to it as possible. If Wolf didn’t make a move to climb on damn quick, he would simply gun the engine and get the hell out of there, leaving the insane Viking to his fate.
“Get that gun up, Hodgie!” Toomey yelled as they went into the final turn for landing. “Fire at anything!”
Hodge already had the M-16 up and out the open side vent. He began firing wildly, filling the Seagull cockpit with smoke and cordite. Toomey killed the engine and slammed the old seaplane onto the water
’s surface. Wolf’s motorboat was coming at a slight angle and at full throttle, leaping into the air as it crossed behind one battleship’s substantial wake.
But there was another battleship coming right down the middle of the bay, intersecting the distance that separated the Seagull from Wolf. Many of this ship’s deck guns were suddenly coming to life. Instantly Toomey knew he would not have a chance to slow down and stop completely for Wolf.
“Hodgie, get back by the big door,” Toomey screamed to the co-pilot. “Drag this clown in if you have to.”
With that, Toomey gunned the Seagull’s engine, banked so hard to the left that the wing touched the top of the water, and flung the seaplane right around the bow of the approaching battleship. Then he slammed the controls back down, bouncing the seaplane off the choppy surface. Wolf’s boat was now just a hundred yards in front of them and coming straight on. Yanking the throttle back to half power, Toomey looked behind him and saw Hodge bracing himself at the open door.
“Ready, Hodge?”
Hodge didn’t have time to answer. They were suddenly right on Wolf’s boat. With much derring-do, the young co-pilot reached out and violently collared the wild masked man, grabbing hold of his cape and yanking it. Wolf was pulled right up out of his seat and halfway into the bay door.
That was enough for Toomey. He gunned the seaplane’s engine and yanked the controls back to his ribcage. The air around them was filled with all kinds of tracer fire now as the seaplane desperately struggled for altitude and speed. All the while Wolf was still hanging out the door, madly firing his weapon down at the battleships, even as Hodge was trying with all his strength to haul him in.
“This guy is nuts!” Toomey screamed over the immense racket. “Fucking nuts!”
Finally getting some speed and height behind him, he twisted the Seagull around in the tightest turn it could handle without ripping apart. And then, when he saw that Wolf was finally inside and safe, he ran the old seaplane out of there as fast as its wings could take them.
Twenty-eight
War of the Sun Page 16
