Dragon

Everyone unfolded the drawings and studied the layout of the facility that represented the worst threat the free world had faced since the Cuban missile crisis. No one spoke as they traced the passageways, memorized the labels describing the rooms, and examined the dimensions.

“The center must be a good three hundred meters below the island’s surface,” observed Mancuso.

“There’s no airstrip or dock on the island,” Stacy murmured in concentration. “The only entry is by helicopter or from Edo City through the tunnel.”

Pitt drank the last of his tequila. “No way in by sea unless the assaulting force were professional mountain climbers. And at that, they’d be picked off by Suma’s defense systems like ants crawling up a white wall.”

“What are those buildings on the surface?” asked Weatherhill.

“A luxury retreat for Suma’s top management. They meet there for business conferences. It also makes an ideal location for secret meetings with politicians, government bureaucrats, and underworld leaders.”

“Shimzu’s painting showed an island barren of plant life,” said Pitt. “Half the island appears covered by trees.”

“Planted by Suma’s landscape people over the past twenty years,” explained Penner.

Mancuso scratched his nose thoughtfully. “What about an elevator between the retreat and the control center?”

Penner shook his head. “Nothing showed on the plans. We can’t risk penetration down the shaft if we don’t have a location.”

“An underground facility of this scope requires outside ventilation.”

“Our engineering team believes several of the houses within the resort area are dummy covers for air vents and exhaust ducts.”

“We might give that a try.” Weatherhill laughed. “I’m good at ducts.”

Penner shrugged. “Again, not enough information. It’s possible air is pumped in from Edo, and the foul returned and vented along with the city’s outflow.”

Pitt looked at Penner. “What are the chances Loren and Diaz are held prisoners on the island?”

Penner gave an unknowing shrug. “Fair to good. We haven’t tracked them down yet. But resortlike accommodations on an impregnable island would certainly make an ideal safe house to hide hostages.”

“Hostages, yes,” said Stacy, “but under what terms? No word of Congresswoman Smith and Senator Diaz has been heard since they were abducted.”

“No demands have been received,” explained Penner, “forcing the President into a wait-and-see game. And until we can provide him with enough intelligence to make a judgment call on a rescue operation, he won’t give the order.”

Giordino gazed at Penner with a small air of contemplation. “There must be a plan to trash the joint, there’s always a plan.”

“We have one,” replied Penner, committing himself. “Don Kern has created an intricate but viable operation to penetrate and disable the center’s electronic systems.”

“What kind of defenses are we talking about?” inquired Pitt. “Suma wouldn’t sink heavy effort and money into the eighth wonder of the modern world without protecting the hell out of it.

“We can’t say with any accuracy.” Penner’s eyes swept over the island model with a look of concern. “We do know what security and military technology is available to Suma, and must assume he’s installed the best sensory gear his money can buy. Exotic radar equipment for land and sea detection, sonar sensors for underwater approach, laser and heat detection ringing the perimeter of the shore. Not the least of which is an army of armed robots.”

“And lest we forget, an arsenal of hidden surface-to-sea-and-air missiles.” This from Pitt.

“It won’t be an easy nut to crack,” Weatherhill said in a classic understatement.

Giordino looked at Penner, amused, curious. “Looks to me like an assault by at least five Special Forces assault teams, preceded by an attack of naval carrier aircraft and a bombardment by a strike fleet to soften up the defenses, is the only way anybody’s going to get inside that rock.”

“Either that,” Pitt tagged, “or a damn big nuclear bomb.”

Penner smiled dryly. “Since neither of your suggestions fits into the practical scheme of things, we’ll have to use other means to do the job.”

“Let me guess.” Mancuso was acid. As he spoke he gestured to Stacy, Weatherhill, and himself. “The three of us go in through the tunnel.”

“All five of you are going in,” Penner murmured quietly. “Though not all by way of the tunnel.”

Stacy gasped in surprise. “Frank, Timothy and I are highly trained professionals at forced entry. Dirk and Al are marine engineers. They have neither the skill nor the experience for a tricky penetration operation. Surely you don’t intend to send them in too?”

“Yes I do,” Penner insisted quietly. “They are not as helpless as you imply.”

“Do we get to wear black ninja suits and flit through the tunnel like bats?” There was no mistaking the cynicism in Pitt’s voice.

“Not at all,” Penner said calmly. “You and Al are going to drop in on the island and create a diversion to coincide with the entry of the others from Edo City.”

“Not by parachute,” Giordino groaned. “God, I hate parachutes.”

“So!” Pitt said thoughtfully. “The great Pitt and Giordino the magnificent fly into Hideki Suma’s private resort fortress with bugles sounding, bells ringing, and drums beating. Then get executed samurai style as trespassing spies. Kind of taking us for granted, aren’t you, Penner?”

“There is some risk, I admit,” Penner said defensively. “But I have no intention of sending you to your deaths.”

Giordino looked at Pitt. “Do you get the feeling we’re being used?”

“How about screwed?”

With his partisan eye Pitt knew the Director of Field Operations wasn’t acting purely on his own authority. The plan had come from Kern with Jordan’s approval and the President’s blessing on top of that. He turned and stared at Stacy. She had “Don’t go” written all over her face.

“Once we get on the island, what then?” he queried.

“You avoid capture as long as possible to distract Suma’s security forces, hiding out until we can mount a rescue mission to evacuate the entire team.”

“Against state-of-the-art security, we won’t last ten minutes.”

“No one expects miracles.”

Pitt said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“We fall from the sky and play hide-and-seek with Suma’s robots while the three pros sneak in through a sixty-kilometer tunnel?” Any hint of irritation, incredulity, and despair was contained with great force of will by Pitt. “That’s the plan? That’s all there is?”

“Yes,” Penner said, self-consciously avoiding Pitt’s blazing stare.

“Your pals in Washington must have drawn that brilliant piece of creativity out of a fortune cookie.”

In his mind, Pitt never doubted his decision. If there was the slightest chance Loren was held prisoner on the island, he would go.

“Why can’t you simply cut off their power source on the mainland?” asked Giordino.

“Because the control center is entirely self-sustaining,” replied Penner. “It has its own generating station.”

Pitt looked at Giordino. “What do you say, big Al?”

“That resort have geishas?”

“Suma has a reputation for hiring only beautiful women,” Penner answered with a faint smile.

Pitt asked, “How do we fly in without being blown out of the sky?”

Penner smiled a smile that seemed to portend something good for a change. “Now that part of the plan has an A-number-one gilt-edge rating for success.”

“It had better,” said Pitt with ice in his opaline eyes. “Or somebody’s going to get hurt real bad.”

44

AS PENNER HAD suggested, being shot down in flames was not a likely prospect. The ultralight power gliders that Pitt and Giordino were to fly off the landing pad of the U.S. Navy detection and tracking ship Ralph R. Bennett looked like pint-sized Stealth bombers. They were painted a dark gray and sported the same weird Buck Rogers shape that made them impossible to see on radar.

They sat like alien bugs under the shadow of the ship’s giant box-shaped phased-array radar. The six-story-high system was composed of 18,000 antenna elements that collected a wide range of intelligence data on Soviet missile tests with an incredible degree of accuracy. The Ralph R. Bennett had been pulled away from its mission near the Kamchatka Peninsula by presidential order to launch the power gliders and monitor activity in and around Soseki Island.

Lieutenant Commander Raymond Simpson, a man on the young side of thirty with sun-bleached blond hair, stood next to the men from NUMA on the open deck. There was an air of capable toughness about him as he kept a tight eye on his maintenance crew, who swarmed around the tiny aircraft fueling tanks and examining instruments and controls.

“Think we can manage without a check flight?” Pitt asked.

“A piece of cake for old Air Force pilots like yourselves,” answered Simpson lightly. “Once you get the hang of flying while lying on your stomach, you’ll wish you could take one home and keep it for your personal use.”

Pitt had never laid eyes on one of the odd ultralight craft until he and Giordino landed on the ship by an Osprey tilt-motor aircraft an hour before. Now after only forty minutes of class instruction, they were supposed to fly them over a hundred kilometers of open sea and make an injury-free landing on the dangerously rugged surface of Soseki Island.

“How long have these birds been around?” Giordino queried.

“The Ibis X-Twenty,” Simpson corrected him, “is fresh off the drawing boards.”

“Oh, God,” groaned Giordino. “They’re still experimental.”

“Quite so. They haven’t completed their testing program. Sorry I couldn’t have given you something more proven, but your people in Washington were in an awful rush, insisting we deliver them halfway across the world in eighteen hours and all.”

Pitt said consideringly, “They do fly, naturally?”

“Oh, naturally,” Simpson said enthusiastically. “I’ve got ten hours’ flying time in them myself. Super aircraft. Designed for one-man reconnaissance flights. Powered by the very latest in compact turbine engines that provide a three-hundred-kilometer-per-hour cruising speed with a range of a hundred twenty kilometers. The Ibis is the most advanced power glider in the world.”

“Maybe when you get discharged you can open up a dealership,” Giordino said dryly.

“Don’t I wish,” said Simpson without feeling the barb.

The skipper of the radar ship, Commander Wendell Harper, stepped onto the landing pad with a large photo gripped in one hand. Tall and beefy with a solid paunch, Harper’s bowlegged gait gave him the appearance of a man who had just ridden across the Kansas plains for the Pony Express.

“Our meteorology officer promises you’ll have a four-knot tail wind for the flight,” he said pleasantly. “So fuel won’t be a problem.”

Pitt nodded a greeting. “I hope our reconnaissance satellite came up with a decent landing site.”

Harper spread an enlarged computer-enhanced satellite photo up against a bulkhead. “Not exactly O’Hare Airport in Chicago, the only flat spot on the island is a grassy area measuring twenty by sixty meters.”

“Plenty of room for an upwind landing,” Simpson injected optimistically.

Pitt and Giordino moved in and stared at the amazingly detailed picture. The central feature was a landscaped garden clustered around a rectangular lawn that was only open from the east. The other three sides were thickly bordered by trees, shrubbery, and pagoda-roofed buildings with high curved bridges leading down from open balconies to an Oriental pond at one end.

Like condemned men who’d just been told they had a choice of being hanged on the gallows or shot against a wall, Pitt and Giordino looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged tired cynical smiles.

“Hide out until rescued,” Giordino muttered unhappily. “Why do I get the feeling my ballot box has been stuffed?”

“Nothing like arriving at the front door with a brass band,” Pitt agreed.

“Something wrong?” asked Harper innocently.

“Victims of high-pressure salesmanship,” Pitt replied. “Someone in Washington took advantage of our gullible nature.”

Harper looked uneasy. “Do you wish to scrub the operation?”

“No,” Pitt sighed. “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”

“I don’t mean to crowd you, but sunset is only an hour away. You’ll need daylight to see your way in.”

At that moment, Simpson’s crew chief came over and informed him the power gliders were serviced and ready for launch.

Pitt looked at the fragile little aircraft. Calling it a glider was a misnomer. Without the strong thrust of its turbine engine, it would drop like a brick. Unlike the high, wide wing of a true ultralight, with its maze of wires and cables, the airfoils on the Ibis were short and stubby and internally braced. It also lacked the ultralight’s canard wing that resisted stalls and spins. He was reminded of the adage about the bumblebee as having all the wrong features for flight, and yet it flew as well as, if not better than, many other insects that Mother Nature had aerodynamically designed.

After finishing their preflight check, the flight crew stood off to the side of the landing pad. In Pitt’s mind they all wore the look of spectators at an auto race anticipating a crash.

“Maybe we can land in time for cocktails,” he said, pulling on his helmet.

With routine calm Giordino merely yawned. “If you get there first, order me a vodka martini straight up.”

Harper incredulously realized that glacial nonchalance was the highest state of emotional nervousness these men were capable of displaying.

“Good luck,” he said, offering both men a firm handshake. “We’ll monitor you all the way. Be sure to activate your signal unit after landing. We’d like to tell Washington you came down safely.”

Pitt gave him a wry smile. “If I’m able.”

“Never a doubt,” Simpson said, as if cheering the home team. “Mind you don’t forget to set the self-destruct timer. Can’t make the Japs a gift of our ultralight technology.”

“Goodbye, and thanks to you and your crews for looking out for us.”

Giordino touched Pitt on the shoulder, gave him an encouraging wink of one eye, and without another word walked toward his craft.

Pitt approached his power glider and eased in from the bottom through a narrow hatch in the fabric-covered fuselage and onto his stomach until his body fit the contours of a body-length foam rubber pad. His head and shoulders were elevated only slightly higher than his legs, elbows swinging free a centimeter above the floor. He adjusted his safety harness and belts that strapped across his shoulder blades and buttocks. Then he inserted his outstretched feet into grips on the vertical stabilizer and brake pedals, and then gripped the stubby control stick in one hand while adjusting the throttle setting with the other.

He waved through the minuscule windscreen at the crew who were standing by to release tie-down cables, and he engaged the starter. The turbine, smaller than a beer keg, slowly increased its whine until it became a high-pitched shriek. He looked over at Giordino, just making out a set of spirited brown eyes. Pitt made a thumbs-up gesture that was returned accompanied with a grin.

One last sweep of the instruments to make sure the engine was functioning as stated in the flight manual, which he barely had time to scan, and a final glimpse at the ensign flapping on the stern under a stiff breeze that beat in from the port side.

Unlike from an aircraft carrier, a forward takeoff was blocked by the great radar housing and the superstructure, so Commander Harper had brought the Bennett around into a quartering wind.

Pitt held the brake on by pressing his toes outward. Then he ran up the throttle, feeling the Ibis try to surge forward. The lip of the landing pad looked uncomfortably close. The lifting force of the Ibis occurred at forty-five kph. The combined wind force and the speed of the Bennett gave him a twenty-five kph running start, but that still left twenty kph to achieve before the landing wheels rolled into air.

The moment of decision. He signaled the flight crew to release the tie-down cables. Then Pitt eased the throttle to the “full” stop, and the Ibis shuddered under the force of the breeze and the thrust of the turbine. His eyes fixed on the end of the landing pad, Pitt released the brakes and the Ibis leaped ahead. Five meters, ten, and then gently but firmly he pulled the control stick back. The craft’s little nose wheel lifted and Pitt could see clouds. With only three meters to spare, he drilled the Ibis into the sky and over the restless sea.

He banked and leveled off at forty meters and watched Giordino sweep into the air behind him. One circle around the ship, dipping his wings at the waving crew of the Ralph R. Bennett, and he set a course for Soseki Island toward the west. The waters of the Pacific rushed beneath the Ibis’ undercarriage, dyed a sparkling iridescent gold by the setting sun.

Pitt slipped the throttle back to a cruise setting. He wished he could put the little craft through its paces, gain altitude, and try some acrobatics. But it was not to be. Any wild maneuvers might show on a Japanese radar screen. In straight and level flight at a wave-top altitude the Ibis was invisible.

Pitt now began to wonder about a reception committee. He saw little hope of escaping from the retreat’s compound. A nice setup, he thought grimly. Crash-land in Suma’s front yard from out of nowhere and create bedlam among the security forces as a distraction for the others.

The crew in the Bennett’s situation room had detected the incoming radar signals sent out by Suma’s security defenses, but Commander Harper decided not to jam the probes. He allowed the Bennett to be monitored, rightly assuming the island’s defense command would relax once they saw the lone U.S. ship was sailing leisurely away toward the east as if on a routine voyage.

Pitt concentrated on his navigation, keeping an eye on the compass. At their present air speed, he calculated, they should set down on the island in thirty-five minutes. A few degrees north or south, however, and they might miss it completely.

It was all seat-of-the-pants flying and navigation. The Ibis could not afford the extra weight of an on-board computer and an automatic pilot. He rechecked speed, wind direction and velocity, and his estimated course heading four times to make certain no errors slipped in.

The thought of running out of fuel and ditching in a rough sea in the dead of night was a hardship he could do without.

Pitt noted grimly that the radios had been removed. By Jordan’s orders, no doubt, so neither he nor Giordino would be tempted to launch into idle conversation and give their presence away.

After twenty-seven minutes had passed, and only a small arc of the sun showed on the horizon line, Pitt peered forward through the windscreen.

There it was, a purple-shadowed blemish between sea and sky, more imagined than real. Almost imperceptibly it became a hard tangible island, its jagged cliffs rising vertically from the rolling swells that crashed into their base.

Pitt turned and glanced out his side window. Giordino hung just off his tail and less than ten meters behind and to his right. Pitt waggled his wings and pointed. Giordino pulled closer until Pitt could see him nod in reply and gesture with the edge of his hand toward the island.

One final check of his instruments and then he tilted the Ibis into a gentle bank until he came at the center of the island from out of the darkening eastern sky. There would be no circling to study the layout of the ground, no second approach if he came in too low or high. Surprise was their only friend. They had one chance to set their little Ibises on the garden lawn before surface-to-air missiles burst in their laps.

He could clearly see the pagoda roofs and the opening in the trees around the open garden. He spotted a helicopter pad that wasn’t on Penner’s mock-up, but he dismissed it as a secondary landing site because it was too small and ringed with trees.

An easy twist of the wrist to the left, right, and then hold. He lowered the throttle setting a notch at a time. The sea was a blur, the towering cliff face rushing closer, swiftly filling the windscreen. He pulled the stick back slightly. And then suddenly, as if a rug was pulled out from under him, the sea was gone and his wheels were hurtling only a few meters above the hard lava rock of the island.

Straight in without a sideways glance, a gentle kick to the right rudder pedal to compensate for a crosswind. He soared over a row of bushes, the tires of his landing gear grooving the tops. Throttle back on idle, the Ibis settled beyond the point of recovery. A tender tug on the stick and the power glider flared. He felt the landing wheels thump as they lightly touched down on the lawn no more than five meters from the edge of a flower bed.

Pitt flipped the kill switch and applied gentle but firm pressure on the brakes. Nothing happened. There was no slowing force pulling his body forward. The grass was wet and the tires slid across the lawn as though coated with oil.

The urge to cram the throttle full forward and pull back on the stick was overpowering, especially since his face was only a few centimeters from the nose of the Ibis. Impact with a tree, a building, a rock wall? Directly ahead, a row of shrubs ablaze in autumn red and gold shielded any solid barrier beyond.

Pitt tensed, bent his head down, and hung on.

The craft was still traveling at thirty kph when it tore through the shrubs, ripping the wings off and plowing with a great shuddering splash into a small pond filled with huge carp.

For a moment there was a deathly silence, broken a few seconds later by splintering and tearing noise as Giordino’s Ibis ripped through the bushes alongside Pitt’s shattered craft and skidded to a stop in a sand garden, devastating intricate designs precisely raked in an artful composition.

Pitt struggled to release his safety harness, but was pinned by the legs, and his arms had no freedom of movement. His head was half submerged in the pond, and he had to tilt his face up to breathe. He could plainly see a school of giant white, black, and gold carp, their gaping mouths opening and closing, large round eyes staring blankly at the intruder in their private domain.

Giordino’s fuselage was relatively undamaged, and he managed to extricate himself without a problem. He rushed over, leaped into the pond, and surged through the muck and lily pads like a maddened hippo. With strength built from long years of bodybuilding, he tore apart the crumpled structural braces that pinned Pitt’s legs as if they were toothpicks. Then he unfastened the safety harness, pulled Pitt out of the mangled craft, and dragged him to the bank.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Bruised shins and a bent thumb,” Pitt replied. “Thanks for the deliverance.”

“I’ll send you a bill,” said Giordino, distastefully eyeing his muck-covered boots.

Pitt removed his crash helmet and threw it in the pond, causing the gawking carp to burst for the safety of the lily pads. He nodded at the wrecked power gliders. “They’ll be coming for us. You’d best switch on the signal units and set the destruct timers.”

While Giordino went about the business of alerting the Bennett of their arrival before setting the timers on small packets of plastic explosives carried inside the aircraft, Pitt rose stiffly to his feet and stared around the garden.

It appeared deserted. The army of human and robotic guards did not materialize. The porches and windows of the buildings were empty of life. He found it impossible to believe no one had heard the cry of the turbine engines and the sounds of the twin impacts from within the thin walls of the Japanese-style constructions. Someone had to live in the neighborhood. The gardeners must be about somewhere, the grounds were immaculate and displayed constant care.

Giordino returned. “We’ve less than two minutes to make tracks before they blow,” he said quickly.

“I’m out of here,” Pitt spoke as he began jogging toward the forested area behind the resort compound.

And then he stiffened suddenly as a strange electronic voice called out, “Remain where you stand!”

Pitt and Giordino both reacted by darting behind the cover of heavy brush and the safety of the trees, crouching and swiftly moving from one to another, trying to distance themselves from the unknown pursuer. They’d only covered fifty meters when they abruptly met a high fence that was bristling with electrified wire and insulators.

“The shortest escape in history,” Pitt muttered dolefully. At that instant the explosives in the Ibises went off within five seconds of each other. Pitt couldn’t see, but he imagined the ugly indolent carp flying through the air.

He and Giordino turned to face the music, and although they’d been warned, they were not totally prepared for the three mechanical apparitions that emerged from the underbrush in a half circle, cutting off all avenues of escape. The trio of robots did not look like the semihuman figures out of television and motion pictures. These traveled on rubber tractor treads and showed no human qualities, except maybe speech.

The mobile automated vehicles were loaded with a jumbled assortment of articulated arms, video and thermal image cameras, speakers, computers, and a quad of automatic rifles pointed directly at Pitt and Giordino’s navels.

“Please do not move or we will kill you.”

“They don’t mince words, do they?” Giordino was frankly disbelieving.

Pitt studied the center robot and observed that it appeared to be operated under a sophisticated telepresence system by a controller at a distant location.

“We are programmed to recognize different languages and respond accordingly,” said the middle robot in a hollow voice, sounding surprisingly articulate. “You cannot escape without dying. Our guns are guided by your body heat.”

There was a brief uneasy silence as Pitt and Giordino briefly looked at each other with the looks of men committed to a job that was accomplished and they could do no more. Carefully, slowly, they raised their hands above their heads, aware that the gun muzzles pointing at them in the horizontal position never wavered.

“I do believe we’ve been cut off at the pass by a mechanical posse,” Pitt muttered softly.

“At least they don’t chew tobacco,” Giordino grunted.

Twelve guns in the front, an electrified fence at their backs, there was no way out. Pitt could only hope the robots’ controllers were wise enough to know he and Giordino presented no threat.

“Is this a good time to ask them to take us to their leader?” Giordino spoke through a grin that was cold as stone.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Pitt answered mildly. “They’re liable to shoot us for using a bad cliché.

45

NO ONE GAVE Stacy, Mancuso, and Weatherhill a second look as they penetrated the depths of Edo City with relative ease and precision. The Hollywood makeup expert Jordan flew to Tokyo did a masterful job of applying false folds to their eyes, realigning and darkening the eyebrows, and designing wigs of luxuriant thick black hair. Mancuso, because he spoke flawless Japanese, was dressed in a business suit and acted as boss to Stacy and Weatherhill, who wore the yellow jumpsuits of Suma’s engineering inspection teams.

Using data from Jim Hanamura’s report on the security procedures, along with identification cards and pass codes provided by a British deep-cover operative working in cooperation with Jordan, they smoothly passed through the checkpoints and finally reached the entrance to the tunnel. This was the tricky part of the operation. The human security guards and identity detection machines had not proven difficult to deceive, but according to Penner during their final briefing, the final barrier would be the toughest test.

A robotic sensory security system met them as they entered a totally featureless, glaringly lit white-painted room. The floor was empty of all furniture and the walls barren of signs or pictures. The door they entered from seemed to be the only entrance and exit.

“State your business,” the robot demanded in mechanical Japanese.

Mancuso hesitated. He was told to expect robot sentry machines, but not something that looked like a trash can on wheels that spouted orders. “Fiber optic communications section to modify and inspect system,” he complied, trying to hide his awkwardness at interacting with artificial intelligence.

“Your job order and pass code.”

“Emergency order forty-six-R for communications inspection and test program.” Then he brought his open hands together, touching the fingertips lightly, and repeated the word “sha” three times.

Mancuso could only hope the British operative had supplied them with the correct pass sign and code word and had programmed their genetic codes into the robotic security memories.

“In sequence, press your right hands against my sensing screen,” ordered the roboguard.

All three dutifully took turns placing their hands on a small blinking blue screen recessed in the barrel-round chest. The robot stood mute for a few moments, processing the data from its computer and comparing facial features and body size against the names and description in its memory disks—a remarkable advance, thought Weatherhill. He’d never seen a computer that could put into memory the data fed to it by a television camera and process the images in real time.

They stood composed and businesslike, knowing from their briefing the robot was programmed to spot the slightest measure of nervousness. They also kept their eyes trained on him. Wandering, avoiding eyes would have invited suspicion. Weatherhill managed a bored yawn while their genetic codes and finger and hand prints were matched up.

“Clearance confirmed,” the roboguard said at last. Then the entire wall at the opposite end of the barren room swung inward and he rolled aside. “You may enter. If you remain beyond twelve hours, you must notify security force number six.”

The British operative had come through. They had passed the obstacle with flying colors. They walked through the door into a carpeted passageway that led to the main tunnel. They exited onto a boarding platform as a buzzer sounded and red and white strobe lights flashed. A work train loaded with construction materials was pulling away from an expansive underground rail yard with the tracks converging at the main tunnel entrance that Mancuso judged was four meters in diameter.

After three eerie minutes of complete silence, an aluminum car with a glass bubble top that could seat ten people approached the platform on a single rail. The interior was empty, the controls unmanned. A door slid open with a slight hiss and they entered.

“A Maglev,” Weatherhill said quietly.

“A what?” Stacy asked.

“Maglev, for ‘magnetic levitation.’ It’s the concept based on the repulsion and attraction between two magnets. The interaction between powerful magnets mounted under the train with others lining a single rail raised in the center moves the cars on a field of electromagnetism. That’s why it’s usually referred to as a floating train.”

“The Japs have developed the most advanced system in the world,” Mancuso added. “Once they mastered the cooling of the on-board electromagnetic superconductors, they had a vehicle that literally flies inches above its track at aircraft speeds.”

The doors closed and the little car paused as its computerized sensors waited for the all-clear-ahead. A green light blinked on above the track, and they glided into the main tube soundlessly, picking up speed until the sodium vapor lamps embedded in the roof of the tunnel merged into an eye-dazzling yellow blur.

“How fast are we going?” Stacy wondered.

“A wild guess would be three hundred and twenty kilometers an hour,” Weatherhill replied.

Mancuso nodded. “At this rate the trip should only take about five minutes.”

It seemed the floating train had no sooner reached its cruising speed than it began to slow. With the smoothness of a skyscraper elevator, it slid to a quiet stop. They stepped out onto another deserted platform. Once they were clear, the car came about on a turntable, aligned itself on the opposite rail, and accelerated back to Edo City.

“The end of the line,” Mancuso said softly. He turned and led the way through the only door on the platform. It opened into another carpeted passageway that stretched thirty meters before ending at an elevator.

Inside, Weatherhill nodded at the Arabic numerals on the control buttons. “Up or down?”

“How many floors and which one are we on?” inquired Stacy.

“Twelve. We’re on two.”

“Hanamura’s sketches only indicated four,” said Mancuso.

“They must have been preliminary drawings that were altered later.”

Stacy stared at the lighted panel pensively. “So much for the hub and spoke layout.”

“Without exact directions to the computerized electronics section,” said Weatherhill, “we’ll have to scratch our original plan and go for the power generating station.”

“If we can find it before arousing suspicion,” complained Mancuso.

“It’s all we’ve got going. Tracing electrical wiring to the source will take less time than trying to stumble onto the control center.”

“Twelve floors of rooms and passageways,” murmured Stacy uneasily. “We could wander around lost for hours.”

“We’re here and we have no alternatives,” said Mancuso, glancing at his watch. “If Pitt and Giordino were successful in landing on the island’s surface and diverting Suma’s security systems, we should have time enough to plant the plastic and escape back through the tunnel to Edo City.”

Weatherhill looked at Stacy and Mancuso, then looked at the elevator panel. He knew exactly how they felt—nerves tense, minds alert, their bodies honed and ready to act. They had come this far and now it all depended on their decisions in the next few minutes. He punched the button marked 6.

“Might as well try the middle floor,” he said with practical logic.

Mancuso raised the briefcase that camouflaged two automatic weapons and clutched it under his arm. Immobile, he and Stacy and Weatherhill stood quietly in uneasy apprehension. A few seconds later there was an audible bong, the digital light for the sixth floor flashed, and the doors spread apart.

Mancuso went through with Stacy and Weatherhill at his heels. When he stopped dead after two steps, he hardly felt the others bump into him. They all stood and stared like village idiots on a space journey to Mars.

Everywhere inside a vast domed gallery there was a bustling purposeful confusion one would expect from an army of efficient assembly line workers, except there were no spoken orders or shouts or group conversations. All of the specialists, technicians, and engineers working on a great semicircle of computers and instrument consoles were robots in myriad different sizes and shapes.

They’d struck gold on the first try. Weatherhill had unwittingly pushed the floor button that took them directly to the electronic brains of Suma’s nuclear command center. There were no human helpers anywhere in the complex. The entire work force was totally automated and made up of sophisticated high-tech machines that worked twenty-four hours a day without coffee breaks, lunch, or sick leave. An operation inconceivable to an American union leader.

Most rolled on wheels, some on tractor treads. Some had as many as seven articulated arms sprouting like octopus tentacles from wheeled carts, a few could have passed as the familiar multipurpose units found in a dentist’s office. But none walked on legs and feet, or remotely resembled C3P0 from Star Wars or Robby from Forbidden Planet. The robots were immersed in their individual work programs and went about their business without taking notice of the human intruders.

“Do you get the feeling we’ve become obsolete?” whispered Stacy.

“Not good,” said Mancuso. “We’d better get back inside the elevator.”

Weatherhill shook his head. “Not a chance. This is the complex we came to destroy. These things don’t even know we’re here. They’re not programmed to interfere with humans. And there are no robotic security guards around. Pitt and Giordino must have saved our ass by distracting them. I say we send this automated anthill to the moon.”

“The elevator has moved on,” said Stacy, pressing the “down” button. “For the next minute we’ve got nowhere else to go.

Mancuso wasted no more time in discussion. He set the briefcase on the floor and began tearing the packets of C-8 plastic explosives attached by tape from around his lower legs. The rest did the same from under their jumpsuit uniforms.

“Stacy, the computer section. Tim, the nuclear bomb prime systems. I’ll tackle the communications gear.”

They had moved less than five steps toward their given targets when a voice boomed and echoed through the concrete walls of the chamber.

“Remain where you are! Do not move or you will surely die!” Perfect English, with barely a trace of a Japanese accent, and the voice cold, menacing.

The surprise was complete, but Mancuso bluffed it out, trying to find a target for the automatic weapons inside his briefcase.

“We are test engineers on an inspection and test program. Do you wish to see and hear our pass code?”

“All human engineers and inspectors along with their codes were discontinued when the fully autonomous vehicles could perform their programs without intervention and human supervision,” the disembodied voice rumbled.

“We were not aware of the change. We were instructed by our superior to inspect the fiber-optic communications,” Mancuso persisted as his hand pressed a button disguised as a cleat on the bottom of his briefcase.

And then the elevator door opened and Roy Orita stepped out onto the control center floor. He paused for a moment, his eyes staring with a certain respect at his former MAIT team members.

“Spare the bravado,” he said with a triumphant smile. “You’ve failed. Your covert operation to stop the Kaiten Project has failed, totally and absolutely. And you’re all going to die for it.”

Jordan and Sandecker shared a light breakfast with the President at the executive retreat at Camp David. They sat at a table in a small cottage in front of a crackling hickory log fire. Jordan and the admiral found the room uncomfortably warm, but the President seemed to enjoy the heat, sipping a cup of Southern chicory-flavored coffee while wearing an Irish wool knit sweater.

The President’s special assistant, Dale Nichols, came in from the kitchen with a glass of milk. “Don Kern is outside,” he reported, addressing Jordan.

“I believe he has an update on Soseki Island,” said Jordan.

The President gestured at Nichols. “By all means, send him in.” And as an afterthought, “Get him a cup of coffee and see if he’d like anything to eat.”

Kern only accepted the coffee and took a seat on a nearby sofa. The President stared expectantly at him, but Jordan gazed emptily into the fire.

“They’re in,” Kern announced.

“They’re in,” echoed the President. “Every one of them?”

Kern nodded. “All three.”

“Any problems?” asked Jordan.

“We don’t know. Before our British contact’s signal was mysteriously cut off, he said they’d made it safely through the tunnel.”

The President reached out and shook Jordan’s hand. “Congratulations, Ray.”

“A bit premature, Mr. President,” said Jordan. “They still have hurdles to clear. Penetrating the Dragon Center is only the first step in the plan.”

“What about my men?” demanded Sandecker testily.

“They signaled a safe landing,” answered Kern. “We have no reason to believe they were injured or harmed by Suma’s security guards.”

“So where do we go from here?” inquired the President.

“After placing their explosives and putting the Dragon Center temporarily out of commission, our people will attempt to effect a rescue of Congresswoman Smith and Senator Diaz. If all goes according to plan, we’ll have breathing space to nail Hideki Suma to the nearest cross and send in our military for a wholesale destruction operation.”

The President’s face took on a concerned look. “Is it possible for two men and a woman to accomplish all that in the next thirty-six hours?”

Jordan smiled tiredly. “Trust me, Mr. President, my people can walk through walls.”

“And Pitt and Giordino?” Sandecker pressured Kern.

“Once our people signal they’re ready, a submarine will surface and launch a Delta One team to evacuate them from the island. Pitt and Giordino will be brought out too.”

“Seems to me you’re taking an awful lot for granted,” said Sandecker.

Kern gave the admiral a confident smile. “We’ve analyzed and fine-tuned every phase of the operation until we’re certain it has a ninety-six-point-seven-percent chance of success.”

Sandecker shot Kern a withering stare. “Better make that a ninety-nine-point-nine percentage factor.”

Everyone looked at Sandecker questioningly. Then Kern said uncertainly, “I don’t follow you, Admiral.”

“You overlooked the capabilities of Pitt and Giordino,” Sandecker replied with a sharp edge to his voice. “It wouldn’t be the first time they bailed out a fancy intelligence agency carnival.”

Kern looked at him strangely, then turned to Jordan for help, but it was the President who answered.

“I think what Admiral Sandecker is referring to are the several occasions Mr. Pitt has saved the government’s ass. One in particular hits close to home.” The President paused for effect. “You see, it was Pitt who saved my life along with that of Congresswoman Smith four years ago in the Gulf.”

“I remember.” Jordan turned from the fire. “He used an old Mississippi River paddle steamer to do it.”

Kern refused to back down. He felt his reputation as the nation’s best intelligence planner was on the line. “Trust me, Mr. President. The escape and evacuation will go as planned without help from NUMA. We’ve taken into account every possible flaw, every contingency. Nothing but an unpredictable act of God can prevent us from pulling it off.”

46

IT WASN’T AN act of God that prevented Mancuso, Weatherhill, and Stacy from carrying through with Kern’s exacting plan. Nor were they lacking in skill and experience. They could and occasionally did open any bank vault in the world, escape from the tightest security prisons, and penetrate the KGB headquarters in Moscow or Fidel Castro’s private residence in Cuba. There wasn’t a lock built or a security system created that would take them more than ten minutes to circumvent. The unpredictability of attack dogs could present a troublesome obstacle, but they were expert in a variety of methods to leave snarling hounds either dead or docile.

Unfortunately their bag of well-practiced tricks did not include escaping from prison cells with no windows or with doors that could only be opened from the floor when the stainless steel ceiling and walls were lifted by a mechanical arm. And after being stripped of all weapons, their martial arts training was useless against sentry robots who felt no pain and whose computerized reaction time was faster than humans’.

Suma and Kamatori considered them extremely dangerous and confined them in separate cells that held only a Japanese tatami mat, a narrow hole in the floor for a toilet, and a speaker in the ceiling. No lights were installed, and they were forced to sit alone and totally enclosed in pitch darkness, void of all emotion, their minds seeking a direction, no matter how small or remote, toward escape.

Then came a bitter realization that the cells were escape-proof. Then numbed disbelief and chagrin that despite their almost superhuman skills there was no way out. They were absolutely and hopelessly trapped.

Positive identification of Pitt and Giordino was made by Roy Orita after studying videotapes of their capture. He immediately reported his revelation to Kamatori.

“Are you certain?”

“Yes, there is no doubt in my mind. I sat across a table from them in Washington. Your security intelligence staff will bear me out after a genetic code check.”

“What is their purpose? They are not professional agents.”

“They were simply diversionary decoys for the team given the assignment for destroying the control center.”

Kamatori couldn’t believe his luck in finding the man he’d been ordered to assassinate appear out of the blue into his own backyard.

He dismissed Orita and went into solitary meditation, his mind meticulously planning a cat-and-mouse game, a sport that would test his hunting skills against a man like Pitt, whose courage and resourcefulness were well known, and who would make a worthy competitor.

It was a contest Kamatori had played many times with men who had opposed Suma, and he had never lost.

Pitt and Giordino were heavily guarded around the clock by a small crew of sentry robots. Giordino even struck up a friendship of sorts with one of the robots who had captured them, calling it McGoon.

“My name is not McGoon,” it spoke in reasonable English. “My name is Murasaki. It means purple.”

“Purple,” Giordino snorted. “You’re painted yellow. McGoon fits you better.”

“After I became fully operational, I was consecrated by a Shinto priest with food offerings and flower garlands and given the name Murasaki. I am not operated by telepresence. I have my own intelligence and decision-making capability and can control appropriate operations.”

“So you’re an independent free agent,” said Giordino, astounded at speaking to a mechanism that could carry on a conversation.

“Not entirely. There are limits to my artificial thought processes, of course.”

Giordino turned to Pitt. “Is he putting me on?”

“I have no idea.” Pitt shrugged. “Why don’t you ask him what he’d do if we made a run for it.”

“I would alert my security operator and shoot to kill as I have been programmed,” the robot answered.

“Are you a good shot?” Pitt asked, intrigued with conversing with artificial intelligence.

“I am not programmed to miss.”

Giordino said succinctly, “Now we know where we stand.”

“You cannot flee the island and there is no place to hide. “You would only die by drowning, eaten by sharks, or be executed by beheading. Any escape attempt would be illogical.”

“He sounds like Mr. Spock.”

There was a knock from the outside, and a man with a permanently scowling face pushed the fusuma sliding door with its shoji paper panes to one side and came in. He stood silent as his eyes traveled from Giordino standing beside the robot to Pitt, who was comfortably reclining on a triple pile of tatami mats.

“I am Moro Kamatori, chief aide to Mr. Hideki Suma.”

“Al Giordino,” greeted the stocky Italian, smiling grandly and sticking out his hand like a used car salesman. “My friend in the horizontal position is Dirk Pitt. We’re sorry to drop in uninvited but—”

“We are quite knowledgeable of your names and how you came to be on Soseki Island,” Kamatori interrupted Giordino. “You can dispense with any attempt at denials, self-defeating tales of misdirection, or counterfeit excuses of innocence. I regret to inform you that your diversionary intrusion was a failure. Your three team members were apprehended shortly after they exited the tunnel from Edo City.”

There was a hushed quiet. Giordino gave Kamatori a dark look, then turned to Pitt expectantly.

Pitt’s face was quite composed. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything to read around here?” He spoke boredly. “Maybe a guide to the local restaurants.”

Kamatori looked at Pitt with pure antagonism in his eyes. After a lapse of nearly a minute he stepped forward until he was almost leaning over Pitt.

“Do you like to hunt game, Mr. Pitt?” he asked abruptly.

“Not really. It’s no sport if the prey can’t shoot back.”

“You abhor the sight of blood and death then?”

“Don’t most well-adjusted people?”

“Perhaps you prefer to identify with the hunted.”

“You know Americans,” Pitt said conversationally. “We’re suckers for the underdog.”

Kamatori stared at Pitt murderously. Then he shrugged. “Mr. Suma has honored you with an invitation for dinner. You will be escorted to the dining room at seven o’clock. Kimonos can be found in the closet. Please dress appropriately.” Then he spun about briskly and strode from the room.

Giordino stared after him curiously. “What was all that doubletalk about hunting?”

Pitt closed his eyes in preparation to doze. “I do believe he intends to hunt us down like rabbits and lop off our heads.”

It was the kind of dining room the most palatial castles of Europe still have to entertain royal and celebrity guests. It was of vast proportions, with an open heavy-beamed ceiling twelve meters high. The floor was covered by a bamboo carpet interwoven with red silk, and the walls were paneled in highly polished rosewood.

Authentic paintings by Japanese masters hung precisely spaced as though each was in harmony with the other. The room was lit entirely with candles inside paper lanterns.

Loren had never seen anything to match its beauty. She stood like a statue as she admired the startling effect. Mike Diaz walked around her. He also came to a halt as he gazed about the richly adorned walls.

The only thing that seemed oddly out of place, that was not distinctly Japanese, was the long ceramic dining table that curled halfway across the room in a series of curves and appeared to have been fired in one giant piece. The matching chairs and place settings were spaced so that guests were not elbow-to-elbow but sitting partially in front of or in back of one another.

Toshie, dressed in a traditional blue silk kimono, came forward and bowed. “Mr. Suma begs your forgiveness for being late, but he will join you shortly. While you wait, may I fix you a drink?”

“You speak very good English,” Loren complimented her.

“I can also converse in French, Spanish, German, and Russian,” Toshie said with eyes lowered as if embarrassed to tout her knowledge.

Loren wore one of several kimonos she found in the closet of her guarded cottage. It beautifully draped her tall lithe body, and the silk was dyed a deep burgundy that complemented the light bronze of her fading summer tan. She smiled warmly at Toshie and said, “I envy you. I can barely order a meal in French.”

“So we’re to meet the great yellow peril at last,” muttered Diaz. He was in no mood to be polite and went out of his way to be rude. As a symbol of his defiance he had refused the offered Japanese-style clothing and stood in the rumpled fishing togs he wore when abducted. “Now maybe we’ll find out what crazy scheme is going on around here.”

“Can you mix a Maiden’s Blush?” Loren asked Toshie.

“Yes,” Toshie acknowledged. “Gin, curacao, grenadine, and lemon juice.” She turned to Diaz. “Senator?”

“Nothing,” he said flatly. “I want to keep my mind straight.”

Loren saw that the table was set for six. “Who will be joining us besides Mr. Suma?” she asked Toshie.

“Mr. Suma’s right-hand man, Mr. Kamatori, and two Americans.

“Fellow hostages, no doubt,” muttered Diaz.

Toshie did not answer but stepped lightly behind a polished ebony bar inlaid with gold tile and began mixing Loren’s drink.

Diaz moved over to one wall and studied a large painting of a narrative scene drawn in ink that showed a bird’s-eye view onto several houses in a village, revealing the people and their daily lives inside. “I wonder what something like this is worth?”

“Six million Yankee dollars.”

It was a quiet Japanese voice in halting English with a trace of a British accent, courtesy of a British tutor.

Loren and Diaz turned and looked at Hideki Suma with no small feeling of nervousness. They identified him immediately from pictures in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles.

Suma moved slowly into the cavernous room, followed by Kamatori. He stared at them benignly for a few moments with a slight inscrutable smile on his lips. ” ‘The Legend of Prince Genji,’ painted by Toyama in fourteen eighty-five. You have excellent commercial taste, Senator Diaz. You chose to admire the most expensive piece of art in the room.”

Because of Suma’s awesome reputation, Loren expected a giant of a man. Not, most certainly, a man who was slightly shorter than she.

He approached, gave a brief bow to both of them, and shook hands. “Hideki Suma.” His hands were soft but the grip firm. “And I believe you’ve met my chief aide, Moro Kamatori.”

“Our jailer,” Diaz replied acidly.

“A rather disgusting individual,” said Loren.

“But most efficient,” Suma came back with a sardonic inflection. He turned to Kamatori. “We seem to be missing two of our guests.”

Suma had no sooner spoken when he felt a movement behind him. He looked over his shoulder. Pitt and Giordino were being hustled through the dining-room entrance by two security robots. They were still clad in their flying suits, both with huge garish neckties knotted around their necks that were obviously cut from the sashes of kimonos they’d declined to wear.

“They do not show respect for you,” Kamatori growled. He made a move toward them, but Suma held out a hand and stopped him.

“Dirk!” Loren gasped. “Al!” She rushed over and literally leaped into Pitt’s arms, kissing him madly over his face. “Oh, God, I’ve never been so happy to see anyone.” Then she hugged and kissed Giordino. “Where did you come from? How did you get here?”

“We flew in from a cruise ship,” Pitt said cheerfully, hugging Loren like the father of a kidnapped child who had been returned. “We heard this place was a four-star establishment and thought we’d drop in for some golf and tennis.”

Giordino grinned. “Is it true the aerobics instructors are built like goddesses?”

“You crazy nuts,” she blurted happily.

“Well, Mr. Pitt, Mr. Giordino,” said Suma. “I’m delighted to meet the men who have created an international legend through their underwater exploits.”

“We’re hardly the stuff legends are made of,” Pitt said modestly.

“I am Hideki Suma. Welcome to Soseki Island.”

“I can’t say I’m thrilled to meet you, Mr. Suma. It’s difficult not to admire your entrepreneurial talents, but your methods of operation fall somewhere between Al Capone and Freddie from Elm Street.”

Suma was not used to insults. He paused, staring at Pitt in puzzled suspicion.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” said Giordino, boldly appraising Toshie as he edged toward the bar.

For the first time, Diaz smiled broadly as he shook Pitt’s hand. “You’ve just made my day.”

“Senator Diaz,” Pitt said, greeting the legislator. “Nice to see you again.”

“I’d have preferred meeting you with a Delta team at your back.”

“They’re being held in reserve for the finale.”

Suma ignored the remark and lowered himself into a low bamboo chair. “Drinks, gentlemen?”

“A tequila martini,” ordered Pitt.

“Tequila and dry vermouth,” answered Toshie. “With orange or lemon peel?”

“Lime, thank you.”

“And you, Mr. Giordino?”

“A Barking Dog, if you know how to make it.”

“One jigger each of gin, dry vermouth, sweet vermouth, and a dash or two of bitters,” Toshie elaborated.

“A bright girl,” said Loren. “She speaks several languages.”

“And she can make a Barking Dog,” Giordino murmured, his eyes taking on a dazed quality as Toshie gave him a provocative smile.

“To hell with this social crap!” Diaz burst out impatiently. “You’re all acting like we were invited to a friendly cocktail party.” He hesitated and then addressed himself to Suma. “I demand to know why you’ve brazenly kidnapped members of Congress and are holding us hostages. And I damn well want to know now.”

“Please sit down and relax, Senator,” Suma said in a quiet but iceberg tone. “You are an impatient man who wrongly believes everything worth doing must be done immediately, on the instant. There is a rhythm to life you people in the West have never touched. That is why our culture is superior to yours.”

“You’re nothing but an insular race of narcissists who think you’re a super race,” Diaz spat. “And you, Suma, are the worst of the lot.”

Suma was a classic, thought Pitt. There was no anger in the man’s face, no animosity, nothing but a supreme indifference. Suma seemed to look upon Diaz as little more than an insolent toddler.

Kamatori, though, stood there, his hands clenched at his sides, face twisted in hatred of the Americans, of all foreigners. His eyes were almost closed, his lips taut in a straight line. He looked like a maddened jackal about to spring.

Pitt had earlier sized up Kamatori as a dangerous killer. He moved casually to the bar, picked up his drink, and then eased subtly between Kamatori and the senator with a you’ve-got-to-get-past-me-first look. The ploy worked. Kamatori turned his anger from Diaz and stared at Pitt through circumspect eyes.

With timing near perfection, Toshie bowed with her hands between her knees, the silk of her kimono rustling, and announced that dinner was ready to be served.

“We shall continue our discussion after dinner,” said Suma, cordially herding everyone to a place at the table.

Pitt and Kamatori were the last ones to sit down. They paused and gazed at each other unblinkingly, like two boxers trying to stare each other down during the referee’s instructions before a fight. Kamatori flushed at the temples, his expression black and malevolent. Pitt poured oil on the fire by grinning contemptuously.

Both men knew that soon, very soon, one would kill the other.

47

THE DINNER WAS begun by an ancient form of culinary drama. A man Suma described as a shikibocho master appeared on his knees beside a plain board holding a fish that Pitt correctly identified as a bonito. Wearing a costume of silk brocade and a tall pointed cap, the shikibocho master displayed steel chopsticks and a wooden-handled long straight knife.

With hands moving the implements in a dazzling blur, he sliced up the fish using a prescribed number of slashes. At the conclusion of the ritualistic performance, he bowed and withdrew.

“Is he the chef?” asked Loren.

Suma shook his head. “No, he is merely a master of the fishslicing ceremony. The chef who specializes in the epicurean art of seafood preparation will now reassemble the fish, which will be served as an appetizer.”

“You employ more than one chef in your kitchen?”

“I have three. One, as I mentioned, who is expert in fish dishes, one who is a master at cooking meats and vegetables, and one who concentrates his talents on soups only.”

Before the fish was served, they were given a hot salty tea with sweet cookies. Then steaming oshibori towels were passed out for everyone to cleanse their hands. The fish was returned, the slices delicately replaced in their exact position, and eaten raw as sashimi.

Suma seemed to enjoy watching Giordino and Diaz struggle with their chopsticks. He was also mildly surprised to see Pitt and Loren eat with the twin ivories as though they were born to them.

Each course was served ably and smoothly by a pair of robots whose long arms picked up and set dishes with incredible swiftness of movement. Not a particle of food was dropped nor the sound heard of a dish clatter as it met the hard tabletop. They only spoke when asking if the diners were through with a particular course.

“You seem to be obsessed with an automated society,” Pitt addressed Suma.

“Yes, we take pride in our conversion to a robotic empire. My factory complex in Nagoya is the largest in the world. There, I have computerized robotic machines building twenty thousand fully functioning robots every year.”

“An army producing an army,” said Pitt.

Suma’s tone became enthusiastic. “Unwittingly, you’ve touched a chord, Mr. Pitt. We have already begun Japan’s new robotic military forces. My engineers are designing and constructing completely automated warships without human crews, aircraft flown entirely by robots, robotic-operated tanks that drive and fight by remote command, and armies composed of hundreds of thousands of armored machines armed with powerful weaponry and long-range sensors that can leap over fifty meters and travel at sixty kilometers an hour. Their ease of repair and their high-level sensory capabilities make them nearly invincible. In ten years, no superpower military force will be able to stand against us. Unlike your Pentagon generals and admirals, who rely on men and women to fight, bleed, and die in combat, we’ll be able to fight large-scale battles without a single human casualty.”

A solid minute passed as the Americans at the table attempted to imagine the magnitude of Suma’s revelation. The concept seemed so vast, so futuristic that they all had trouble accepting the fact that robotic armies were about to become a here and now proposition.

Only Giordino appeared indifferent to the immense scope of cyborg warfare. “Our mechanical chaperon claims he was consecrated,” he said, casually picking at the fish.

“We combine our religion, Shintoism, with our culture,” answered Suma, “believing that inanimate, as well as animate, objects are blessed with a soul, an advantage we have over you in the West. Our machines, be they industrial tools or a samurai’s sword, are revered as humans. We even have machines that teach many of our workers to behave as machines.”

Pitt shook his head. “Sounds self-defeating. You’re taking jobs away from your own people.”

“An archaic myth, Mr. Pitt,” replied Suma, tapping his chopsticks on the table. “In Japan, men and machines have developed a close relationship. Shortly after the turn of the century, we’ll have a million robots doing the work of ten million people.”

“And what happens to the ten million people who are laid off?”

“We export them to other countries, just as we export our manufactured goods,” said Suma quietly. “They become good law-abiding citizens of their adopted nation, but their loyalty and economic connections will still be tied to Japan.”

“A kind of worldwide brotherhood,” said Pitt. “I’ve seen how it works. I recall watching a Japanese bank being built in San Diego by Japanese architects, Japanese developers, Japanese construction workers, all using Japanese equipment and Japanese building supplies imported aboard Japanese ships. The local contractors and suppliers were cut out completely.”

Suma gave an uncaring shrug. “Economic conquest has no rules. Our ethics and morals come from a different breeding ground than yours. In Japan, honor and discipline are knotted tightly to loyalties to the Emperor, family, and the corporation. We are not bred to venerate democratic principles or charitable generosity. The United Way, volunteer work, charity events to raise money for starving people in Africa, and organizations for providing aid to foster children in third-world nations are virtually unheard of in my country. We concentrate our benevolent efforts on taking care of our own.” He paused, and then motioned to the robots as they re-entered the room balancing trays. “Ah, here comes the next course.”

The bonita was followed by individual wooden trays that held unpeeled ginkgo nuts threaded with pine needles and a pyramid of sliced abalone. Then came a flower soup, a clear broth with single orchids floating in the bowls.

Loren closed her eyes as she savored it. “It tastes as wonderful as it looks,” she said.

Suma nodded. “Japanese haute cuisine is created to delight the eye as well as the palate.”

“A successful attempt at visual and taste perfection,” Pitt observed.

“Are you a bon vivant, Mr. Pitt?” asked Suma.

“I enjoy the pleasure of a gourmet meal, yes.”

“Are your tastes varied?”

“If you mean, do I eat most everything, the answer is affirmative.”

“Good.” Suma clapped his hands. “Then you’re in for an exciting and harmonious treat.”

Loren thought the dinner was half over, but it had barely begun. A truly exceptional display of tasty dishes, their ingredients artistically arranged, arrived in a steady stream. Figs in sesame sauce, rice with basil, another soup with egg yolk, neatly sliced conger eel, radish, and mushrooms accompanied by roe of sea urchin, several kinds of fish, including turbot, snapper, pike, and squid wrapped in a collage with varied types of seaweed, and lotus root mixed with intricately cut mussels, cucumber, and zucchini. A third soup was served with pickled vegetables, rice, and sesame. At last, dessert was presented, consisting of several sweet fruits, and the feast concluded with the inevitable cup of tea.

“A final meal for the condemned?” Diaz asked harshly.

“Not at all, Senator,” Suma replied in a congenial voice. “You and Congresswoman Smith will be returning to Washington within twenty-four hours on board my private jet.”

“Why not now?”

“You must be instructed of my goals first. Tomorrow I will personally conduct you and Congresswoman Smith on a tour of my Dragon Center and demonstrate the source of Japan’s new might.”

“A Dragon Center,” repeated Diaz curiously. “For what purpose?”

“You don’t know, Senator, about the nuclear bomb cars our host has spread around half the world?” Pitt asked provokingly.

Diaz was uncomprehending. “Bomb cars?”

“Suma, here, wants to play hardball with the big boys, so he’s dreamed up a blue-ribbon extortion plot. As soon as his highly touted Dragon Center is completed, he can push a button and cause the detonation of a nuclear bomb at any location his robots park a car with a built-in bomb.”

Loren’s eyes went wide with shock. “Is this true? Japan has secretly built a nuclear arsenal?”

Pitt nodded at Suma. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Suma stared at Pitt like a mongoose eyeing a cobra. “You’re a very astute man, Mr. Pitt. I’m told it was you who put Mr. Jordan and his intelligence people onto our method of smuggling the warheads into your country.”

“I freely admit that hiding them in automobile air-conditioning compressors was a cagey act of genius on your part. You almost got away with a clean operation, that is, until a bomb accidentally exploded aboard your auto transport ship.”

Frowning, baffled, Loren asked, “What do you hope to gain?”

“Nothing deep and unfathomable,” answered Suma. “Using your slang, Japan has always been on the short end of the stick. Raw universal anti-Japanese prejudice is deeply ingrained in the white West. We have been looked down on as an odd little Oriental race for three hundred years. The time has come to grasp the dominance we deserve!”

An angered flush crept into Loren’s face. “So you’d launch a war that would slaughter millions of people for nothing but false pride and greed. Didn’t you learn anything from the death and destruction you caused in the nineteen-forties?”

“Our leaders went to war only after the Western nations strangled us to death with trade embargoes and boycotts. What we lost then in lives and destruction, we’ve since surpassed in expansion of economic power. Now we are being threatened again by international ostracism and world enmity merely due to our diligent efforts and dedication to efficient trade and industry. And because our great economy is dependent on foreign oil and minerals, we can never again allow ourselves to be dictated to by Washington politics, European interests, or Middle East religious conflict. With the Kaiten Project we have the means to protect ourselves and our hard won economic gains.”

“The Kaiten Project?” Diaz repeated, never having heard of it before.

“His sordid plan to blackmail the universe,” Pitt explained caustically.

“You’re flirting with fire,” Loren said to Suma. “The United States, the Soviet Union, and Europe will band together to destroy you.”

“They will back off when they see what it will cost them,” Suma said confidently. “They’ll do little but hold press conferences and declare they will solve the problem through diplomatic means.”

“You don’t give a damn about saving Japan!” snapped Diaz suddenly. “Your own government would be horrified if they were aware of this monster you’ve created. You’re in this for yourself, a personal power grab. You’re a power-mad maniac.”

“You are right, Senator,” Suma said in quiet control. “In your eyes I must appear as a maniac intent on supreme power. I won’t hide it. And like all the other maniacs of history who were driven to protect their nation and its sovereignty, I won’t hesitate to use my power to guide expansion of our race around the globe while protecting our culture from the corruptions of the West.”

“Just what do you find so corrupting about the Western nations?” demanded Diaz.

A look of contempt came into Suma’s eyes. “Look to your own people, Senator. The United States is a land of drug addicts, Mafia gangsters, rapists and murderers, homeless and illiterates. Your cities run rampant with racism because of your mixed cultures. You are declining as did Greece and Rome and the British Empire. You’ve become a cesspool of deterioration, and the process is unstoppable.”

“So you think America is undermined and finished as a superpower,” said Loren in an annoyed voice.

“You do not find such decay in Japan,” Suma replied smugly.

“God but you’re hypocritical.” Pitt broke out laughing, turning every head at the dining table. “Your quaint little culture is rife with corruption in the highest political levels. Reports of scandals fill your newspapers and TV stations on a daily basis. Your underworld is so powerful it runs the government. Half your politicians and bureaucrats are on the take, openly receiving money for political influence. You sell highly secret military technology to the Communist Bloc for profit. Living costs are ridiculously out of sight for your own people, who pay twice what Americans pay for goods manufactured by Japanese corporations. You steal high-tech advancements wherever you can find them. You have racketeers who regularly disrupt company meetings to extract payoffs. You accuse us of racism when your best-selling books promote anti-Semitism, your department stores display and sell black Sambo manikins and dolls, and you sell magazines on street newsstands depicting women in bondage. And you have the gall to sit there and claim you have a superior culture. That’s garbage.”

“Amen, my friend,” said Diaz, raising his teacup. “Amen.”

“Dirk is one hundred percent right,” Loren added proudly. “Our society isn’t perfect, but people to people, our overall quality of life is still better than yours.”

Suma’s face altered into a mask of wrath. The eyes were as hard as topaz on the satin-smooth face. His teeth were set. He spoke as if cracking a whip. “Fifty years ago, we were a defeated people, reviled by the United States! Now, all of a sudden, we are the winners, and you have lost to us. The poisoning of Japan by the United States and Europe has been stopped. Our culture will prevail. We will prove to be the dominant nation in the twenty-first century.”

“You sound like the warlords who prematurely counted us out after Pearl Harbor,” Loren reminded him curtly. “The United States treated Japan far better after the war than we’d have expected if you were the victors. Your armies would have raped, murdered, and pillaged America just as you did China.”

“Besides us, you still have Europe to contend with,” warned Diaz. “Their trade policies are not nearly as tolerant and patronizing as ours toward Tokyo. And if anything, the new European Common Market is going to dig in against your economic penetration. Threatened by nuclear blackmail or not, they’ll close their markets to Japanese exports.”

“Over the long term, we will merely use our billions of cash reserves to slowly buy up their industries until we have a base that is impregnable. Not an impossible operation when you consider that the twelve largest banks in the world are Japanese, constituting almost three quarters of the total market value of all the rest of the foreign banks. That means we rule the world of big money.”

“You can’t hold the world hostage forever,” said Pitt. “Your own government and people will rise up against you when they discover the world’s warheads are aimed at the Japanese islands instead of the United States and the Soviet Union. And the possibility of another nuclear attack becomes very real should one of your car bombs accidentally detonate.”

Suma shook his head. “Our electronic safeguards are more advanced than yours and the Russians’. There will be no explosions unless I personally program the correct code.”

“You can’t really start a nuclear war,” Loren gasped.

Suma laughed. “Nothing as stupid and cold-blooded as what the White House and Kremlin might attempt. You forget, we Japanese know what it’s like to suffer the horror of atomic warfare. No, the Kaiten Project is far more technically sophisticated than masses of missile warheads aimed at cities and military installations. The bombs are designed to be set off in remote strategically unpopulated areas to create a massive electromagnetic force with the potential of destroying your entire economy. Any deaths or injuries would be minimal.”

“You really plan to do it, don’t you?” said Pitt, reading Suma’s mind. “You really intend to set off the bombs.”

“And why not, if circumstances warrant it. There is no fear of immediate retaliation, since the electromagnetic force will effectively close down all American, NATO, and Soviet communications and weapons systems.” The Japanese industrialist stared at Pitt, the dark eyes cool and tyrannical. “Whether I take that step or not, you, Mr. Pitt, won’t be around to find out.”

A frightened look swept Loren’s face. “Aren’t Dirk and AI flying back to Washington with Senator Diaz and me?”

Suma exhaled his breath in a long silent sigh and shook his head very slowly. “No… I have made them a gift to my good friend Moro Kamatori.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Moro is an expert hunter. His passion is tracking human game. Your friends and the three intelligence operatives who were captured during their attempt to destroy the center will be offered a chance to escape the island. But only if they can elude Moro for twenty-four hours.”

Kamatori gave Pitt a subzero stare. “Mr. Pitt will have the honor of being the first to make the attempt.”

Pitt turned to Giordino, the trace of a grin on his saturnine face. “See, I told you so.”

48

“ESCAPE,” MUTTERED GIORDINO, pacing the small cottage under the watchful eye of McGoon, “escape” where? The best long distance swimmer in the world couldn’t make it across sixty kilometers of cold water swept by five-knot currents. And even then, Suma’s hoods would be waiting to gut you the minute you crawled onto a mainland beach.”

“So what’s the game plan?” asked Pitt between pushups on the floor.

“Stay alive as long as possible. What other options do we have?”

“Die like stouthearted men.”

Giordino raised an eyebrow and stared at Pitt suspiciously. “Yeah, sure, bare your chest, refuse the blindfold, and puff a cigarette as Kamatori raises his sword.”

“Why fight the inevitable.”

“Since when do you give up in the first inning?” Giordino said, beginning to wonder if his old friend had suffered a brain leak.

“We can try to hide somewhere on the island as long as we can, but it’s a hopeless cause. I suspect Kamatori will cheat and use robotic sensors to track us down.”

“What about Stacy? You can’t stand by and let that moonfaced scum murder her too.”

Pitt rose from the floor. “Without weapons, what do you expect? Flesh can’t win against mechanical cyborgs and an expert with a sword.”

“I expect you to show the guts you showed in a hundred other scrapes we’ve been through together.”

Pitt favored his right leg as he limped past McGoon and stood with his back to the robot. “Easy for you to say, pal. You’re in good physical shape. I wrenched my knee when I crash-landed into that fishpond and I can barely walk. I stand no chance at all of eluding Kamatori.”

Then Giordino saw the wily grin on Pitt’s face, and a dawning comprehension settled over him. Suddenly he felt a complete fool. Besides McGoon’s sensors, the room must have had a dozen listening devices and video cameras hidden in and around it. He figured Pitt’s drift and played along.

“Kamatori is too much a samurai to hunt an injured man. If there’s a morsel of sporting blood in him, he’d give himself a handicap.”

Pitt shook his head. “I’d settle for something to ease the pain.”

“McGoon,” Giordino hailed the sentry robot, “is there a doctor in the house?”

“That data is not programmed in my directive.”

“Then call up your remote boss and find out.”

“Please stand by.”

The robot went silent as its communications system sent out a request to its control center. The reply came back immediately. “There is a small staff in a clinic on the fourth level. Does Mr. Pitt require medical assistance?”

“Yes,” Pitt answered. “I’ll require an injection of a painkiller and a tight bandage if I’m to provide Mr. Kamatori with a challenging degree of competition.”

“You did not appear to limp a few hours ago,” McGoon flagged Pitt.

“My knee was numb,” Pitt lied. “But the pain and stiffness have increased to where I find it difficult to walk.” He took a few halting steps and tensed his face as though experiencing a mild case of agony.

As a machine that was completely adequate for the job, Murasaki, alias McGoon, duly relayed his visual observation of Pitt’s pathetic display to his directorate controller somewhere deep within the Dragon Center and received permission to escort his injured prisoner to the medical clinic. Another roboguard appeared to keep a video eye on Giordino, who promptly named the newcomer McGurk.

Playing his fake condition as though an Academy Award was in the offing, Pitt shuffled awkwardly through a labyrinth of corridors before being hustled into an elevator by McGoon.

The robot pressed a floor button with a metal finger, and the elevator began to quietly descend, although not as silently as the one in the Federal Headquarters Building.

Too bad the MAIT team didn’t have intelligence on an elevator that dropped from the island’s surface to the underground center, Pitt thought during the ride. Penetration from the resort might have been carried off with a higher chance of success. A few moments later the doors spread and McGoon prodded Pitt into a brightly lit passageway.

“The fourth door on your left. Take it and enter.”

The door, like every piece of flat surface in the underground facility, was painted white. A small red cross was the only indication of a medical center. There was no knob, only a button set in the frame. Pitt pushed it and the door noiselessly slid open. He limped inside. An attractive young lady in a nurse’s uniform looked up from a desk through serious brown eyes as he entered. She spoke to him in Japanese, and he shrugged dumbly.

“Sorry,” he said. “I only speak English.”

Without another word she stood and walked across a room with six empty beds and disappeared into an office. A few seconds later a young smiling Japanese man wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater under the standard white coat with a stethoscope hanging from his neck approached with the nurse at his heels.

“Mr. Pitt, Mr. Dirk Pitt?” he inquired in West Coast American.

“Yes.”

“I was informed you were coming. Josh Nogami. This is a real honor. I’ve been a fan of yours since you raised the Titanic. As a matter of fact, I took up scuba diving because of you.”

“My pleasure,” Pitt said almost bashfully. “You don’t sound like a local boy.”

“Born and raised in San Francisco under the shadow of the Bay Bridge. Where are you from?”

“I grew up in Newport Beach, California.”

“No kidding. I served my internship at St. Paul’s Hospital in Santa Ana. I used to surf at Newport every chance I got.”

“You’re a long way from your practice.”

“So are you, Mr. Pitt.”

“Did Suma make an offer you couldn’t refuse?”

The smile went cool. “I’m also an admirer of Mr. Suma. I joined his employ four years ago without being bought.”

“You believe in what he’s doing?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Pardon me for suggesting that you’re misguided.”

“Not misguided, Mr. Pitt. Japanese. I’m Japanese and believe in the advancement of our intellectual and aesthetic culture over the contaminated society America has become.”

Pitt was in no mood for another debate on lifestyle philosophies. He pointed to his knee. “I’m going to be needing this tomorrow. I must have twisted it. Can you deaden the pain enough so I can use it?”

“Please roll up your pant leg.”

Pitt did so and made the required grimaces and quick expulsions of breath to simulate hurt as the doctor felt about the knee.

“Doesn’t appear swollen or bruised. No indication of a torn ligament.”

“Hurts like hell, though. I can’t bend it.”

“Did you injure it when you crashed into Mr. Suma’s retreat?”

“News travels fast here.”

“The robots have a grapevine that would make San Quentin prison inmates proud. After I heard of your arrival, I went up and viewed the remains of your airplane. Mr. Suma wasn’t happy that you killed over four hundred thousand yen worth of his prized carp.”

“Then you know I’m the opening act for the massacre tomorrow,” said Pitt.

The smile left Nogami’s face and his eyes went dark. “I want you to know, though I may follow Mr. Suma’s commands, I don’t favor Kamatori’s murderous hunting games.”

“Any advice for a condemned man?”

Nogami motioned around the room. “The walls have more eyes and ears than a theater audience. If I dared cheer for your side, I’d be forced to join you out on the field. No thanks, Mr. Pitt. I’m greatly saddened by your predicament, but you have nobody to blame but yourself for dipping your oars in dangerous waters.”

“But you will see what you can do for my knee.”

“As a doctor I’ll do my best to ease your pain. I’m also under orders by Kamatori to see that you’re fit for the chase tomorrow.”

Nogami shot Pitt’s knee with some unpronounceable drug that was supposed to deaden pain and wrapped it with athletic tape. Then he gave Pitt a small bottle of pills. “Take two of these every four hours. Don’t overdose, or you’ll become groggy and make an easy mark for Kamatori.”

Pitt had carefully watched as the nurse went back and forth into a small supply room for the tape and pills. “Do you mind if I borrow one of your empty beds and relax for a while. Those Japanese sleeping mats aren’t built for these bones.”

“Okay by me. I’ll notify your guard robot that I’m keeping you under observation for an hour or two.” Nogami looked at him steadily. “Don’t even think of trying to escape. There are no windows or rear exits in here, and the robots would be all over your ass before you took two steps toward the elevator.”

“Not to worry,” Pitt said with a friendly smile. “I fully intend to save my strength for tomorrow’s fun.”

Nogami nodded. “Take the first bed. It has the softest mattress. I use it myself. The one Western vice I refuse to give up. I can’t stand those damn tatami mats either.”

“The bathroom?”

“Through the supply room to your left.”

Pitt shook the doctor’s hand. “I’m grateful to you, Dr. Nogami. A pity we see things through a different lens.”

After Nogami returned to his office and the nurse sat back down at her desk with her back to him, Pitt hobbled to the bathroom, only he didn’t enter but merely opened and closed the door with the required sounds to allay any suspicions. The nurse was busy filling out papers at her desk and did not turn to observe his actions through the door of the supply room.

Then he quietly searched the drawers and shelves of medical supplies until he found a box of plastic bags attached to thin tubes with eighteen-gauge needles on their ends. The bags were marked CPDA-1 Red Blood Cells with anticoagulant solution. He removed one of the bags from the box and shoved it inside his shirt. It didn’t make even the slightest bulge.

A mobile X-ray unit stood in one corner of the room. He stared at it briefly, an idea forming in his mind. Using his fingernails, he worked free a plastic manufacturer’s nameplate and used it to unscrew the rear panel. He rapidly twisted off the connectors to a pair of six-volt dry-cell rechargeable batteries and removed one, slipping it down the front of his pants. Then he ripped out as much of the electrical wiring as he could without an excess of suspicious sound and wrapped it around his waist.

Finally he stepped softly into the bathroom, used it, and flushed the toilet. The nurse didn’t even look up as he settled onto the bed. In his office, Nogami seemed absorbed, talking in hushed tones on the phone.

Pitt stared at the blank ceiling, his mind at ease. It wasn’t exactly what Jordan and Kern would call an earth-shattering master plan, but it was all he had, and he intended to play it to the hilt.

49

MORO KAMATORI DIDN’T merely look evil, he was evil. The pupils of his eyes never changed from the violent black poisonous stare, and when the tight lips parted in a smile, which was seldom, they revealed a set of teeth laced with more gold than the Comstock Lode.

Even at that early hour—at five o’clock the sky was still dark—he had a fastidious arrogance about him. He was immaculately dressed in a hakama, baggy trousers that were almost a divided skirt, and an Edo-period kataginu, a brocaded silk style of sleeveless hunting jacket. He wore only sandals on his feet.

Pitt, on the other hand, looked like a refugee from a rag picker’s bin. He was clad only in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts cut off from the bottoms of his flying suit. His feet were clad in a pair of white sweat socks.

After being awakened and escorted to Kamatori’s personal study, he stood shivering in the unheated room, taking in every detail of the walls that were filled with antique weapons of every historic era from around the world. Suits of armor, European and Japanese, stood like soldiers at attention in the middle of the room. Pitt felt a wave of revulsion in his stomach at the trophies neatly spaced between hundreds of swords, spears, bows, and guns.

He counted thirty mounted heads of Kamatori’s hapless human victims staring sightlessly into space from unblinking glass eyes. Most were Asian, but four had Caucasian features. His blood iced as he recognized Jim Hanamura’s head.

“Come in, Mr. Pitt, and have a cup of coffee,” invited Kamatori, motioning Pitt to a vacant cushion beside a low table. “We’ll talk a few minutes before—”

“Where are the others?” Pitt interrupted.

Kamatori stared coldly. “They are seated in a small auditorium next door, where they will view the hunt on a video screen.”

“Like an audience watching a bad late-night movie.”

“Perhaps the last to run the hunt will profit by the mistakes of those who go before.”

“Or perhaps they’ll close their eyes and miss the show.”

Kamatori sat very still, the barest hint of a smile touching the corner of his taut lips. “This is not an experiment. The procedure has been refined through experience. The prey wait their turn tied to chairs, and if need be, with their eyes taped open. They have every opportunity to witness your demise.”

“I trust you’ll send my residuals from the reruns to my estate,” Pitt said, seemingly gazing at the heads adorning the walls, fighting to ignore the horrifying display while concentrating on a rack of swords.

“You put up a very good facade of courage,” Kamatori observed. “I’d have expected no less from a man of your reputation.”

“Who goes next?” Pitt asked abruptly.

The butcher shrugged. “Your friend Mr. Giordino, or maybe the female operative. Yes, I think hunting her down will raise the others to a furious pitch, inciting them to become more dangerous as prey.”

Pitt turned. “And if you cannot catch one of us?”

“The island is small. No one has eluded me for more than eight hours.”

“And you give no quarter.

“None,” said Kamatori, the evil smile widening. “This is not a child’s game of hide-and-seek with winners and losers. Your death will be quick and clean. That’s a promise.”

Pitt stared the samurai in the eye. “Not a game? Seems to me I’m to play Sanger Rainsford to your General Zaroff.”

Kamatori’s eyes squinted. “The names are not familiar to me.”

“You’ve never read The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell? It’s a classic story of a man who hunts his fellow man for sport.”

“I do not taint my mind by reading Western literature.”

“Glad to hear it,” Pitt said, mentally adding a slight edge to his chances of staying alive.

Kamatori pointed toward the door. “The time has come.”

Pitt held his mark. “You haven’t explained the ground rules.”

“There are no ground rules, Mr. Pitt. I generously give you an hour’s start. Then I begin to hunt you armed only with my sword, an ancestral weapon that has been in my family for several generations and has seen much enemy blood.”

“Your samurai ancestors must be real proud of a descendant who stains their honor by murdering unarmed and defenseless.”

Kamatori knew Pitt was deliberately provoking him, but he could not contain his growing rage with the American who showed no trace of fear. “There is the door,” he hissed. “I begin the pursuit in one hour.”

The act of uncaring indifference was shaken off the minute Pitt cleared the gate through the electrified fence. Ungoverned fury swept him as he ran past the line of trees surrounding the resort and into the shadows of the stark, barren rocks. He became a man outside himself, cold and cunning, his perceptions abnormally heightened, driven by one overpowering thought.

He had to save himself to save the others.

The gamble on running free in his stocking feet rather than the heavy boots he’d worn when flying off the deck of the Ralph R. Bennett was paying off. Thankfully the rocky ground was covered with several centimeters of damp soil eroded over the centuries from the lava rock.

He ran with deadly purpose, spurred on by anger and fear he might fail. His plan was simple enough, ridiculously simple, though the chance of pulling the wool over Kamatori’s eyes seemed slightly less than impossible. But he was dead certain the ploy had not been tried by the other hunted men. The unexpected was on his side. The others had only tried to put as much distance between them and the resort as possible before frantically finding a hiding place to stall off discovery. Desperation breeds genius, but they had all failed, and with gruesome finality. Pitt was about to attempt a new wrinkle in the escape game that was just crazy enough to work.

He also had another advantage over those who had gone before. Thanks to Penner’s detailed model of the island, Pitt was familiar with the general landscape. He recalled in his mind the dimensions and heights with exacting clarity, knowing precisely where he had to go, and it was not toward the highest point on the island.

People who run in terror during a chase inexplicably head upward, up stairs in a building, up a tree to hide, up to the rocks crowning the summit of a hill. All dead ends with no possibility of successful escape.

Pitt branched off and descended toward the eastern shoreline, executing a meandering trail as if he was undecided which way to turn, occasionally doubling back to make his pursuer think he was wandering lost in circles. The uneven moonlike ground and the dim light hindered any sharp sense of direction, but the stars had yet to fade, and he could still read north from Polaris. He stopped for a few minutes, resting to conserve his strength, and took stock.

He realized that Kamatori, tracking his victims in sandals, could never have brought them to bay in only eight hours. An amateur woodsman, with a small amount of luck, should have avoided capture for one or two days, even if tracked by dogs… unless his trail was followed by someone with the advantage of electronic body sensors. There was no question in Pitt’s mind that he was being hunted by a robot festooned with sensors. He moved off again, still cold but feeling no strain or exhaustion.

The end of the hour found Pitt skirting the cliffs above the sea. The scattered trees and underbrush grew to the very edge of the palisades. He had slowed to an easy jog as he searched for a break in the surf-pounded rocks nearly twenty meters below. At last he came to a small clearing sheltered by large rocks. A small pine with several of its roots exposed by erosion hung precariously over the restless water far below.

His eyes intently searched the nearby area for signs of a video camera or body heat sensors and came up empty.

Reasonably certain he was unobserved, he tested the trunk of the tree with his weight. It sagged, and the pine-needled top leaned another five centimeters outward and down. He calculated that if he climbed far enough into its branches, his added weight would pull the bare root system from the earth, sending both Pitt and the tree hurtling down the side of the cliff and into the sea.

Then he studied the dark and swirling water as do the divers atop the cliffs at Acapulco. He judged the depth of a narrow slot between the rocks at three meters in depth, four when a breaker roared in. No one in their right mind would consider the thought churning in Pitt’s brain as he examined the backwash and the directional sweep of the current. Without either a dry or a wet suit, a swimmer wouldn’t survive twenty minutes in the cold water before hypothermia set in, providing he survived the fall.

He sat down on a rock and removed the plastic blood bag from under the waistband of his shorts and laid it on the ground at his feet. He extended his left arm and squeezed his fist, probing with his right hand until he located the vein in the fiat opposite the elbow. He paused a few moments, fixing the vein in his mind, picturing it as a hose. Then he took the needle that was attached to the blood bag’s hose and pushed it into the vein on an angle.

He missed and had to try again. It finally slipped inside the vein on the third try. Now he sat there and relaxed as his blood flowed into the bag.

A dog’s faint howl in the distance caught his ear. What seemed an obvious truth at the moment struck him with numbing force. He couldn’t believe how he’d overestimated Kamatori. He didn’t speculate, didn’t guess he’d be tracked by a flesh and blood hound. He’d blindly accepted as fact his pursuer would use electronic or robotic means to discover his prey. He could only imagine the leering face of the cutthroat samurai as he found Pitt treed by a vicious dog.

With incredible patience, Pitt sat and waited for his blood to fill the plastic bag as he listened to the yelping draw closer. The dog was hard on his trail and less than two hundred meters away when the blood volume reached 450 milliliters, and Pitt jerked the needle from his arm. He quickly stuffed the blood-filled bag under a pile of rock, covering all sight of it with loose dirt.

Most of the men decapitated by Kamatori, ravaged by terror and panic, had foolishly tried to outrun the hound until dropping from exhaustion and being run to ground. Only the braver ones had stopped and attempted to fight off the dog with whatever weapon they could lay a hand on, in most cases a heavy stick. Still unaware of the surprise about to pounce on him, Pitt went one step further. He found a long, thick tree limb but also collected two heavy rocks. As a final defense, he threw his meager weapons on top of a large rock and then climbed up.

His feet had only barely left the ground when the baying hound dashed through the trees and onto the cliff edge.

Pitt stared in dumb astonishment. The pursuit dog wasn’t the furry kind at all. It had to be the weirdest nightmare of a robot Pitt had laid eyes on.

The Japanese engineers at Hideki Suma’s robotic laboratories had outdone themselves on this one. The tail, standing straight into the air, was an antenna, and the legs rotated like spokes of a wheel with the ends bent on a ninety-degree angle to grip the ground. The body was a complex of electronics clustered around an ultrasonic ranging sensor. It was the ultimate in tracking machines, able to detect human scent, heat, and sweat, and able to navigate around or over obstacles at a rate of speed matching a Doberman pinscher.

The only similarity between a real dog and the robomutt, if Pitt stretched his imagination and ignored the recorded howls, was a nasty jaw system with teeth that circulated instead of gnashed. Pitt shoved one end of his tree limb at the metallic snout only to have it torn out of his hands and shredded in a cloud of splinters.

It was a wonder any bodily members of Kamatori’s victims were left to mount on a wall after this monstrosity got through with them, Pitt thought. But the artificial dog made no effort to move in for the kill. It partially climbed the rock Pitt stood on and kept its distance, the miniature video camera recording Pitt’s movements and location. Its purpose, Pitt recognized, was to corner and locate the quarry so Kamatori could home in and perform the ritual murder.

Pitt lifted one of the rocks over his head and threw it. The robomutt was too agile, it easily leaped to its right as the rock missed and struck the ground several centimeters away.

Pitt raised the other rock, the only weapon left to him, and made as if to hurl it, but he stopped in midlaunch and observed the dog again jump to his right. Then, as if he was a bombardier, he made an adjustment and let fly. The timing was good and his aim true. The dog, apparently programmed only to veer on a starboard tack during an assault, dodged directly beneath the falling rock.

There was no bark or whine, no sizzle of shorted electronics or sparks. The mechanical canine just sort of sagged sluggishly on its spoke legs without falling over, its computer and monitoring systems smashed. Pitt almost felt sorry for it as it slowly went inert like a mobile toy whose batteries faded and died—but not too sorry. He came down off his rock and kicked the thing in its electronic gut, knocking it over on its side. Pitt made certain the video camera was nonfunctioning, and then he retrieved the blood bag from under its cover of rotted wood and leaves.

He fervently hoped the blood he’d drained from his vein had not weakened his system. He was going to need every bit of his strength for the job ahead.

Kamatori became apprehensive when the image on his tiny wrist TV monitor suddenly faded. His last reading from the robot-tracking dog’s sensor put Pitt approximately a hundred and seventy-five meters in a southeasterly direction toward the palisades along the shore. He was amazed that Pitt had allowed himself to be cornered so early in the hunt. He hurried in that direction, initially thinking the system had suffered an electronic malfunction. As he rushed toward the final contact position, it began to seep into his brain that possibly the quarry was the cause of the problem.

This had never happened with the earlier prey. None of them came close to defeating the robot or inflicting any damage. If Pitt had managed to do what the others couldn’t, Kamatori decided he must be very cautious in his approach. He slowed his pace, no longer concerned with speed. Time was a commodity he could easily afford.

He used nearly twenty minutes to close the gap and arrived at the small clearing above the cliffs. He vaguely saw the outline of the robodog through the underbrush. He feared the worst as he realized it was lying on its side.

Staying in the trees, he made a wide sweep around the open pile of rocks. Cautiously, Kamatori crept toward the dog that lay still and motionless. He drew his sword and lifted it high above his head, the hilt clutched in both hands.

A practiced user of kiai, with the motive power to raise himself to a fighting fury, and a fiery resolve to overwhelm his opponent, Kamatori deeply inhaled a breath, gave a bansheelike cry, and leaped, hoping to fall upon his hated foe at the exact moment Pitt exhaled his breath.

But there was no Pitt.

The small clearing looked like the aftermath of a massacre. Blood was splattered everywhere, on the robodog, the rocks, and tiny splotches ran down the cliff face. He studied the ground. Pitt’s footprints were deep and scattered in convulsive disorder, yet no drenched trail of blood led away from the clearing. He peered down at the sea and rocks below and saw a tree pulled out by the receding water only to be swept in again by an incoming wave and thrown onto the rocks. He also studied the ragged hole and torn root system on the edge of the drop.

For several minutes he regarded the scene, examining the chewed tree limb, the rock lying next to the tracking robot. The robodog was not designed to destroy, only to pursue and locate. Pitt must have turned and fought, damaging his pursuer and somehow altering its computer programming and turning it into a vicious killer.

The robodog had then gone on the attack and savagely slashed at Pitt’s flesh. With nowhere to run and no way to fight the horror, Pitt must have tried to escape by climbing out on the tree. But his weight was too much and together they fell onto the rocks below. There was no sign of Pitt’s body, but no man could have survived. He had either been swept away by an undertow or finished by sharks attracted to the bleeding body.

Kamatori exploded in blind rage. He picked up the mechanical dog and flung it over the cliff. Pitt had defeated him. The adventurer’s head would not be mounted on the walls with the other grisly trophies. The samurai butcher felt shame at being cheated. No one had ever escaped his sword.

He would take his revenge on the other American hostages. He decided Stacy was to be his next prey, imagining with great delight the horrified faces of Giordino, Weatherhill, and Mancuso as they viewed him hacking her to pieces in vivid color.

He held his sword blade up in front of his eyes, experiencing a feeling of euphoria as the new sun glinted on the blade. Then he flourished it over his head in a circle and slipped it into its scabbard in one smooth instantaneous motion.

Still angered and disappointed at losing the one man he desperately hoped to kill, he headed back into the craggy landscape toward the resort, his mind already relishing the next chase.

50

THE PRESIDENT STOOD on the green grass of the Congressional Country Club engaged in a late afternoon round of golf. “You’re sure about this? There is no mistake?”

Jordan nodded. He sat in a golf cart watching as the President studied a fairway from the fourteenth tee. “The bad news is confirmed by the fact the team is four hours behind their scheduled contact time.”

The President took an offered five iron from his caddie, who rude in another cart with a Secret Service agent. “Could they have been killed?”

“The only word we have from the British agent inside the Dragon Center is that they were captured soon after exiting the undersea tunnel into the command center installation.”

“What went wrong?”

“We didn’t take into consideration Suma’s army of robotic security forces. Without the budget to place intelligence operatives in Japan, we were ignorant of their advancement in robotics. Their technology in developing mechanical systems with human intelligence, vision, and superphysical movement came as a surprise.”

The President addressed the ball, swung, and stroked it to the edge of the green. Then he looked up at Jordan. He found it difficult if not impossible to comprehend a mechanical security force. “Actual robots that walk and talk?”

“Yes, sir, fully automated and highly mobile and armed to the teeth.”

“You said your people could walk through walls.”

“There are none better at what they do. Until now there was no such thing as a foolproof security system. But Suma’s vast technology created one. Our people met a computerized intelligence they weren’t trained to bypass, that no operative in the world is trained to overcome.”

The President slipped behind the wheel of the cart and pressed the accelerator pedal. “Any hope of a rescue mission to save your people?”

There was a moment’s silence as Jordan hesitated before continuing. “Doubtful. We have reason to believe Suma intends to execute them.”

The President felt a wave of pity for Jordan. It had to be a bitter pill for him to swallow, losing almost an entire MAIT team. No operation in national security history had suffered from such incredibly rotten luck.

“There’ll be hell to pay when Jim Sandecker hears that Pitt and Giordino are going down.”

“I don’t look forward to briefing him.”

“Then we must blow that damn island under the sea, and the Dragon Center with it.”

“We both know, Mr. President, the American public and world opinion would come down on you like a ton of bricks despite your attempt to stop a nuclear disaster in the making.”

“Then we send in our Delta Forces, and quick.”

“Delta Force teams are already standing by their aircraft at Anderson Air Force Base on Guam. But I advise we wait. We still have time for my people to accomplish their planned mission.”

“How, if they have no hope of escape?”

“They’re still the best, Mr. President. I don’t think we should write them off just yet.”

The President stopped his cart beside the ball that sat only a few centimeters from the green. The caddie ran up with a nine iron. The President looked at him and shook his head. “I can putt better than I can chip. You better let me have a putter.”

Two putts later the ball dropped in the cup. “I wish I had the patience for golf,” said Jordan as the President returned to the cart. “But I keep thinking there are more important things to devote my time to.”

“No man can go continuously without recharging his batteries,” said the President. He glanced at Jordan as he drove to the next tee. “What do you want from me, Ray?”

“Another eight hours, Mr. President, before you order in the Delta Forces.”

“You really think your people can still pull it off.”

“I think they should be given the chance.” Jordan paused. “And then there are two other considerations.”

“Such as?”

“The possibility Suma’s robots might cut our Delta Forces team to pieces before they could reach the command center.”

The President grinned dryly. “A robot may not go down under the assault of a martial arts expert, but they’re hardly immune to heavy weapons fire.”

“I give you that, sir, but they can lose an arm and still come at you, and they don’t bleed either.”

“And the other consideration?”

“We have been unable to uncover the whereabouts of Congresswoman Smith and Senator Diaz. We suspect there is a strong case to be made for them being held at Suma’s retreat on Soseki Island.”

“You’re stroking me, Ray. Brogan over at Langley is certain Smith and Diaz are under guard in Edo City. They were seen and identified at Suma’s guest quarters.” There was a long pause. “You know damned well I can’t afford to give you eight hours. If your team hasn’t resurfaced and completed their operation in four, I’m sending in the Delta Forces.”

“Suma’s island is bristling with defense missile systems. Any submarine attempting to land men within twenty kilometers of the shore would be blown out of the water and any aircraft dropping parachutists shot out of the sky. And should the Delta Forces somehow gain a foothold on Soseki, they’d be slaughtered before they could get inside the Dragon Center.”

The President gazed out on the course as the sun was settling into the treetops. “If your team has failed,” he said pensively, “then I’ll have to doom my political career and launch a nuclear bomb. I see no other way to stop the Kaiten Project before Suma has a chance to use it against us.”

In a room deep in Building C of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Clyde Ingram, the Director of Science and Technical Data Interpretation, sat in a comfortable chair and studied a giant television screen. The imagery detail from the latest advance in reconnaissance satellites was unbelievable.

Thrown into space on a secret shuttle mission, the Pyramider satellite was far more versatile than its predecessor, the Sky King. Instead of providing only detailed photos and video of the land and sea surface, its three systems also revealed subterranean and suboceanic detail.

By merely pushing buttons on a console, Ingram could maneuver the big bird into position above any target on earth and aim its powerful cameras and sensors to read anything from the fine print of a newspaper lying on a park bench and the layout of an underground missile complex to what the crew of a submarine lurking under an ice floe was having for dinner.

This evening he was analyzing the images showing the sea around Soseki Island. After picking out the missile systems hidden in the forested land around the retreat, he began to concentrate on finding and positioning underwater sensors placed by Suma’s security force to detect any submarine activity and guard against a clandestine landing.

After close to an hour, his eyes spotted a small object resting on the seafloor thirty-six kilometers to the northeast and three hundred and twenty meters deep. He sent a message to the computer mainframe to enlarge the area around the object. The computer in turn gave the coordinates and instructed the satellite’s sensors to zero in.

After the signal was received and locked in the satellite sent an enlarged image to a receiver on a Pacific island that was relayed to Ingram’s computer at Fort Meade, where it was then enhanced and thrown on the screen.

Ingram rose and walked closer to the screen, peering through his reading glasses. Then he returned to his chair and pressed a number on a telephone and called his Deputy Director of Operations, who was in his car stuck in the horrendous homeward traffic crush of Washington.

“Meeker,” came a weary voice from a cellular phone.

“This is Ingram, boss.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of peeking at the world’s darkest secrets all night? Why don’t you go home and make love to your wife?”

“I admit sex is best, but staring at these incredible pictures is a close second.”

Curtis Meeker sighed with relief as the traffic opened up and he made it through the last intersection light signal before turning down his street. “You see something?” he asked.

“I have an airplane in the sea off Soseki Island.”

“What model?”

“Looks like a World War Two B-Twenty-nine, or what’s left of it. Appears heavily damaged but otherwise in pretty good shape after sitting on the seabed for fifty years.”

“Any details?”

“A clear picture of numbers and letters on the side of the fuselage and the tail. I can also make out a small figure on the bow beneath the cockpit.”

“Describe it.”

“Not a perfect image, mind you, when you consider that we’re looking through four hundred meters of water. But I’d say it looks like a devil with a pitchfork.”

“Make out any wording?”

“Pretty vague,” answered Ingram. “The first word is covered by undersea growth.” He paused and gave the command to the computer for further enhancement. “The second word looks like ‘Demons.’ “

“A little off the beaten path for the Twentieth Air Force during the war,” said Meeker.

“Think there’s any importance attached to it?”

Meeker shook his head to himself as he turned into his driveway. “Probably just an aircraft that went missing after it flew off course and crashed like the Lady Be Good in the Sahara Desert. Better have it checked out, though, so any living relatives of the crew can be notified of their final resting place.”

Ingram set down the receiver and stared at the shattered picture of the old aircraft buried under the sea, and found himself wondering how it came to be there.

51

THERE HAD BEEN no need to tape their eyes open. Stacy, Mancuso, and Weatherhill had watched the viewing screen in horrified fascination just before the picture went black during Pitt’s fight with the robodog. Then sadness and shock flooded their emotions as Kamatori fiendishly aimed another camera at the blood-drenched ground.

The four of them sat chained to metal chairs grouped in a small semicircle around a huge high-resolution video screen set into the wall. The two robots Giordino called McGoon and McGurk stood guard with the latest in Japanese automatic rifles aimed at the back of their prisoners’ heads.

The unexpected defeat of their plans and total helplessness had stunned them worse than the virtual sentence of death. A hundred plans to salvage their predicament rushed through their minds. None had the slightest hope of getting off the ground. They were conscious now of little but approaching death.

Stacy turned and looked across at Giordino to see how he was taking the crushing blow of his friend’s loss. But his face was completely composed and thoughtful, with no trace of sorrow or rage. Giordino sat there in icy calm, his eyes curiously staring at the action on the screen as if it was an adventure serial at a Saturday matinee.

A short time later, Kamatori entered the room, sat down crosslegged on a mat, and poured a cup of saki. “I trust you watched the results of the hunt,” he said between sips. “Mr. Pitt did not play by the rules. He attacked the robot, altered its programming, and died through his own stupidity.”

“He would have died by your hand anyway!” spat Mancuso. “At least he cheated you of that piece of butchery.”

Kamatori’s lips curled downward briefly and then up in a sinister smile. “I assure you, there will be no repeat of your friend’s performance. A new robodog is presently being reprogrammed so that any unexpected damage to his system will not result in an attack on his quarry.”

“That’s a break,” grunted Giordino.

“You scumbag,” hissed Mancuso, red-faced and straining against his chains. “I’ve seen the brutalities men like you did to Allied prisoners of war. You delight in the torture of others, but can’t stand the thought of suffering yourself.”

Kamatori observed Mancuso with the same expression of haughty distaste he might have displayed at observing a rat baring its teeth from a sewer. “You shall be the last I run to ground, Mr. Mancuso. You will suffer at watching the agony of the others until your turn.”

“I volunteer to be next,” said Weatherhill calmly. His mind skipped over escape schemes and began concentrating on one act. He figured if he did nothing else, killing Kamatori would be worth dying for.

Kamatori slowly shook his head. “Miss Stacy Fox has that honor. A professional female operative will make an interesting challenge. Far better than Dirk Pitt, I hope’ He was a shocking disappointment.”

For the first time Weatherhill felt a trace of nausea run through him. He had never been afraid of death. Half his life had been spent on the brink between living or being killed. But sitting helplessly while a woman was brutally murdered, a woman he knew and respected, made him sick.

Stacy’s face was pale as Kamatori rose to his feet and ordered the robotic guards to release her chains, but she glared at him with icy contempt. The locks were opened by an electronic signal, and she was roughly pulled to her feet free of the chair.

Kamatori pointed toward the door that opened to the outside of the room. “Go,” he commanded in a sharp voice. “I will begin the pursuit in one hour.”

Stacy took what she thought was her last look at the others. Mancuso seemed stricken, while Weatherhill stared back at her with great sorrow in his eyes. But it was Giordino who caused her to do a double take. He gave her a wink, a nod, and a smile.

“You’re wasting time,” Kamatori said coldly.

“No need to dash off,” came a voice from behind the two robotic guards.

Stacy turned, certain her eyes were deceiving her.

Dirk Pitt stood on the threshold, leaning negligently against the doorframe, gazing past her at Kamatori. Both his hands rested on the hilt of along saber whose tip stabbed the polished floor. His deep green eyes were set, an anticipatory grin was on his rugged face.

“Sorry I’m late, but I had to take a dog to obedience school.

52

NOBODY MOVED, NOBODY SPOKE. The robots stood motionless, waiting for a command from Kamatori, their data processors not fully programmed to react at Pitt’s sudden appearance. But the samurai was in the opening moments of shock at seeing Pitt standing there without a scratch on his body. His lips parted and his eyes spread, and then slowly the beginning of a forced smile twisted the lines on his curious face.

“You did not die,” he said as his mind pushed through the curtain of surprise and his face became a dark cloud. “You faked your death, and yet the blood—”

“I borrowed a few things from your hospital,” Pitt explained casually, “and performed a bloodletting on myself.”

“But you had nowhere to go but into the surf or onto the rocks below the cliff. And if you survived the fall and dropped into the water, you would have been swept away by the vicious undercurrents. You could not have survived.”

“I used the tree you saw floating in the surf to cushion my fall into the water. Then I floated with the current until it released me a few hundred meters from shore. After drifting a short distance, I caught the incoming tide and swam until I reached a small cove and climbed the palisades below the resort.”

The surprise in Kamatori’s eyes transformed to intense curiosity. “The security perimeter, how was it possible for you to slip through the robotic guards?”

“Speaking figuratively, I knocked them out.”

“No good.” Kamatori shook his head. “Their detection systems are flawless. They are not programmed to let an intruder pass.”

“Bet me.” Pitt lifted the saber, rammed its point into the wooden floor, and released his grip, leaving it quivering in the polished wood. He took the small object from under his arm that could now be seen as a sock with something wrapped inside it. He moved unobtrusively toward one of the robots from the rear. Before it could turn, he pressed the thing inside the sock against the plastic wall surrounding the computerized midsection. The roboguard immediately went rigid and immobile.

Realizing too late what Pitt was doing, Kamatori shouted, “Shoot him!”

But Pitt had ducked under the muzzle of the second robot’s automatic rifle and shoved the strange object against its processor. Like the first, it became inert.

“How did you do that?” Stacy gasped.

Pitt pulled the sock off a small six-volt dry cell from the portable X-ray machine and an iron pipe wrapped with two meters of copper wire. He held the package up for all to see.

“A magnet. It erased the programs from the disks inside the robots’ computer processors and fouled up their integrated circuits.”

“A temporary reprieve, nothing more,” commented Kamatori. ‘ ‘ I badly miscalculated your ingenuity, Mr. Pitt, but you have accomplished little but prolonging your life by a few more minutes.”

“At least we’re armed now,” said Weatherhill, nodding at the stationary guns held by the robots.

Despite the turn of events, Kamatori could not conceal the expression of triumph on his face. He was back in total control. Pitt’s near-miraculous resurrection had been for nothing. “The guns are tightly molded to the flexible arms of the robots. You cannot remove them with anything less than a cutting grinder. You are as helpless as before.”

“Then we’re in the same boat now that your bodyguards have been unplugged,” said Pitt, tossing the magnet to Stacy.

“I have my katana.” Kamatori’s hand raised and touched the hilt of his native Japanese ancestral sword that rested in the sheath that stuck out behind his back. The sixty-one-centimeter blade was forged from an elastic magnetic iron combined with a hard steel edge. “And I also carry a wakizashi.” He slipped a knife about twenty-four centimeters in length from a scabbard inside his sash, displaying its blade before resheathing it.

Pitt stepped back toward the doorway leading to Kamatori’s antique arsenal and yanked the sword from the floor. “Not exactly Excalibur maybe, but it beats swinging a pillow.”

The sword that Pitt had taken from a wall of Kamatori’s study was a nineteenth-century Italian dueling saber with a blade ninety centimeters from hilt to tip. It was heavier than the modern fencing saber Pitt had used during his days at the Air Force Academy and not as flexible, but in the hand of a skilled fencer it could be used with great effect.

Pitt had no illusions of what he was plunging into. He didn’t doubt for an instant that Kamatori was a practicing expert at the Japanese sword sport of kenjutsu, while he hadn’t swung a blade in a practice match for over two years. But if he could just stay alive while Stacy somehow freed Mancuso and Weatherhill, or distracted Kamatori so Pitt might gain an advantage, there was a slim chance they could still escape the island.

“You dare to challenge me with that?” Kamatori sneered.

“Why not?” Pitt shrugged. “In truth samurai warriors were little more than overblown toads. I figure you were bred from the same slime pond.”

Kamatori brushed off the insult. “So you’re to wear a halo and play Sir Galahad against my black knight.”

“Actually I had Errol Flynn against Basil Rathbone more in mind.”

Kamatori closed his eyes and in an unexpected movement sank to his knees and went into a meditating trance. He became immersed in the art of kiai, an inner force or power attributed with accomplishing miracles, especially among the samurai class. Mentally, long practice in uniting the soul and conscious mind and bringing them into a kind of divine realm supposedly raises the practitioner to a subconscious level that aids him in performing superhuman feats in the martial arts. Physically, it involved the art of deep and prolonged breathing, the reasoning being the man who has a full load of air in the lungs has it all over the opponent who has exhaled.

Pitt sensed a quick attack and flexed his legs and body in the on-guard position.

Nearly two full minutes passed, and then suddenly, with lightninglike speed, Kamatori leaped to his feet and pulled his katana from its scabbard with both hands in a long sweeping motion. But instead of losing a microsecond by lifting the blade over his head for a downward stroke, he continued the motion in an upward diagonal cut in an attempt to slash Pitt open from the hip to the shoulder.

Pitt anticipated the move and narrowly parried the wicked slice, then made a quick thrust, penetrating Kamatori’s thigh before jumping backward to avoid his opponent’s next savage attack.

The tactics of kenjutsu and Olympic saber were wildly different. It was as if a basketball player was pitted against a football halfback. Traditional fencing had linear movements with thrusting strokes, while kenjutsu had no limitations, the katana wielder wading in to cut down his opponent in a slashing assault. But they both relied on technique, speed, and the element of surprise.

Kamatori moved with catlike agility, knowing that one good cut against Pitt’s flesh would quickly end the contest. He moved rapidly from side to side, uttering guttural shouts to throw Pitt off balance. He rushed fiercely, his two-handed strokes beating aside Pitt’s thrusts with relative ease. The wound in his thigh went seemingly unnoticed and caused no obstacle to his nimble reactions.

Kamatori’s two-handed katana strokes cut the air slightly faster and carried more power than the saber in Pitt’s single hand. But in the hands of a skilled fencer, the old dueling blade could reverse angle a fraction more quickly. It was also nearly thirty centimeters longer, a benefit Pitt used to keep Kamatori’s slashing attack out of range of a mortal injury. The saber combined the point with the stroke, while the katana was all slash and cut.

Kamatori also had the advantage of experience and constant practice with his blade. Pitt was rusty, but he was ten years younger than the kenjutsu expert and, except for the loss of blood, was in top physical condition.

Stacy and the others were spellbound by the spectacular display of leaping, thrusting, and running attacks as the blades glinted like strobe lights and clattered as their edges struck. Occasionally Kamatori broke off the attack and retreated, altering his position to stay between Stacy, Mancuso, and Weatherhill to prevent her from freeing them, and to satisfy himself that she wasn’t attempting to attack him from the rear or flank. Then he shouted a guttural curse and resumed the slashing onslaught against the hated American.

Pitt was holding his own, lunging when an opening presented itself, parrying the explosive power of Kamatori’s strokes, and evading the incredible ferocity of the attacks. He tried to work Stacy clear, but his opponent was too shrewd and shut down every opportunity. Though Stacy was an expert at judo, Kamatori would have cut her down before she came within two meters of him.

Pitt fought hard and silently, while Kamatori came on savagely, yelling with every stroke, slowly forcing Pitt to retreat across the room. The Japanese smiled faintly as a fierce swipe grazed Pitt’s extended sword arm and drew a thin line of blood.

The sheer force of Kamatori’s assault kept Pitt on the defensive warding off the chopping blows. Kamatori swept from side to side, attempting to fight in a circle.

Pitt easily saw through the ploy and steadily fell back a step at a time, then suddenly lunged, relying on his dexterous use of the point and controlled fencing style to keep alive and frustrate Kamatori’s timing.

One thrust caught Kamatori in the forearm but didn’t slow down the kenjutsu master for an instant. Lost in the kiai, striking when he thought Pitt exhaled his breath, he felt no pain, nor seemingly noticed when Pitt’s saber point pierced his flesh. He hurtled back and came inexorably after Pitt, swishing his kutana in a blur of whirling steel with short brutal back-and-forth strokes almost faster than the eye.

Pitt was tiring, his arm felt leaden, like a prizefighter’s after the fourteenth round of a toe-to-toe slugging match. His breath was coming faster now, and he could feel the increased pounding of his heart.

The ancient saber was showing signs of wear too. Its edge was no match for the fine steel of the Japanese katana. The tarnished old blade was deeply nicked in fifty places, and Pitt knew that one solid blow on the flat side could very well break it in two.

Kamatori amazingly showed no hint of weariness. His eyes seemed glazed with bloodlust, and the power behind his strokes was as strong now as at the beginning of the duel. It was only a matter of another minute or two before he would wear Pitt down and cut away his life with the proud sword of Japan.

Pitt leaped backward for a quick breather to take stock as Kamatori paused to catch Stacy’s movements out of the corner of his eye. She stood suspiciously still with her hands behind her back. The Japanese sensed something and moved toward her, but Pitt advanced again, stretching forward on one knee with a rapid thrust that caught the katana and slid down the hilt, the saber’s tip just fanning the knuckles of Kamatori’s forward hand.

Pitt suddenly changed tactics and pressed forward, seeing an opportunity that he had missed. Unlike the shorter hilt of the old dueling saber, with its shell enclosing the hand, Kamatori’s katana had only a small round guard at the base of the longer hilt. Pitt began aiming his thrusts, using a wrist-snapping circular motion. Feinting toward his assailant’s midsection during a lunge, Pitt flicked the tip of the blade to the left and caught Kamatori’s hand during a vicious upswing, slicing fingers to the bone.

Incredibly, Kamatori simply cursed in Japanese and came on again, blood spraying whenever he whipped his sword. If he felt the cold grip of defeat in his gut, he didn’t show it. Immune to pain and injury by his immersion into his kiai, he resumed the attack like a madman.

Then his head snapped back and to one side as a steel object struck him in the right eye. With unerring aim, Stacy had thrown the lock that had fastened her chains. Pitt snatched the moment and lunged, ramming the point of his saber into his opponent’s rib cage and puncturing a lung.

Kamatori faltered momentarily and insanely continued to fight. He moved against Pitt, shouting with each stroke as blood began to foam from his mouth. But his speed and power were diminished, and Pitt had no problem fending off the weakened cuts.

Pitt’s next thrust laid open Kamatori’s right biceps. Only then did the highly burnished steel of the katana waver and droop.

Pitt stepped in and swung the saber as hard as his strength would allow, knocking the katana free of Kamatori’s hand. The blade clattered to the floor, and Stacy snapped it up.

He kept the saber pointed at Kamatori and stared at him. “You lose,” Pitt said with controlled courtesy.

It was not in Kamatori’s samurai bones to acknowledge surrender so long as he still stood on his feet. His face underwent a curious change. The mask of hatred and ferocity melted away and his eyes assumed an inward look.

He said, “A samurai takes no honor in defeat. You can cut out a dragon’s tooth, but he grows a thousand more.” Then he snatched the long knife from its sheath and leaped at Pitt.

Pitt, though weak and panting for breath, easily stepped aside and parried the slashing knife. He swung the faithful old saber for the last time and severed Kamatori’s hand at the wrist.

Shock flooded Kamatori’s face, the shock of disbelief, then pain, then the full realization that for the first time in his life he had been subdued by an opponent and was going to die. He stood and glowered at Pitt, his dark eyes filled with uncontrolled rage, the empty wrist hanging by his side, blood streaming to the floor.

“I have dishonored my ancestors. You will please allow me to save face by committing seppuku.”

Pitt’s eyes half closed in curiosity. He looked at Mancuso.

“Seppuku?”

“The accepted and more stylish Japanese term for what we crudely call hara-kiri, which actually translates as belly cutting. He wants you to let him have a ‘happy dispatch.’ “

“I see,” Pitt said, a tired but maddened understanding in his voice. “I see indeed, but it’s not going to happen. He’s not going to get his way. Not with his own hand. Not after all the people he’s murdered in cold blood.”

“My dishonor at having been defeated by a foreigner must be expunged by offering up my life,” Kamatori muttered through clenched teeth, the mesmeric force of kiai quickly fading.

“His friends and family will rejoice,” explained Mancuso. “Honor to him is everything. He considers dying by his own hand beautiful and looks forward to it.”

“God, this is sickening,” murmured Stacy disgustedly as she stared at Kamatori’s hand on the floor. “Tie and gag him. Let’s finish our job and get out of here.”

“You’re going to die, but not as you hope,” said Pitt, staring at the defiant face darkened in hate, the lips drawn back like a dog baring its teeth. But Pitt caught a slight look of fear in the dark eyes, not a fear of dying, but a fear of not joining his ancestors in the prescribed manner of honored tradition.

Before anyone knew what Pitt was about to do, he grabbed Kamatori by the good arm and dragged the samurai into the study containing the antique arms and the gruesome collection of mounted human heads. Carefully, as if he was aligning a painting, he positioned Kamatori and rammed the saber blade through the lower groin, pinning him upright to the wall beneath the heads of his victims.

Kamatori’s eyes were filled with unbelief and the fear of a miserable and shameful end. The pain was there too.

Pitt knew he was looking at a near corpse and got in the last word before the eyes went sightless in death.

“No divine passing for a killer of the helpless. Join your prey and be damned.”

53

PITT REMOVED A Viking battle-axe from its brackets on a wall and returned to the video monitor room. Stacy had already picked the locks on the chains confining Giordino and Mancuso and was working to free Weatherhill.

“What did you do with Kamatori?” Giordino asked, peering curiously around Pitt’s shoulder into the trophy room.

“Mounted him with the rest of his collection.” He handed the axe to Giordino. “Break up the robots so they can’t be repaired anytime soon.”

“Break up McGoon?”

“And McGurk.”

Giordino looked pained, but he took the ax and smashed it into McGoon. “I feel like Dorothy trashing the Tin Man from Oz.”

Mancuso shook Pitt’s hand. “You saved our asses. Thank you.”

“A nice bit of swordplay,” said Weatherhill. “Where’d you learn it?”

“That will have to wait,” Pitt said impatiently. “What’s Penner’s grandiose scheme for our rescue?”

“You don’t know?”

“Penner didn’t deem us worthy of his confidence.”

Mancuso looked at him and shook his head. “There is no plan for a rescue mission,” he said with an embarrassed expression. “Originally we were to be evacuated by submarine, but Penner ruled that out as too risky for the sub and its crew after reviewing a satellite photo of Suma’s sea defenses. Stacy, Tim, and I were to make our way back through the tunnel to Edo City and escape to our embassy in Tokyo.”

Pitt nodded at Giordino. “And the two of us?”

“The State Department was alerted to negotiate with Suma and the Japanese government for your release.”

“The State Department?” Giordino moaned between chops. “I’d sooner be represented by Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

“Jordan and Kern didn’t take into account Suma and Kamatori’s nasty dispositions,” said Mancuso cynically.

Pitt’s mouth tightened in a hard bitter line. “You people are the experts. What’s the next move?”

“Finish the job as planned and hot-foot it through the tunnel,” answered Weatherhill as Stacy opened the lock and his chains fell away.

“You still aim to destroy the Dragon Center?”

“Not completely, but we can put a dent in it.”

“With what?” inquired Giordino. “A homemade magnet and an axe?”

“No sweat,” Weatherhill replied airily, massaging his wrists. “Suma’s security forces may have taken our explosives kit during our capture and subsequent search, but we still have enough for a minor bang.” He sat down and pulled off his shoes, prying off the soles and incredibly kneading them into a ball. “C-Eight plastic,” he said proudly. “The very latest in explosives for the discriminating spook.”

“And the detonators are in the heels,” muttered Pitt.

“How’d you know?”

“Positive thinking.”

“Let’s move out,” said Mancuso. “The robot’s controllers and Kamatori’s human pals will wonder why his private hunt has been shut down and come running to investigate.”

Stacy stepped to the door leading outside Kamatori’s personal quarters, opened it slightly, and peered around the garden outside. “Our first hurdle is to find the building with the elevator to the underground center. We were led up here from our cells blindfolded and didn’t get a feel for its exact location.”

“I’ll lead you to it,” said Pitt.

“You know the location?”

“I should. I rode it down to the hospital.”

“Your magnet won’t be of much help if we run into a squad of robots,” Mancuso said grimly.

“Then we’ll have to expand our bag of tricks,” said Pitt. He moved over beside Stacy and looked through the cracked door. “There’s a garden hose just under that bush to your left. See it?”

Stacy nodded. “Beside the terrace.”

He gestured at the katana she still held in her hand. “Sneak out and slice off a few feet.”

She stared at him quizzically. “May I ask why?”

“Cut up the hose in short lengths, rub one against a piece of silk, and you strip out the negative electrons,” Pitt explained. “Then touch the end of the hose against a robot’s integrated circuits, making the electrons jump and destroy the delicate components.”

“An electrostatic discharge,” murmured Weatherhill thoughtfully. “Is that it?”

Pitt nodded. “You could do the same thing by rubbing a cat or dragging your feet across a carpet.”

“You’d make a good high school physics teacher.”

“What about the silk?” asked Giordino.

“Kamatori’s kimono,” Weatherhill said over his shoulder as he hurried into the trophy room.

Pitt turned to Mancuso. “Where do you intend to set off your firecrackers where they’ll do the most damage?”

“We don’t have enough C-Eight to do a permanent job, but if we can place it near a power supply, we can set back their schedule for a few days, maybe weeks.”

Stacy returned with a three-meter section of garden hose. “How do you want it sliced?”

“Divide it into four parts,” Pitt answered. “One for each of you. I’ll carry the magnet as a backup.”

Weatherhill came back from the trophy room carrying torn shreds of Kamatori’s silk kimono, some showing bloodstains, and began passing them out. He smiled at Pitt. “Your placement of our samurai friend made him a most appropriate piece of wall decor.”

“There is no sculpture,” Pitt said pontifically, “that can take the place of an original.”

“I don’t want to be within a thousand kilometers when Hideki Suma sees what you’ve done to his best friend.” Giordino laughed, throwing the broken remains of the two roboguards into a pile in a corner of the room.

“Yes,” Pitt said indifferently, “but that’s what he gets for pissing off the dark side of the fence.”

Loren, her face still and angered, observed in mounting shock the awesome technical and financial power behind Suma’s empire as he led her and Diaz on a tour through a complex that was far more vast than she could ever imagine. There was much more to it than a control center to send, prime, and detonate signals to a worldwide array of nuclear bombs. The seemingly unending levels and corridors also contained countless laboratories, vast engineering and electronic experimental units, a fusion research facility, and a nuclear reactor plant incorporating designs still on the drawing boards of the Western industrialized countries.

Suma said proudly, “My primary structural engineering and administration offices and scientific think tank are housed in Edo City. But here, safe and secure under Soseki Island, is the core of my research and development.”

He ushered them into a lab and pointed out a large open vat of crude oil. “You can’t see them, but eating away at the oil are second-generation genetically engineered microbes that actually digest the petroleum and multiply, launching a chain reaction and destroying the oil molecules. The residue can then be dissolved by water.”

“That could prove a boon for the cleanup of oil spills,” commented Diaz.

“One useful purpose,” said Suma. “Another is to deplete a hostile country’s oil reserves.”

Loren looked at him in disbelief. “Why cause such chaos? For what gain?”

“In time, Japan will be almost totally independent of oil. Our total generating power will be nuclear. Our new technology in fuel cells and solar energy will soon be incorporated in our automobiles, replacing the gasoline engine. Deplete the world’s reserves with our oil-eating microbes, and eventually all international transportation—automobiles, trucks, and aircraft—grinds to a halt.”

“Unless replaced by Japanese products,” Diaz stated coldly.

“A lifetime,” Loren said, becoming skeptical. “It would take a lifetime to dry up the billion-gallon oil reserve stored in our underground salt mines.”

Suma smiled patiently. “The microbes could totally deplete United States strategic oil reserves in less than nine months.”

Loren shook her head, unable to absorb the horrible consequences of all she’d been exposed to in the past few hours. She could not conceive of one man causing such a chaotic upheaval. She also could not accept the awful possibility that Pitt might already be dead.

“Why are you showing us all this?” she asked in a whisper. “Why aren’t you keeping it a secret?”

“So you can tell your President and fellow congressmen that the United States and Japan are no longer on equal terms. We now have an unbeatable lead, and your government must accept our demands accordingly.” Suma paused and stared at her. “As to generously giving away secrets, you and Senator Diaz are not scientists or engineers. You can only describe what you’ve seen in vague layman terms. I have shown you no scientific data but merely an overall view of my projects. You will take home nothing that can prove useful in copying our technical superiority.”

“When will you allow Congresswoman Smith and I to leave for Washington?” asked Diaz.

Suma looked at his watch. “Very soon. As a matter of fact, you will be airlifted to my private airfield at Edo City within the hour. From there, one of my executive jets will fly you home.”

“Once the President hears of your madness,” Diaz snapped, “he’ll order the military to blow this place to dust.”

Suma gave vent to a confident sigh and smiled. “He’s too late. My engineers and robotic workers are ahead of schedule. You did not know, could not have known, the Kaiten Project was completed a few minutes after we began the tour.”

“It’s operational?” Loren spoke in a shocked whisper.

Suma nodded. “Should your President be foolish enough to launch an attack on the Dragon Center, my detection systems will alert me in ample time to signal the robots to deploy and detonate the bomb cars.” He hesitated only long enough to flash a hideous grin. “As Buson, a Japanese poet, once wrote, ‘With his hat blown off/the stiff-necked scarecrow/stands there quite discomfited.’

“The President is the scarecrow, and he stands stymied because his time is gone.”

54

LIVELY, BUT NOT HURRIEDLY, Pitt led them into the building of the retreat that housed the elevator. He walked in the open while the others dodged from cover to cover behind him. He met no humans but was halted by a robotic security guard at the elevator entrance.

This one was programmed to speak only in Japanese, but Pitt had no trouble in deciphering the menacing tone and the weapon pointing at his forehead. He raised his hands in front of him with the palms facing forward and slowly moved closer, shielding the others from its video receiver and detection sensors.

Weatherhill and Mancuso stealthily closed in from the flanks and jabbed their statically charged hoses against the box containing the integrated circuits. The armed robot froze as if in suspended animation.

“Most efficient,” Weatherhill observed, recharging his length of hose by rubbing it vigorously against the silk.

“Think he tipped off his supervisory control?” Stacy wondered.

“Probably not,” Pitt replied. “His sensory capability was slow in deciding whether I was a threat or simply an unprogrammed member of the project.”

Once inside the deserted elevator, Weatherhill opted for the fourth level. “Six opens onto the main floor of the control center,” he recalled. “Better to take our chances and exit on a lower level.”

“The hospital and service units are on four,” Pitt briefed him.

“What about security?”

“I saw no sign of guards or video monitors.”

“Suma’s outside defenses are so tight he doesn’t have to concern himself with interior security,” said Stacy.

Weatherhill agreed. “A rogue robot is the least of his problems.”

They tensed as the elevator arrived and the doors slid open. Fortunately it was empty. They entered, but Pitt hung back, head tilted as if listening to a distant sound. Then he was inside, pressing the button for the fourth level. A few seconds later they stepped out into a vacant corridor.

They moved quickly, silently, following Pitt. He stopped outside the hospital and paused at the door.

“Why are you stopping here?” Weatherhill asked softly.

“We’ll never find our way around this complex without a map or a guide,” Pitt murmured. “Follow me inside.” He pushed the door button and kicked it back against its stops.

Startled, the nurse-receptionist looked up in surprise at seeing Pitt burst through the doorway. She was not the same nurse who aided Dr. Nogami during Pitt’s earlier visit. This one was as ugly and ruggedly constructed as a road grader. Even as she recovered, her arm snapped out toward an alarm button on an intercom communications unit. Her finger was a centimeter away when Pitt’s flattened palm struck her violently on the chin, catapulting her in a backward somersault onto the floor unconscious.

Dr. Nogami heard the commotion and rushed from his office, stopping abruptly and staring at Pitt and the MAIT team as they flooded through the door before pushing it closed. Oddly, the expression on his face was one of curious amusement rather than shock.

“Sorry for intruding, Doc, Pitt said, “but we need directions.”

Nogami gazed down at his nurse who was lying on the floor out cold. “You certainly have a way with women.”

“She was about to set off an alarm,” Pitt said apologetically.

“Lucky you caught her by surprise. Nurse Oba knows karate like I know medicine.” Only then did Nogami take a few seconds to study the motley group of people standing around the prostrate nurse. He shook his head almost sadly. “So you’re the finest MAIT team the U.S. can field. You sure don’t look it. Where in hell did Ray Jordan dig you people up?”

Giordino was the only one who didn’t stare back at the doctor in mute surprise. He looked up at Pitt. “Do you know something we don’t?”

“May I introduce Dr. Josh Nogami, the British deep cover operative who’s been supplying the lion’s share of information on Suma and his operation.”

“You figured it out,” said Nogami.

Pitt made a modest hands-out gesture. “Your clues made it elementary. There is no St. Paul’s Hospital in Santa Ana, California. But there is a Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London.”

“You don’t sound British,” said Stacy.

“Though my father was raised as a British subject, my mother came from San Francisco, and I attended medical school at UCLA. I can do a reasonable American accent without too much effort.” He hesitated and looked Pitt in. the eye, his smile gone. “You realize, I hope, that by coming back here you’ve blown my cover.”

“I regret throwing you in the limelight,” Pitt said sincerely, “but we have a more immediate problem.” He nodded toward the others. “Maybe only another ten or fifteen minutes before Kamatori and three of his security robots are discovered… ah… incapacitated. Damned little time to set off an explosive charge and get out of here.”

“Wait a minute.” Nogami raised a hand. “Are you saying you killed Kamatori and zapped three roboguards?”

“They don’t come any deader,” Giordino answered cheerfully.

Mancuso was not interested in cordial conversation. “If you can please provide us with a diagram of this complex, and quickly, we’ll be on our way and out of your hair.”

“I photographed the construction blueprints on microfilm, but had no way of smuggling them out to your people after I lost my contact.”

“Jim Hanamura?”

“Yes. Is he dead?” Nogami asked, certain of the answer.

Pitt nodded. “Cut down by Kamatori.”

“Jim was a good man. I hope Kamatori died slowly.”

“He didn’t exactly enjoy the trip.”

“Can you please help us?” Mancuso asked urgently, insistently. “We’re running out of time.”

Nogami didn’t seem the least bit rushed. “You hope to get out through the tunnel to Edo City, I suppose.”

“We had thought we might take the train,” said Weatherhill, his eyes aimed through the door into the corridor.

“Fat chance.” Nogami shrugged. “Since you guys penetrated the complex, Suma ordered the tube guarded by an army of robots on the island side and a huge security force of specially trained men at the Edo City end. An ant couldn’t get through.”

Stacy looked at him. “What do you suggest?”

“The sea. You might get lucky and be picked up by a passing ship.”

Stacy shook her head. “That’s out. Any foreign ship that came within five kilometers would be blown out of the water.”

“You have enough on your minds,” Pitt said calmly, his eyes seemingly fixed on one wall as if seeing something on the other side. “Concentrate on planting the explosives. Trust the escape to Al and me.”

Stacy, Weatherhill, and Mancuso all looked at each other. Then Weatherhill nodded in agreement. “You’re on. You’ve saved our lives and got us this far. Be downright rude not to trust you now.”

Pitt turned to Nogami. “How about it, Doc, care to tag along?” Nogami shrugged and gave a half smile. “Might as well. Thanks to you, my usefulness here is finished. No sense in hanging around for Suma to have my head lopped off.”

“Any suggestions for a place to set explosives?” asked Weatherhill.

“I’ll show you an access hole to the electrical cables and fiber optics that feed the entire complex. Set your charge there and you’ll put this place out of business for a month.”

“What level?”

Nogami tilted his head toward the ceiling. “The level above, the fifth.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” Weatherhill said to Pitt.

“Ready now.” Cautiously, Pitt slipped into the corridor and dogtrotted back to the elevator. They all followed and piled in and stood silent as it rose to the fifth level, tensed for any trouble they might face when the doors opened. Suddenly the elevator dropped down instead of going up. Someone had beat them to it by pressing the button on the level below.

“Damn,” Mancuso swore bitterly. “That’s all we need.”

“Everybody!” Pitt ordered. “Push the doors together to keep them from opening. Al, lean on the ‘door close’ button.”

The elevator stopped and they all pressed their hands on the doors and pushed. The doors tried to spread apart but could only jerk spasmodically without opening.

“Al!” Pitt said softly. “Now hit five!”

Giordino had kept one finger pressed against the “door close” button so tightly the knuckle went white. He released it and pushed the button marked 5.

The elevator shuddered for a few moments as if torn in two directions, then it gave an upward jerk and began rising.

“That was close, too close,” Stacy sighed.

“Going up,” Giordino announced. “Housewares, kitchen utensils, dishes, and hardware—” Abruptly he broke off. “Oh, oh, we haven’t tagged home base yet. Someone else wants on. The light on five just blinked.”

Again alerted, every eye unconsciously rotated toward the panel and the small indicator light that was flashing for the fifth level. Then, as if activated by the same set of gears, they turned and crouched, ready to spring into action.

A white-coated engineer was standing there wearing a hard hat, intently studying notations on a clipboard. He didn’t even look up as he entered the elevator. Only when it began to seep through to him that the elevator wasn’t moving did he gaze around into the Occidental faces. None that he observed were smiling.

He opened his mouth to shout, but Pitt clamped one hand over the engineer’s mouth and squeezed the carotid arteries with the other. Even before the eyes rolled back in the head and the body went limp and sagged to the elevator floor, Nogami was out and leading the others into a passageway.

Weatherhill was the last to go. He paused and looked at Pitt. “When and where do you want us to join up?” he asked.

“Topside in twelve minutes. We’ll hold the cab.”

“Good luck,” Mancuso muttered, hurrying after the others, wondering what the man from NUMA had on his canny mind.

Giordino looked down at the unconscious engineer. “Where do we stash him?”

Pitt pointed up at the access door in the ceiling of the elevator. “Tear his lab coat into strips, then tie and gag him. We’ll park him on the elevator roof.”

As Giordino pulled off the white lab coat and began ripping it apart, he gave Pitt a half-crooked grin. “I heard it too.”

Pitt grinned back. “Ah, yes, the sweet sound of freedom.”

“If we can snatch it.

“Optimism, optimism,” Pitt muttered cheerfully as he launched the elevator upward. “Now let’s show some speed. It’s twelve minutes to show time.”

55

THE MAIT TEAM deep in the Dragon Center could not have been under heavier stress than the two men sweating out the minutes in the communications room of the Federal Headquarters Building. Raymond Jordan and Donald Kern sat watching a huge clock and listening anxiously for the team call sign to be beamed from a satellite in a fixed synchronous position over Japan.

As if triggered by the sudden buzz of a telephone sitting on the table between them, their eyes met, their faces drawn. Jordan picked up the receiver as if it carried the plague.

“Yes, Mr. President,” he answered without hesitation.

“Any word?”

“No, sir.”

The President went quiet for a moment, then said solemnly, “Forty-five minutes, Ray.”

“Understood, sir. Forty-five minutes until the assault.”

“I’ve called off the Delta Forces. After a conference with my other security advisers and the Joint Chiefs, I’ve come to the decision that we cannot afford the time for a military operation. The Dragon Center must be destroyed before it becomes operational.

Jordan felt as though his world was slipping away. He threw the dice one more time. “I still believe that Senator Diaz and Congresswoman Smith may be on the island.”

“Even if you’re right, their possible deaths would have no bearing on my decision.”

“You won’t change your mind and give them another hour?” Jordan pleaded.

“I wish I could find it in my heart to let you have more time, but our national security is at high risk. We cannot allow Suma the opportunity to launch his campaign of international blackmail.”

“You’re right, of course.”

“At least I’m not alone. Secretary of State Oates has briefed the leaders of the NATO nations and Soviet President Antonov, and they have each agreed that it’s in all our mutual interest to proceed.”

“Then we write off the team,” said Jordan, his frustration showing in his tone, “and perhaps Diaz and Smith.”

“I deeply regret compromising the lives of dedicated Americans, some of whom were good friends. Sorry, Ray, I’m faced with the age-old quandary of sacrificing a few to save many.”

Jordan set the receiver in its cradle. He seemed strangely hunched and shrunken. “The President,” he said vacantly.

“No reprieve?” asked Kern grimly.

Jordan shook his head. “He’s scrubbed the assault and is sending in a nuclear warhead.”

Kern went ashen. “Then it’s down to the wire.”

Jordan nodded heavily as he looked up at the clock and saw only forty-three minutes remaining. “Why in God’s name can’t they break free? What happened to the British agent? Why doesn’t he communicate?”

Despite their fears, Jordan and Kern were not remotely prepared for an even worse disaster in the making.

Nogami guided the MAIT team through a series of small side passageways filled with heating and ventilating pipes, skirting heavily populated offices and workshops, keeping as far out of the mainstream of activity as possible. When confronted by a roboguard, Nogami engaged it in conversation while one of the others slowly angled in close and shut down its circuits with a charge of static electricity.

They came to a glass-enclosed room, a large expansive area filled with electrical wiring and fiber-optic bundles, all branching out into narrow tunnels leading throughout the Dragon Center. There was a robot standing in front of a huge console of various dials and digital instruments.

“An inspector robot,” said Nogami softly. “He’s programmed to monitor the systems and report any shorts or disconnects.”

“After we queer his circuits, how long before his supervisor sends someone to check on him?” asked Mancuso.

“From the main telepresence control, five or six minutes.”

“Plenty of time to place the charge and be on our way,” said Weatherhill casually.

“What do you figure for the timer setting?” Stacy asked him.

“Twenty minutes. That should see us safely to the surface and off the island if Pitt and Giordino come through.”

Nogami pushed open the door and stepped aside as Mancuso and Weatherhill entered the room and approached the robot from opposite sides. Stacy remained in the doorway, acting as lookout. The mechanical inspector stiffened at his console like a metal sculpture as the statically charged hoses made contact with his circuit housing.

Smoothly, skillfully, Weatherhill inserted the tiny detonator into the plastic explosive and set the digital timer. “In amongst the cables and optical fibers, I think.”

“Why not destroy the console?” said Nogami.

“They’ve probably got backup units in a supply warehouse somewhere,” explained Mancuso.

Weatherhill nodded in agreement as he moved up a passageway a short distance and taped the charge behind several bundles of heavily insulated cable and optical fibers. “They can replace the console and reconnect new terminal leads in twenty-four hours,” he lectured, “but blow a meter out of the middle of a thousand wires and they’ll have to replace the whole system from both ends. It will take them five times as long.”

“Sounds fair,” Nogami acquiesced.

“Don’t make it obvious,” said Mancuso.

Weatherhill looked at him reproachfully. “They won’t be looking for something they don’t know exists.” He gave a love pat to the timer and exited the passageway.

“All clear,” Stacy reported from the doorway.

One at a time they moved furtively into the corridor and hurried toward the elevator. They had covered nearly two hundred meters when Nogami suddenly halted and held up his hand. The sound of human voices echoed along the concrete walls of a side passage followed by the soft whirr of an electric motor. Nogami furiously gestured for them to move ahead, and they darted across the opening and rushed around a corner before the intruders came into sight of the main corridor.

“I misjudged their efficiency,” Nogami whispered without turning. “They’re early.”

“Investigators?” Stacy asked him.

“No,” he answered quickly. “Telepresence supervisors with a replacement for the robot you put out of commission.”

“You think they might be onto us?”

“We’d know if they were. A general alarm would be sounded and a horde of Suma’s human security forces along with an army of roboguards would have swarmed through every corridor and blocked all intersections.”

“Lucky someone hasn’t smelled a rat from all the robots we’ve wasted,” grunted Mancuso as he rushed along the corridor in Nogami’s trail.

“Without obvious signs of damage, the telepresence supervisors will think they suffered from simple electronic malfunctions.”

They reached the elevator and lost a full two minutes as they waited for it to rise from a lower level. After what seemed half a lifetime, the doors finally opened to an empty interior. Weatherhill was the first in, and he pressed the button for the surface level.

The elevator, with the three men and one woman standing grimly and silently, rose with excruciating slowness. Only Nogami had a watch, the others having lost theirs when they were captured. He peered at the dial.

“Thirty seconds to spare,” he informed them.

“Out of the fire,” murmured Mancuso. “Now let’s hope there’s no frying pan.

All that mattered now was their escape. What plan did Pitt have circulating inside his head? Had anything happened to him and Giordino? Had Pitt miscalculated and was he recaptured or dead? If he was, then all hope had vanished and they were left with nothing, no direction for freedom, their only hope of escape struck down.

They had lost track of the number of times they’d prepared for the worst, crouched ready to spring at whatever or whoever stood outside the elevator. They stiffened as the doors pulled apart.

Giordino stood there big as life, a broad grin on his face. When he spoke it was as though he was standing at the gate of an airport. “May I see your boarding passes, please?”

Ubunai Okuma and Daisetz Kano were top-level robotic engineers, highly trained in the teleoperation of computer vision and artificial intelligence, as well as the maintenance and troubleshooting of sensory malfunctions. In the telepresence control room they had received a signal that robot electrical inspector Taiho, whose name meant “big gun,” was nonfunctioning, and they immediately moved to replace him for repair.

Sudden breakdown from myriad problems was not uncommon. Robotics was still a new science, and bugs cropped up with maddening frequency. Robots often stalled abruptly for reasons that became readily apparent only after they were returned to a reconditioning center and probed.

Kano circled Inspector Taiho, making a quick visual check. Seeing nothing obvious, he shrugged. “Looks like a faulty circuit board.”

Okuma glanced at a chart on a clipboard that he carried. “This one has a history of problems. His vision imaging has caused trouble on five different occasions.”

“Strange, this is the fourth unit to be reported as failed in the past hour.”

“It always runs in streaks,” muttered Okuma.

“His systems need updating and modifying,” agreed Kano. “No sense in giving him a quick fix. I’ll schedule him for a complete rebuild.” He turned to the replacement robot. “Ready to assume inspection duties, Otokodate?”

An array of lights flashed and Otokodate, a term for a sort of Robin Hood, spoke in slow but crisp words. “I am ready to monitor all systems.”

“Then begin.”

As the replacement robot took its place at the monitor, Okuma and Kano hoisted the malfunctioning robot onto a motorized dolly with a small crane. Then one of them programmed a code word into the dolly’s computer and it began to move automatically toward the conditioning area without human control. The two engineers did not accompany the injured robot but made their way toward the workers’ comfort room to indulge in a brief cup of tea.

Left alone, Otokodate concentrated his vision system on the dials and blinking digital readings and routinely began to process the data in his computer. His high-level sensing ability, incredibly advanced over a human’s, caught an infinitesimal deviation of measurement.

The laser pulse rate through an optic fiber is measured in millions of beats per second. Otokodate’s sensors could read the instrument measurements far more accurately than a human, and he recognized a minuscule drop in the pulse rate from the standard 44.7 million beats per second to 44.68 million. He computed the refractive index profile and determined that the light transmitting its waves through two of the strands inside a ribbon containing thousands of optic fibers was temporarily zigzagging at some point.

He signaled telepresence command that he was leaving the console for an inspection of the fiber bundles inside the passageways.

56

SUMA WAS GROWING more angry and impatient by the moment. Diaz and Smith never seemed to tire of quarreling with him, giving vent to their hatred of his achievements, threatening him as if he was a common thief off the street. He came to welcome the chance to wash his hands of them.

Abducting Senator Diaz, he felt, was a mistake. He took him only because Ichiro Tsuboi was confident that Diaz carried substantial influence in the Senate and held the President’s ear. Suma saw the man as petty and narrow-minded. After a medical discharge from the Army, Diaz had worked his way through the University of New Mexico. He then used the traditional road to power by becoming a lawyer and championing causes that brought headlines and support from the majority state party. Suma despised him as an obsolete political hack who harped on the monotonous and tiresome harangue of taxing the rich for welfare programs to feed and house nonworking poor. Charity and compassion were traits Suma refused to accept.

Congresswoman Smith, on the other hand, was a very astute woman. Suma had the uncomfortable feeling she could read his mind and counter any statement he tossed at her. She knew her facts and statistics and could quote them with ease. Loren came from good western stock, her family having ranched the western slope of Colorado since the 1870s. Educated at the University of Colorado, she ran for office and beat an incumbent who had served for thirty years. She could play hardball with any man. Suma suspected that her only soft spot was Dirk Pitt, and he was closer to the truth than he knew.

Suma stared across the table from them, sipping saki and regrouping for another exchange of harsh words. He was about to make another point when Toshie came into the room and whispered softly into his ear. Suma set his saki cup on the table and stood.

“It’s time for you to leave.”

Loren elegantly came to her feet and locked eyes with Suma. “I’m not moving from here until I know Dirk and AI are alive and treated humanely.”

Suma smiled indulgently. “They covertly came onto foreign soil, my soil, as intelligence agents of a foreign country—”

“Japanese law is the same as ours in regards to espionage,” she interrupted. “They’re entitled to a fair trial.”

Suma gloated with malicious satisfaction. “I see little reason to carry this discussion further. By now, Mr. Pitt and Mr. Giordino, along with the rest of their spy team, have been executed by my friend Moro Kamatori. Make of it what you will.”

Loren felt as if her heart had been crushed in ice. There was a stunned silence, made even more shocking at knowing it must be true. Her face went white and she swayed on her feet, her mind suddenly void.

Toshie grabbed Loren’s arm and pulled her toward the door. “Come, the aircraft that will take you to Edo City and Mr. Suma’s private aircraft is waiting.”

“No ride through your amazing tunnel beneath the sea?” asked Diaz without a hint of disappointment.

“There are some things I don’t wish you to see,” Suma said nastily.

As if walking through a nightmare, Loren uncaringly allowed Toshie to drag her through a foyer that opened onto a stone path that crossed over a small pond. Suma bowed and motioned for Diaz to accompany the women.

Diaz shrugged submissively and limped with his cane ahead of Suma while the two roboguards brought up the rear.

Beyond the pond, a sleek tilt-turbine aircraft sat in the middle of a lawn surrounded by a high, neatly trimmed hedge. The jet engines were turning over with a soft whistling sound. Two crewmen in red nylon flight suits and brimmed caps stood at attention on each side of the steps leading inside the main cabin. Both were short, one slim, the other fairly bursting the stitched seams over his shoulders. They respectfully bowed their heads as Suma’s party approached.

Diaz stopped suddenly. “When I return to Washington, I’m going to hold a news conference and expose you and your monstrous plans. Then I’ll fight you with every means at my command in both houses of Congress, until every asset you have in the United States is confiscated and nationalized. I won’t rest until you pay for your crimes.”

Suma made an infuriating grin. “Our Washington lobbyists are more than strong enough to dilute your pathetic efforts. We own too many of your fellow legislators, who have a weakness for hidden wealth, for you to influence. Your voice will ring hollow, Senator Diaz. Your government, whether you like it or not, corrupt and mired in emotional programs instead of technology and science, has become a wholly owned Japanese subsidiary.”

Loren leaned toward Suma, her eyes narrowing in scorn. “You underestimated American guts fifty years ago, and once again you’ve awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with terrible resolve.”

“Admiral Yamamoto’s words after December the seventh do not apply now,” Suma said contemptuously. “Your people have lost the fortitude to make sacrifices for the good of the nation. You must face reality, Congresswoman Smith. America’s greatness is gone. I have nothing more to say except to urge you to warn your President of Japan’s intentions.”

“Don’t you mean your intentions,” said Loren bravely, the color coming back into her face. “You don’t represent the Japanese people.”

“A safe journey home, Congresswoman Smith. Your visit has ended.”

Suma turned and began to walk away, but he’d only taken one step when the two crewmen grabbed his arms from each side, lifted him off his feet and hurled him backwards through the open door into the aircraft’s cabin, where he seemingly vanished. It all happened so fast that Loren and Diaz stood in blank-minded shock. Only Toshie reacted, lashing out with her foot at the heavier-built crewman.

“Is this any way to begin an intimate relationship?” laughed Giordino, grabbing Toshie’s foot, sweeping her up in his arms, and hoisting her through the door to Weatherhill and Mancuso’s waiting hands as easily as if she was filled with air.

Loren gasped and started to mutter something to Giordino, but Stacy brusquely pushed her up the short stairs. “No time to waste, Ms. Smith. Please step lively.” With Loren on her way, she pulled at Diaz. “Get a move on, Senator. We’ve worn out our welcome.”

“Where… where did you all come from?” he stammered as Mancuso and Weatherhill hauled him through the hatch.

“Just your friendly neighborhood hijackers,” Weatherhill answered conversationally. “Actually, it was Pitt and Giordino who got the drop on the crew and tied them up in the cargo compartment.”

Giordino lifted Stacy into the cabin and scrambled up the stairs after her. He threw a smart salute at the two roboguards that aimed their weapons at him but stood in stationary bewilderment.

“Sayonara roboturkeys!”

He yanked the door shut and locked it. Then he turned and shouted one brief word in the direction of the cockpit.

“Go!”

The soft whistle of the two turbine engines increased to an earsplitting shriek, and their thrust flattened the grass under the stubby wings. The wheels lifted from the damp ground and the aircraft rose straight into the air, hung there for a few moments as the engines slowly twisted to a horizontal position, and then it shot off in a wide bank that took it over the sea toward the east.

Loren hugged Giordino. “Thank God you’re all right. Is Dirk with you?”

“Who do you think is driving the bus?” Giordino smiled broadly as he nodded toward the cockpit.

Without another word, Loren ran up the aisle and threw open the cockpit door. Pitt sat in the pilot’s seat, heavily concentrating on flying an aircraft that was new to him. He didn’t blink or turn his head as she slipped her hands around his neck and down inside his borrowed Suma Corporation flight suit and kissed him at least a dozen times.

“You’re alive,” she said joyfully. “Suma said you were dead.”

“It hasn’t exactly been a fun-filled day,” Pitt managed between her kisses. “Does this mean you’re glad to see me?”

She lightly dragged her nails over his chest. “Can’t you ever get serious?”

“Lady, right now I’m about as serious as I can get. I’ve got eight people depending on me to fly an aircraft I’ve never touched before. And I better get the hang of it real quick or we’re all going body surfing.”

“You can do it,” she said confidently. “Dirk Pitt can do anything.”

“I wish people wouldn’t say that,” Pitt groaned. He gave a quick tic of his head to his right. “Take the co-pilot’s seat and play with the radio. We’ve got to call in the cavalry before the samurai air force takes up the chase. No way we can outrun jet fighters.”

“Suma doesn’t own the Japanese military.”

“He owns everything else around here. I’m not taking any chances. Switch on the radio, I’ll give you the frequency.”

“Where are we going?”

“The Ralph R. Bennett.”

“A boat?”

“A ship,” Pitt corrected her. “A U.S. Navy detection and tracking ship. If we get to her before we’re intercepted, we’re home free.”

“They wouldn’t dare shoot us down with Hideki Suma on board.”

Pitt’s eyes flickered from the instrument panel to the water rushing by below. “Oh, how I hope you’re right.”

Behind them, Giordino was trying but failing to soothe Toshie, who was hissing and striking out like a hysterical rat. She spat at him but narrowly missed his cheek, catching him on the ear. Finally he grabbed her from the rear and held her in a tight vise grip.

“I realize I don’t make a good first impression,” he said happily, “but to know me is to love me.”

“You Yankee pig!” she cried.

“Not so, my Italian ancestors would never admit to being Yankees.”

Stacy ignored Giordino and the struggling Toshie and tightly bound Suma to one of several plush leather chairs in the luxurious executive main cabin. Disbelief was written all over his face.

“Well, well, well,” said a happy Mancuso. “Surprise, surprise, the big man himself came along for the ride.”

“You’re dead. You’re all supposed to be dead,” he muttered incredulously.

“Your buddy Kamatori is the one who’s dead,” Mancuso sadistically informed him.

“How?”

“Pitt stuck him on the wall.”

Pitt’s name seemed to act as a stimulant. Suma came back on keel and he said, “You have made a disastrous mistake. You will unleash terrible forces by taking me hostage.”

“Fair is fair. Now it’s our turn to act mean and nasty.”

The human voice can’t exactly imitate the hiss of a viper, but Suma came pretty close to it. “You are too stupid to understand. My people will launch the Kaiten Project when they have learned what you’ve done.”

“Let them try,” Weatherhill fairly purred. “In about another three minutes your Dragon Center is going to have its lights put out.”

The robotic electrical inspector Otokodate soon found the explosive charge taped to the ribbon of fiber optics. He deftly removed it and rolled back to his console. He studied the package for several moments, recognizing the timer for what it was, but his memory had not been programmed to analyze plastic explosives, and he had no concept of its purpose. He transmitted a signal to his superior in robotic control.

“This is Otokodate at power center five.”

“Yes, what is it?” answered a robot monitor.

“I wish to communicate with my supervisor, Mr. Okuma.”

“He is not back from tea yet. Why are you transmitting?”

“I have found a strange object attached to the primary fiberoptic bundle.”

“What sort of object?”

“A pliable substance with a digital timing device.”

“Could be an instrument left behind by a cable engineer during installation.”

“My memory does not contain the necessary data for a positive identification. Do you wish me to bring it to control for examination?”

“No, remain at your station. I’ll send a courier down to collect.”

“I will comply.”

A few minutes later a courier robot named Nakajima that was programmed to navigate every passageway and corridor and pass through the doors to all office and work areas in the complex entered the power center. As ordered, Otokodate unwittingly turned over the explosive to Nakajima.

Nakajima was a sixth-generation mechanical rover that could receive voice commands but not give them. It silently extended its articulated gripper, took the package, deposited it in a container, and then began the trip to robotic control for inspection.

Fifty meters from the power center door, at a point well removed from humans and critical equipment, the C-8 plastic detonated with a thundering roar that rumbled throughout the concrete passageways of level five.

The Dragon Center was designed and built to withstand the most severe earthquakes, and any structural damage was minimal. The Kaiten Project remained intact and operational. The only result of Weatherhill’s explosive charge was the almost total disintegration of courier rover Nakajima.

57

THE ROBOGUARDS ALERTED their security command to the stray drama in the garden before Pitt had lifted the tilt-turbine cleat the hedged confine. At first the robots’ warning was discounted as a malfunction of visual perception, but when an immediate search failed to turn up Suma, the security command offices became a scene of frenzied confusion.

Because of his monumental ego and fetish for secrecy, Hideki Suma had failed to groom a top-level executive team to act in an emergency if he was beyond reach. In panic, his security directors turned to Kamatori but quickly discovered all private phones and pages went unanswered, nor were signals to his personal roboguards acknowledged.

A special defense team, backed by four armed robots, rushed to Kamatori’s quarters. The officer in charge knocked loudly, but receiving no reply, he stepped aside and ordered one of the robots to break in the locked door. The thick etched glass partition was quickly smashed into fragments.

The officer cautiously stepped through the empty video viewing room and advanced slowly into the trophy room, his jaw dropping in stunned disbelief. Moro Kamatori hung, shoulders hunched over, in an upright position, his eyes wide open and blood streaming from his mouth. His face was contorted in pain and rage. The officer stared vacuously at the hilt of a saber protruding from Kamatori’s groin, the blade running through his body and pinning him to the wall.

Like a man in a daze, the officer could not believe he was dead and gently shook Kamatori and talked to him. After a minute it finally broke through that the born-too-late samurai warrior wasn’t going to speak again, ever. And then, for the first time, the officer realized the prisoners were gone and Kamatori’s roboguards were frozen where they stood.

The confusion was magnified by the news of Kamatori’s killing and the almost simultaneous explosion on level five. The ground-to-air missiles installed around the island rose from their hidden bunkers, poised and ready for launch but put on hold due to the uncertainty of Suma’s presence on the plane.

But soon the action became purposeful and controlled. The remote video recordings of the roboguards were replayed, and it was clearly seen that Suma was forced aboard the aircraft.

The aging leader of the Gold Dragons, Korori Yoshishu, and his financial power force, Ichiro Tsuboi, were in Tsuboi’s offices in Tokyo when the call came from Suma’s security director. The two partners of Suma immediately assumed full command of the situation.

Within eight minutes after the explosion, Tsuboi used his considerable influence with the Japanese military to scramble a flight of jet fighters to chase the fleeing tilt-turbine. His orders were to intercept and attempt to force the plane back to Soseki Island. Failing in this, they were to destroy the craft and everyone on board. Tsuboi and Yoshishu agreed that, despite their long friendship with Suma, it was better for the Kaiten Project and their new empire that he should die than become a tool for foreign policy blackmail. Or worse, scandalized as a criminal under the American justice system. And then there was the frightening certainty that Suma would be forced to reveal details of Japan’s secret technology and plans for economic and military supremacy to U.S. intelligence interrogation experts.

Pitt took a compass heading on the position where the ship was cruising when he’d taken off for Soseki Island. He pushed the engines dangerously past their limit as Loren tried desperately to make contact with the Bennett.

“I can’t seem to raise them,” she said in frustration.

“You on the right frequency?”

“Sixteen VF?”

“Wrong band. Switch to sixteen OF and use my name as our call sign.”

Loren selected the ultra-high frequency band and dialed the frequency. Then she spoke into the microphone attached to her headset.

“Pitt calling USS Bennett,” she said. “Pitt calling the Bennett. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? Please answer.”

“This is the Bennett.” The voice replied so loud and clear it nearly blasted out Loren’s eardrums through the headset. “Is that really you, Mr. Pitt? You sound as if you had a sex change since we last saw you.”

The aircraft had been scanned by the Bennett’s supersensitive detection systems from the moment it left the ground. Once it was perceived as heading over the sea to the east, it was tracked by a tactical electronic warfare and surveillance receiver system. Within minutes of being alerted, Commander Harper was pacing the deck in the situation room. He stopped every few seconds and peered over the shoulders of the console operators who stared into the radar screens and the computer monitor that analyzed and measured the signals and enhanced the approaching target into a recognizable classification.

“Can you distinguish—?”

“Either a tilt-rotor or a new tilt-turbine,” the operator anticipated Harper. “It lifted like a helicopter, but it’s coming on too fast for rotor blades.”

“Heading?”

“One-two-zero. Looks to be on a course toward the position where we launched the two Ibises.”

Harper swung to a phone and picked it up. “Communications.”

“Communications, sir,” a voice answered instantly.

“Any radio signals?”

“None, sir. The airwaves are quiet.

“Call me the second you receive anything.” Harper slammed down the phone. “Any course change?”

“Target still flying on a one-two-zero heading slightly south of east, Captain.”

It had to be, but it couldn’t be Pitt, Harper thought. But who else would fly toward that particular position? A coincidence? he wondered. Not one to run on idle, he barked an order to his executive officer, who was standing at his side.

“Turn on a course toward the position where we launched the Ibises. Full speed until I tell you different.”

The officer knew Harper preferred efficiency to traditional protocol, so he turned without acknowledging and speedily relayed the orders to the bridge.

“Communications for you, Captain,” announced a seaman.

Harper snatched the phone. “This is the captain.”

“I have a signal from a woman claiming to be Congresswoman Loren Smith. She also claims Mr. Pitt is at the controls of an aircraft hijacked from Soseki Island, carrying eight passengers including Senator Michael Diaz and Mr. Hideki Suma.”

Too far down the chain of command to be informed of the abductions of Loren and Diaz, Harper could not be blamed for a lack of credence. “They hijacked an airplane and snatched Suma? And where in hell did Pitt dig up a pair of politicians on Soseki Island?” He paused to shake his head in wonderment, then gave an order over the phone. “Tell whoever you’re in contact with that I require more concrete identification.”

The communication specialist came back within half a minute. “The woman swears she’s Congresswoman Loren Smith of Colorado, and if we don’t guide them in and provide protection in the event they’re pursued, she’s going to lunch with Roy Monroe and demand you’re put in command of a tugboat in the Arctic. I’m not one to offer advice to the captain, sir, but if she’s friendly with the Secretary of the Navy, she must be who she says she is.”

“All right, I’ll buy her story for now.” Harper reluctantly caved in. “Give instructions to turn twenty degrees south and continue on a westerly heading until we meet up—”

“I have two aircraft rising from Senzu Air Base,” the console operator monitoring the tactical receiver system broke in. “Configuration and speed indicate Mitsubishi Raven interceptors of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force. They’ve turned onto the same heading as the tilt-turbine and are probing with radar.”

“Damn it!” Harper burst. “Now we’ve got the Jap military to deal with.” He turned to his exec again. “Apprise Pacific Command of our situation. Inform them I am going on combat mode. I intend to fire on the pursuers if they show any indication of a hostile act. I’m taking on the responsibility of protecting those people in the tilt-turbine aircraft in the belief they’re American nationals.”

His executive officer hesitated. “Aren’t you going out on a limb, sir?”

“Not too far out.” Harper smiled shrewdly. “Do you seriously think I’ll be court-martialed for shooting down hostile aircraft to save the lives of two members of Congress?”

Harper’s logic was unarguable. The executive officer smiled back. “No, sir, I don’t guess you would.”

Pitt took the aircraft up to four thousand meters and held it there. The time for hugging the surface of the sea was past. He was out of range of the island’s missile systems and now had a straight shot at the Ralph R. Bennett. He relaxed and donned the radio headset and microphone that was hanging on the arm of his seat.

“Eighty kilometers to go,” he said quietly. “She should be coming into sight dead ahead.”

Giordino had relieved Loren in the co-pilot’s seat and was studying the fuel gauges with a bemused eye. “Suma’s ground crew was pretty stingy with the gas. We’ll be on fumes in another ten minutes.”

“They only needed to partially fill the tanks for the short hop from Soseki and back from Edo City,” said Pitt. “I’ve pushed her hard and used up fuel at an extravagant rate.”

“You better take it easy and conserve.”

There was a click in their earphones and a deep voice came through. “This is Commander Harper.”

“Nice to hear from you, Commander. This is Dirk Pitt. Go ahead.”

“I hate to be the bearer of grim tidings, but you’ve got a pair of Japanese mosquitoes chasing your tail.”