Barracuda: Final Bearing

PROLOGUE

The cockpit shuddered as the ramjet engine shut down, fired its explosive bolts and detached, the pilot’s flickering display showing the propulsion module tumbling into the sea below.

“Phase two,” the pilot murmured in Japanese into his boom microphone. “Aircraft stable in full glide. Descending on glide path at nineteen thousand meters.”

There was no need to maintain radio silence — the electronics saved the voice data, video camera images and avionics telemetry into a magnetic bubble memory and transmitted a compressed burst once every five to ten minutes on a constantly changing frequency with time-varying encryption codes aimed in a beam to randomly selected Galaxy multipurpose satellites. The communications suite was frontier technology, Japanese technology, the most advanced in the world. Maj. Sushima Namuru would continue to transmit despite the fact that this was the most secret human intelligence operation ever taken on by the Japanese Self Defense Force.

The cockpit hummed from the instruments and the gyro. Namuru half closed his eyes, at one with the airplane, which moments before had been a high-speed jet and was now gliding silently, its polymer airframe and fabric skin making it invisible to radar, its lack of an engine making it invisible to infrared scanners, its lifting surface shape eliminating much of the wingtip vortex swirl making the flight whisper quiet. The plane was a prototype, named Shadowstar by Namuru, the name resonant with meaning to him. For a moment he saw images of the morning, his goodbye to his wife and young son, the send-off party with his squadron of Divine Wind flyers, his time alone in the shrine, feeling his ancestors surround him, giving their approval.

He glanced at the tiny camera eye set in the overhead, the one that monitored him and his reactions, hoping that someday his son would see the video and have pride in his father.

Namuru’s reverie ended two seconds after it had begun, his attention now taken up in his display’ screen, its three-dimensional display of glide slope superimposed over the terrain model so real that despite working with it for years, Namuru was still tempted to reach out and touch the objects in the display. The screen was all Namuru needed to fly the plane — there were no windows to the world outside. The only thing the display was unable to do was allow a windowless landing approach; for that a pilot still needed a real view. But on, this mission, Namuru’s Shadowstar would not be landing.

The aircraft passed over the line marking Greater Manchuria’s territorial waters, then soon flew over Greater’ Manchuria’s coastline. Namuru shook his head slightly, amazed at how close this new barbarian nation was to Japan, just across the Sea of Japan, the state once divided between Russia and China, but now a united threat merely 300 kilometers from Japan at its closest point, the distance between Tokyo and the Greater Manchurian capital of Changashan only 1050 kilometers, well inside the range of the old Russian SS-34 nuclear-tipped missiles. The missiles were supposedly destroyed under the United Nations ban on nuclear devices years before Greater Manchuria’s formation, but if they were, Namuru’s mission would not have been ordered. The intelligence brief, held an hour before his takeoff, detailed the satellite data that pointed to a nuclear-weapons storage depot in the sleepy railhead town of Tamga 200 kilometers northeast of Port Artom, the city the Russians had called Vladivostok.

The evidence was frightening. That a ketojin, a savage, like Len Pei Poom could form a nation of barbarians so close to Japan could not be permitted. Especially if they were in possession of nuclear missiles. Namuru almost longed for decades past when the Soviet Union and China and America were too busy threatening each other to be a danger to Japan. But now that Japan was alone it would be up to him, Namuru himself, to give his commanders the intelligence they would require before taking action against this threat. Namuru watched the glide path on the display. The glider had floated silently to an altitude of 5000 meters, completely undetected, now within twenty kilometers of Tamga.

The computer flashed up the countdown to aircraft destruct. Scarcely a minute now. Namuru glanced at the pilot-monitor camera as he spoke.

“Phase three. Two minutes to aircraft destruct. As yet no sign of detection.”

“Please remain seated,” the man in the business suit said, his voice quiet but full of authority. The officers in the command center remained at their consoles, glancing briefly, respectfully up at Prime Minister Hosaka Kurita as he walked slowly among the rows of equipment with his escort, Gen. Masao Gotoh, the chairman of the Joint Staff Council. Gotoh led Kurita to an isolated area of the dark room, the command corner, where an enlarged screen four meters wide and two meters tall flashed views fed by the defense computer network. The screen was split, one-half of it showing a helmet and oxygen mask, the only signs that a person was present the eyes, the other screen half showing a terrain model with superimposed computer graphics. It was gibberish to Prime Minister Kurita. Gotoh explained, his own eyes on the display.

“These are the transmissions from Colonel Namuru in the Shadowstar aircraft. We are seeing them at a five minute delay from real time since the data is recorded, compressed and relayed at a burst to a satellite — that way it is unlikely he would be detected even against an advanced adversary. Against the Greater Manchurians, he is invisible. In a few minutes Namuru’s aircraft will put him down near the Tamga weapons depot. We will be monitoring him as he executes his mission.” Kurita took a peek at his watch and settled into a leather command chair, his eyes unblinking as he took in the screen. “What if something happens to him? What if he’s caught?” Gotoh smiled to himself, knowing Kurita had been fully briefed, but also knowing the older man liked richness of detail. Briefings alone were not enough for him.

“Colonel Namuru and the other Divine Wind Warriors have an implanted chip with a small chemical canister surgically placed in their abdominal cavities. On a signal from the satellite, the chip will release a small dose of poison into Namuru’s body. Thirty seconds later he will be dead. There is no antidote.”

The Prime Minister nodded.

The two men watched the data display in silence. “You can see him here preparing for the aircraft to destruct,” General Gotoh said, the pilot’s image busy in the cockpit. Suddenly the screen image bounced violently, then winked out.

The Shadowstar glider sailed at 150 kilometers per hour, 3000 meters over the scrubby hills, four kilometers outside of Tamga. The cockpit’s computer display numerals reached the single digits, rolled too quickly to one, then zero. The aircraft self-destruct sequence began.

The polymer of the airframe was as strong as aluminum when in solid form. Running through the skeletal structure of the framing were hundreds of small polymer tubes and capillaries, all of them connected to a foillined polymer tank filled with a mixture of sulfuric acid and several advanced solvents. A small cylinder of highpressure nitrogen inside the top of the tank, on a computer signal, opened to the tank, the whooshing gas pressuring the fluid inside while a valve at the tank bottom snapped open, allowing the acid and solvent mixture to flow into the pipes and tubes and capillaries leading to the plane’s airframe structural components. The walls of the tubes were machined precisely so that they would carry the acid to the remotest tubes just before dissolving themselves. The dissolving tubes then spilled the acid into the hollow regions of the airframe structures and along their outsides. The polymeric composition of the airframe was chemically synthesized so that it reacted exothermically with the acid while dissolving in the solvents. Areas of the structure not directly in the wash of acid and solvents reacted from the heat of the adjacent melting structures, the acid molecules diffusing throughout the liquefying mass. Over the next twenty seconds, what before had been a network of solid curving beams and struts making up the shape of an airplane became a melting waxy semisolid, then a liquid, then finally as the reaction rate increased, a vapor. The airplane’s lifting body shape melted into a large teardrop, the liquid flying off into the slipstream behind it, the liquid turning to a plume of gray smoke, until all that was left of the aircraft was the egg-shaped carbon composite cockpit module, now tumbling end-over-end to the rocky slopes below.

Inside the cockpit Namuru felt the aircraft shake, then tremble violently as the wings and tail liquefied and vaporized, the module encasing him spinning toward the earth. The g-forces of the spin knocked Namuru about the cockpit, straining his five-point harness, threatening to break his neck. Namuru wondered if the computer were still active. If it had malfunctioned in the breakup of the airframe, the cockpit module would fall dumbly into the ground below, shattering at terminal velocity of 160 kilometers per hour. He fought the dizziness of the spinning cockpit and the massive g-forces to reach his gloved hand for the manual parachute lever. He had just managed to brush it with his fingers when the explosive bolts blew off the drogue chute panel, ejecting a streamer from the rear of the cockpit module, stabilizing the wildly spinning egg until one second later the main chute blew out, luffing in the slipstream gale until it filled, the cockpit module settling below it. The cockpit egg now drifted gently down to the slope of a craggy hill a hundred meters below. Namuru had only a moment to inhale to clear his head before the module hit the mountainside, the impact considerable even under the canopy of the main chute.

Namuru hurried to punch the cockpit rupture button, knowing that the computer would wait only two minutes for him to activate it before self-destructing. The worst thing that could happen on this mission was his capture, and if he had arrived unconscious, the computer would kill him before allowing him to be taken. He pulled the cover from the rupture command switch and toggled it down and the cockpit module split in half, opening cleanly along a prescored material weld. The top of the module pulled up and away from the bottom on pneumatic cylinder struts, allowing a cold wind and diffuse but glaring winter light into the module. Namuru unlatched a case from the bulkhead of the capsule and hauled himself out into the cold of the outside and stepped away from the cockpit. Seconds later the module began to smoke and sizzle, burning until there was nothing left but a black molten pool of carbon, melted fiber optics and singed liquid crystal.

Namuru opened the case he had withdrawn and revealed a thick vest, full of pockets, heavy with explosives and the automatic pistol. He put on the vest and took out equally heavy pocketed pants that he strapped onto his thighs and fastened with Velcro seams. He kept his helmet on, since it contained two cameras, one that gave Yokosuka Center a view of what he himself saw, a second with a fisheye lens focused on his face. He pulled a small folding spade from a utility pocket and covered the smoking ruin of the cockpit and the parachute with earth dug from the rocky frozen ground. He stepped back after a few minutes, sweating despite the chill, realizing the job was far from perfect but still would only be noticed by someone stepping on top of it.

He ditched the shovel, pulled the pistol out of his vest, screwed on the long silencer and snapped a large clip into the gun. He then thrust the piece into a soft holster set into his vest and withdrew high-powered binoculars and a black rubber box with rounded edges about the size of a steno pad. The pad had heavy elastic straps on the back and a removable cover on the front that now revealed a liquid crystal display. Namuru strapped the pad onto his left forearm, then ran a small wire between his watch and the pad, switching the watch into digital compass mode, its satellite receiver turned to the orbiting Galaxy geostationary multipurpose satellite. A thumb pressure on the display turned the unit on, the display flashing a question mark. He raised the pad to his lips and whispered his password, which this hour was “blue.” The display flashed to life, bright and colorful, although the light from it faded to black if the screen were observed even slightly off from directly in front of it at a distance of thirty centimeters. “Nav display, vector to Tamga weapons depot,” Namuru whispered to the pad. An overhead satellite photograph view of a hilly rocky region flashed onto the display, the scene showing an eerie depth from the three-dimensional effect. The green of the trees and ground cover were broken by several roads, a winding rail track and the roofs of several small buildings, with what appeared to be an expansive flat plateau among the buildings. A yellow grid flashed up over the landscape, with a blinking circle on the crest of a hill to the south of the compound. Namuru noted that the circle was within two kilometers of the center of the complex — and since the circle was his own position, he would have an easy hike to the base perimeter. He looked up into the cloudy sky for any sign of the sun, but it was buried in thick overcast.

He made a full turn, looking and listening for observers in the scrubby growth around him. All was quiet. The pad computer aural sensors were tuned to pick out man-made noises and would alert Namuru by buzzing the flesh of his forearm, but until that function proved itself it was not to be assumed that it worked. After a last glance at the pad display, Namuru set off in the direction of the compound.

“So how will he get through the perimeter fence and security?” Prime Minister Kurita asked, watching raptly as the screen display jiggled and showed Major Namuru walking through the thick trees on the downslope of a mountain leading to the Tamga valley. The view on one panel of the display showed the trees and underbrush approaching the camera; a second panel showed a fisheye-lens view of a puffy-looking face beaded with sweat, the eyes wide and hyper alert; the third panel revealed a grid superimposed on a bird’s-eye view of the valley with a flashing circle nearing a fenceline surrounding a military compound.

“Not a problem,” General Gotoh replied, glancing from the screen to Kurita’s lined face, then back to the display. “Namuru has gas for dogs, a silenced automatic for human guards, shorting cables for electrified fences. We’ve spent six months training him in the use of every security measure we know. He’s consistently penetrated them 78 percent of the time.”

“Seventy-eight percent doesn’t sound like it’s passing.”

“That is against Japanese technology perimeter security,” Gotoh said, typing into a keyboard in front of his control console. “Against gaijin methods, he will be more than the equal of a security detail.”

“Tell me again how he is going to get inside the bunker, if that is what it is.”

“He’ll shoot the guards,” Gotoh said simply, his eyes still on the display, careful not to let a flicker of annoyance cross his face at Kurita’s insistence on covering briefing material over and over.

“Does he have to do that? It would seem to imperil the mission, draw attention to the breakin.”

“True, Prime Minister. But guards of nuclear weapons are trained — conditioned is perhaps a better term — to shoot intruders. They call it Deadly Force Authorization. It means shoot first and forget the questions. The quickest way to penetrate the security around a nuclear weapon is to surprise the guards and kill them. Even then, one’s life expectancy is numbered in the minutes, perhaps only seconds. That’s why Namuru has the cameras. If he’s shot we’ll still have the data.”

“What about the time delay? They might disconnect and destroy his camera before we know what happened.”

“Unavoidable, I’m afraid, sir. But it is unlikely that if Namuru and his gear is captured that the gaijin Greater Manchurians could understand that he is transmitting. By the time they realized it, we would know all that Namuru knew.”

In the panel monitoring Namuru’s view a bush flashed close to the camera, then rolled away to reveal a length of fencing between two trees. The right panel showing the navigation display changed, a graph replacing the aerial photograph, the graph pulsing with circular curves.

“The fence is electrified with high voltage,” Gotoh announced. The view from Namuru’s helmet blurred as he approached the fence. Namuru’s hands flashed in and out of view, attaching a cable to the fence, just before the fireball exploded and the screens again went blank.

Namuru looked at the fence as his computer pad flickered with the electromagnetic signature of 11,000 volts surging through the aluminum cable braided through the fence. What could be seen through the fence was limited, since there were more trees there and little else.

Namuru snaked out the electrical cables that were in the back of the heavy vest, uncoiled the heavy insulated wires, withdrew the lengths of copper rods half a meter at a time. He screwed the copper rod lengths together, until there was a two-meter-long copper rod, then attempted to force the rod into the ground. It went in halfway, then had to be tapped with a rubber mallet from another vest pocket until the rod was buried in the ground with only five centimeters protruding.

Namuru hid the mallet under a bush. At least after this, he thought, much of the weight he’d carried in would be left behind. He took a cable and attached it to the top of the copper rod with a heavy copper clamp.

The other end of the cable he attached to a large alligator clip, then stepped back to inspect his work. He unfastened the computer pad and digital receiver watch, his vest and his utility leggings so that most of the metal objects were removed from his body. He put on the thick 100,000-volt rubber gloves. His boots were already wrapped in insulating material, one of the reasons his feet were so uncomfortably hot.

He took a deep breath, studying the cable winding through the aluminum mesh fence. The idea was to get his cable attached to the live electrical cable in the fence, thereby grounding the voltage to the copper rod in the earth. The live wire would then short its potential to ground, either tripping the electrical circuit at the generator or melting the wire at the connection to the rod. If he did this right the power would blast through the grounding mechanism and disrupt the entire circuit so that he could cut through the fence. But if he mishandled the operation 11,000 volts of power would pass through his body. That had happened to one of the Divine Wind officers in penetration training. The high voltage had blown off the man’s legs and one of his arms, stopped his heart and left him a smoking wreck. The training chief had cut the power, and the ambulance crew had revived the man, and he had actually lived for two days, the incredible pain of those days carved on his terrified burned features when they had buried him. A horrible way to die, a worse way to live. Namuru prayed, just don’t let it leave me burned and maimed.

He lunged with the alligator clip and hit the high voltage fence cable with it. The fireball had no sound, only a fist of pressure. Namuru saw the light expand to the size of a zeppelin and surround him as it smashed into him and blew him off his feet and sent him flying into the woods.

“What happened?”

“Looks like he took a shock,” Gotoh said, his voice a monotone. The screens remained blank.

“And he’s dead?”

“Too early to say, sir.” Gotoh had risen to hover over another younger officer at a neighboring console. The officer tapped furiously at a keyboard, stopping occasionally to manipulate a mouse, then typing again.

“We’re addressing the satellite now trying to get Major Namuru’s cameras to work again. If we can reestablish a link with his instrumentation we might be able to determine what is going on.”

The screen flashed a momentary broken image, then went dark again. Gotoh and Kurita waited.

“How long do we wait?”

“The mission brief calls for a four-minute delay before the satellite signals the chip with the poison canister in the major’s abdomen,” Gotoh said.

“How long has it been?”

“We were already on a five-minute delay from real time when the major got hit with the electricity. We saw it three minutes ago. I’d say Major Namuru has another sixty seconds before the computer aborts the mission and calls down to the chip to inject the poison.”

The screen flashed, then held. The camera view from Namuru’s helmet stared straight up at the sky, the boughs of two trees breaking the featureless clouds. The face-monitoring camera came up next. Namuru’s face was burned on the left side, his eye gone, the flesh seared and melting. His right eye was shut and swollen.

“Prime Minister, I don’t think we should wait for the mission computer. We should abort now. Namuru’s gone.”

Kurita stared at Namuru’s burned and disfigured face.

“I agree. General.”

Gotoh gave the order to the officer on the control console, who nodded and made the commands as if they had nothing to do with killing a fellow officer.

“The signal is out, sir,” the officer reported.

“He’ll be dead in thirty seconds if he isn’t already,” Gotoh said.

Kurita looked up at the screen. “We need another plan. We still must find out if Len Pei Poom has nuclear weapons. He could be targeting Tokyo even now.”

Namuru was burned from the inside out. His flesh felt hot and running on his left side, his face aching and puffy. His whole body ached, he couldn’t move. He concentrated for what seemed hours trying to move his right hand, finally able to move it upward. In the next ten minutes he used the hand to lift himself so that he was sitting up. He couldn’t see out of his left eye. He reached for his face and felt the burned flesh, hard and crumbling.

He crawled through the brush to find his watch and the computer pad. When he found them, the computer pad had melted into a puddle of plastic. The watch was also destroyed, the satellite above having given the signal to abort the mission. Which meant that his poison capsule should have been released and he should be dead.

Except that the electrical fireball must have fried the chip inside him. But if there had been enough power to kill the chip, there might have been enough to fracture the poison canister. It could be leaking even now, he thought. He had only hours to live — but then that was the whole idea of this mission.

He managed to stand, shaking when he finally made it. He took some water from his vest, then tried to put it on. It was too heavy and he was too weak. He would have to go in without it. He bent over the vest and pulled out the pistol, a spare clip, the two gas bottles, a small collection of electronic boxes and a small pack of film, then adjusted his helmet, wondering if the cameras were still operating. The circuits checked out — he should still be transmitting. He wondered if there was anyone on the other end. He stepped slowly toward the fence, saw the blackened hole the fireball had blown in it. He crouched down, walked through and limped to the trees, his strength coming and going erratically.

With the computer pad gone, he was operating on memory. The satellite photo had pictured a wide flat mound of earth, the kind used to conceal an underground bunker. The earth mound would be behind two rows of outbuildings from where he was, just beyond the trees. Moving through the trees to the far edge, he saw the outbuildings and began walking unsteadily through the exposed ground to the cover of the buildings. If the cameras weren’t working, the mission was over.

The two black dogs running silently toward him were within ten meters before he saw them with his one eye.

“Prime Minister! General!”

The lieutenant from the command center, Gotoh saw.

“Sir, the major. He’s alive. He’s inside the compound—”

“General, what happened to the poison?” Kurita asked.

“I’m not sure, sir. Perhaps the electrocution damaged it.”

“What else could fail on this day,” Kurita mumbled.

The two men hurried back to the command center, returning to the control corner they had abandoned minutes before. The left screen was unsteady with the blur of movement, the transmission fading in and out, the software freezing the image rather than allowing the display to go black during the short transmission interruptions.

During one short interruption Kurita saw the frozen image of the exposed fangs of a large black dog leering angrily at the camera as it lunged. The eyes were red and furious, the mouth hungry and lethal. Kurita unconsciously felt his throat.

The dogs had gotten too close. If he had still been able to use the computer pad, the motion detector would have alerted him to the animals ten seconds before, but that was in the past. In an adrenaline rush he grabbed a gas bottle with each hand, aiming as best he could with only one good eye, the streams of gas jetting out at the dogs in a loud blast, a white cloud forming around him. He clamped his mouth shut, hoping he could keep from inhaling the gas. The lab techs had assured him the nerve gas was active only on animals, not humans, but after seeing it demonstrated, he wondered. The dogs, already flying through the air to get to his throat, were dead before they hit him, the two bodies knocking him to the ground, the sounds of the dogs’ gasping expulsions of breath in his ears as their bodies spasmed through reflex nerve actions.

Namuru got up, replaced the bottles in his belt and withdrew the automatic pistol. He was within ten meters of the objective now, the hump of earth covering the suspected bunker rising over his head. The slope of the dirt was too regular to be natural. There was definitely something buried here. Namuru closed the clump of trees at the edge of the earth embankment and had a momentary impression of the two armed guards in their helmets and flak jackets. Namuru sprayed them with a single silenced burst from the pistol, more than two dozen Teflon-jacketed rounds exploding inside their bodies. He had shoved the pistol into his belt, the barrel scalding hot, while the guards were still on their feet, slowly collapsing to the ground. As the two liquid thumps came from their impact with the earth, Namuru cradled the keypad entry box in his hands.

The keypad required a password numeric sequence be entered to open the blast doors of the bunker. Namuru pulled the cover off, reached into his belt for the electronic boxes, none of them bigger than a matchbook, and selected, the proper one. He placed the box over the number pad, hit a button on the face of the box and waited. Twenty seconds later a small crystal display blinked as the box talked to the keypad. Finally the keybox surrendered, the heavy steel blastdoor groaning as it moved its rusted mass, one panel sliding right, the other left, opening into the darkness of the bunker. As it opened, Namuru pulled the pistol from his belt and dropped the electronic box, which was already sizzling and melting into a self-destruct sequence.

Namuru rushed into the opening, firing at the dim shapes of the inside guards, none prepared for an intruder.

His eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness as he ejected the spent clip of the weapon and inserted another, the only replacement ammunition he had brought.

He almost smiled as he saw the missiles in the dim light of the dusty overhead lamps. He stepped over the bodies of four guards for a better look, glancing up to see if he was being followed. So far all was quiet. He only needed another minute.

Namuru had spent years studying nuclear weapons. He could recognize and identify any production nuclear missile made by any nuclear power, past or present. And the missiles on the dollies in front of him were definitely old Russian SS-34’s — medium-range ballistic missiles. Theater nuclear weapons able to reach any major city within 1500 kilometers. Most of the missile bulk was devoted to warhead rather than rocket fuel, which was why their range was so short. But Tokyo was only 850 kilometers away. It was not enough for him to identify the missile model, however Namuru’s mission was to determine beyond any doubt that they were truly nukes, not just dusty hulks of the old SS-34s, or some unknown conventional model of the warhead with conventional high explosive mated to the SS-34’s rocket stage.

All nuclear warheads, he knew, emitted neutron radiation.

Especially an older Russian model. The neutron flux from the plutonium warhead would be enough to cloud a special filmstrip. Namuru stepped over to the weapon body, going through a yellow rope with the three-bladed circular radiation warning sign on it, and attached one of the filmstrips to the nearest warhead, then a strip on the next, and one on the furthest. There were at least twenty missiles in this end of the bunker and there would be no way to have time to test them all. Namuru counted to ten, then pulled the films away, crouching below the weapons. He put each film through a developer and waited another ten seconds, then held the processed film to the light. All three were clouded.

All three had been exposed to high dosages of neutron flux.

All three weapons had nuclear warheads.

Which meant Manchuria could attack Japan and bring her to her knees.

Which meant that the war would begin in days when the high command attacked this facility.

Namuru thought he heard a voice. He pocketed the films and ran out the blast door and into the open, amazed that his body could function after the electrical jolt, but then realizing he was operating on pure adrenaline. He ran past the outbuildings to the trees, and beyond to the burnt-out hole in the fence. There was noise now, a rising siren just starting off on the other side of the bunker, gathering pitch and volume until it howled, an old-fashioned air-raid alarm. He heard the roar of truck engines as he dived through the fence opening and made it back to the trees, where he had stashed his vest and leggings.

He was almost finished.

“So it is true,” General Gotoh said.

“The weapons?”

“They are nuclear,” Gotoh said to Kurita as both men watched the screen, Namuru’s view of the missiles clear in his helmet-mounted camera. Namuru had apparently just gotten rid of the film and begun his escape. “Did you see the film? It clouded. Only neutron radiation can do that so quickly. And only nuclear fuel or nuclear warheads would do that. The SS-34s are live, sir.”

“What happens to Namuru now?”

“We give him a medal. And we keep watching.”

Namuru got the vest and leggings on and pulled the helmet camera out of the helmet by a coiled thread-thin wire, attaching the tiny camera eye to a limb on a tree, then backing away two meters so that the camera was looking at his face.

“Phase nine,” Namuru said to the camera. “The weapons are SS-34s, at least two dozen of them. I have confirmed that they are nuclear. My extraction was successful but I am being pursued. This mission is now complete.”

Namuru listened for a moment, the sirens wailing behind him. He thought he heard footsteps in the underbrush.

It was time.

“To the victory of Japan,” he said, and reached to the back of his helmet to pull the T-handle cord, down to his shoulder blade.

Kurita stared at the screen. Namuru’s face was clearly visible, almost like a news reporter at a scene giving a description. The weapons were nuclear, he had said.

“To the victory of Japan,” Namuru was saying as he pulled something down behind his back.

On the screen the explosion took Kurita by surprise.

The detonation was severe enough to cause the transmission to freeze-frame several times as the satellite lost lock over the next second, the frames freezing the specter of Namuru’s head being blown apart by his helmet lined with explosives. The screen shook as the vest apparently detonated, blowing the camera backward until the screen view looked up at the sky, then rolled over to look back toward the damaged fence. In a blur men could be made out running toward the fence, when the screen suddenly became snow and static, the static noise loud.

The officer at the control screen turned off the display.

“What happened?” Kurita heard himself say.

“Major Namuru’s helmet, utility vest and leggings were fitted with explosives to blow his body apart. That way the Manchurians would have no way to identify him as a Japanese, not that their DNA-coding labs could ever match anything we have. The explosives also blew up his equipment so that there is nothing left for them to have that points to us. He was trained to detonate the explosives on camera so that we could verify that his self-destruction was complete. An excellent mission, Namuru did well,” the general said.

“Next time. General, you might consider warning me that I will be witnessing a man’s death in real time.”

“Sir, it was not real time — it was on a five-minute time-delay.”

Kurita realized General Gotoh would never understand.

But it was time now for Greater Manchuria to understand. Soon they would know that having offensive nuclear missiles, violating the UN ban, so close to Japan would cost them dearly.

“Call Minister MacHiie. Tell him to convene the Defense Security Council in one hour. Bring a disk of Namuru’s mission but please edit out the last part.”

“Yes, Prime Minister.”

“And, General. Make sure your war plan is very carefully thought out.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kurita stared at the general for a long moment, then walked out, trying to banish the images of Namuru’s death from his mind, but not succeeding.

CHAPTER 1

Rear Adm. Michael Pacino settled into the seat of the Sea King helicopter and stared out the window, the beautiful vista of the Chesapeake unwinding beneath him.

Pacino was only forty-two years old though he felt much older. He was tall, over six feet two, his frame slim but solid. He was still able to wear the uniforms he had worn when he graduated from the Naval Academy twenty years earlier; and from a distance he could be mistaken for a midshipman. Close-up the illusion continued for a moment because his almost gaunt face still had the shape of his youth, his emerald-green eyes sharp and clear, his pronounced cheekbones presiding over a straight nose and full lips. But then the clues to Pacino’s age came into focus — deep lines at the corners of his eyes, crow’s feet from staring out to sea or peering through periscopes, face tanned and leathery and losing the resilience it had once had, as if he had spent years in the sun, though actually the coloring was the result of severe frostbite he had suffered in an arctic mission that had gone wrong. The skin of his hands and arms was likewise damaged. His hair was thick but had turned white, not a single dark pigment remained of the jet-black hair he had once had. Rumor had it that the last mission he had commanded, so highly classified that even some of the brass weren’t cleared to hear about it, had frightened the last of the black from his head. In any event, the effect of his skin, his white hair, and his gauntness made Pacino’s rank of rear admiral seem less odd, since most men of his rank were twenty years older than Pacino. Pacino’s khaki shirt collar displayed the two silver stars of flag rank, and he wore a gold dolphin pin above his left breast pocket, a plain black phenolic name tag above his right pocket reading simply PACINO, and a white-gold Annapolis ring on his left ring finger.

In the seat of the big chopper, he wondered what Richard Donchez wanted to see him about. An hour before he had just taken the first bite of his working dinner with his aide, a young lieutenant named Joanna Stoddard, when his secretary came in.

“Admiral Donchez called from Fort Meade, sir,” the secretary said. “He’s sending a chopper to pick you up.”

“He say what’s on his mind?”

“He said he knew you’d ask and told me he wanted to give you an urgent briefing, and that all I could say was Scenario Orange. He said you’d know what that meant.”

He had been startled to hear Donchez use the term “Scenario Orange.”

Adm. Richard Donchez — the “admiral” ceremonial now that Donchez was retired from the Navy — was the director of the National Security Agency, which had responsibility for electronic intelligence, whether by eavesdropping, satellite surveillance or any other nonhuman intelligence methods. The CIA had once had its own spy satellites until the Whitman Act reorganized the intelligence agencies, combining the old Central Intelligence Agency with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the new organization called the Combined Intelligence Agency.

There had been momentum enough in the frenzy of government reorganization that Congress threatened to make NSA part of CIA, but Donchez’s predecessor had called in favors from Capitol Hill and the result was an independent NSA with a meaty budget, a highly skilled staff and magnificent gadgets, among them the Big Bird III keyhole series satellites and several special operations nuclear subs. The subs gathered intelligence by driving close to a subject’s shores and keeping an antenna up to listen for short-range clear transmissions. It was this that made Pacino wonder what NSA Director Donchez was up to. The subs that reported to NSA could be one reason to call for him, since Donchez had to work closely with USUBCOM to deal with his special operations ships. But now that the Dayton was gathering intel in Tokyo Bay and the Cincinnati was doing the same in Port Artom in Greater Manchuria, the current trouble spots of the world, there usually would be little else official that Donchez would come to him about. Which brought Pacino back to the top secret code words “Scenario Orange.”

Scenario Orange was the classified term for the possibility of war between the United States and Japan. War plans against other nations, even allies such as the UK, were routinely written, scrutinized and fed to a Dynacorp Frame 90 supercomputer for simulation and refinement. Until the tension surfaced between Greater Manchuria and Japan, those war plans would be expected to gather dust for the next half-century, but now things were very different.

The helicopter shuddered, the engine noises rising and falling again as the chopper neared Donchez’s Fort Meade helipad, the compound nestled in suburban Maryland between Baltimore and Washington. It was getting dark by the time the helicopter made its final approach. The harsh glare of the helipad landing lights flooded into the cabin.

Even before the pilot throttled down Pacino got up from his seat, grabbed his hat and held it against the rotor wash, waved to the pilots and stepped out into the cold night. His light working khaki jacket was no match for the cold front that had just moved over the area. At least it was no longer raining, he thought as he jogged to the edge of the pad, where Donchez was waiting, an unlit Havana cigar clenched in one hand, a smile crinkling his aging features. Pacino smiled back as he approached.

Dick Dohchez had been Pacino’s father’s roommate at Annapolis decades before, the two men joining the submarine force together, always home-ported in the same town, usually taking shore duty at the same command. When Pacino was born Donchez and Pacino’s father were both at sea, both under the polar icecap. By the time they came home, Pacino was two months old. His earliest memories of his father always seemed to include Donchez. He remembered countless Saturdays spent on his father’s ship, the two Pacinos visiting Donchez’s boat for a meal. Eventually when Pacino went to Annapolis, his father commanded the Stingray, berthed one pier over from Donchez’s original Piranha.

When Stingray sank in mid-Atlantic from the detonation of her own torpedo — as the official story had it— Pacino was eighteen years old, a plebe at the Naval Academy. It had been Donchez himself who had broken the news to Pacino that the Stingray had gone down with all hands, and since then the older man had tried to fashion himself as a mentor and surrogate father to Pacino. Yet for twenty years Pacino had distanced himself from Donchez, perhaps, he admitted, linking Donchez to the sinking because he had been the messenger.

Eventually Donchez had become a rear admiral in command of the Atlantic Fleet’s submarine force, and hence Pacino’s boss during Pacino’s first command tour on the USS Devilfish. Donchez had risen to command the service as Chief of Naval Operations, but afterward had left the Navy. There was nowhere upward to go. Donchez had always had an interest in intelligence work and had confided to Pacino that he wouldn’t mind an appointment to CIA, which had always been tight with the upper echelons of the Navy, largely because of the spy duty that US subs had done in the past. But CIA was the personal fiefdom of Boswell Farnesworth Leach III, one of the previous president’s cronies, not to be replaced for some time. Donchez had been appointed Dirnsa, with the implied understanding that someday CIA would be his. That had been eleven months ago.

Donchez looked odd in a business suit, the gold braided stripes that once climbed all the way to his elbows now giving way to the Armani material. The last ten years had worn heavily on Richard Donchez, Pacino thought. It seemed each time he saw him Donchez had shrunk, until he was over a head shorter than Pacino. He had grown thinner, his shirt collars no longer acquainted with his neck. Pacino remembered that Donchez’s hairless head had seemed macho, but now that Donchez was older the baldness added to a look of infirmity that worried Pacino.

Pacino held out his hand to the older man, who pulled him into a bear hug, slapping his back. “Mikey, you look great.”

“Uncle Dick, how you doing?”

“Same as always, Mikey. Glad you could come.”

“My aide mentioned Scenario Orange.” Pacino stated bluntly as they climbed into Donchez’s staff car for the ride to his office. “What’s going on with Japan?”

“I knew that would get your attention,” Donchez said. “We’ll talk about it inside the building. It’s built against the possibility of eavesdropping. Security is better than the White House.”

The limo drove through the dense forest of the complex, low brick buildings every few thousand feet giving the impression of a college campus, the resemblance broken by the fences, the security guards and the large antennae following the satellites overhead.

“Speaking of the White House, sir, how is the new president?”

“She’s great, Mikey. I mean that. She can be tough, at times too tough, thinks she’s Margaret Thatcher, or maybe she thinks she has to look strong as the first elected female President in the history of the country. But I can work with that. Hell, it’s easier to back down an aggressive commander in chief than put backbone in a weak one.”

The speech had come almost glibly, Pacino thought. The old man probably got asked that question all the time.

The car stopped at the front entrance of building 527, Donchez’s new NSA headquarters. The floodlights were on, although it was not yet dark, showcasing the multiwinged building. From the front the protruding entrance wing was a truncated five-story pyramid done in brick and plate glass and copper sheathing, the copper just starting to turn an antique green.

“The copper reminds me of the Academy,” Donchez said. “The rest is sort of modern without looking like a cookie-cutter office building.”

Pacino looked at the low wide pyramid while following Donchez to the doors. The pyramid face was broken by a long row of plate glass set deep into a horizontal groove. The executive suites, Pacino figured.

“Where the hell did you get budget coverage for this? And it should have taken two years to build and you go from concept to finished building in, what, ten months?”

Donchez didn’t smile. “Black programs, Mikey. Ultrasecret. We need the security — the electronic eavesdropping systems of our potential adversaries are getting too good, so we got the budget coverage in a hurry. But believe me, we’re getting more than our money’s worth here. You’ll see.”

Donchez’s office on the top floor was even more of a showplace than his Chief of Naval Operations suite at the Pentagon.

Along the wall were bookshelves filled with dusty volumes and some new books. The wall was covered with framed photographs, Donchez’s old submarines, one showing the icepack with a black submarine conning tower broken through the ice, Donchez standing in front of it wearing arctic gear and a baseball cap with scrambled eggs on the brim — the old Piranha from the 1970s. Model submarines in expensive cases were set in the four corners of the room. Opposite the windows a bar was set behind wood panels.

Donchez threw out his cigar, pulled a new one from a humidor, walked to the bar and poured three fingers of Jack Daniel’s over ice cubes in the highball glass and waved Pacino to one of the leather chairs, putting the drink on a side table and taking the neighboring chair.

“How are you, Mikey? I mean with the divorce at the same time you’re trying to get your arms around the Unified Sub Command?”

Pacino knew he didn’t come up by helicopter to discuss his divorce or how he felt about his job. He was right. Donchez reached into the table between them and pulled out a small keypad, flashing his fingers across it. The room grew dark as the polarized glass of the windows turned the clear glass black. A panel in the high ceiling opened and a screen came down in front of them. The room lights dimmed as a projection television flashed the emblem of the National Security Administration.

The image of the NSA dissolved to be replaced by a map of the north Pacific Rim. The banana-shaped islands of Japan were color-coded orange. The islands zoomed in while Donchez began with basics on Japan, facts about Prime Minister Hosaka Kurita, a brief history of Japan from the Shoguns to World War II through the trade problems of the late twentieth century to the isolation and trade wars of the twenty-first century’s first decade.

The briefing seemed to drag on.

“What about Scenario Orange?” Pacino asked.

“Part of the problem is Greater Manchuria,” Donchez said, not directly answering, “but I’ll get to that in a minute.”

Greater Manchuria, Pacino knew, was a republic recently formed out of a chunk of land from Russia and another from China. Its ultranationalistic dictator was a problem for continental Asia, but a problem, so far as Pacino knew, with no connection with Japan.

Donchez went on. “If we look at today’s global situation, it is very tense, Mikey. Scenario Orange is, I think, just over the horizon. We’re going to have to fight them, and sooner than later. Here’s why. Start with the lousy relations between us. Japan made the first mistake— their move for world economic conquest led them to try and buy too damn much. The final straw was their play to take over AT&T, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and General Motors. Jesus. And people once complained about hotels and movie studios and Rockefeller Center.”

Pacino nodded. The news had broken one Wednesday morning just two years before, when overnight the Japanese government, through MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, had engineered a whirlwind takeover of the five most strategic corporations in America — and how they did it was a stunning lesson in secrecy and deception, the Japanese buying stock through third and fourth parties over months until the day they announced that their interest in the big five was controlling.

“The Fair Trade Bill that shut that takeover down cold was a slap in the face to Japan. You know how big they are on face. They apparently thought things would be business as usual. Suddenly anything with more than 10 percent Japanese content was illegal to import into the United States. Japanese goods might as well have been illegal drugs. We thought we were sending Japan a strong signal. They misinterpreted it, or at least they took strong exception to it.”

“They landed on their feet, they went deeper into Asian and African markets and Russia is a prime market for them. The Russians would do anything to trade with Japan,” Pacino said.

“They did not land on their feet, Mikey. They were hurt bad. They are mad as hell, and their anger is directed at the US. Even though what they did with the covert takeover attempts of our industries was unethical — not to mention damned hostile — the Japanese didn’t and don’t want to see it that way. To them our response was the economic equivalent of a nuclear bomb dropped by America — a total trade ban on Japanese goods in the US. It was a big hit in the pocket too. The US was a sort of cash cow for them. It went away overnight and no other markets can replace that, including Russia, which is still too poor to do important business with Japan.”

“So far you’re talking economics, Dick.”

“All that historic national aggression we’ve seen before from Japan has been channeled once again into a military buildup. The manufacturing capability that once built cars for sale to America has been converted to defense. The so-called Self Defense Force — they don’t call it an army, since an army is outlawed by their constitution — has increased in manpower by a factor of a dozen. The force’s air wing has ten squadrons of the most advanced fighter in the air, the Firestar. And you know about their navy, the Maritime Self Defense Force. They were building a nuclear submarine for export sale five years ago, the Destiny class. Then they began building an improved version for themselves, the Destiny II class. They’ve built over a dozen of them. They’re the most capable supersub since our Seawolf class. But from the little I hear from Leach at CIA, the Destiny II boats are head and shoulders better than Seawolf. And your aging Los Angeles-class subs are no match for it.”

“I know. Admiral. But we could only get funding for two more Seawolf-class ships, the Barracuda and the Piranha. Until the new class comes off the drawing boards that’s all we’ll get.”

“You’d better listen up, then, Mikey. There’s worse news. Apparently there is now a Destiny III-class submarine. The Destiny III is unmanned, run by a computer.”

“I had a quick briefing on that. From what I understand, it’ll never work. The problems are endless. My people tell me it’ll never go to sea.”

“I hope you’re right, but if anyone can make a robotic submarine work, it’s the Japanese.”

Pacino was restless. The briefing, troubling as it was, didn’t seem to justify Scenario Orange. “So, Dick, we had a trade war. The Japanese lost and have turned to other markets, including Russia. They’ve built up their military while ours has dwindled. That’s not enough—”

“Listen to me and listen good.” Donchez clicked his remote angrily, and the map returned to an overhead view of the Far East. The new nation of Greater Manchuria, shown in blue, faced Japan across the Sea of Japan, the blue giant extending from North Korea north to the Sea of Okhotsk far north of Japan’s Hokkaido Island. The northern island in Japan’s chain, the disputed island of Sakhalin that had been Russian territory, was now part of Greater Manchuria. Greater Manchuria also included what had once been called Manchuria, a part of northeast China and far east Russia, but was now known as Greater Manchuria since it also comprised the Russian territory fronting the Sea of Japan, the slice of land once called Sikhote Alin, as far south as Vladivostok, now renamed Artom.

Greater Manchuria was a state the size of Mexico hovering off Japan’s west coast. Immediately south of Greater Manchuria the state of East China, color-coded white, extended from North Korea south along the coastline to Vietnam, the strip of land 1000 miles wide, the larger country of West China in red still three-quarters the size of the former communist China had been before East China and Greater Manchuria had split off. The screen zoomed in on Greater Manchuria, to the capital city of Changashan, then came down in satellite’s-eye-view of the city center to the Presidential Palace. The image froze and bled into the face of President Len Pei Poom, who looked startlingly young to be the dictator of the new nation. He wore an officer’s cap and a dark military uniform, but otherwise looked ordinary, someone who wouldn’t be looked at twice on the street.

“Len Pei Poom, Greater Manchuria’s president, and his new republic are getting on a lot of nerves lately. I don’t know if you knew this,” Donchez said, reaching into his humidor and offering Pacino a Havana cigar, “since somehow we’ve been able to keep it from the press, but we’ve been bankrolling Greater Manchuria through Israel for the last five months.”

“Why?” Pacino asked, taking the flame from Donchez’s lighter.

“I thought we were tight with East China since they broke off from the reds, and the East Chinese aren’t too friendly with Len now.”

Donchez lit his own cigar.

“We want to maintain ties to East China, and Russia, and the Greater Manchurians. The balance of power is crucial to our interests in Asia. We don’t want one big power there bullying everyone else and turning eastward toward us. Japan was weakened by the trade war, but now we see them building up their military, and now that Greater Manchuria is established, the Japanese see Greater Manchuria as a threat. Let me put it to you like this — Japan’s aggressiveness and military hardware are the gasoline. Greater Manchuria, as a perceived threat to Japan, is the firewood. If we get a spark, we are in trouble.”

“Wait a minute, why would Japan see Greater Manchuria as a threat?”

“Same reason they hated Korea. It’s based on geography, politics, national psychology. Japan is highly xenophobic — they’ve always been distrustful of outsiders. And now this Len character surfaces, unites this nation right across the pond from Japan, and the Japanese are worried.”

“That he’ll invade Japan? Greater Manchuria’s a land power, not a sea power. Len doesn’t even own a canoe, that I know about. And he has his hands full with East and West China and Russia. What would he care about Japan?”

“The question is, what does Tokyo think of his intentions toward Japan? And it’s more concrete than that. Did you know about the possibility of Len having nuclear weapons?”

“I read some of the speculation in the papers, but nukes have been illegal for years in Asia. I don’t believe in ghosts or nuclear weapons in Asia.”

“Leach of CIA thinks there are. Not ghosts, missiles. In Greater Manchuria. Leach was certain that the only way Len in Greater Manchuria was able to break off from the Russians and the East Chinese was by discovering a cache of nuclear-tipped SS-34 missiles. We were ordered by the president to find out. We found nothing. I concluded that Len had no nukes, but Len did manage to keep the wolves at bay with not much of an army. How?”

“I hope you have an answer to that question, Dick.”

“Mikey, I think I made a mistake. I think Len does have nukes. And I think Japan, already threatened by the very idea of Greater Manchuria, knows about it. That’s the match that’s going to set Asia on fire. And it could involve us. Scenario Orange.”

“Back up, Dick. Why do you think Len has nukes?”

“Yesterday, just as I was telling Warner’s cabinet that Len didn’t have nukes, we picked up a flurry of transmissions. We broke them all.”

The screen moved closer to Greater Manchuria, descending toward the terrain like a spacecraft returning to earth, the view closing in on Lake Ozero Chanka, a sixty-mile-wide lake set inland by a hundred miles.

“This is the railhead town of Tamga. This place has mostly been abandoned. Or so it would seem. This looks like a perimeter fence and it surrounds some kind of armed camp, one we previously cataloged as closed, so we didn’t pay any attention to it until all the transmissions came in.”

Satellite photos flashed by as Donchez spoke, one of them an overhead view of a compound with a perimeter fence and a large mound of earth, a sort of humped plateau.

“The interception was lengthy. It boiled down to the Greater Manchurians going berserk that this place, this compound, was broken into. There were two repeated messages from the capital in Changashan asking if the ‘stored units’ were tampered with, and two replies that the units were fine. As to who broke in, the messages said it was a human agent who committed suicide.”

“Possibly one of Leach’s people?”

“No. I would have been in on a HUMINT penetration inside Greater Manchuria, especially a suicide mission, which we’re not exactly big on commissioning.”

“So who?”

“One of Kurita’s men. The suicide at the end puts his marker on it. I’m old enough to remember when the Japanese invented the suicide assault.”

“Did you check this place? Tamga?”

“Nothing we have can tell if there are nukes stored there. Short’ of going in like Kurita did, we won’t be able to tell. And Kurita won’t say.”

“So what now?”

“First we make sure we’re right. You ever watch Conspiracy: Exposed on UPX?”

“Sure. That nutcase Zap Zaprinski. I’ve never seen a journalist quite like him, if journalist is the word. What’s that got to do with nuclear weapons in Greater Manchuria?”

“We’re getting Conspiracy: Exposed to go into Changashan and try to get Len Pei Poom to admit to having nukes.”

“How the hell are you going to do that? I mean, you are the director of the god damned NSA but Hollywood doesn’t care that you need intelligence. What’s going on here. Uncle Dick?”

“Len will see Zaprinski.”

“But Zap Zaprinski is a clown. He’s shock journalism.”

“Exactly. But Len doesn’t spend much time watching American TV. Chances are neither do his advisors. And he’s got bigger problems than who interviews him. Another thing — we don’t want to send a serious journalist in, some Mike Wallace go-for-the-jugular reporter who’ll antagonize Len and miss getting the scoop on the missiles.”

“So you send in Zap. Will the UPX network let him go?”

“It’s arranged. So, now, will Len talk?”

“The way I see it, the reason to reveal nuclear weapons would be to deter Russia and East China from attacking Greater Manchuria. But the reason to keep it quiet is more compelling,” Pacino said. “If Len reveals nukes, Russia or East China might try to take them out. My guess is Len mugs in front of the camera to get sympathy from the West and holds his cards close to his chest on the alleged nukes. And at the end of the day we’ll know nothing.”

“But he may suspect that someone hostile to him knows already, based on the breakin. If so, we think he’ll talk.”

“So he talks. What does that do for us?”

“It should keep Japan from attacking the missiles, from attacking Greater Manchuria. If Len opens up to the world that he has nukes, the Japanese may pull back and we prevent a war.”

“What if Len keeps his mouth shut? Or if we’re too late?”

Donchez nodded. “Worst-case scenario, Mikey. Japan attacks Greater Manchuria. The world is sympathetic to Greater Manchuria and afraid of Japan. The West is called on to stop Japan. And next thing we know, we’re up against a shooting war.”

“Wait a minute,” Pacino said. “Let’s look at this another way. Nuclear missiles in Asia are bad news. Why would Japan attacking them be such a bad idea? Maybe we should just let them do that.”

“Mikey… a little history. If Japan attacks Greater Manchuria, and they succeed, what next? Remember the 1930s? Japan needed resources and oil, so they took over almost all of Asia. If the world sits by and watches them attack Len, who’s next? Korea? East China? They have the best military in Asia. Once they have momentum… the dumbest, most suicidal thing in the world would be to let them get away with this.”

Donchez stood. “Mikey, you’d better stand by. Get your submarine force ready. You may be in a fight with the Destiny subs sometime in the next year, or sooner. There’s no telling.”

Pacino stood and Donchez started to walk with him to the door. “Where are you going? Back to Norfolk?”

“First I’m going to Groton. I’ve got something going on with the new Piranha, the Seawolf-class boat coming out of new construction.”

Pacino knew Donchez would be interested, since he had commanded the first Piranha, hull number SSN-637, back in the late sixties.

“Piranha. I guess it’s okay they reuse the good names. Still, it isn’t the same. What’s going on with her, anyway?”.

“I’m outfitting her with Vortex missiles.”

The Vortex had been Donchez’s brainchild when he had been Chief of Naval Operations. The program had been cancelled after billions had been spent, the missile considered too lethal to its own firing platform. The test sub that had fired the missile had been Donchez’s old decommissioned Piranha, now in pieces at the bottom of the Bahamas test range, the Vortex test-launch having blown the old sub apart. The missile worked, but a way to launch it from a submarine had never been found.

“Dumb move,” Donchez said, shaking his head. “The firing ship always blows up. You should know that—”

“I do. But there’s nothing wrong with the Vortex missile. It needs an outside launcher tube. I’m going to mount ten of them on the outside of Piranha’s hull.”

“It may still blow a hole in the ship’s hull.”

“We’ll test it when her new skipper shows up. I’ve scouted out a terrific captain to run the Piranha. You’d love this guy. Blood and guts. Smokes Havanas. Drinks Jack Daniel’s. And he can drive a submarine like no one since” — Pacino paused, realizing he was about to say! “my father.”

“Since you, Mikey, is what you’re saying.”

“Dick, this guy could kick my rear end.”

“No way. What’s his name?”

“Phillips, Bruce Phillips.”

“I know him. Or at least his family. He could buy and sell us. Guy’s got tons of money, old family money. And he gives it up to drive a sewer pipe.”

“I’m about to put him under a couple tons per square inch in my attack trainer. And I’m going to simulate that he’s up against a Japanese Destiny II class sub. I’m taking wagers that he’ll come out on top.”

“Well, I hope he’s as good as you say he is. I wouldn’t want my sub’s namesake going to a paper-pushing type. So many of Wells’s skippers couldn’t shoot the broadside of a barn. You’d better clean up that force.”

They were at the ornate entrance to the building. The black Lincoln waited, tailpipe vapors wafting over the car in the light winter wind.

The two men began the checkout process at the security desk. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Michael.” Pacino stared. Donchez had never called him that. “That Vortex missile’s bad news.”

“You know, Uncle Dick, I really miss going to sea,” Pacino said, changing the subject.

“Fleet command is nothing compared to conning a sub in combat.”

“With all the tension in Japan, Scenario Orange may not be so far off.”

“I have to doubt it, sir. But if the balloon went up and we got into a hot war at sea, I’d still be cooling my heels at USUBCOM headquarters.”

“Not necessarily. Get your deputy to run the show landside and then go to sea with one of the boats. If you’re going to command in a war, Mikey, you can’t do it from the rear.”

“I’m tempted to do as you say, but it wouldn’t work, not with Wadsworth in charge.”

“Watch out for Tony Wadsworth. He doesn’t like you. Just another reason to take your show to sea. Sometimes submarines don’t have time to come to periscope depth to communicate. It could give you the independence you’d need.”

“I’ll consider it, sir.”

“Admiral Donchez, sir,” one of the security guards called. “Urgent call coming in from the White House switchboard.”

“Looks like you’ll have to find your own way out, Mikey. Good luck.”

Pacino shook the admiral’s hand and forced a smile, ducking quickly into the staff car. The older Donchez got the harder it became to say goodbye to him, Pacino thought. He never knew if it was to be the last time he’d see the old man.

The new headquarters building faded behind in darkness and the trees. Pacino was so lost in thought about commanding a fleet from a submarine that he barely noticed when the helicopter took off and Fort Meade shrank below him.

CHAPTER 2

Adm. Michael Pacino looked up from the briefing table, the chart computer display on it showing Tokyo Bay.

Comdr. Bruce Phillips, the commanding officer of the 688-class submarine Greeneville walked in, looking tense.

“Commander Phillips,” Pacino said, rising to his feet and shaking the younger man’s hand. “Good to meet you. I know you’re anxious to get on with it. I just want to let you know I want to see you succeed here. This isn’t a test to remove you from command, as the rumors have it. I just want to see how you fight your ship. Are you ready?”

“Yes sir.”

“The scenario we’ll be running is you against a Destiny II-class Japanese attack submarine outbound from Tokyo Bay. The Destiny is on the way to the deep Pacific to try and sink a US surface-action group. Your mission is to sink him before he can get by you and, obviously, to survive. Which won’t be easy, because the Destiny II is one of the best there is. Your USS Greeneville is an older 688-class ship, but I’m convinced you can beat this guy.”

“I’ll try, sir.”

“I’ll be there only to observe. It’s your deal. Good luck.”

The announcement came over the loudspeaker.

“OWN SHIP IS USS GREENVILLE, SUBMERGED OPERATIONS, EIGHTY NAUTICAL MILES SOUTHWEST OF TOKYO BAY. IN THIS SCENARIO, HOSTILITIES HAVE BROKEN OUT BETWEEN THE U.S. AND JAPAN. OWN SHIP’S MISSION IS TO SINK OUTBOUND DESTINY NUCLEAR ATTACK SUBMARINE COMING OUT OF TOKYO BAY ENROUTE TO THE PACIFIC. BEGIN SIMULATION.”

Admiral Pacino looked around. Something seemed wrong.

He sensed it the moment he walked into the darkened control room. He tried to identify the source of his uneasiness but his thoughts were interrupted by the voice of the officer of the deck announcing, “The admiral is in the control room.”

“Carry on,” Pacino said, looking up to the periscope stand where Comdr. Bruce Phillips presided over his battlestations crew. “Captain Phillips, please go ahead.”

“Aye, Admiral,” Phillips said, turning away from Pacino to look at the control-room displays below him.

The room was completely dark, rigged for black, lit only by the backwash of light from the firecontrol console screens and the instrument faces mounted on the ship-control console, the periscope stand and at various points in the overhead. As Pacino’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could make out the watchstanders crammed into a room the size of a small den. Three were in the ship-control station up forward, the seats and console arrangement looking like it had been transplanted from a 747 cockpit, except that instead of windows there were rows of instruments monitoring the nuclear submarine’s course, speed, depth, angle, engine speed and control surface positions. Two men sat in leather seats on either side of a central console crammed with rows of switches and knobs, each man holding a control yoke exactly like that of an airplane. Behind the console an older heavier man leaned forward, supervising the first two. To the left was a large wraparound panel where another crewman sat facing rows of dials and switches, two large monitor screens set in the panel dimly flashing system-status displays with diagrams of pipes and tanks.

Behind the cockpit setup was the elevated periscope stand, the platform rising eighteen inches off the surrounding deck with polished stainless-steel railing enclosing it. The stand was called “the conn,” since the officer of the deck controlled the ship from the platform.

The two stainless steel poles penetrating the stand were the periscopes, both useless since the sub was too deep to see anything but darkness. On the conn Captain Phillips and his officer of the deck, a young lieutenant, stood side by side, the lieutenant unconsciously mimicking the older captain’s stance and square-jawed squint at the room below.

On the starboard side of the conn was a long row of consoles, each with a television monitor screen. The row was the attack center, where the machines figured out where the enemy submarine was and programmed weapons to take him out. When Pacino had commanded a submarine the consoles were called the firecontrol system, before the separate ship’s computers were linked and integrated, the row now part of a combat-control suite.

Pacino looked at the displays on the console screens, surprisingly empty.

Aft of the periscope pedestal were two plotting tables, one used for navigation, the chart showing Tokyo Roads, the small islands and the main traffic approach channel into Tokyo Bay. The ship’s position was marked with a glowing dot off the island of Inamba-Jima, barely over the hundred-fathom curve, very shallow water for a deepdraft submarine. The second table was crowded with two officers and an enlisted plotter, staring at a blank white sheet of tracing paper since there was no enemy to track.

On the port side of the periscope stand were rows of navigation equipment. Set into the overhead were radio control panels, television screens, chronometer indicators, cables and valves. One of the television monitors between the ship control area and the attack center was dark, since it played the view out of the periscope. The second was above the middle firecontrol console display and was lit in red and lined with what looked like vertical scratches — the sonar display repeater. Pacino looked at the screen, which showed that the sea around them was empty.

The crew seemed aware of him, yet was ignoring him, which gave him an odd feeling of being almost invisible.

Pacino glanced around the room again, beginning to feel plugged into the tactical situation, at one with the sea and the ship, the warm feeling he had once felt in his own control room on the Seawolf, but the warmth stopped as he realized that never again would he command a nuclear submarine, a job now reserved for the young. He looked at the captain, Comdr. Bruce Phillips, and envied him.

In stark contrast to Pacino, Phillips was short, with crewcut blond hair and a muscular build. The crewcut Pacino understood, since it was plain even in the dim light of the room that Phillips’ hair had been receding.

Phillips had shaved it all off close to the scalp some weeks before, but it seemed to look more natural now that it had grown a sixteenth of an inch. Phillips was in his late thirties and single, the latter unheard of for a submarine captain with all the social obligations of the job.

But then Phillips had never fit the type, Pacino thought. He wasn’t the conventional older, spare-tirecarrying family-man commanding officer. Phillips was independently wealthy, from an old Philadelphia Main Line family. The money, Pacino thought, might have been in part responsible for what made him different.

He had a reputation for lack of caution, not so much uncaring as dismissive of safety regulations, impatient with bureaucracy, inattentive to fleet politics. The previous force commander, Adm. Dick Wells, had put it negatively to Pacino: “Phillips might at first seem like a good commander but he’s unreliable, inconsistent and has an attitude. He’ll screw something up and sink someday. He ran aground two months ago and the investigation is still ongoing. So far it looks like it was just bad luck, a double equipment malfunction, but bad luck follows sloppy sailors. I was going to recommend to the board of inquiry that we can him. There are too many good submarine officers out there to waste time on a marginal performer. Well, he’s your problem now.”

“How did he get command in the first place if he’s so sloppy?” Pacino had asked.

“Usual story. Inflated fitness reports, he knew somebody on the selection board for commander, kissed up to his squadron commander. He’ll snow you under until you look at the repair reports. His equipment is always breaking. His ship is dirty. When you ask him why, he just chomps on a cigar and squints at you.”

Pacino wasn’t sure whether to buy Wells’s opinion, discard it, or see the same facts in a different light. Ten years before, someone on fleet staff might well have described Pacino himself that way. Except Pacino had never been sloppy; his equipment had been functional if not perfect, his decks tidy if not spotless, the Navy paperwork completed if not enjoyed. There was a distinction between bold and reckless. The question was, which was Phillips?

As if hearing his thoughts, Phillips squinted over at Pacino as he dug out a fat cigar from his khaki shirt pocket and put it in his mouth. He looked away to the sonar display, then reached for a phone. His voice was quiet, but Pacino picked up his conversation.

“Sonar, Captain, I’m about to brief the battlestations crew. Interrupt me if you get a detect.” He put the phone back in its cradle and scanned the room, clearing his throat.

“Attention in the firecontrol team,” he announced, his voice not deep but rock steady, grabbing the ears of every man in the room without having to shout. “Since the declaration of war with Japan on Friday the approach to Tokyo Bay has been clean. However, satellite photographic intelligence from an hour ago showed a Japanese Destiny Type-Two attack submarine getting underway from the Yokosuka piers. We suspect that his mission is to attack the USS Ronald Reagan carrier battle group outbound from Pearl Harbor. Our Op Order came in with the intelligence brief. Our mission is to sink the Destiny II immediately upon detection.”

Phillips looked around the room, put the cigar in his teeth and gave the rest of his speech talking around the cigar.

“Let me remind you all of the Destiny II’s armament. He is probably carrying the new model of Nagasaki torpedo. It’s a dozen tons of weapon, goes seventy-five knots compared to our forty, has an endurance of an hour and can sink us if it detonates within a hundred yards of our hull. There will be no outrunning that son of a bitch. So let’s stay alert and put this guy on the bottom before he hears us. Officer of the deck, rig ship for ultraquiet. That’s all, folks. Carry on.”

Pacino put on a spare headset to listen in on the control-room conversation. He couldn’t have said it better, he thought, looking up at the sonar repeater set high in the overhead of the conn above the middle firecontrol console. The trace coming down the screen was new.

“Conn, Sonar,” crackled in Pacino’s ear from the sonar supervisor, who manned the watch in the closetsized sonar room forward of control. “New sonar contact on broadband sonar bearing zero one five, designate Sierra One.”

“Sonar, Captain, aye,” Phillips snapped, squinting.

Pacino looked at the navigation display, realizing that bearing 015 pointed to the outbound traffic separation scheme from Yokosuka. Phillips met his eyes for a moment, nodded.

“Conn, Sonar, new contact Sierra One is operating on the surface, loud wake noises, no turn-count from his screw.”

“Captain, aye,” Phillips said, looking at the bearing line of the contact on the sonar screen set into the overhead above the conn. “Why no turn-count?”

“Sir, the screw appears to be a turbine-type screw, ducted propulsor. Contact is tentatively classified as a warship, submarine type. Destiny class, running on the surface. Conn, Sonar, we now have an increase in signal.

Contact is putting out transients.”

“Is it possible he’s submerging?”

“Captain, Sonar, yes.”

“Let’s designate contact Sierra One as Target One, Destiny Il-class attack submarine.”

Phillips barked orders to the firecontrol team— weapon presets for the torpedoes in tubes one and two, speed changes, depth changes, calling for the bearing rate to the target. The ship settled down to a momentary quiet as the sonar and computer gathered data on the outbound Japanese submarine.

Pacino glanced quickly at the chronometer display above the firecontrol consoles, his experience telling him to turn now to get the second leg on the target, to zig zag the opposite direction and see how the direction to the contact, his bearing, changed. Pacino ached to give the order himself, when finally Phillips called out! “Helm, right fifteen degrees rudder, steady course east.

Sonar, turning to the north.”

“Helm, aye, my rudder’s right fifteen, passing two eight zero.”

“Conn, Sonar, aye,” the sonar supervisor’s anxious voice crackled in Pacino’s headphones. “Captain, you’re pointing the target, sir.”

“I know fix that, god damnit,” Phillips said.

Pacino made a mental note to talk to Phillips about two things — that pointing the ship toward the contact when the range was unknown could cause a collision, and was a violation of fleet regulations, and second, that he’d better get his crew used to violating fleet regs, because in wartime the only rules were the ones the captain made up along the way. Obviously the sonar chief hadn’t figured that out, but it was Phillips’s job to prepare him. But then, how would he himself as a submarine skipper, the way he was six years ago, perform under the harsh light of an admiral’s eye? Perhaps the same as Phillips, perhaps worse.

“Conn, Sonar, loss of contact! Target One has shut down, last bearing zero one eight.”

“Dammit,” Phillips mumbled. “What the hell happened?”

Phillips’s executive officer hurried into the room. Lt. Comdr. Roger Whatney, Royal Navy, was on exchange while an American was second-in-command of a Trafalgarclass sub, all part of a pilot program to bring the two English-speaking nuclear submarine navies into a closer cultural alignment, one of Pacino’s innovations since taking over the reorganized fleet. Whatney was short and slight enough to make Phillips look a giant. He was quick to smile, easy going, his enthusiasm a trademark.

Today, however, he looked deflated, haggard. He stood next to Phillips.

“Where the hell did he go. Coordinator?”

During battlestations Whatney would become the firecontrol coordinator, responsible to Phillips for the target’s firecontrol solution. For the duration of the battle Whatney would cease to be called “XO”—shorthand for executive officer and would be simply “Coordinator.”

“We lost the target, sir? Looks like he pulled the plug and went silent.”

“Here’s your headset. You look like crap.”

“Thanks, Captain. A close encounter with pneumonia.”

Phillips bent over the officer at the firecontrol console and spun the knobs set into the horizontal skirt of the panel. The lines on the display rotated and wiggled. “Coordinator, I’m thinking of putting a torpedo down the bearing line to his old position.”

“Sir, loss of contact was two minutes ago. At his range, he could drive off-track before the torpedo got there even if he didn’t hear it. And if he did, we’re done for.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Sonar, any detect?”

“Captain, Sonar, no.”

The room waited for the outbound Japanese sub to come closer, for him to get louder. Pacino watched the chronometer, thinking that he was probably going thirty-five knots at a range of sixty miles, with a detection range to the Destiny pessimistically at five miles, meaning it could be well over an hour before he got this far out. What would he do if he were in command. Drive in closer, he thought.

“Helm, left ten degrees rudder, steady course zero one eight, all ahead standard. Attention in the firecontrol team. We’ve lost Target One when he submerged. Present intentions are to get closer to him, get a quick detect, then drive off the bearing line to get a one-minute range, then fire a Mark 50 selected to immediate enable. After weapon launch we will clear datum to the south at flank and monitor the situation on the caboose array and the towed array endbeam. Carry on.”

Gutsy, Pacino thought. This would be interesting. The time on the chronometer unwound for ten minutes until sonar called on the headsets.

“Conn, Sonar, reacquisition Target One, bearing zero one one.”

“Helm, left three degrees rudder, steady course three zero zero. Commencing leg one when steady. Coordinator. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Sir, steady course three zero zero,” the helmsman called from the ship-control panel.

“Mark leg one, Coordinator.” Phillips tapped the soggy-ended cigar against his leg. Thirty seconds later the bearings were coming into the firecontrol screen and forming a rough line down the display.

“Got a curve, sir, recommend maneuver,” Whatney said.

“Helm, right ten degrees rudder, steady course east.”

Pacino waited, wondering how long it would be before the outbound Destiny heard them, wondering how long it would take a Japanese commander to put a torpedo in the water.

“Come on. Coordinator, you’ve got thirty seconds when steady.”

“Steady course east, sir.”

“Very well. Helm.” Phillips’s face seemed to be relaxing, lost in the situation, now seemingly unaware of Pacino’s observation.

“Weps, confirm torpedo settings tube one.” The weapons officer sat at the far right console, the panel replete with function keys and a large silver lever.

“Tube one, outer door open, weapon warm, immediate enable set, medium speed active snake—”

Whatney interrupted. “Gotta curve, Captain, and a firing solution, range seven thousand yards, target speed thirty knots, target course one nine zero. Recommend immediate launch.”

“Firing point procedures, tube one,” Phillips called.

“Ship ready,” the lieutenant next to Phillips reported.

“Weapon ready,” the weapons officer said.

“Solution ready,” from Whatney.

“Shoot on generated bearing,” Phillips commanded, shoving the cigar into his mouth.

“Set,” the officer at the middle firecontrol panel called, sending the target solution to the torpedo.

“Standby,” the weapons officer said from the weapons console, taking the large silver trigger all the way to the left.

“Shoot,” Phillips ordered.

“Fire!” the weapons officer said, his voice excited as he pulled the trigger to the far right.

Nothing happened. Pacino now realized what had been wrong when he had first walked into the room.

The crew around him seemed not to notice.

“Tube one fired electrically. Captain,” the weapons officer said.

“Unit one, normal launch,” sonar reported. “Unit is active.”

“Let’s get out of here, Coordinator. Sonar, prepare to monitor the caboose array, we’re putting the target in the baffles. Helm, all ahead flank, right ten degrees rudder, steady course south.”

Pacino waited for the deck to tremble from the power of the main engines running at flank speed, but the deck was whisper-quiet.

“Sonar, Captain, what have you got on the caboose array?”

“Captain, own ship’s unit is still in search mode. We no longer hold Target One on the caboose array. He’s also dipping below threshold on the towed array endbeam. Loss of contact. Target One.”

Phillips and Whatney shared a dour look. There was nothing now for them to do but get away from the Destiny and hope the torpedo hit him before he realized what had happened.

“Conn, Sonar, torpedo in the water! Rough bearing one two zero.”

Pacino felt the acid hit his stomach. The Destiny had just fired a torpedo, a large-bore Nagasaki Mod Alpha.

They had almost no chance of evading the torpedo. It would be easier to outrun a bullet aimed at your head from a foot away. Pacino concentrated on Phillips to see if he would continue to function.

Phillips reached up to the sonar-repeater monitor and repeatedly stabbed a fixed function key, the monitor view changing with each button press until the caboose-array display flashed up. The caboose array was a recent innovation designed to allow the sub to hear contacts directly behind, since the machinery and screw made too much noise for the spherical sonar array in the nose cone to listen astern. The towed array, a long cable towing a rope-like set of sonar sensors designed to pick up narrow-frequency sound energy, was some help but was not intended to hear broadband irregular noises such as the screw vortex from a torpedo running due astern. The caboose array was installed to fill the gap. The teardrop-shaped sonar hydrophone assembly was about a half-meter across, big enough to detect some noises but not accurate in bearing because of the wiggling it did at the end of the towed array cable. And pulling the caboose caused drag on the ship, slowing her down.

Phillips would now need to make a decision — to continue to “drag the onion,” as pulling the caboose array during a flank run was called, or get rid of the unit and go deaf, unable to know if the torpedo was still on his tail but at least speeding up the ship.

“Sonar, Captain, jettison the caboose and retract the towed array. Maneuvering, all ahead emergency flank at one four zero percent reactor power. Weapons officer, shut the outer doors to tubes one and two.”

“We’ll have to cut the wire. Captain. We won’t know if the torpedo detonated on Target One.”

Phillips made a sour face. “Cut the god damned wire.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Conn, Maneuvering,” a new voice said on the headphones! “making emergency flank turns now and one three seven percent reactor power, limited by overheating port and starboard main engine forward bearing temperatures.”

“Cut in more aux seawater to the lube oil cooler,” Phillips ordered.

“Sir, the valves are wide open, we’re at max cooling.”

“You got electrical loads running on the battery?”

“Motor generators are at max. Captain, we can’t pick up any more kilowatts.”

“Attention in the firecontrol team,” Phillips said, his forehead beading up with sweat. His armpits were stained now, the cigar gone, a rivulet of sweat gathering liquid as it ran down his brow to his nose. “The Destiny has counterfired a torpedo. We’ve done everything we can to run from it at max speed. There is nothing more we can do except hope the Japanese torpedo runs out of fuel. Meanwhile, at least we have the pleasure of knowing our own Mark 50 is chasing the Destiny just as his weapon is chasing us. Even if he gets us, he’s going down.” Phillips stared at the room, the watchstanders staring at him, waiting for him to say the words that there was some way out of this.

“That is all. Carry on.”

Pacino looked down. The ride was still whisper quiet.

Quiet until the sound of the incoming torpedo sonar beeped into the room. The enemy torpedo sonar was a high-frequency screamer, the pulses pounding into the skull of every crew member, the sound a terrifying screech. Suddenly the pulses changed to a siren tone, wailing upland down in frequency, getting louder.

Soon there was another sound — of the torpedo’s screw whooshing through the water, the torpedo incredibly close to be able to hear that. There were perhaps only ten seconds to detonation.

“Conn, Sonar, torpedo is close, detonation any minute.”

A loud, resounding boom roared through the room.

Bright fluorescent lights flashed, clicked and held, the light flooding into the control room. The firecontrol consoles, sonar repeater, chronometer and ship control instruments all went out. A huge voice spoke from the overhead.

“TORPEDO IMPACT. OWN SHIP DESTROYED. END SIMULATION. COMMANDER, WE’RE READY FOR YOU IN THE DEBRIEF THEATER.”

CHAPTER 3

Phillips was soaked in sweat, blinking in the light, the sudden fracturing of his reality confusing even though he knew it had been an exercise. Slowly, as if emerging from a darkened movie theater to bright daylight, the watchstanders left the room through the aft door, down a cinder block corridor to a small projection room. As they left it finally came to Pacino what had been wrong with the control room during the exercise — the noise was wrong. It just hadn’t sounded like a real submarine. And the deck had never shaken during the high-speed maneuvers when it should have been trembling violently. He would have that changed later. The new attack simulator was another of his projects. Before, there had been attack trainers but they were just firecontrol consoles in a dark room. This simulator had the cramped arrangements of all the panels, the pipes and valves and feel of the real thing, but until he could pipe in the sound of a real control room and install vibration cells under the deck it would still just be another attack trainer.

When the men were seated, Pacino standing in front of the screen, the lights went out and the screen flashed up the view of Tokyo Bay. A blue dot appeared at the bottom southwest of the traffic entrance, a blue line trailing behind it showing where it had been. “The blue dot is own ship,” Pacino said, standing at the screen with an electronic pointer arrow indicating the dot. “While you were waiting here the orange dot makes its way southwest out of the bay. As you suspected, it was a Destiny II class. Nice work in sonar, by the way. Commander Phillips was correct to attempt to get a shot out at the outbound unit when it was on the surface, since Destiny would have been deaf to an incoming torpedo, but I had her pull the plug early. As you can see, once Destiny is at sea submerged she is very quiet.”

“I should have gotten the shot off earlier,” Phillips said.

“Maybe,” Pacino said, “but that wasn’t the purpose of the exercise. I wanted you to see what you’re up against when that unit goes under. It’s quiet as a ghost. Anyway, you reacquired the Destiny here. Freeze frame, Chief.” Pacino’s arrow pointed to the orange dot, much closer, its history track longer now. “Give me an elapsed time. Chief, and pipe in the control-room conversations.” The view froze and an elapsed time came up on the screen, showing 00:00:00. “Okay, let’s watch and then analyze it when it’s over.” Pacino stepped back, watching the subs maneuver, the orange Japanese Destiny continuing southwest in a line, the blue US sub going west, Phillips’s voice commencing leg one when steady. Coordinator you’ve got thirty seconds.

The blue sub turned to the east, taking some time to come around, while the Japanese sub got closer and closer. Shoot on generated bearing… set… standby… shoot… fire! Tube one fired electrically. A new black track emerged from the blue dot, the fired torpedo, heading north to the Japanese orange dot. Almost immediately a red track came from the orange dot and pointed to the blue dot — the Nagasaki torpedo. The blue dot turned to run while the orange dot began to drive due east. Pacino watched, seeing that the red Japanese torpedo was dramatically faster than the black American one. The red track rapidly caught up with the blue dot until the blue dot flashed, pulsed and vanished. “Own ship sank at time 6:41,” Pacino deadpanned. The screen view continued as the orange sub kept going east, the black American Mark 50 torpedo going north to where the Japanese sub once had been. The two tracks made a cross as the black trace kept going north, the Japanese sub now miles to the east.

“The Destiny drove off the track of the Mark 50 and has lived to tell the tale,” Pacino commented.

“Dammit,” Phillips muttered, “we should have shot quicker.”

“Let’s spin it back to the initial detection. Chief. As you can see at the elapsed time of 00:50, the first leg is done and you’re steady on the second leg. Nobody in this trainer has ever done that in less than one minute thirty.” Pacino didn’t mention the previous record was his own.

“You did a great job on speed. Commander Phillips, going just fast enough to get the boat through a maneuver but not so fast that own ship noise would eliminate the signal from the target. Here at time 01:14 you’re ready to fire. Torpedo is fired at time 01:27. That’s thirteen seconds. Commander, if you had been in snapshot mode you could have launched in three seconds, which would have saved you ten seconds. Getting formal reports of ‘ship ready,’ ‘weapon ready’ eats time you don’t have. Just command ’snapshot tube one’ and the weapon’s away.”

“You’re right,” Phillips acknowledged.

“Chief, show us what happens if one ship fires ten seconds earlier,” Pacino called out. The image reversed to time 01:14, and the torpedo emerged at time 01:17. The men watched the scenario as the same thing happened. The Japanese sub escaped, the American sub sank.

Phillips sat up in his seat.

“You’d have died anyway,” Pacino said. “And those are my only comments. Well done, men.”

“Admiral? Sir?” Phillips had raised his hand like a schoolboy in class. “Are you saying that the only thing we did wrong was shooting the Mark 50 ten seconds late, and even if we had fired earlier we’d be gone?”

“Looks like it. Captain.”

“Then how the hell can we go to sea against the Destiny submarine and survive?”

Pacino paused. “This simulation assumes the Japanese crew to be nearly perfect, which, of course, they aren’t.”

“So in real life we might have won.”

“Maybe. Have you heard of the Destiny III class?” Phillips shook his head. “It’s completely computer controlled. A robot sub. There will be no inattention, no distracted captains. That’s what you might be up against. And by the way, that’s top secret, so you didn’t hear it from me.”

Phillips frowned and fished out a fresh cigar from his shirt pocket.

“Captain Phillips, I’d like to talk to you after you dismiss your crew.”

“Aye, Admiral. XO, dismiss the men.”

The watchstanders filed out until only Pacino and Phillips were left. Pacino’s face grew serious. “I didn’t want to tell you while your crew was here,” Pacino said, his voice a monotone. “How long have you been in command of the Greeneville?”

“Two years. Admiral.”

“Well, Phillips, you’re relieved of command of the Greeneville.”

When Philips had gone, Pacino had the chief turn out the lights and return the scenario to the time before the American sub heard the Destiny.

“Chief, can you reconfigure own ship to be a Seawolf class?”

“We think the program is almost right, sir, but I can’t guarantee the results yet until we field calibrate.”

“Can you reconfigure?”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Then do it.” Pacino waited as the chief changed the computer simulation to make the American ship a Seawolf class instead of the Improved Los Angeles class.

“Admiral, own ship is now the USS Barracuda, Seawolf class.”

“Begin simulation with the same signal-to-noise ratio.”

The scenario began to run, almost the same as before, except the Japanese sub was detected at a range of 14,000 yards instead of 7000 yards. Pacino maneuvered the ship, calling commands into the overhead to the chief at the computer-control console. He couldn’t help noticing that the fastest he could get a firing solution was two and a half minutes, sixty seconds longer than Phillips. He shot the torpedo, the Japanese sub moved off to the east and counterfired, and soon own ship sank and the Japanese Destiny emerged unscathed.

“Chief, rerun that simulation with Phillips’s maneuvers superimposed, with his one-point-five-minute time to solution.”

“Sir, should I take out Phillips’s ten-second firing delay?”

“Yes, shoot faster.” The scenario played out again. Again the US sub shot the black torpedo, the Japanese evaded and counterfired. The US sub sank. “This time increase the Mark 50 search speed to high,” Pacino ordered, thinking the torpedo was too slow. The simulation ended the same way. The American sub sank.

“Dammit. Chief, you got the ability to program in a Vortex missile as own ship’s unit?” The Vortex missile was an experimental hybrid combination of torpedo and missile, ran underwater on solid rocket fuel and traveled at 300 knots to the target. It was the fastest underwater device ever invented, guided by a blue laser and packing several tons of Plasticpac ultradense molecular explosive. It was accurate, fast and lethal. The weapon would have been used fleet-wide if not for two problems: one, the unit was huge and would not fit into an Improved 688-class submarine torpedo room; two, the missile had to be “hot launched” to be stable, meaning it ignited its solid rocket fuel inside the torpedo tube, and so far in every test it had blown up its own launching tube. In its last test in the Bahamas test range the unit had killed the target drone submarine and the launching drone submarine. The missile program, not surprisingly, had been abandoned.

“Admiral, we have an old program I wrote for the Vortex, but, sir, that thing’s a suicide weapon. It always blows up the tube.”

“I know, I know, but configure it and let me try it.”

“Aye, sir. It’ll take a few minutes.”

Pacino waited, thinking about Phillips and the expression on his face when Pacino had relieved him.

“I’m ready. Admiral.”

“This scenario assumes a Seawolf class firing when Phillips got the solution, this time using a Vortex missile.”

Pacino watched the screen, saw that the Destiny was detected at 14,000 yards, seven miles out, and that a minute and seventeen seconds later the Vortex missile was ejected from the tube. The result was dramatic.

The firing dot, the US submarine, vanished as soon as the missile was launched, the chiefs black humor sneaking into the simulation. The missile track covered the ground to the Destiny in mere seconds. The missile hit the orange dot before it had time to fire back. The orange dot, the Destiny II class Japanese attack submarine pulsed, flashed and vanished.

Pacino stared at the screen, wondering how he could get the Vortex to keep from blowing up the firing ship.

Bruce Phillips walked slowly in the rain to the old turn-of-the-century Corvette, the blue convertible clean but ready for the used-car lot. He climbed in, wiped the rain from his face, cranked the motor to get the heater going and reached for the phone to call Abby while still in the parking lot of the USUBCOM Training Center. He had known Abby O’Neal for almost two years, having met her at an international conference on maritime law he had been assigned to in a northern Virginia resort. Abby was a successful maritime law attorney. Phillips had approached her at a reception after her presentation. Her hair was long, sleek and midnight black with a sheen to it. Her looks were black Irish, her features soft, her eyes large and brown. But taking in his crewcut and rhino build, she obviously was thinking him a muscle head who knew nothing of the sea, his ill-fitting civilian suit giving away little about his career. The next day he had given his presentation on the effect of submarine warships on maritime law, and when he had finished she had come up to him and spent the next five minutes apologizing for the day before. Phillips had asked her out and they had been inseparable ever since.

Her secretary answered now.

“Braddock, Samuels & O’Neal, Ms. O’Neal’s office.”

“Hi, Sarah, is Abby in?”

“Hi, Skipper, she’s just coming out of a meeting— here she is.”

“Bruce, hi. How’d it go?”

“I lost my ship today.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, honey, but you said those simulators are hell.”

“No, I wasn’t talking about the simulation. I got sunk in that too, but the admiral—”

“That guy you were telling me about, the maniac?”

“That’s the one. He relieved me of command. I’m no longer in command of the Greeneville.” His voice was a monotone, as Pacino’s had been earlier.

“Bruce, I can’t believe it. What did you do that was so bad in a simulator? Or was this about the grounding? Was the simulator some kind of last chance?”

“Not quite, Ab. Get this.” And now his voice took on the excitement he felt. “Admiral Pacino took me off the Greeneville so he could assign me to the Piranha, that brand-new Seawolf-class boat coming out of construction in Connecticut, the one we saw in the Sunday paper. She’s mine now! Pacino said I was the one he wanted driving it. He’s taking me out to dinner tonight and flying me to Groton next week for the change of command.”

Phillips waited for her to react.

“My God. That guy Pacino must love you.”

“He just recognizes tactical brilliance when he sees it.”

“Right,” she said, laughing, “as long as there are no sandbars in sight.”

“Well, if Wells were still USUBCOM commander I’d be relieved of Greeneville and driving a desk at the office of base security and car stickers.”

“Congratulations, honey. Why don’t you ditch the admiral and we’ll celebrate tonight, just us?”

“You know I’d love that, but I better not. I’ll be home early.”

“I’ll be waiting, Captain.”

Phillips pressed the END button and dropped the phone in the console, stared at the rain washing the windshield and thought about how it would feel to command the newest submarine in the fleet. And suddenly it hit him that he’d be leaving his officers and crew behind, which dampened his mood. Well, perhaps he could convince Pacino to allow him to take Roger Whatney with him. Roger was now Phillips-trained. The two of them were a team, and Phillips didn’t look forward to breaking in a new XO.

He turned his mind to the things that needed to be done to turn his present ship over to her new skipper, put the car in gear and pulled out, heading for the O-club. It had turned out to be a good day, after all.

CHAPTER 4

Comdr. Toshumi Tanaka gripped the carved wooden handrails mounted on the edge of the clearing situated on the ridge overlooking the submarine piers of the Yokosuka Maritime Self Defense Force Base some 200 meters below the rocky ledge. The clearing at this spot had been groomed as a garden and meditation site. Below Tanaka’s feet rounded stones were placed to form a cobbled area up to the handrails looking down the ledge. The spot was beautiful in the spring and summer, but in the fall the gloomy aura of it made it unpopular, which fitted Tanaka’s mood. He glared out at the vista. Today he could only view the world through a haze of anger and frustration.

He thought of better times. When he was a small boy he had lived in a house by the sea, a house filled with laughter and love. His father had been a stern but caring naval officer, his mother happy to take care of him and his younger sister Onu. The elder Tanaka, then a junior officer, had been at sea much of the time, but when he was there the family was joyful. Toshumi and Onu spent happy hours playing and reading with their mother, waiting for the times when their father would return. All this until his eighth year when his father Akagi was asked to go on a foreign assignment in the United States and the Tanaka family had left Japan for America.

Akagi Tanaka, a commander then, was sent to a small seacoast town in Maryland to teach navigation to the students at the U.S. Naval Academy.

And from then on his son Toshumi learned firsthand what it was to feel like a stranger, to be made fun of and feel humiliation. It had been a relief when he returned to Tokyo and his old friends, but four years after the family’s return the Maritime Self Defense Force called on Akagi Tanaka again, this time to attend the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. By then Toshumi Tanaka was a young teenager, watching the beautiful, rich American girls stroll the beaches and streets of the town, and knowing only rejection. Finally he convinced his family to allow him to go back to Japan and his friends. It was a happy reunion — abruptly interrupted by the news that his mother Orou was dead from breast cancer. From then on Toshumi’s life was a charcoal sketch, done in shades of gray and black. The pain of losing his mother would always be with him and he felt his father responsible. If only his father hadn’t insisted on dragging the family to America, Toshumi reflected bitterly.

Two years later his father, now a captain with friends at the Maritime Self Defense Force Academy in Yokosuka, was able to secure an appointment for Toshumi, although Toshumi had begun to hate the navy, connecting it with his father, with the foreign assignments, with his mother’s death. But to say no to this opportunity was to be forever behind his peers, at the bottom of Japanese society.

When Toshumi Tanaka finished school he had chosen to go into submarines, finding the surface navy boring, and found a natural, unsuspected talent. Tactically he was far ahead of his contemporaries and drove a submarine like it was part of himself. For the first time in many years he felt happy doing something; when he was driving a sub he could almost forget his mother’s death, his anger at his father. He was promoted years ahead of his contemporaries from lieutenant to lieutenant commander. As one of the youngest lieutenant commanders in the force, he was made the first officer of the first Destiny-class submarine intended for Japanese use — until then they had been manufactured for export sale. This had been the Destiny II class, the first submarine in the class, named Eternal Spirit.

After two years in the building yards and three years at sea Toshumi was promoted to full commander and given command of his own new Destiny II ship, the Winged Serpent. That had been only a year ago, and now he was a senior officer and submarine commander at age thirty-five. His father, Akagi, was now an admiral, the chief of staff of the MSDF, and though some outsiders thought that Toshumi’s position was based on his father’s commanding the force, those who knew Toshumi Tanaka also knew of his extraordinary talents for commanding men and his ship.

Tanaka forced his thoughts back to the present, forced his eyes to see the naval base stretching out to the horizon on either side. Below the ridge, piers pointed out to the bay, fingers reaching seaward. There was a large gap between the closest piers, with a squat outbuilding located half on the concrete of the pier, half hanging out over the brackish water of the slip. Tied up to the bollards on the seawall was a submarine, one of the Destiny III-class ships, the computer-controlled unmanned vessels.

Abruptly he heard footsteps behind him, and a shadow of a man materialized beside him. Tanaka did not turn.

“I thought I might find you here. Captain,” a young voice said. Still Tanaka didn’t turn. His second-in-command, Lt. Comdr. Hiro Mazdai, was as different from himself as a first officer could be. Tanaka was the son of a navy officer, Mazdai was born to wealth, the son of a Panasonic chief financial officer and board member.

Tanaka was raised on military compounds, Mazdai had never left Tokyo until he went to sea. Tanaka had sweated through five grueling years at the Self Defense Force Maritime Academy, Mazdai had breezed through Tokyo University. Tanaka was a loner, Mazdai was married to a beautiful Tokyo girl eleven years his junior. Tanaka was just short of 170 centimeters tall, almost towering for a Japanese, but slight, almost frail. Mazdai was short, stretching to reach 155 centimeters, solid and wide.

“The crew is ready, sir,” Mazdai said. “We have completed the ready-for-sea checklist. All the weapons have passed their electronic checks.” Far out on the right, blue in the mist, their submarine, the Winged Serpent, lay tied up next to several other submarines of the Destiny II class. Down below, an odd-looking truck drove up. Several men in yellow suits jumped off the rear. All wore full helmets with clear faceplates and carried automatic rifles. A door in the pier building rose slowly, revealing bright interior lights shining down on the weapon-loading gear.

“We won’t be going to sea,” Tanaka said flatly to his second in command.

“Sir?”

Tanaka looked directly at Mazdai, disgust clear in his face. “That Three-class down there, that robot sub is doing our mission. Our weapons will be removed as soon as that… thing is done being loaded.”

“They took the mission away from us?”

The men in yellow suits surrounded the truck as it opened, splitting like a clamshell to reveal encased weapons painted yellow and magenta. Stencilled on the side of the capsules were large words, unreadable from that height, but Tanaka knew what they spelled: “DANGER — RADIATION HAZARD — PLUTONIUM.”

“Some wizard at fleet headquarters has decided that an unmanned submarine is more appropriate in the land-attack role than our Winged Serpent.”

Mazdai paused, weighing his words. “Sir, you are telling me that Winged Serpent has been taken off the strike mission. We have lost it to a damned robot? And someone at fleet HQ downloaded our mission to one of the Three class.”

“That, Mr. First, is correct.”

“Do you think your father had anything to do with this?”

“Whatever, I doubt our orders will change.”

“What are our orders now?”

“We pull into the loading bay and give back the Hiroshima missiles, then we go back to Pier 17.”

Two hydraulic cranes had pulled up to the open clamshell truck beds. The men in yellow suits fastened lifting slings to either end of the first weapon. Behind the truck a flatbed weapon transporter waited, ready to move into the weapon-loading building. Tanaka noticed that the yellow-suited men’s full-face helmets were connected to air bottles on their backs, precautions in case of a plutonium loss of containment.

“The Three class is flawed, sir. How can they trust it with a land strike?”

Tanaka shook his head. “I agree, but if the robot submarines prove themselves in a combat situation, the Two class will be phased out. They will claim manned submarines devote too much volume and weight to hotel accommodations. The computer-driven subs have no living quarters so they can carry more weapons. Command and control is supposedly more assured.”

“Until, sir, the computer has a malfunction. And a computer-driven ship can only fight the way it’s programmed. No midbattle learning, no human ingenuity, no intuition.”

“And no wives at home to worry about, no babies about to be born, no monthly bills distracting the crews’ minds. The computer never gets tired, it never longs for a woman, it never gets sick. It’s just always there, driving the submarine. So goes the opinion of fleet HQ.”

As they spoke, the cranes lifted out the first weapon canister and loaded it gingerly to the waiting transport bed, then turned their booms to pick up the second unit.

“You once mentioned inviting your father on the ship, sir, perhaps for dinner? Maybe together we could convince him.”

Tanaka controlled his face to hide thoughts about his father. “Perhaps we will do that soon, but there is no time now.”

The cranes lowered the second weapon to the transport bed. The clamshell truck closed and drove off, the cranes also departing. The men in yellow suits stayed behind, walking slowly behind the low transport, which rolled into the loading building and vanished into the portal. The rolling door came down, leaving the seawall area deserted except for two guards with their rifles at the ready.

“You’d better get back to the ship and inform the men about scrubbing the mission,” Tanaka told Mazdai, who was astute enough to know when to withdraw and leave Tanaka alone.

All was quiet now on the seawall. Tanaka could visualize the Three-class submarine being nose-loaded with weapons. The loading building functioned as a caisson, sealing around the bow of the sub and draining out the water to leave the entire nose-cone area accessible for bow-in torpedo loading. Except the weapons being loaded into the unmanned computer submarine were not torpedoes, but Hiroshima missiles. For the land-attack mission that his Winged Serpent should have had.

After a sleepless night, part of it spent in the rain at his mother’s memorial, he showered, dressed in a fresh uniform and called for his driver. Within hours he was back at the pier. Before he walked down its length, he stopped and stared at the scenario unfolding under the harsh lamps of the floodlights in the middle of the night.

Moored to the neighboring pier was the Three-class ship that had been loaded with the radioactive missiles the day before. The ship that was formerly called Divine Firmament had been renamed Curtain of Flames — presumably to inspire fear. In Tanaka it only inspired rage.

CHAPTER 5

The black Lexus limousine rolled to a halt before the headquarters building, its powerful engine purring quietly at idle. Immediately a uniformed guard in a shining helmet with white gloves opened the rear door and snapped to attention in a rigid salute. A dozen other military guards holding rifles stood lined up on either side of a heavy gate set into the stone wall surrounding the building. Prime Minister Hosaka Kurita stepped out of the large car, past the guards, and through the gate, never acknowledging their existence. A step behind him Asagumo MacHiie, the Minister of Information, walked and tried to keep up with Kurita. The prime minister was twenty years MacHiie’s senior, but seemed to have the physical strength of a man ten years younger than MacHiie. Both men were dressed in expensive and conservative dark charcoal gray suits, starched white handmade shirts, and crimson ties, each with a tiny intricately detailed Japanese flag set in the red field. Their leather shoes were Japanese made, each pair worth the equivalent of a month’s rent for a luxury Tokyo flat.

Prime Minister Hosaka Kurita was nearing sixty years old but had a tangible vitality to him. He could energize a room. His hair was mostly gray with only hints of its former black. Kurita was the grandson of the Imperial Japanese Army general who had commanded the invasion and occupation force in Indonesia. Kurita’s father, Noboru Kurita, had worked for MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, during the heady years of Japan’s rise from the ashes of World War II to world preeminence in manufacturing and trade. The elder Kurita had become a deputy minister for semiconductors and was responsible for the successful Japanese penetration of American electronics markets. He was the architect of the Japanese takeover attempt of AT&T, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and General Motors. Noboru had died of a stroke at his desk, laboring over the acquisition deal that should have made IBM a Japanese-owned company.

Hosaka Kurita had mourned Noboru’s passing, his bond with his father so strong that even now, nearly fifteen years later, he would occasionally mention to Asagumo MacHiie, his minister of information, that he could still feel the spirit of his father with him, struggling by his side, watching over him, demanding performance from him.

Fortunately for Noboru Kurita, he had not lived to see the trade war with the US and Europe, and the eventual closing of Western markets to Japan. Kurita would never forget the day the US president had signed the Fair Trade Bill into law that made anything with Japanese content over 10 percent illegal to be imported or sold in the US and made Japanese ownership of corporations illegal, even repatriating — or expropriating — all real estate sold to Japanese owners. The nations of the European Union passed similar laws, some even harsher than America’s. That month Japan turned into a poor nation, the cash river from the West drying up. That had all been four hard years ago, two years before Hosaka Kurita came to power.

Hosaka Kurita had followed his father’s footsteps at MITI and had eventually himself been elevated to Minister of International Trade and Industry, perhaps because of his father’s reputation there. But Hosaka Kurita proved able, becoming a member of the Diet’s House of Councillors at the age of forty-six. When he was fifty-five, he became prime minister. In Kurita’s mind his ascent to PM was not so much a result of his personal qualities as of his outspoken, passionate speeches against the West and the United States in particular. Even so, his character and leadership were already legendary at MITI, his eloquence able to move the entire Diet when he was a member of that legislative body. His platform, his mandate and, he believed, his destiny was to bring Japan back to world prominence, as his father had done in the 1950s. Except that now Japan’s kokutai, her national destiny, depended not on forsaking the sword for the factory but rather upon using the might of the factory to once more hoist the sword.

But as passionate and warlike as Kurita was, he was also conditioned in the ways of on, the special obligation of one holding power to those whom his power touches.

He had listened countless hours to his father’s words on giri, the network of obligational relationships, the endless mutual and reciprocal obligations borne by a leader. Kurita was at once assertive and certain yet humble and nonconfrontational. Kurita could give a speech urging confrontation with the West, and afterward seem to back down to the conflicting opinion of a colleague. Kurita was Japan. There was no Caesar in Japan, no pope, no king. Power was shared. Groups, not leaders, did the business of governing Japan. But ultimately those groups would listen to someone with the voice of destiny, and destiny seemed to sing through Kurita’s throat.

They were only a dozen steps into the building when it opened into a vast rotunda, the dome peak over seven stories overhead. There Koutarou Iizuka, the Director General of the Japanese Defense Agency, waited with his entourage and the other council members. Prime Minister Kurita first greeted Iizuka as a father greeted a son. He beamed up at the younger man, his bow deep. Iizuka turned to MacHiie, a warm bow of greeting passing between the men. Iizuka had also been to the university with MacHiie years before. In fact, so had every other member of Kurita’s Defense Security Council.

The DSC met at the headquarters of the Japanese Defense Agency at any point of crisis that could result in military action. Kurita had formed the DSC soon after being voted PM, and the council was made up of the five inner-circle cabinet ministers whom Kurita most trusted. The men were arranged by rank, determined by how close they were to Kurita. The PM and Iizuka greeted each of the other council members — Foreign Minister Yoshida, the stereotypical diplomat; MITI Minister Uchida, a hardheaded hawk; and Minister of Finance Sugimoto, the elderly, dispassionate financial wizard recently brought over from industry, from Sanyo.

At the end of the row, a newcomer waited, an elderly man with what looked like great physical strength, white hair, white mustache and a starched white high-collared tunic with gold-braided shoulder boards, ribbons on his breast, a gold rope slung over his shoulder. His pants were starched and white, his shoes white as well. At the man’s hip was a sword hanging off a gold hook that vanished into the tunic. The man’s face was creased with deep wrinkles, the tanned skin taut. Rather than the usual Japanese dark brown, this man’s eyes were light gray with flecks of green running radially from the irises. Some said he looked like a wolf.

“Admiral Tanaka,” Kurita intoned as the men bowed to each other, “I am so glad that you were able to attend. Gentlemen, Adm. Akagi Tanaka, Supreme Commander of the Maritime Self Defense Force, will attend this meeting in addition to General Gotoh.”

Standing a few meters from Tanaka was Gen. Masao Gotoh, the Chairman of the Self Defense Force Joint Staff Council, who functioned as the commander in chief of the entire military. Gotoh stood a distance from Admiral Tanaka, as if he wished to express a tacit disapproval of his own subordinate — remarkable within the tight framework of team cooperation inside the military.

The men walked into an ornate room with a huge rare tigerwood table taken from Indonesia in the last world war. On the wall were oil paintings of Japanese military conquests from the previous millennia all the way to the fighting for the empire in World War II. Shields and swords hung at the corners, while glass cases enclosed antique ship models, the battleship Yamato over four meters from bow to stern, its guns pointed at the conference table as if leveling fingers demanding action from the council. The room seemed to be designed for war plans.

The prime minister used notes, since in the ancient tradition of matomari, the honored vehicle of group decision-making, the leader was first obligated to summarize an issue, showing no opinion, so that the group could begin to discuss it. Since confrontation was unheard of, each man would reveal his opinion slowly, one thought at a time. The momentum of consensus would build slowly, the brakes of dissenting opinions applied gently. As the men began to see similar patterns of thought among their colleagues, their opinions would become more safe to expose, until finally consensus would be reached. Once the leader established agreement, action would be taken.

Kurita stood and cleared his throat, his hands at rest at his sides. The ministers and military officers sat straight in their chairs, all eyes on Kurita. The hum of the presentation screen coming down was barely perceptible, accentuating the pin-drop silence in the room.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Kurita began as a map of Japan flashed on the screen. The Homeland was colored white. To the northwest Greater Manchuria was displayed in gray. “I hardly need mention the gravity of the Greater Manchurian situation. In the last twelve hours we have determined that here in Tamga” — a small dot in a valley near Lake Ozero Chanka pulsed in red — “is a storage depot for SS-34 missiles. General Gotoh will run the disk of our confirming penetration mission.”

The disk played the scenes obtained from Major Namuru’s mission into Tamga, up to the point where he said, “To the victory of Japan,” when the picture was darkened. The soundtrack, however, continued, the dual explosions loud in the enhanced acoustics of the room.

The screen retracted into the ceiling. Kurita cleared his throat again. “It is clear that the SS-34 missiles are nuclear tipped. It is also clear that they are twenty-four minutes’ flight time away from us in Tokyo.”

Kurita looked around the room. “Minister Yoshida, do you have any thoughts?”

Yoshida, as foreign minister, was notorious for his relatively optimistic view of the world. “It is most regrettable that there appear to be offensive instruments of war in Greater Manchuria. However, it is our responsibility to the people of Japan to remember that these weapons may not be aimed at Japan at all. They may not even work. The Russians no doubt left them behind. They are not even loaded into those underground silos. It would be premature, I suggest, to assume the intention of aggression only on this.”

Kurita thanked him, turned to General Gotoh.

“Obviously, intent is difficult to confirm. But as for the functions of the missiles — are they operational, General?”

“Prime Minister, the missiles are in perfect working order. Once manufactured they do not, after all, break. The bunker was climate-controlled, leading us to the knowledge that the missile-computer systems were being attended to. Furthermore, these weapons are not launched from silos as Minister Yoshida mentioned but from trucks. The missiles were preloaded onto launcher subassemblies inside the bunker. We can go back and review the disk if there is any doubt of that. The subassemblies need only be lifted onto a launcher truck to be ready to fire. A simple flatbed truck will suffice.”

“So allow me to review. General. You are certain these missiles work?”

“I am, sir,”

“And they have launchers?”

“They do.”

“And the launchers will work?”

“We are certain of it.”

The meeting went on for another hour while the opinions of the men in the room moved closer to the idea of a military strike, in spite of Yoshida’s dissenting feelings. Finally General Gotoh made a move to review the arguments.

“So, gentlemen, if I might take this moment to summarize. I think we have reached agreement on several points. First, that there are offensive missiles in Greater Manchuria. Second, that these missiles are nuclear-tipped. Third, that the units are operational. Fourth, the missiles are twenty-four minutes’ flight time from Tokyo. And therefore, fifth, if President Len has an intention of launching an attack on Japan, he will be successful. Tokyo will look worse than 1945. Worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs were dropped. To put it in perspective, the Hiroshima bomb had the equivalent of twenty thousand tons of TNT explosive. An SS-34 has over two million tons. Twenty well-targeted SS-34s would take our nation back two thousand years. Our descendants would live off whatever little land is not contaminated by nuclear radiation. Our promises to the people that Japan would never again suffer this humiliation and death will be turned to ashes along with the world’s most advanced cities. On this, we are agreed, are we not?”

Kurita kept his face neutral. The men had agreed on the first four points. The fifth was Gotoh’s opinion based on the consequences of a nuclear attack. But what he had said would need to be covered at some point, and perhaps it would be best to signify agreement and get the discussion of the memories of being bombed with nuclear weapons behind them. Since Japan remained the only nation to have been targeted and attacked by nuclear bombs, the national consciousness had remained sensitive to the issue. The antinuclear protests in Asia during the past decades had been heavily funded by Japan, and had succeeded in spite of rumors in the Western press that Japan itself was working on a new type of nuclear weapon.

Kurita began working his way around the table, asking each man present for an opinion, bringing out each minister’s specialty. The minister of finance, Haruna Sugimoto, was asked what effect the weapon’s presence alone had on the economy of Japan, and then what would happen to the economy if the SS-34s ever landed on Japanese soil. The MITI minister was asked about the effects on industry and how long it would take to rebuild the nation should it come under attack. MacHiie was asked about the effects of an attack on the world’s information network, and he had replied in much the same voice as did the MITI and finance ministers.

When all had spoken except Adm. Akagi Tanaka, who was not involved in the actual decision-making process but was present to give the council the benefit of his naval knowledge, Kurita stood.

“We have taken many hours to understand and explore the data before us — the fact of the existence of the SS-34 missiles and exactly what that means to Japan and the world around us. We now know the consequences of the use of those weapons, and we realize that those consequences are indeed grave. So grave that we are moved to ask the next question — what action do we now take?”

“Mr. Prime Minister, aren’t we forgetting something?”

The room turned toward Foreign Minister Yoshida.

Kurita bit the inside of his lip, but turned toward Yoshida and allowed him to speak.

“We have spoken about the weapons. We have spoken of what they can do. But for many decades we have been surrounded by such weapons. Before the revolution China had many such instruments of war, some no doubt reserved for Tokyo. Who could doubt Soviet Russia had even more? And the ships of the United States fleet that docked here for so many decades until the trade war, how many of them had nuclear missiles in their holds and magazines?”

“But now, a small nation apparently has a cache of nuclear missiles, and the gods alone know how old they are. But I am willing to agree that they will work, so long as this body agrees that we know nothing of the intent of the owners of the missiles. China and Russia had no love for Japan, and we lived with the threat. The United States was supposedly an ally, and we lived with their weapons of destruction, even though they were the ones who murdered our children in the war.”

Kurita was surprised that Yoshida had righteous anger in his repertory, but then realized it was another diplomatic tool, just like a smile or handshake.

“Yet now a nation that has offered no proof of hostile intent, no desire to hurt us, just a desire to live, just as we desire to, has managed to come into the possession of weapons of nuclear war. And while I agree that they are dirty and cursed machines, they cannot harm us without a malevolent nation to use them. And no facts have crossed this table attesting to the intent of the Greater Manchurians. I propose we simply ask the Greater Manchurians to remove the weapons. If they do, we can sell them military hardware, helping our economy and keeping them secure so they won’t have to rely on the missiles. If they keep the weapons, we can expose them to the world and ask for UN help. Eventually the warheads would be turned over and destroyed in accordance with the Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. The crisis would be averted and we would lead our lives as before. Amend that — better than before, because by our actions we will show the world our moral character. And that may help to end this destructive trade embargo by the West.”

There was silence in the room for some minutes after Yoshida spoke.

“Mr. Prime Minister, I’d like to say a few words, if I may.”

“Please go ahead, General Gotoh.”

“Minister Yoshida is entirely correct in his concerns about the intentions of Greater Manchuria. His proposal to ask the Greater Manchurians to remove the weapons has merit.” Kurita did not expect an opening toward Yoshida from his opposite number in the council. “In fact, what we are proposing has elements of Minister Yoshida’s idea.”

Gotoh had the room’s members entirely focused, in spite of the fact that the meeting had gone into its third hour.

“There are several possible uses for these missiles. As we have discussed, one use is for a preemptive strike against Japan. But another purpose is deterrence. Holding back the aggressions of the Russians, the East Chinese and the West Chinese, and theoretically the aggressions of Japan. I am getting ahead of our meeting agenda, and for that I apologize. The next order of business was to be — what should Japan do about these missiles? I will introduce that question now, because it addresses Minister Yoshida’s concerns.”

“Let us assume for a moment that the missiles are present for the purposes of deterrence. I personally do not believe this, because a nuclear deterrent only works if the enemy knows the weapons are there and operational. These missiles are secret. But let us go beyond that and recognize that there is a way for us to neutralize these missiles without the world knowing about them. We can surgically knock out these missiles while still letting Greater Manchuria bluff her neighbors into thinking she has a nuclear strike force.”

“Again, I am arguing a point of logic I do not believe, because Greater Manchuria has kept these missiles a deep secret, but we can say for Minister Yoshida that there could always be plans to announce the presence of these missiles, turning them into a deterrent force. We have a way of striking these weapons so that they will be neutralized forever, in a way that there will be no telltale sign that the neutralization has come from us.”

The room was silent. Kurita addressed Gotoh. “General, you seem to be saying that we can blow up these missiles and destroy them, but in such a way that no one will link the raid to Japan, is that correct?”

“Very close, sir. We can strike the missiles and make them useless. There will be no explosions. The missiles will not be physically destroyed but they will no longer be offensive weapons.”

“You have a way to destroy these missiles without physical destruction? I think we are all confused, General.”

Gotoh lowered the projection screen and tapped into the disk player. “This disk doesn’t have a soundtrack, gentlemen,” Gotoh said, stepping up to the screen with a pointer. A computer image of a cruise missile materialized on the screen. The missile grew until its nose cone filled the image and the weapon became transparent, revealing numerous components inside.

“In the last four years we have perfected a new weapon that causes destruction without blowing anything up. We call this missile the Hiroshima. The warhead itself is called the Scorpion. The warhead components are separate chemicals and gases that are dispersed into a cloud and react in midair to form a polymer emulsion — a glue, if you will. This glue rains down on the land below and adheres to every surface. Mixed in with the glue is this substance shown in the blue container. These are fine filings of plutonium, one of the most poisonous substances on the planet. The glue liquid and plutonium form a matrix that contaminates the area below the activation of the warhead. The effective zone of contamination varies with glue load, plutonium weight and missile altitude. We can dial in the area of contamination. Once contaminated, the area below, while physically the same, must be abandoned. Any human life in the effective zone dies from radiation effects. Other personnel entering the scene will die. An on-scene commander would soon deduce the cause of deaths in the effective zone, and the area would be cordoned off. Decontamination is not possible. The glue is essentially permanent, it doesn’t wash off with water or chemicals. Nothing short of scraping every square millimeter with a chisel can clean up the area. If this weapon detonates over the Tamga bunker, the area will be condemned for many years and use of the weapons will be impossible.” The picture darkened and the screen retracted into the ceiling above. “We plan to deploy a Hiroshima missile with a Scorpion warhead such as this against the Tamga weapons depot.”

Foreign Minister Yoshida shook his head. “So you plan to deploy a nuclear weapon against the Greater Manchurians because they have nuclear weapons?”

“No, Minister Yoshida, that is not true. This warhead is not a nuclear weapon.”

“It causes widespread radioactive contamination, killing the targeted city with radiation poisoning. It is a nuclear weapon.”

“No. It is a plutonium poison weapon, and yes, it kills. But the target is not a city, it is a bunker. Anyone inside will be a professional soldier taking the risks that soldiers take. We estimate only two hundred casualties.”

“Our people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki from radiation. No Japanese weapon should exist that does this. General Gotoh.”

“Our people also died in the Pacific from bullets and bombs and fires, Minister Yoshida. That has not stopped us from using and making bullets and bombs and incendiary devices. All this talk about the nuclear destruction in 1945 has to stop. That was three generations ago. It was war. That is what happens in a war. This scenario is very different. We are surgically removing a threat. There will be deaths, but no spectacular flaming mushroom cloud, no babies dying in their mother’s arms, no shadows of pedestrians carved into the walls of buildings, no walls of flame for thirty miles from ground zero. It will not be a pretty scene inside the effective zone, but for this operation the effective zone will be a few hundred meters in diameter.”

“A practical question. General,” Kurita said. “The weapons are stored inside a bunker. How will this glue matrix contaminate them under the cover of the bunker roof?”

“First, the entire complex will be contaminated. No one will be able to get close, even if the weapons themselves are uncontaminated. But the ventilation systems will spread enough of the glue and plutonium to contaminate the surfaces of the interior. We have done tests. The missiles will be rendered useless.” Gotoh went on to explain technical details of the weapon, comfortable now that he was discussing machines instead of morality.

After he had spoken for another twenty minutes, uninterrupted by Yoshida, Kurita called for a break. The council members filed out to consider. When the members returned, the meeting began where it had left off.

“So you believe an attack with these weapons is truly justified?” Yoshida asked Kurita directly.

“It is not just I, Minister Yoshida,” Kurita replied to the foreign minister.

“The council members believe it to be justified. If I understand the thinking of the group, they feel that the Greater Manchurian weapons are sufficiently offensive that their mere existence in an operational status, and within the unstable rogue government of this state, merit the contemplation of a military strike to make the missiles ineffective. You have brought up doubt that the Greater Manchurians intend to use the missiles. We share your troubled feelings, Yoshidasan. This will be the weightiest decision made by our nation since the preventive strike on the Americans at Pearl Harbor, and you are correct that it should be considered cautiously. But let me add that in war, or a prelude to war, there is much uncertainty. Allow me to liken this most serious matter to a chess game in which the playing board is partially obscured. Or to a game of poker in which the opponent’s entire hand is obscured. We have peeked under the handkerchief hiding the board, Minister. We have seen several of our opponent’s cards. We know things about him while he knows little about us. We must not waste this advantage.”

“However, let me address one of your concerns. That of the reaction of Greater Manchuria should we attack their missiles. We have discussed a covert attack, and letting the Greater Manchurians guess who did the work. We have debated, the impact of Japanese denials of Greater Manchurian accusations. We believe that if Greater Manchuria cried to the Western press about being attacked by Japan, the West would turn against us, in war as well as in commerce. And so far there have been no solutions to these problems. You do not want to attack Greater Manchuria’s territory because they have not attacked us. We are worried that after the attack Greater Manchuria may use evidence of the strike against Japan. I have an answer to both problems.”

“We should commission a diplomatic mission to go along with the strike. Minister Yoshida, your ambassador to Greater Manchuria — what is his name?”

“Nakamoto.”

“Of course. Your Ambassador Nakamoto goes to President Len and tells him that Japan knows of his nuclear missiles and believes them to be offensive. Len will deny this. Nakamoto will say that Len must sign a nonaggression treaty with Japan in which Japan will control the missiles. Len will refuse. Nakamoto will demand that a Japanese military detail must be put in Tamga to oversee the depot and control the missiles. Len will again refuse. At this point the diplomatic delegation will depart to call Tokyo. That is when the strike will be executed. The diplomatic delegation will gather data transmitted by Tokyo and once the strike is a success, will meet again with Len. He will be shown the film of the bombing from the missile target camera. His own people will confirm for him what happened at Tamga. Nakamoto will tell Len that his refusal to help us led to the strike. But now Nakamoto will also tell him that Japan will keep the strike a secret — so that the missiles remain a deterrent to his immediate neighbors. In exchange, Japan and Greater Manchuria will sign the nonaggression treaty that he initially refused to sign. In the end, Japan has been honorable, telling Greater Manchuria what is desired, only attacking when there is no hope. After the attack, Japan offers to help Greater Manchuria keep her neighbors at bay. Nakamoto will offer to help Len build up his conventional military by selling him hardware at a special discount.”

“As you can see, all parties win. The missiles will be destroyed, putting us at ease. Japan’s honor remains intact, since we offered a diplomatic solution that was refused, leaving us no choice but a military strike. After the strike, the outstretched hand of Japan helping Greater Manchuria will transform a threat into an ally. In the years to follow. Greater Manchuria may well thank the heavens for the day we attacked Tamga.”

“Mr. Prime Minister,” Yoshida said, “if we use diplomacy we may well succeed where General Gotoh has predicted failure. If Greater Manchuria sees logic they will agree to the nonaggression treaty and Japanese control of the nuclear missiles. If that happens, we can avoid this horrible military attack.”

“Gentlemen? General Gotoh?”

“Minister Yoshida, if Len Pei Poom signed a treaty that put those missiles under Japanese military control I will withdraw my motion for the strike. With one condition: that if the Greater Manchurians dissemble, if we suddenly lose communication with the missile-guarding detail, that the strike be executed. I must say that the chances of Len accepting Japanese Self Defense Force personnel at his secret missile depot, with the Japanese in control, is minimal. I do not think he will agree to it.”

“But if he does, we must be prepared to stick to the terms of our own treaty,” Yoshida said. “I don’t want us to demand he sign a treaty and then watch us refuse to sign it ourselves. If our ambassador goes to Len with a peace treaty in hand I must know that Japan will be willing to live by its terms.”

“Japan will abide by the terms of the treaty, Yoshidasan,” Kurita said. “You write the treaty and make sure it is one we can live with. Len may sign the nonaggression pact, and this crisis is over. If he does not, we end the crisis by destroying the missiles. We then help Len by making sure his neighbors still think he has the missiles, and meanwhile we help him arm his military. And we help our own economy as well. In the end we may generate a large market in Greater Manchuria and receive their raw materials. I think we have taken a bad situation and turned it to our advantage.”

Kurita went around the room soliciting opinions. Approval was unanimous. Yoshida merely nodded.

“There is more to discuss, gentlemen,” Kurita said. “General, how will this weapon be delivered? And how will we control its launch?”

“We must ensure that the strike is effective. We plan on using two missiles. For absolute secrecy, these two units will be launched from a submarine already patrolling off the Greater Manchurian coast. Admiral?”

Admiral Tanaka stood. The screen came down and a map of the Sea of Japan materialized.

“We have placed a Destiny-class nuclear-powered submarine here off the Greater Manchurian shore. As you know, the Destiny-class submarines are quiet. They are nuclear propelled, so they will never need to surface after they leave port. The submarine patrols here off the coast waiting for the order from us to shoot the Hiroshima cruise missiles with the Scorpion dispersion-gluebomb warheads. On receipt of orders to fire, the submarine fires the two cruise missiles and departs the area to return home. The cruise missiles come from the sea and fly close to the ground until they reach the target— Tamga. Estimated elapsed time from receipt of orders to launch and missile detonation is less than an hour.”

“Have we tested this method of cruise-missile launch?” Kurita asked.

“Extensively, sir.”

“Very well. Has anyone any questions of the admiral or general? No? I recommend the council stand by to be reconvened later. I move we adjourn.”

CHAPTER 6

President Len Pei Poom, if seen in civilian clothes, would not earn a second glance, being of medium height and weight, with thinning hair and a nondescript mustache.

Which perhaps could explain why he was never seen out of a military uniform, his tunic resplendent with medals and a gold sash. Unlike most military dictators who wore the uniform of the fighting forces, Len’s medals were genuine. He had been a career army officer his entire adult life, ever since a battlefield promotion in Afghanistan when he was eighteen and fighting a pointless war for what then was the behemoth of the Soviet Union. Later, in his twenties, he was detached from the Red Army to the United Nations forces in Ethiopia, Somalia and Bosnia, then repatriated to the Russian Republic Army for the Allied ground offensive against the Muslim United Islamic Front of God, which was an alliance of over two dozen Islamic nations led by a fanatical if charismatic dictator. Len was a mere major when Russian forces invaded northern Iran. He had been in command of an infantry company during the initial assault.

By the time the decapitated UIF had surrendered, Len had been named a general, commanding the Second Combined Infantry Force that overran Tehran. In the interval he had lost every friend, every acquaintance, to enemy fire. The ground war had been a slaughterhouse.

No man could live through that war and not be changed, but circumstances were favorable to Len. In the years after his return from the Iranian front, the Russian Republic had continued to fall on hard times.

Len’s home in the city of Chabarovsk, now renamed by him as Changashan, had been in a rebellious Russian republic. Len had become involved, slowly, since at first he had been regarded as a Russian general and not to be trusted. Within two years he had become the head of a revolutionary movement, determined to split off from greater Russia. He had learned the lessons of other earlier, less successful succession movements, and had managed to consolidate support from China, then in the middle of its own bloody civil war. Len had alternated use of diplomacy and threats. China ceded its Greater Manchurian territory just as the White Army was advancing on it, perhaps knowing that Greater Manchuria would fall to the Whites anyway, but Len had managed to hold on to it as the rebel Chinese fighters had turned toward Beijing. By the time the Chinese Red Forces had consolidated power and taken back Beijing, Len had wrangled Sikhote Alin from Russia. The latter feat was a masterful stroke of diplomacy, but it had boiled down to the Russians being distracted by their own problems far to the west, an economic collapse narrowly averted in the months that Len was shoring up the borders of his new state one he had decided to name Greater Manchuria, a bone thrown to the Chinese that comprised half the land area of the region. Len’s military at the time had been skeletal and poorly equipped, though heavily manned.

All that had been three years ago. Len had just begun to feel confident that the country might survive. The government he had constructed functioned, if crudely, but the people were fed and the trains ran, if not necessarily on time. But it was then that the crisis hit. The Chinese Civil War ended, with West China, the Reds, taking up central and northeast China and East China, the Whites, taking the eastern coastline. Not long after, the West Chinese, sharing a border with southern Greater Manchuria, decided they wanted their territory back, though it took some time for them to assemble their infantry and armored forces along the border. The Russians, with their worldwide intelligence network left over from communist days, saw the Chinese forces, and decided to mass their own armies at the western and northern borders of Greater Manchuria.

At one point Len believed that Greater Manchuria had only days of survival left. Appeals to the Western nations were greeted with monetary aid and advisors, but there would be no one to fight the war for them.

Now, years later, the Western media credited Len with holding off both the Russians and Chinese without firing a shot, making him out to be a diplomatic hero. He had not been, but he had found a silver bullet. His aide. Col. Woo Sei Wah, had flown into Changashan and found Len despondent. “I have news too sensitive for any radio circuit,” Woo had announced. Len had not looked up from his desk. “The old Russian weapons depot at Tamga. We found missiles. Nuclear missiles. SS-34s, in perfect condition, their launchers all there and ready. There are enough weapons there to destroy the Chinese and Russian armies outside the borders and still have a half-dozen in reserve in case they come for more.”

At first Len could scarcely believe the news, but as Woo’s facts gathered irresistible force, what had happened became clear. The treaty banning all nuclear weapons in Asia had been signed by the Russian Republic as well as the other Asian nations. Something somewhere in the dusty, creaking Russian bureaucratic machine had malfunctioned, and a theater commander had failed to order the missiles turned over to the UN destruction committee. Apparently the mistake was never found. The Russians were not so stupid that they had forgotten about the nuclear missiles, but whoever the Sikhote Alin regional commander had been, Len knew he was an idiot. Through a combination of errors, the regional CO had neglected to report to the UN the Tamga facility. The mistake had to have been uncovered over the next year, since at some point the Russian army had evacuated the military bases and abandoned them, but Len’s theory was that the regional CO had thought it better to abandon the missiles and gamble on them not being found than to call attention to his humiliating, compromising mistake. He had to have rationalized his decision with the thought that the untutored Greater Manchurians would never understand how to use so modern a weapon system anyway. Whatever his thinking, a cache of SS-34s was now in Len’s quiver, and he used them wisely.

Woo Sei Wah had tried to convince Len to strike with the missiles, but Len had argued that two phone calls would be more effective. The first was to the Kremlin, in which Len had calmly informed the Russian president that he had the SS-34s, that if there were any doubts that there were SS-34s they should check the records and interrogate the former Sikhote Alin Regional Commanding General, and that his people knew how to deploy the missiles, and that, in fact, the armies massing on his borders were targeted by missiles one through seventeen. Before he hung up he suggested that the Russian president call the West Chinese Party Secretary and confirm the presence of the nukes. The second call took only minutes to be put through to the party secretary’s office.

Ten days later the Russian and Chinese forces rolled back deep into their respective nations, and Greater Manchuria had survived unmolested ever since.

Until now.

Earlier that morning Colonel Woo had stood before Len’s large desk, a storm cloud rolling over his face as he dropped a bombshell: “The Tamga depot has been raided by a commando. The fenceline was breached. A single operative neutralized several guards, two killer dogs, opened the bunker’s electronically locked door and visited the weapons for over two minutes. When he was done he left the way he came, then within sight of the fence hole committed suicide.”

“The Russians?”

“No, sir. The Japanese.”

“The Japanese? Are you insane? Why would the Japanese break into Tamga? And how did you make the determination that the raid was done by the Japanese?”

“General, we found a scorched reentry vehicle, some kind of space capsule, two kilometers into the woods. The commando didn’t cover his trail, as though he knew he wouldn’t have to. At the fence there were several instruments charred beyond recognition. There was a penchant for self-destruction of the tools this man used, leading us to believe it was a suicide raid. The fence was penetrated, then the man managed to unlock an electronic security blast door. From everything we know, the Russians and Chinese don’t have the technology to do that. Finally, the man blew himself up. All we found left of him were his feet inside his boots. The planning of the suicide mission leads us to believe that only two cultures could have done this — the Islamics or the Japanese. And why would the Muslims be concerned? Finally, the stature of the corpse indicates that the warrior was quite short. Likely Japanese.”

“But why would they do this? Why are they worried about Tamga?”

“Have you considered the map lately, sir? If you roll it out and look at it from Japan’s point of view, we are their new landward neighbors across the Sea of Japan. They likely see us as a threat, and that is the worst news we’ve had since the Russians and Chinese tried to invade us. If the Japanese know about our missiles, it is almost a certainty that they are threatened by them. Tokyo, after all, is only minutes away from Tamga by rocket motor.”

“Why would I lift a hand against Japan?”

“Why do the Japanese hate the Koreans? Like Greater Manchuria, it is the proximity to their island, their sacred world. You know Korea is considered a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.”

Len had lapsed into silence. Woo waited, staring out the window at the city below.

“Do you truly believe the invader was Japanese?”

“I do. But perhaps you should see for yourself.”

“And do you also believe this indicates a future hostile action by the Japanese against Greater Manchuria?”

“More difficult to predict, and based on less evidence, but the answer is yes.”

“What is more likely, a protest to the UN or a strike against my missiles?”

“An attack.”

“We must move the missiles—”

“No. Outside their bunker they would be exposed.”

“But an attacker would have to find their redeployed location. We could hide different missiles in different places.”

“You might buy time, sir, but taking the missiles from the compound makes them susceptible to one-man attacks of the kind that happened at the compound. It is one thing for the Japanese to find them, another for them to blow them up. Meanwhile, we have increased the base perimeter outward by two kilometers, we are installing infrared and radar motion sensors. The buffer zone is patrolled by killer dogs. The fenceline voltage has been boosted from eleven-thousand volts to one-hundred-twenty-four thousand. If you get closer than ten meters to it, every hair on your body stands on end. We have a system on the drawing board to put nerve-gas canisters on the perimeter fence posts, actuated automatically by an approaching intruder. In addition I am moving antiaircraft gun emplacements around the bunker itself. The blast door electronic lock has been replaced by old-fashioned metal-hardware locks.”

“But a determined, technologically advanced enemy could still destroy the missiles.”

“Perhaps some of them. But if even one remains, that enemy will suffer regret for a very long time.”

Woo left then. He had saved Len’s life on a battlefield in Iran five years earlier, which had only been the beginning of their partnership. Since then they had gone through much. Was it only prelude to much more? Len wondered.

CHAPTER 7

“This isn’t like the Japanese,” Len said, shrugging into his full military tunic as Lee Chun Wah held it for him. “They plan everything they do. Nothing spontaneous.”

“Sir,” Lee said, “it is a diplomatic delegation. They seem to be sincere.”

President Len looked at Lee Chun Wah, his personal aide.

“Mr. Lee, you may, in my presence, accuse the Japanese of many things. But don’t ever accuse them of being sincere.”

“Yes, sir.”

Len buttoned the tunic and concentrated on putting on his war face. Only minutes before he had been called by Lee, who relayed the fact that a Japanese diplomatic delegation headed by Ambassador Usume Nakamoto was enroute to the presidential palace and had requested permission to convene with President Len. Unprecedented.

Len would never have allowed it under normal circumstances, but he suspected that this must have something to do with the suicide raid on the missile complex.

He watched out the window as the door of the Lexus limousine opened, and a three-man diplomatic team disembarked, clearly one leader with two lackies, one of them carrying the leader’s briefcase, the other holding a bulky metal suitcase. The leader stood by the car for several moments, smiling, bowing and shaking hands with the palace guards.

As the delegation was led into the presidential mansion, Len concentrated on what he would say. The videolink conference room, he decided, would be the room in which he would receive the Japanese. There they could be filmed unobtrusively, the video cameras mounted in the fabric of ornate and ancient oil paintings depicting wars on land and at sea. He could use the disk to keep the Japanese honest.

The intercom buzzed and Nakamoto was finally announced.

Len nodded at Lee Chun Wah, and together they left the office and walked briskly down the hall to the conference room. Lee opened the door for President Len, who proceeded in.

The room was painted a deep shade of green to the railing, which was stained a dark brown and varnished to a glowing shine. Above the railing the huge oil paintings hung, the bloody scenes of battle shocking at first, then soon ignored. The room had no windows, its only furniture a wooden conference table with dark green leather set into the surface, several chandeliers casting a mellow light throughout the room. The place would be ideal for poker, an American ambassador had once joked. He had not known how close he was to the truth.

Against the front wall stood Nakamoto and his aides.

The Japanese ambassador, elderly and deeply wrinkled, broke into a grin, revealing uneven teeth protruding outward on top, inward on the bottom. He required only round wire-rimmed glasses, it occurred to Len, to complete the caricature of a Japanese from an old Allied World War II poster. Nakamoto began to bow, deeply, and Len wondered how he could go so far down without falling. Len continued to stand upright, refusing to bow, having decided to throw cold water on Nakamoto from the start. The Japanese were not going to steamroll him with their polite rituals, disarming their opposition and walking away winning the negotiation. That might work with certain naive American presidents, but not a former battlefield commanding general.

“Please state your business, Nakamoto.”

Nakamoto looked at the Greater Manchurian president with no change in his expression. “Honorable President Len Pei Poom, we have come to discuss a matter of urgency and concern to the Japanese people—”

Len sat down, not drawing his chair up to the table, as if he was about to leave momentarily. He looked pointedly at his watch and said nothing.

The Japanese ambassador sank slowly into a seat.

“Your nuclear missiles, Honorable Mr. President.”

“What?” Len sounded more indignant than surprised. In fact, he had suspected as much.

Nakamoto proceeded to open an envelope and spread out several black-and-white photographs of the inside of the Tamga facility, one of them showing the inside of the bunker. “These were taken from inside your facility.”

Len refused to look down at the photographs. The Japanese gave him no chance to accuse them of spying. They began by acknowledging it. Clever. Nakamoto might look like a caricature, but that was clearly only on the surface.

“You admit it,” Len said slowly, trying to recover.

“I merely advise you of a fact. The prime minister is gravely concerned.”

“He has no need to be.”

“We do not agree. We wish control of the Tamga facility to ensure our security. We will keep this private. We understand you have Russia and the Chinas to contend with. But we have, as I say, our concerns. The Japanese Self Defense Force will send a small force to guard the missiles. We must agree before you ever use them, and a Japanese team will fire the missiles for you if—”

Len allowed himself to laugh, although he saw nothing amusing. These people were serious.

“Sir, our only objective is to insure that Greater Manchuria not threaten Japan.”

“My answer is that you go back to your embassy. Mr. Lee, see these gentlemen to their car.”

“Wait, please, Honorable Mr. President Len. I request that you let me make a call to Tokyo. I have a satellite phone cell that will put me in video contact from here, if you will but allow it. Let me but put this matter to Tokyo.”

Len began to shake his head, but an old saying by Daniele Vare, an Italian diplomat, came to mind: “Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.”

“Ambassador Nakamoto, you may make your call. I will be in my office chambers. When you are ready to talk again, pick up the phone in the corner and I will be back.”

The rocky coastline approached rapidly and the missile climbed to forty meters in anticipation of a small cliff.

The cliff approached at 600 kilometers per hour. At one instant the missile was flying over the sea, the next it was navigating over the rocky terrain of the Greater Manchurian wilderness. The missile continued on, following its programmed trajectory, dodging small mountains and trees and outcroppings of rocks, the land flying toward the video view at a dizzying speed.

Every few minutes the missile transmitted a burst communication to the Galaxy satellite, the transmission composed of video images of the previous five minutes along with missile-status parameters. The transmission was triple encrypted, meaningless tones to a hostile receiver, the first encryption by the computer onboard, the second encryption done by varying the transmission frequency across the spectrum in planned jumps so that a receiver could pick up the entire transmission only if he knew what frequency to skip to. And the frequency skips took place at random times, essentially making for a third encryption. The final precaution was the random-minute transmission intervals, so that a receiving station could not detect the telemetry during the outages between transmissions. The random transmission intervals were done so that a listener would not detect a transmission pattern and be waiting for a burst communication every five minutes, which would be too regular. The integrated system was highly stealthy and amounted to a full data exchange under conditions that normally would dictate radio silence.

The missile flew on, the afternoon sun beginning to sink in the sky. By sunset, the mission would be long over.

Back in his office Len looked at Lee Chun Wah.

“What are the Japanese doing? Their offer seems almost deliberately insulting. They want my missiles. A Japanese team to make sure I don’t play with my own toys, so to speak. And now they’re on the phone. What are they thinking?”

“Only they know for sure. A not uncommon phenomenon for them.”

“Any way of accessing the video cameras in the conference room? Getting an early read?”

“Afraid not, sir. We can get the disk in from the computer once the session is over, but we can’t tap into the room now.”

“Make a note — I want those cameras tied into my personal closed loop video. We may need to do this in the future.”

“Yes, sir.”

The phone rang. Lee Chun Wah picked it up.

“They are ready sir. And Nakamoto sounded shaken.”

“Ambassador Nakamoto. What has Tokyo told you?”

Nakamoto looked up from the table to the standing form of Len Pei Poom. Len’s directness seemed to be contagious. “Honorable Mr. President, Tokyo has decided to protect our nation. We must be rid of your threatening missiles.”

Nakamoto pointed to the display of a notebook computer on the table. The display showed land flying toward the video eye, trees and hills passing by at a tremendous speed.

“With a nominal five minute delay, this is the view out the targeting camera of one of the missiles we have launched at your Tamga facility. It will be arriving at the facility in approximately two minutes. We have one last chance to stop the missiles.

Will you agree to sign a nonaggression pact with Japan, and agree to put Japanese Self Defense Force troops in command of your missiles?” ‘We. And now, if there is nothing else, we will get you back to your embassy,” Len said.

“You consider this a bluff?”

“I do.”

“I will prove you are tragically mistaken. Mr. President.”

Len noticed he was no longer the “Honorable Mr. President,” but he was too angry to deal with it. What he desired was to reach over and snap Nakamoto’s neck.

Len forced himself to watch the computer display as the video showed the sky, then the horizon, then an aerial shot of the ground approaching. He tried to show no emotion as he recognized the Tamga facility approach the view. All a Japanese trick — after all, the technology to fake this was well within their means. But then the compound continued to grow closer in the video display.

Len held his breath.

CHAPTER 8

The transmission came in from Galaxy satellite number three. The satellite identified itself, then issued a go code for the weapon to continue on its flight path for the target. If the message had not been received, the missile would have turned around and flown back out to sea and self-destructed. The attack could not take place unless the Japanese Defense Agency gave final confirmation within one minute of final arming and detonation of the warhead. But the message decoded to “detonate over target as planned,” and the missile made its final turn toward the target, now only one kilometer away over the ridge forming the Tamga Valley.

The warhead self-checks remained satisfactory. The missile armed the warhead detonator train, removing the safety interlocks from the system. It moved the canister of plutonium dust into proximity of the high-explosive cylinder so that the donut-shaped plutonium canister completely surrounded the explosive. The explosion cloud would not chemically alter the plutonium, but rather disperse it.

Next to the plutonium canister high-pressure bottles of explosive ethylene gas were located, the gas pressure so high that a bottle failure alone could blow up half a city block. On the outside skin of the warhead were plastic bottles of vinyl acetate monomer liquid along with layered annular plastic bottles of other liquids, called “stardust” since they were miscellaneous additives that caused the polymerization to be able to proceed in the high temperatures of the fireball generated by the small high-explosive charge of the central detonator. The entire warhead was filled with inert nitrogen, which meant there was no stray oxygen to ruin the onboard chemicals or cause the ethylene to burn on warhead detonation.

Now fully armed, the warhead reported back to the missile computer that it was ready. The missile, at range to the target indicating half a kilometer, pulled up on the winglets and climbed for the sky.

The Tamga facility was now dead ahead by only a few hundred meters. The missile nose-cone video camera saw only the heavens above as the missile climbed, and when the altitude indicated a height of 1500 meters the winglets rotated to send the missile plummeting down over the target.

The video camera showed the facility laid out like a still-color aerial photograph, the afternoon sun casting the low shadows of the trees over the compound, which grew rapidly closer as the missile dived for the center, the humpbacked earthen bunker shown on the navigation files describing the target. The view continued to grow until the surrounding complex was gone, only the central buildings and the bunker in view, with one of the SS-34 missiles rolled out on the southwest side of the bunker, the shadows of people clear in the camera view.

Altitude 500 meters. The detonator, a small blasting cap, was energized by the missile-computer circuitry. Seeing the high voltage, the detonator exploded and caused the high-explosive charge to go off.

Altitude 450 meters. The high-explosive detonation rippled through the plutonium canister, the fireball reaching out to the ethylene bottles and rupturing them. Contained in the high-energy gases of the explosion were plutonium fragments and ethylene gas. The ethylene did not burn or explode, since the high explosive had already used its oxidizer, and there was no oxygen inside the warhead, only nitrogen. The blast circle then extended to the vinyl acetate monomer bottles and the stardust, the plastic material of the bottles vaporizing, the liquid, then atomizing and vaporizing as well, taking the aerosol stardust with it. The pressure pulse blew off the warhead skin, and the cloud grew, a sphere of high pressure, high-temperature gases, the ethylene gas mixing with the vinyl acetate monomer in the high temperatures and reacting to form a vinyl-acetate ethylene copolymer — a liquid latex glue — which completed its reaction, using up the ethylene and vinyl acetate and stardust, the gas cloud finally cooling and changing from a sphere to a teardrop shape as it fell toward earth.

The polymer glue then mixed with the plutonium dust and rained down on the earth, the first droplets falling onto the ground of the bunker, the SS-34 missile that had been rolled out, and those standing by the missile.

After weapon one detonated, weapon two’s warhead exploded, adding a second wave of plutonium-latex rain down on the compound below.

When the rain was finished, there was nothing left of either cruise missile. Weapons one and two, however, would live on in the lethal effects of their warheads.

Their missions were accomplished.

Finally the video display on the tabletop flashed as the image of the compound vanished.

“That is it?” Len asked.

“The weapons are now destroyed,” Nakamoto said. “I want you to know that many people argued against this course of action. None of us thought you would say no to us. It is regrettable that—”

“Nakamoto, now that your movie is over, you must go. My missiles are not for sale. But thank your prime minister for the interesting video. The special effects were outstanding.”

“But, Mr. President—”

“I must go now. Mr. Lee Chun Wah will take you to the airport.”

Len turned and left.

The forty steps to his office had seemed a lifetime as Len thought about the strange presentation by the Japanese.

When he opened the door to the office. Lee Chun Wah gestured to him rapidly.

“There’s a phone call from Tamga, sir. The crew from the American television show ‘Conspiracy Exposed’— the ones you sent to interview the base commander — want to talk to you — they said something awful is happening.”

Len listened for a moment, knit his brows. “No one picked up. I only heard screaming.”

Len put the phone down, a dread beginning to fill him.

If the Japanese had truly attacked the weapons, the survival of Greater Manchuria was at risk. In fact, Greater Manchuria might not exist a week into the future without the SS-34s.

A frantic knock came at the door. Intelligence officer Col. Ni Han Su rushed in.

“Sir, the video, turn it on, now!”

Len had spent too much of his life on battlefields to berate a junior who screamed at his superiors — a disciplined subordinate who behaved in this fashion did it for a very good reason. Len turned on the video to see an announcer from BBC Asia speaking, reporting on the destruction. The American reporters must have made their report before dying. The reality of the attack on his missiles was too clear.

“Get Ambassador Nakamoto back in the conference room.”

“Sir, he’s still there packing his equipment.”

Len fairly burst into the room. Nakamoto looked up at him.

“Ambassador Nakamoto, you and your countrymen are treacherous felons. You come here, make impossible demands, and while I receive you, you stab me in the back, just as you did the Americans at Pearl Harbor while you talked of peace. You have attacked my missiles, which I have kept only for defense. You have killed my men and will blame this savagery on my alleged in transigence. I promise you that the world will know every detail of what has happened here.”

“Sir, I will overlook your unreasoned outburst for now and urge you to realize that it is in your best interests, and Greater Manchuria’s best interests, to keep this matter quiet. If so, Russia and the Chinas will not know you have lost your weapons. Japan will not, I guarantee you, speak of it. You keep your deterrent while Japan has its security, its freedom from fear of your former SS-34 nuclear missiles. This, sir, is the perfect solution.”

Len looked at him in disbelief. “Surely you realize the world already knows. I have just heard it announced on the BBC. No more talk. You will be driven to the airport under escort from the palace guards. There you will meet the others from your embassy. You will all be put on a military transport and flown back to your island. God have mercy on your souls.”

Len walked out of the room, motioning Lee Chun Wah to follow. Inside Len’s office he gave his command to Lee while raising the phone to his ear: “Go out to the airfield and see the commanding general of the air force at the tower. Allow the transport with Nakamoto and his people to get out over the Sea of Japan, but just on our side of the twenty kilometer territorial limit. When they are there, one of the escorting F-16’s will blow them out of the sky.”

Lee Chun Wah nodded, his face grim.

“And Lee, the disk of the meetings inside the conference room, copy and send to BBC. I want them on the air tonight. Unedited. We will let the world know exactly who the Japanese are behind their masks. Greater Manchuria may not survive but Japan will suffer with us.”

Len stood, looking out the window at the approach to the palace’s entrance. He could see Nakamoto’s bent form walking to the limousine, then duck into it. The man looked old. It was later than he knew — his last day on earth.

The operator clicked into the connection. “Yes, sir?”

“Get me the President of the United States.”

CHAPTER 9

On the other side of the world the early morning winter sun competed with scattered clouds, trying to light the landscape of the Connecticut countryside. Bruce Phillips took a breath of the northern air as he moved down the stair ramp from the Grumman twelve-passenger jet. The bare branches of the trees and weeks-old grimy snow might normally make for a gloomy scene, but to Phillips they added to the charm of this trip. He felt like a kid going with his father to pick out a Christmas present.

Admiral Pacino walked three steps ahead of him to the waiting staff car, where an aide stood by the open door. Phillips climbed in next to Pacino. The car drove toward the fence gate, the idling jet shrinking behind.

For some minutes neither man said a word. Phillips looked out the window at the thick trees, their frozen branches waving in a cold wind.

“You ever heard about the Vortex missile?” Pacino asked, looking out his own window.

“Excuse me, sir?” Phillips moistened his lips, wanting a cigar but knowing it would not be proper unless his superior offered to let him smoke. All the more reason to be away from the top brass, he thought.

“The Vortex antisubmarine missile, invented four years ago for the Seawolf class,” Pacino said. “The program was abandoned last year.”

“I haven’t heard the term, sir.”

Pacino nodded. “I was involved early in the program, I keep forgetting its classification. When I worked on it the Vortex name alone was classified secret. The program was compartmented, limited distribution, codeword stuff. Anyway, Admiral Donchez came up with the concept — an underwater weapon that’s a hybrid rocket and torpedo. It’s solid-rocket fueled, blue-laser guided. Warhead is seven tons of Plasticpac explosive with a plasma yield equivalent to the effect of a small battlefield nuclear device.”

“An underwater rocket? With seven tons of Plasticpac?”

Pacino paused, looking at Phillips. “You wouldn’t happen to have any cigars, would you?”

Phillips grinned and pulled out two long Honduran cigars from his jacket pocket. “Sorry they aren’t Cuban,” he said, and passed the cigar cutter to Pacino, then his lighter, the emblem of the USS Greeneville worn by use. The back of the limo filled with mellow smoke.

“Anyway, the missile worked well. I was at a Bahamas test-range exercise when the Vortex made its preop trial. The firing ship was an instrumented 637-class attack sub, gutted of equipment with the Vortex launcher installed. The target sub was an old diesel boat similarly instrumented.”

Phillips glanced at Pacino, squinting through the smoke. Pacino seemed sad, or nostalgic, or both.

“What happened?”

“The missile worked perfectly. Blew the target sub to iron filings. The blast made a water-vapor mushroom cloud that rained down on us for five minutes. I was deaf for three days.”

“So why haven’t we in the fleet heard about this miracle missile? It sounds like a silver bullet.”

“Because the Vortex blew up the firing ship as well. There was nothing left of her. The solid-rocket fuel over-pressurized the tube and the launcher burst open. The rocket exhaust blew the firing platform in half.”

“Bad day after all.”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“So why don’t you launch this beast like a ballistic missile — propel it out the tube and then light off the rocket motor?”

“It’s unstable. Spins around, the rocket motor goes off and water forces tear it apart. It needs the whole tube length for guidance.”

Phillips looked at Pacino, wondering why the admiral was going on about a dead-end weapon program. When Phillips tamped out his cigar in the ashtray, the car had pulled up to a fenced-in gate. A large sign read DYNACORP INTERNATIONAL — ELECTRIC BOAT DIVISION. Pacino put down his window and passed out a bar-coded identification card to the guard, and Phillips reached into his wallet and handed over his own ID.

“State your business please,” the guard said.

Pacino did and the car drove through the gate and around several small buildings, approaching a wide tall structure that was blue in the haze of distance. As they drew closer to the building a large sign loomed overhead: NUCLEAR SUBMARINE MANUFACTURING FACILITY— fast attack boat department. The car stopped a final time. Pacino grabbed his white hat and climbed out of the car. Phillips got out, pulling his black overcoat collar up against the wind.

From a door in the monolithic wall a short man in a double-breasted suit walked out, a uniformed naval officer following behind him. The man in civilian clothes had a goatee and mustache, his jowly face hanging down below the knot of a blue-patterned tie. The officer behind him wore a black reefer jacket with the four-striped shoulder boards of a navy captain. He was tall with graying cropped hair, an expression of distaste carved into the wrinkles of his face.

“Gentlemen,” the civilian called heartily from forty feet away. “Glad you could make it!”

“Who’s this guy?” Phillips mouthed to Pacino.

“Rebman, Doug Rebman,” Pacino whispered back, “the Dynacorp vice-president of attack-sub shipbuilding. He’s hard to take but he knows his stuff.”

“And the captain?”

“Emmitt Stephens, superintendent of shipbuilding. As SUPESHIPS he has the unpleasant duty of hanging around with Rebman, but he got my Seawolf to sea from a drydock in four days when it would take a normal mortal four weeks. He’s the best.”

Rebman led them around the corner of the facility to an elevated platform overlooking a jetty four stories below. Phillips stopped dead in his tracks. Pacino looked over at him and smiled.

“Never seen the Seawolf class before, Phillips?”

Beyond the railing of the platform a submarine lay next to a narrow jetty, the hull bounded closely on either side by the protruding concrete structures. The ship was tremendously large, looking absurdly wide and fat. The hull was a flat black, the surface of it covered with foam tiles for quieting against active sonar pings.

The conning tower, the sail, jutted straight up over the cylindrical hull, a triangular fillet joining the front of the sail to the ship below.

“She’s huge,” Phillips gasped. “I mean, she’s at least ten feet wider in diameter than my Greeneville.”

“Meet the USS Piranha,” Pacino said. “SSN23, third — and last — in the Seawolf class. Named after the original Piranha that Dick Donchez commanded in the 1970s. She’s forty-two feet in diameter. She displaces over nine thousand tons, makes way on twin turbines cranking out fifty-two thousand shaft horsepower. The nuclear reactor is natural circulation cooled up to 50 percent power, that’s thirty-two knots without reactor circulation pumps. Bruce, this submarine is quieter going full out than your old Greeneville is at idle.”

Pacino continued on, and before Phillips realized it, a half-hour had gone by, and he realized that something was different about the submarine. Where a few minutes before the hull had been black and unmarked, there was now a distinct white waterline mark circling the hull. He looked again, and noticed that the white line was rising further from the water.

“What’s going on?”

“Dr. Rebman, please explain,” Pacino said.

“We’re lifting the hull out of the water,” Rebman said. “For Admiral Pacino’s ship alteration. We call it the Pacino ship-alt, Admiral.”

“Lifting the hull out?”

“The ship is resting on blocks much like those on the floor of a drydock. This is a special jetty, Commander. The blocks touching the underside of the ship’s hull are connected to a large metal platform, and beneath that we have steel columns about one meter in diameter. The columns are threaded and connected to motors below. There are twenty of them, and when we turn the motors, the columns turn and lift the platform out of the water, an inch at a time. Once the platform is out of the water the whole assembly can be moved into the assembly building. It allows us to move a submarine from its waterbome condition to inside the manufacturing bay in about four hours. That same operation to get a sub into drydock would take two to three days.”

Phillips looked down at the jetty and saw that the sub had emerged from the water by another foot while they were talking.

“Let’s go into the conference room, gentlemen,” Rebman said. “We’ll have a window view there. You can still see the ship coming out of the slip and into the building.”

The four men walked inside to a hallway and then into a windowed room, one set of plate glass looking out over the jetty, where the Piranha was still quietly coming vertically out of the water, the other looking into the cavernous expanse of the manufacturing building. Phillips chose a seat where he could swivel his chair and see first one view, then the other. Rebman doused the lights and started a disk presentation on the projection-screen wall.

“Commander Phillips, this presentation is for you as commanding officer of the Piranha. We put together this briefing about the Vortex missile, which I’m sure you’re not aware of, when we moth-balled the program. Now the program is back.”

Phillips looked to Pacino, who had a single finger over his lips, then watched the film on the Vortex program, observing computer views of the innards of the missile. He saw the missile test in the Bahamas when the missile was fired from one sub to see if it could hit the other. The screen view showed the explosion of the target boat as seen from the surface. The camera obviously had shaken as the shock wave hit, the enormous mushroom cloud rising from the sea as if a great beast had climbed out of the ocean, then the spray was raining back down again as the cloud dispersed. The target was obliterated, but then the film showed the slow-motion cameras depicting the inside of the firing ship, the film capturing the firing tube as it blew open, the flames pouring violently out of the tube, the screen going black as the recording camera was vaporized by the hot gas exhaust. A graphic came up, showing a cartoon of the missile in the tube and how the tube exploded, then widened to show how the rocket exhaust melted through the hull while the tremendous gas volume blew the hull open just as the missile had blown open the tube. In the cartoon the firing sub broke in half and drifted to the ocean bottom. After a few more words describing the final moneys spent on the missile program, the disk went blank.

“That was two years ago,” Dr. Rebman said. “We thought the missile program could not go on. We put ten production missiles in a warehouse, archived the records and let the program die. Then Admiral Pacino called me. His idea to revive the Vortex missile is key to the alterations we will be doing to the Piranha. And that, Commander Phillips, is where you come in.”

“What the hell are you doing to my ship?” Phillips heard himself ask.

“It’s not quite your ship yet, Bruce,” Pacino said, “but I’m glad you already feel possessive about her.”

Pacino then went to the white wall, pointed his finger and traced a shape on it. As he did, the electronic white board turned his finger motion into a drawing, his finger acting as the chalk. The resulting shape was a submarine hull.

“Bruce, we know the Vortex missile needs to be launched from a tube to be stable. We also know it blows up missile tubes. What we want to do,” Pacino said as he drew a small cylinder on the outside of the sketch of the sub hull, “is put the launching tubes on the outside of the sub. They will have blow-off caps at the aft end. When the missile launches, the outside tube won’t blow up because the rupture cap at the back blows off and the missile leaves through the tube. The tube opens up at both ends and still acts to guide the missile in its first few milliseconds of travel. The missile leaves the external tube and moves on to the target. The sub then discards the tube and it falls to the bottom of the sea.”

“Let me get this straight,” Phillips said. “You’re going to put these tube launchers on the outside of my hull?”

“Right.”

“That’s going to be noisy. It’ll ruin the shape of the ship. All that work making the Seawolf class hydrodynamic and whisper quiet is down the drain. This tub will whistle and rattle and moan at cruising speed. An enemy boat will hear us coming five nautical miles away.”

“Bruce, remember your failure in the simulator the other day? It was inevitable, though I didn’t tell you so at the time. Your torpedoes had to miss. The only thing that would have helped was a Vortex missile. If you’d had one, the Destiny you attacked would have been dead.”

“So would I when the Vortex blew up in the tube.”

“Exactly, which is why they’ll be on the outside of your hull, not the inside. The open-ended launching tubes with blow off caps will keep the hull from rupturing. The problems with the Vortex are, we believe, fixed.”

“Admiral, you mentioned them in the plural. You said they’d be on the outside of my hull. So do I get more than one?”

“I’m having ten of them put on the exterior of your hull. If we ever go up against Scenario Orange, you’ll have ten silver bullets.” Phillips looked into Pacino’s eyes, then exhaled and looked out the window at Piranha, now completely out of the water, the hull still drying in the cold breeze, the monster being moved slowly through the open door of the manufacturing facility.

“Admiral?”

“Yes?”

“You figure ten are enough?”

The massive hull of the Piranha lurked high above and behind the four men as they walked parallel to the hull to the east end of the bay. Phillips looked up at the black-painted cylinder dwarfing them. It was hard to believe that, with the ship this big on the outside, it would feel small on the inside.

By the time they reached the bow section, Phillips could see the racks with the stacked cylinders on them, the stenciling clear from fifty feet away reading MOD BRAVO VORTEX. The men stopped near a weapon-loading tractor bed.

“Let’s roll one of the missiles out,” Pacino said.

One of the weapon-handling crewmen assembled two men to roll out the nearest Vortex. It took a few minutes, and during the wait Phillips saw the giant door of the facility begin to close, plunging the interior into gloom until his eyes adjusted to the overhead halogen lamps. Finally the weapon dolly pulled out one of the Vortex canisters. It was huge, almost four feet in diameter and fifty feet long.

“And how do you plan on putting ten of these things on the outside of the Piranha?” Phillips asked.

“You’re going to look like you’re wearing a bandoleer,” Pacino said.

“Amazing.”

“Admiral Pacino?” a young civilian asked, winded from trotting across the facility floor.

“I’m Pacino.”

“Sir, an Admiral Donchez called and said he needed to see you at the White House within the hour.”

Pacino looked startled. “Thanks. Emmitt, how soon can you be, done with the alterations to the Piranha?”

“It’s a month of work. Admiral.”

“You know what I’m going to say, don’t you, Emmitt?”

Capt. Emmitt Stephens smiled, resigned. “Yes, sir. You want the work done in a week with Piranha out of here on her own power. I’ll see to it.”

Pacino shook his hand, then Rebman’s and waved Phillips to walk with him.

“What was that about a week, sir?” Phillips asked.

“Emmitt Stephens can work miracles. There’s no reason you should have to wait a month to get your boat ready. I want you on the way to the Pacific by this time next week.”

“Why, sir? What’s going down?”

“Let’s just say I have a bad feeling.”

“One week. I can’t believe it.”

“Neither can I,” Pacino said. “I was just going to ask him to get it done in two. Good thing I kept my mouth shut.”

“What’s this White House business about. Admiral?”

“I’ll find out in an hour. Bruce, don’t be a stranger. I consider you my first line commander. Don’t let me down out there.”

Pacino clapped him on the shoulder and vanished out the corner door into the winter air. Phillips looked back up at the tail of the Piranha looming over his head, thinking about the admiral who had called him the best.

He let his gaze roam over the Piranha’s massive hull, and felt a mix of awe and near-sensual pleasure.

CHAPTER 10

Pacino was ushered into the Oval Office and led to a seat on a wide sofa next to Richard Donchez.

The room seemed much smaller than it had appeared on television. The desk was the same, the couch and chair arrangement the same, even the fireplace looked familiar, but the combination in reality was so close as to seem claustrophobic, although that could have come from the crowd in the room.

Pacino recognized Vice President Al Meckstar, the dark-haired Hispanic-looking boy of politics, his looks deceptively youthful. Now in his early forties, Meckstar had joked he would dye his temples gray if that would lend him more credibility. Meckstar sank into the sofa opposite Pacino and Donchez, next to Secretary of State Phil Gordon. Gordon was thin, a marathon runner who had joined government directly out of Harvard, although little of his education or elite background seemed to have rubbed off on him. His eternal smile and joking cheerfulness were so thick as to seem affected but they were not. His political instincts were matched by none; his success at State was eerie. Someone had remarked that Gordon could have been a time traveler back from the future armed with detailed history books, so accurate were his intuitions about foreign heads of state.

At the end of the opposite couch Steve Cogster, the National Security Advisor, stretched his awkwardly long legs. Cogster was an oddball. Donchez had once told Pacino he did not trust him. Impeccably turned out in a pinstriped suit, imported silk tie, and sparkling wingtips, Cogster was as tall as Pacino, with thinning blond hair, slightly buck teeth, and oval-shaped lenses in wire-framed glasses. Cogster was famous for his soft-spoken arguments in public, coupled with his flaming Emails and memos so caustic his own staff had nicknamed him “the Blowtorch,” passing his acerbic E-mails throughout State. Even Donchez had received a few winners at NSA. It was rumored that Phillip Gordon kept a file of Cogster’s most acidic memos and passed them around Friday afternoons.

Some said that Gordon even had some of them framed in his office and only took them down when Cogster or the president visited him at State.

Donchez had once remarked that Cogster would not be a good man to have as an enemy, but having him as an ally did not seem particularly beneficial either. The Blowtorch was just that, best to stay out of the flame path.

In the end chair, near the fireplace, the director of the CIA sat with his legs crossed, his pale hairy flesh exposed over sagging socks. Boswell Famesworth Leach III was bald, his face was red, his teeth either capped or false, his manner earnest. But Donchez had once characterized him as a snake. There were too many backs in Washington bearing Leach’s knives, Donchez had said. Leach seemed to be the one person in government that Donchez loved to hate. Leach never signed his name, only used his initials, “BFL.” Donchez had indicated to Pacino that Leach’s intelligence estimates were usually inaccurate — not because of the failings of the CIA itself, since the information and analyses coming into Leach’s office were sound, but because Leach was so arrogant that any intelligence assessment that didn’t fit his predetermined notions would be rewritten to fall into line with his world views. Nonetheless, his intel assessments had been oddly correct in recent months, which had prompted Donchez to tell Pacino that “BFL” stood for “Blind Fucking Luck.”

Noticeably absent was the Secretary of Defense, the elder statesman of the group. Bob Katoss, the pipe-smoking sixty-five-year-old who refused to wear suits, only cardigan sweaters and open-necked shirts. The political cartoons regularly depicted him wearing bunny slippers with the outfit. Katoss was from the old school, refusing to suffer fools, refusing to smile at those he did not respect.

In short, refusing to be a politician. Donchez considered him a breath of fresh air; Pacino wasn’t so sure; he wondered if the man’s pugnacious exterior perhaps fronted for an inadequate intellect and a cold heart.

Katoss had been retired for five years, his detractors frequently said, and in fact, at this critical meeting, Katoss was unapologetically on vacation in the Bahamas. Pacino was glad for the man’s absence and wondered why President Warner had chosen him, but then who knew what political obligations she had had?

The Secretary of the Navy was likewise missing, President Warner having sent him on a mission to Africa with the chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Anthony Wadsworth, a tough black man, an inch taller than Pacino and who at 250 pounds had been a boxer at the Academy. He and Pacino had crossed paths a decade before when Pacino’s first submarine, Devilfish, had been involved in an exercise against Wadsworth, who then was a full captain and the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier Eisenhower. Pacino had had orders to sneak up on Wadsworth’s carrier and act as the aggressor submarine, and Wadsworth’s antisubmarine warfare ships, the destroyers and frigates, were tasked with finding Pacino and Devilfish first. The exercise signal that the operation order specified was a flare, purple smoke, to be fired from Devilfish’s signal ejector to indicate that the submarine was shooting torpedoes at the aircraft carrier. Wadsworth hadn’t planned on Pacino getting in close, since he was scouring the seas around the Eisenhower with S-2 Vikings and the towed array sonar systems of his escort ships.

It had taken Pacino all day to set up to penetrate the antisubmarine net around the carrier but he finally had sneaked in past the outer barriers and had gotten in close. He could have simply launched a series of purple flares from the center of the task force, but somehow that didn’t seem enough. Pacino had maneuvered Devilfish directly beneath the Eisenhower, steamed up on her port side, the opposite side of the ship from the island and bridge. Pacino had launched a purple flare from the signal ejector, filming it from the periscope as it arced high in the sky and landed on Wadsworth’s flight deck. The carrier flight-deck crew had panicked, not expecting the burst of purple smoke from out of nowhere. The crew had treated it like a fire, stringing out hoses, alarms blaring. Pacino had gone deep, increased speed to flank and pulled away from the carrier, then when he was a mile away, had come back up to periscope depth and taken a panoramic photograph of the Eisenhower, the purple smoke obscuring half the deck, frantic firefighters scrambling to put out the flames.

Back in port after the incident, the squadron commander had called Pacino to his stateroom on the tender and chewed him out for a quarter-hour. Wadsworth had apparently put up a stink about Pacino violating safety rules with the flammable smoke grenade, not to mention violating the Oporder and showing that a lone submarine could humiliate the carrier battle group’s antisubmarine defenses and get close enough to poop a flare onto the carrier’s deck, which, of course, was the idea. All that saved Pacino’s career was that at the time Admiral Donchez was Commander Submarines US Atlantic Fleet, and had admired Pacino’s gutsy move. But even Donchez had taken Pacino aside to tell him to save his aggression for real combat and not embarrass politically connected senior officers.

When a few months later Wadsworth had held a reception on board the Eisenhower for the fleet staff, one of Pacino’s junior officers had presented Wadsworth with a framed four-foot-wide blowup of the periscope photograph of Eisenhower with her deck half-obscured by purple smoke, the crosshairs on the picture leaving no doubt who had taken the photo. Another junior officer had snapped a shot of Wadsworth looking at the huge photo, his mouth wide open in shock and anger. That photo had been framed and hung on the bulkhead of Devilfish’s wardroom. The incident had been somewhat typical of Pacino’s approach to life and to command before the arctic mission Donchez had sent him on, the one that had led to Devilfish’s sinking. The years before that ice-cap mission now seemed so remote as to be from somebody else’s life, but the fallout from them was still real, including Wadsworth’s feelings about Pacino.

Pacino emerged from his reminiscence to look at Donchez, closeted as he was with men who were as difficult for him as Wadsworth was for Pacino. Sitting in the chairs next to Leach were Air Force general Felix Clough, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army general Kurt Sverdlov, the newly nominated chairman. Pacino knew Donchez and Clough shared a professional dislike that went back decades, based partly on each man’s disregard for the other’s service. But Clough was a lame duck, and Sverdlov and Donchez seemed to be forming a close working relationship, Sverdlov apparently realizing that having a friend at NSA could help him. Meanwhile, Donchez was no longer in the Navy or in competition with Sverdlov the way he had once been with Clough. Pacino knew that Donchez hoped that when Leach was gone he would inherit CIA, and from that point on, the Blowtorch notwithstanding, he would have a seamless, functional network surrounding and leading up to the president.

As if cued by Pacino’s thought, President Jaisal Warner swept into the office with aides in tow, her low-voiced orders flying to each until she reached her seat and dismissed them. The men in the room all stood as if someone had called them to attention. Warner waved them to their seats. Pacino tried not to stare at her, but wasn’t successful.

Jaisal Warner was only in her second year in office, yet it was already a charmed administration. Warner had come into office almost unopposed, the previous incumbent withdrawing from the race for reasons of health, his announcement coming just after Warner was nominated. His party’s nomination was a tired old senator who was in the race for show.

Warner’s campaign had focused on her energy and competence as the remarkably successful governor of California, where her hard-nosed leadership had pulled the state out of severe financial troubles. After the governorship she had become the state’s junior senator yet had been named to the Armed Services Committee, making news with her proposals on revolutionizing the military. She had become something of a media darling, as well as of even the military and the American people over a period of ten years. Her campaign slogan still graced the bumpers of countless cars, the green letters proclaiming on a white field: JAISAL WARNER — JUST GET OUT OF HER WAY.

Even her name was symbolic of her rise to power — the name Jaisal was Indian for “victory.” Her first hundred days in office had been a thunderstorm of activity as she cleaned house in the government, eliminating half the government bureaucracy and replacing the administrators with handpicked replacements. She made the cover of Time three times in two years, one caption reading: JAISAL CLEANS UP, the next: WARNER’S MACHINE, the third: GOVERNMENT NOW WORKS! the last in capital letters with an exclamation point. Warner seemed to live for crises, Donchez had once remarked to Pacino. She often quoted wartime leaders, her favorites Winston Churchill, the two Roosevelts, Eisenhower, even Nixon, but her clear number one was Margaret Thatcher.

Warner stood now in front of the large chair at the desk end of the couch-and-chair arrangement. She was in her late forties, and remained a very beautiful woman. She wore a dark suit, the skirt midlength, with a cream silk blouse, a small diamond necklace at her throat. Her hair was cut in a bob, the straw color graying but attractive. Her hands were graceful, her fingers long and unadorned by rings. Her husband had died when she was in the Senate, and she had never remarried, all her energy pouring into her job. Her eyes were dark and unreadable, but the lines around her mouth seemed to indicate her concern. When she spoke, her voice was clear.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said. “Please sit down.” She remained standing herself. “I assume you’re all up to speed on what’s happened in Greater Manchuria. I think you should all see this.” She nodded at an aide, who passed out folders.

Pacino opened his, finding an advance copy of the next week’s Time magazine. On the cover was: JAPAN STRIKES AGAIN. Pacino opened the old-fashioned paper magazine, this version the one that would be sold on the newsstands.

Magazines had gone digital four years before so that they could be downloaded onto a Writepad personal notesheet computer, but some people, particularly the over-fifty generation, preferred a hardcopy to hold in their hands, so the glossy paper version continued to be published. A photo of Kurita was shown, the caption quoting him as saying Japan had nothing to do with the attack. Another picture showed the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman issuing the statement that the bombing was justified to eliminate the threat of the nuclear weapons in Greater Manchuria, making Kurita an instant liar. The lack of coordination of the Japanese government was astonishing, as it added even more to the picture of Kurita as a treacherous operative. Next was a story on the growing sentiment of Americans to “do something” about Japan, the bar graphs showing the burgeoning anti-Japanese sentiment. A final article profiled the US military, showing the possible military options that could be used against Japan. No one had attacked the US directly, but the mood of America now approached the intensity of feeling immediately before Pearl Harbor, if Time’s graphics were to be trusted.

“So, let’s talk about how I see what’s going on here before we open this up to discussion,” Warner said. “First, Japan, feeling threatened by Greater Manchuria because of the possibility that Greater Manchuria could attack Tokyo, decides to take out the Greater Manchurian nuclear weapons. Next, Kurita is exposed doing what he denies.”

“I suggest two ways of looking at this. One, the Greater Manchurian nuclear weapons were dangerous and destabilizing. The Japanese in one sense did our work for us.” Warner rubbed her eyelids, looking tired for a second.

“Now the nukes are gone and the East Chinese or the West Chinese or the Russians may invade Greater Manchuria and take over their territory. One headache gone, a bigger new one replaces it. This is unacceptable for us, we need a real balance of power there, not one all-powerful Far East nation.”

“Now focus on Japan. We can say, for argument, that Greater Manchuria had no intentions of threatening Tokyo whatsoever, that their missiles were a deterrent to Russia and the Chinas. The attack by Japan on continental Asia is another example of Japan’s new militarism. Let’s look at the last five years. We essentially stopped trade between Japan and America. Europe followed suit. Japan was hurt, and badly. They turned their industrial strengths into rearming, building up a threatening military.”

Pacino could almost hear in Warner’s words Donchez’s briefing. She must have liked it, found it convincing, because here she was speaking just as Donchez had a few days ago.

“Next we see a Japanese strike against an Asian nation. They took matters into their own hands rather than consulting with the rest of the world. Our response now is critical. If we look the other way, we encourage Japan to keep using its military. Some of my advisors indicate that in another five years or less, Japan could well invade continental Asia and expand. They would have an empire greater than in 1941. And that means China, Korea, Greater Manchuria, Indonesia, southeast Asia, all of it, back in aggressive Japanese hands. By then, there would be no stopping Japan without a major blood bath involving another world war. On the other hand, we could move in and stop this now, and turn the tide. How many of us would argue, if we could go back in time, with stopping Hitler when he tried to make his move into the Sudetenland? We could have averted World War II. An early confrontation avoids a later war, if we learn anything from history. So, in spite of Japan’s military strength, or because of it, I believe we should seriously discuss a military option. I am also open to other options. I’d like to go around the room now and ask each of you for your opinion.”

Warner was famous for this approach, Pacino thought. Her advisors hated it, but it allowed her to get to a decision quickly at the risk of generating great conflict among the cabinet. Warner was convinced she could manage the clashing egos, but the recent resignation of the attorney general had shaken the administration, and his replacement had yet to be chosen.

“Alex, you get the honor of speaking up first.” Alex Addison was the soft-spoken chief of staff. He was fiercely protective of the president and her schedule but otherwise — as Donchez had described him — he would mostly be a good guy to have a beer with. He was short and balding but trim and well-dressed, still in his suit coat while the rest of the men were in shirtsleeves.

“Thank you, Madam President,” Addison began so softly that Pacino had to strain to hear. “I think we should hammer the Japanese. We’ve always been reasonable with them, but now they need to be taught a lesson — that they can’t just attack a neighbor without retribution.”

“Short and strong and to the point, Alex. What about the people? Remember Vietnam. Do you think the voters feel as you do?”

“Yes, Madam President, though I’d leave the specifics of a military option to the pros.” Addison nodded at the generals and to Pacino. “Indeed, I believe the people are very tired of the way we have tiptoed around Japan.”

“We cut off nearly all trade with them after they tried to raid AT&T and IBM.”

“Right, and they still flourish.”

“It has hurt them—”

“And they are more dangerous than ever. I believe the American people would support a military option.”

“Thank you, Alex. Al?”

Vice President Meckstar cleared his throat and stretched his neck. “Well, we can’t just go in there bombing and shooting. We have to have a clear objective. We have to figure out what we want. I’d say our position should be that we are going after Japan to dismantle their military. After all, their own constitution prohibits them from having a military.”

“We blew off that rationale during the Cold War with Russia,” National Security Advisor Cogster said. “Kind of hard to invoke it now, over a half-century later.”

“Getting back to our objective, Al?” Warner prompted.

“Yes. We want the Japanese to dismantle any more of these dirty radiation bombs, decommission their navy and sell their fighter planes. They won’t do it, so we help them.”

Cogster interrupted, “You’re talking about an invasion. Does anyone here remember their freshman year history? This is the country we dropped two nuclear weapons on to avoid invading.”

“Good point, Steve,” President Warner said to Cogster. “Well, Phil, it’s time for some of your inimitable wisdom,” Warner said to Secretary of State Phil Gordon, walked to the back of the desk, parted the curtains and stared out at the city.

“I’ve been thinking about this for some time,” Gordon said. Pacino leaned forward. “If we go in for an invasion, we go too far. We lose — millions killed, loss of prestige. If we do nothing, we do too little. Much too little. Loss of world respect, administration appears weak—”

“That’s not going to happen,” Warner said, her voice momentarily rising. She frowned, hearing it.

“Absolutely not. Madam President. So we’re walking a tightrope, as usual. The middle course seems the best all around. We put up a blockade around Japan. Nothing goes in. Nothing comes out. They’ll be in serious domestic turmoil within three months. Before that happens I believe they’ll let us inspect their weapons, even allow us to take away the nastier ones, quietly let the air force and navy decline. By then, some new crisis will come up, the revolution in India and that wild man Nipun, and we can let Japan save some face. We mostly need to worry about how to prop up Greater Manchuria for the next month or so.”

“Great,” Cogster said. “Our best option according to Phil is to starve the Japanese. The little children starve to death on the APN network, bellies all swollen, tears coming down their sweet dirty faces, and it will be our fault. Or worse.”

“Worse?” Warner asked. “Yes, ma’am. The Japanese could well come out fighting. That is their heritage and history, after all.”

“And what would they do? What is their capacity?”

“Perhaps our Admiral Pacino should answer that question,” General Clough said. The people in the room all turned to stare at Pacino. The moment he had dreaded. Well, time to get on with it, he thought.

“Since setting up and enforcing a blockade is an act of war,” he began, “we had better remember that the Japanese have a blue-water navy made up entirely of submarine assets. Their air force is formidable. Several squadrons of Firestar fighters. As I’m sure General Clough knows, the Firestar fighters are considered more than a match for our F-16s, F-15s and F-14s. The F/A-18 stands a slight chance, and the AFX advanced fighter has technology almost as good. Almost. As far as the Maritime Self Defense Force is concerned, half of the subs are the new Destiny III class, computer-controlled and extremely quiet. The other half are the Destiny II class, the earlier manned vessels. Also quiet and lethal. Just one of these submarines lurking off the coast of Japan would make a battle-group commander think twice about setting up a blockade. But it’s more than one. There are almost thirty of these killer subs. Some are being built, some are being repaired or refitted, but our latest estimates show between twenty-two and twenty-six vessels.”

“So?” CIA director Leach asked, speaking up for the first time, while looking at his fingernails. “The Japanese may have some nice toys, as you say, but I understand their robot subs are problematic and—”

Warner broke in. “Admiral Pacino, you called a blockade an act of war?”

“Madam President, as far as international and maritime law are concerned, a blockade is exactly that. We would be as much at war with Japan, legally, as if we’d invaded them.”

“That’s true, technically,” Phillip Gordon said, surprised at Pacino’s fairly arcane knowledge for a military man. “We could introduce a resolution to the UN that specifies sanctions against Japan, no one trading with her at all, unless Japan allows a UN team to inspect and dismantle all the other radiation weapons, as well as ordering Japan to eliminate her air force and navy. The trouble is getting key nations to go along with the sanctions. We’ve had conversations with Vorontsev’s people.” Vladimir Vorontsev was the new president of the Russian Republic.

“And?” Warner prompted.

“Well, we need to consider events in Russia as well as those in Japan. Russia and America, as you all know, have grown further apart over the last fifteen years. Russia’s governments have been steadily more authoritarian. The Russians are poor. If we set up an effective economic embargo, Russia will abstain from voting for sanctions in the Security Council. It will be an opportunity for them to cozy up to a power, to Japan. Russia has the oil, ore, and lumber that the Japanese need. If we put sanctions on Japan, Russia will still trade with them. They’ll see it as win-win. They get trade and reduce their own risk of being invaded themselves by Japan. Bottom line — Russia will keep Japan resupplied even after the UN votes sanctions. So sanctions will mean nothing. We are back to a blockade now, which would eliminate a Russian resupply.”

Pacino looked at her, almost seeing through her attempts to seem almost naive, a posture that made the men speak their minds more than if she revealed her own opinions.

“Furthermore,” Gordon said. “If we are slow to put up a blockade around Japan, the Russians would resupply Japan, neutralizing the sanctions. We would have a very tough time effecting a blockade two weeks from now, with the Russians already supplying Japan — it would mean a confrontation at sea with the Russians. If we go ahead and set it up now, the Russians would think twice about running it.”

“You’ll still have to wait,” Pacino put in. “The carrier battle group operating in the Pacific under Exercise Pacific Thrust is a long way from Japan. Seven days at tactical-approach velocity from the inner waters around Japan.”

“So, Admiral Pacino,” the president said! “you are saying the blockade would be an act of war. And Phillip, you’re saying that without it, sanctions are useless, because there’s a new Russian alignment toward Japan.”

“Exactly,” Philip Gordon said. “Another damned tightrope.”

“Admiral Pacino, how would you recommend proceeding?”

Thin ice, Pacino thought. With Wadsworth in Africa, he was being asked to recommend the Navy’s advice during a time of crisis. If he were wrong, Wadsworth would crucify him. If he were right, Wadsworth would be just as angry for taking the political spotlight from him.

“I’m sure Admiral Wadsworth would be better to—”

“Admiral Pacino,” Warner said, iron in her voice, “I’ve asked’your recommendation and I want to hear it. I didn’t ask Boxing Tony, I asked you.”

“Yes, well, I see it like this. The fleet is a week out of Japan. We should do our work now in the UN, as though sanctions will work. We get State to work on Vorontsev to hold back, even if it means giving him some trade benefits, making him whole on the money he’ll lose. Then we take out every Japanese Galaxy satellite in orbit, all ten of them. Our submarines sortie from east and west, seek out the Japanese fleet and sink their submarines. Our aircraft carrier air arm takes on the Firestar fighters, one hopes with a covert night raid that catches them on the ground. Or General Clough’s Stealth fighters could go in to neutralize the air force. And if we’re quick about it, we could use air attacks to neutralize some of their submarines, because once they’re at sea, they’ll give us a hell of a fight. We can claim that the strike is done to bring Japan back into compliance with their own constitution, and that we have to take that step because the Greater Manchurian missile attack shows that they can’t be trusted with a military. By that time the USS Ronald Reagan is in the immediate waters off Japan and we can enforce our blockade. The Russians, I suggest, won’t fool with us when we have Japan surrounded. But just in case, I recommend we also send the other battle groups to sea.”

Pacino reached into his briefcase for his Writepad computer.

“The carriers Abraham Lincoln and United States are in Pearl Harbor, being fueled and loaded out now. They can be ready to go to sea tomorrow on your orders, Madam President. In addition we can assemble a European force with the French carrier De Gaulle and the Royal Navy’s Ark Royal, both of them accompanied by their escort forces. The Brits and French are visiting Guam now and they can load out, fuel up and get underway within thirty-six hours. The Royal Australian Navy has a small force that could come up from the south. By Christmas, if we’re quick, we could have Japan encircled.”

Warner waited for comments, and when there were none, looked hard at Pacino.

“Admiral, you are saying you would hold off the Japanese until the first carrier battle group is closer, then take out the Japanese surveillance and communication satellites, then attack and blow up the Japanese air force and submarine navy, then set up the blockade. Is that how you see it?”

“Yes, ma’am. We should be deliberate about it, but we should hit the Japanese with a knockout punch now and make our demands later.”

“And if they fight back?”

“Madam President, they will fight back. This is exactly what happened just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. We cut off the flow of their oil, they were backed into a corner. Once in the corner, they fought to get out, among other things. And they’ll do it again.”

“So you’re saying we are heading for war?”

“I’m saying that Japan is an island nation. It’s like a scuba diver, if you will. If we cut off its air, it can either die or fight back, and the Japanese aren’t likely to lie down and die.”

“And so?”

“The Reagan task force is accompanied by two 688-class submarines. If the Japanese deploy their submarines in force they could conceivably overcome the 688 subs and sink them. After that, the surface force would be easy pickings. There are a dozen admirals in the navy senior to me who would jump down my throat for saying this, but it’s true — the only effective antisubmarine warfare device is another submarine. Destroyers and frigates and helicopters and P-3 patrol planes are good, damned good, but good won’t wash against the Japanese. Their subs and crews are the best. Their technology is on the cutting edge. Their sub is the latest generation built. Even our Seawolf class was designed a decade and a half ago, and we only have two of them. The Destiny class is equal to, if not better than, the NSSN, our new submarine being designed.”

Leach shook his head. “You sound like your counterparts did during the Cold War — ‘The Russians are better than we are, they have all the best stuff, they can kick our tails.’ Then when it came to it, their military was revealed to be overstated and we’d spent our national product on guns, defending against an alleged tiger bear, forgive me, that was a paper tiger going flat broke.”

Pacino said nothing. Leach, the head of the CIA, had no business holding his job with such an attitude. No wonder Donchez couldn’t stand him.

“Dick?” President Warner asked Donchez.

“My opinion on the issue is that Japan is once again threatening all of Asia, and the world demands something be done. Our people think we should do something about it. Our response to this must be governed by the best interests of America. And by Japan’s peculiar response to threats of force. Here’s what I mean. Al was right when he said we need to have a clear objective, something more than pie in the sky. We must know what we want and be willing to take only that, nothing less. The American people must buy into that objective before we act. And I think the objective is to walk away from this event with Japan’s radiation missiles destroyed, their submarines and fighters reduced in number to what they really need for home defense. This would involve international inspectors or advisors on Japanese soil. Now — here’s how we do that…”

“We have to realize that the Japanese famed national pride would be a casualty of this operation. These people will die before they’ll accept some of what I am suggesting. They will fight, so we must be prepared for that. We must expect a violent reaction to a blockade. I think Admiral Pacino has it right — we need to do a coordinated attack on the Japanese Galaxy satellites, encircle Japan, keep Russia out of the scene, whatever the cost, and take on the Japanese air force with ground attacks or air-to-air combat. We will have casualties and lose some of our force strength. Once the blockade is in place, I fully expect the Maritime Self Defense Force to come out fighting.”

“Why?” Leach said. “Just because you and Pacino think it’s 1941? That was then. This is now, for God’s sake.”

“Same cultures. Same ocean in between. Same island economy in Japan. Same worldview in America. They have guns and ships and airplanes. We have guns and ships and airplanes. Three generations later, and it’ll come down to the same fight.”

Warner turned toward Leach. “Brian, what’s on your mind?”

“Well,” Leach began in his faintly singsong voice, “I think we’ve all missed the point here. We’re already talking about war, how we’ll do it, what the bad guys will do, what the public will think.” Leach crossed his legs, the hair showing on the skin of his ankles. He pulled a pair of half-frame glasses from his shirt pocket and perched them on the end of his nose. “We haven’t discussed diplomacy yet.”

Leach now looked over his glasses at Phillip Gordon, secretary of state, as if denigrating him for not doing his job.

“We haven’t discussed nonmilitary options yet. I think we should have our ambassador there explain some simple facts to Prime Minister Kurita. Facts such as — we have the power to completely bottle up the Japanese islands. We can blow up their entire military. Madam President, I suggest we get smart. Ask politely, spell out the facts. I believe the Japanese will cooperate — they don’t want to lose face. I urge you to consider that.”

Warner paced, finally stopped, again in front of the window.

“General Sverdlov,” she called. She had yet to ask the opinion of the incoming nominee for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Sverdlov was a young-looking general, short with a full head of straight, fine brown hair, teeth so smooth and white as to seem capped or coated, and a perpetual smile. With his recent ear operation he was rarely seen without a ball of cotton in his right ear, and he had stumbled slightly on the way in, his equilibrium thrown off. Pacino had met him at several Pentagon parties, and they had gotten along well, although Sverdlov’s second wife had seemed a bit young and flirty.

Sverdlov blinked and rubbed his chin, his teeth appearing as he smiled. “You know. Madam President, when a cancer patient goes to a surgeon, the surgeon recommends surgery. An oncologist recommends chemotherapy or radiation. A faith healer recommends prayer and herbs. A tree surgeon, he pulls out a damned chain saw. If you put a situation like this in front of the Navy,” Sverdlov pointed to Pacino and Donchez, since Donchez had once been the Chief of Naval Operations, “they’ll recommend blockade. The Secretary of State will urge diplomacy, and CIA and NSA will recommend spying for more information or a covert operation to assassinate the prime minister. But the call for diplomatic means from CIA and the call for a military operation from State tell me that this situation is far beyond routine. So now you want the overall military view, knowing I’m an Army professional.”

Sverdlov flashed a dazzling smile, neutralizing any thoughts of the crowd around him that he was being pompous.

“I’d say blockade now if we had the carrier battle groups closer to Japan, but I do not want to advise that until our forces are in position. If we announce a blockade and the Russians run goods to Japan, it’ll be damned hard to set up a blockade piecemeal and stop the Russian resupply. If we just send in an ambassador to threaten Japan, we appear weak to them and the world. I suggest a compromise.”

Pacino smiled to himself. It was no wonder Sverdlov had managed to work his way to the top — as a military man he was a master politician. Which made Pacino wonder about the future of his own career, with his bull-in-a-china-shop approach, and with Wadsworth gunning for him.

“Let’s do this,” Sverdlov went on. “For the next two days we say nothing. No comment. The Navy makes announcements and gets into the news with a massive deployment of the fleets out of Pearl Harbor. The battle group at sea heads directly for Japan, and the other battle groups follow suit. Five days of steaming later, the Japanese Galaxy satellites show all this firepower headed their way, almost there. The first battle group is already in position. We let the Russians do what they want, with a notice to them that at noon on Day Zero, something will change. Then, only then, our ambassador comes knocking. He says he’s got a face-saving deal in mind for the Japanese. The deal is, we slip in some UN inspectors, we put in at Port Yokosuka with a battle group, and what’s in it for the Japanese is that we will let them back into our trade markets, slowly and quietly, and in two weeks this all drops from the news and we go on.”

“What if Kurita says no?” Warner asked, a warm expression directed at Sverdlov.

Obviously Warner was one of Sverdlov’s many champions, Pacino thought.

“That would be crazy, though I admit the Japanese sometimes look that way to Western eyes. Okay, so let’s assume they turn us down. All the better for us, because then we have no choice but to set up the blockade. And we do, but our ships just watch the commercial boat traffic for a day, let the reality sink in. We ask Kurita one last time. He says no again. We announce that for one week we will blockade Japan. We start our stranglehold and let them feel it. We ask Kurita again. Again he says no. We keep up the blockade. Every week we ask. When Kurita says no, we’ll publish that to the world. Then the starving people are his fault. Eventually, I believe we’ll work it out.”

“Thanks, General, very interesting. Now, Mr. Cogster?”

Cogster cleared his throat and uncrossed his legs. “General Sverdlov seems to have the situation analyzed. Although we haven’t answered the one question we should have asked at first. What happens if we just do nothing? Why do we feel we have to solve every international squabble in the world? What’s Greater Manchuria to us? What is Japan to us?”

“Alex, what do you think of Steve’s playing, I assume, devil’s advocate?”

Alex Addison, Chief of Staff, lifted an eyebrow and rubbed his nose. “Well, I think the answer’s obvious, Madam President. If we do nothing we announce to the world that we’re the Great Britain of the twenty-first century, a former world power, no longer a player. Greater Manchuria is a good friend to have because of its location and resources, its counterbalance to Russia and the Chinas. And Japan is a problem to us. If we let them get away with this, that is a slippery slope. Japan then would have a blank check to use their illegal military any damned way they want. And then finally, our popularity figures will literally go negative. The public wants action. If we want to be here in two years to finish your good work, we’d better give Admirals Pacino and Wadsworth some orders.”

“Steve?” Warner asked expectantly.

Cogster looked at the shine of his shoes. “I have to say that I don’t think the Navy is adequately represented here. We have a junior flag officer who commands submarines, and I mean no disrespect, Admiral Pacino, we’ve all heard about how brave you are, your Navy Cross and all those other medals, but you do have a sub man’s point of view. Your worries about Japan’s subs are a case in point. Maybe they’re no big deal. I don’t know, but I’d like to hear what Admiral Wadsworth has to say about this.”

“Okay, Steve,” Warner said. “But what about Admiral Donchez, who was chief of naval operations just two years ago?”

Cogster smiled tentatively at Donchez.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, looking at Warner for the first time. “That was then. Two years ago. This is now. Wadsworth is the officer responsible for the Navy. I say let’s get his input.”

The Blowtorch speaks, Pacino thought, while trying to keep his face impassive.

“Well, Steve, you do have a point, but we need to put a plan in action now. Can we raise Admiral Wadsworth on the videolink?” Warner waved over a staffer who took four other staffers and began scurrying in and out of the room while the occupants shared an uncomfortable silence. Pacino turned on his Writepad computer and began scribbling on the one-page display. With his finger he drew a line vertically down the center of the page and on the left wrote “Blockade” and on the right “Delay.” The notes below each were his ideas for orders to the combined submarine force for each decision. By the time the videolink was ready with Wadsworth, Pacino felt he had the embryo of a plan.

Wadsworth wore whites, in contrast to Pacino’s dress blues, since Wadsworth was in tropical Africa. Warner briefed Wadsworth on the situation as if he hadn’t heard, then informed him of the recommendations of the men in the room, eventually outlining Pacino’s ideas. Wadsworth’s face tightened at the last.

Finally Warner asked the admiral his opinion.

“It’s difficult for me to believe Admiral Pacino would want to attack Japan without provocation. That is a dangerous recommendation. He apparently feels that our carrier battle groups are no match for the Japanese submarine force, and, Madam President, that is just his parochial submariner attitude. The Japanese forces’ reputations are overblown. They have high technology, and the bugs that go with it. Their planes have low reliability and their submarines don’t always work. Let’s not make this decision based on guesses. I recommend we use the diplomatic solution, and we should keep the USS Reagan force Japan-bound, and I do want the Abe Lincoln and United States sent to sea toward the northwest Pacific, but no threats, no talk of blockade. Let’s let diplomacy work.”

“Thank you. Admiral,” Warner said, beginning to look weary. “Steve?”

“Ma’am, it’s up to us to do the right thing. Admiral Wadsworth’s sober and responsible recommendation is the right thing.”

“Admiral Pacino?”

“Yes, ma’am?” Wadsworth was having his revenge, and at what cost?

“Do you agree with Admiral Wadsworth?”

This was it, he thought. Either he bought into what he believed was a flawed plan and watched it fail, or he publicly disagreed with Wadsworth and was quietly relieved and retired from the Navy ten days from now when Wadsworth came back and built up a case against him. Which would be easy — he had, after all, lost two ships in five years, albeit in combat, but nevertheless, it was a dual black mark. Pacino looked at Wadsworth’s puffy face on the video screen and decided he didn’t want to be part of a Navy with a Wadsworth in charge.

He had had a wonderful career, and every career had to end. In the military, that came about by death, disability, resignation or retirement. And retirement could be voluntary or forced. Perhaps resignation held more dignity, particularly when the politics of flag rank became too much. He thought about his waterfront house over the Severn River, facing the Naval Academy, about his dreary office at the base in Norfolk, about the fact that for the rest of his career he would probably just command one office after another, never again giving rudder orders aboard a nuclear submarine. That duty was reserved for younger officers. So what was left for him? No longer eligible for submarine command, the rest of his career would be a series of meetings like this one.

With that thought, Pacino made his decision.

“Madam President, not only do I completely disagree with Admiral Wadsworth, I’m willing to put my reasons why in a memo to you. Admiral Wadsworth, I’ll be sure and have a copy on your desk for when you return from Africa. If we do as Admiral Wadsworth suggests, the Japanese submarine fleet will put to sea as soon as they see our carrier battle groups coming, which they will if we aren’t going to knock out their surveillance satellites. When the battle groups are finally in position, the Japanese sub force will put our surface ships on the bottom the minute we say the word ’blockade.’ If we want this operation to work, we have to sortie the fleet, hit the Galaxy satellites, attack the sub bases and air force bases, and blow away their planes and ships — and all within a six-hour interval — and tighten the rope around Tokyo’s neck. If we fail to commit to that level, Admiral Wadsworth’s surface sailors will be drinking seawater. And I suggest history will remember the men in this room — and in our videolink — as cowards and failures.”

There was a shocked silence in the room. Wadsworth heard Pacino on a two-second delay. As the words registered a storm came over his face.

Pacino no longer cared, and ignored the video display and the recording camera. Donchez’s face was a study in mixed emotions. Pacino didn’t care about that either. He began packing his notes in his briefcase.

“Admiral Pacino,” President Warner said, her tone neutral, “I think perhaps it would be best if you got yourself back to your office. The rest of us need to talk to Admiral Wadsworth. Thank you for your time. And your outspoken and candid opinion.”

Pacino stood and nodded to Donchez, then followed one of Warner’s staffers out of the Oval Office. He doubted he’d ever see the inside of it again.