Vulcan's Forge

The White House

Staff Sergeant Harold Tompkins was about as nervous as a human being could get. He was on duty in the Situation Room when the video images from Pearl Harbor faded from the high-definition screen. He fiddled with the satellite feeds under the combined stares of the President, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the secretaries of State and Defense, and the directors of the CIA, NSA, and FBI.

One moment the image of Pearl Harbor was crisp and vivid and the next, the screen had gone blank. Had this been a commercial transmission, a “Please stand by” sign would have flashed and those assembled gone off for snacks or to use the bathroom. But this was not a commercial transmission; Pearl Harbor had just come under attack when the image had faded and these men expected Tompkins to get the video feed back on line.

“Anything?” Admiral C. Thomas Morrison asked.

“No, sir, not yet,” Tompkins managed to squeak.

“Jesus Christ.”

The air was thick in the twenty-by-twenty-foot vault buried four floors below the White House. A blue pall of smoke swirled from the cigarettes that these men would never admit to in public. Even the President, where he sat hunched at the head of the large refractory table, had a Marlboro hanging from the corner of his pensive mouth.

“If my wife sees me like this, she’s going to kill me,” he said to lighten the mood. The answering laughter had a nervous edge.

Despite the cigarettes, the hands made twitchy by endless cups of coffee and the grizzled stubble that covered their faces, these men were still as sharp as they’d been when called to the situation room twelve hours earlier. An aide entered from the single elevator and walked straight to Sam Becker, the head of the National Security Agency.

“Sir, here’s the latest from the KH-11 flyby.” He handed over a sheaf of infrared photographs taken by an orbiting spy satellite. “Just like the photos taken from the SR-1 Wraith, I’m afraid the analysts couldn’t make much out of them. The heat signature from the volcano makes it impossible to locate any other thermal images.”

“Damn,” Becker said, leafing through the photos. “If my men didn’t see a Russian nuclear sub, I don’t see how Mercer could have. The NSA has the best photo interp people in the world. I hope you’re right about him, Dick.”

Henna looked up from the fan of papers spread before him. “I’ve got no guarantees, but so far the man hasn’t disappointed. He told me over the phone that he had the John Dory pinpointed at the volcano site.”

“If that’s true, why didn’t we just order him to tell us where that was?” asked Paul Barnes.

“Christ, Paul, you met him. Do you think he would have told us anything?”

“I agree with Dick on this one,” the President remarked, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. “The deft touch is what’s needed here, not a heavy hand.”

“I think I have it, sirs,” Tompkins interrupted. The men turned to the screen.

An image came into focus, a handsome Oriental man dressed in jungle camouflage. Behind him, marines were firing at an unseen enemy from the protection of sandbag bunkers. Two Abrams tanks sat squarely on a wide expanse of asphalt, their turrets pointed toward the main gates of Pearl Harbor. Their 120mm cannons were silent, but machine-gun fire spat from their coaxially mounted Brownings. It was a macabre scene because there was no audio.

Tompkins pressed a few more buttons on his console and the clamor of battle assaulted the room. The ferocity was stunning.

“Repeat your message, Colonel. We lost your transmission for a few minutes,” Morrison said.

Over the sound of the battle, words matched the officer’s moving lips. “. . about ten minutes ago, sir.”

“Colonel Shinzo, this is Admiral Morrison, please repeat,” the admiral asked a second time.

“Sir, about ten minutes ago all hell broke loose. Without warning, the guardsmen and locals outside the gate opened fire. Small arms mostly, but the guardsmen do have rocket launchers and TOW antitank missiles. They are not making any move for an assault yet, but it’s only a matter of time, sir.”

Colonel Shinzo shouted something incomprehensible and ducked behind a sandbag wall. The camera must have been mounted on a tripod because it remained steady as a grenade detonated no more than twenty yards away. The image faded for a moment, then returned. Shinzo was again standing in view.

“What are you doing to hold them, Shinzo?”

“As ordered, we’re firing over their heads, but my boys are taking too many casualties to remain passive much longer, sir.”

“Colonel Shinzo, do you recognize my voice?” the President asked clearly, hiding his exhaustion.

“I believe so, Mr. President.” The statement was more of a question.

“Colonel, you’re doing a fine job there, but I want civilian and National Guard casualties at a minimum. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Shinzo said resignedly, knowing this meant losing a lot of his men.

The noise of the battle increased dramatically. Shinzo turned away quickly as the transmission broke off again.

The assembled men all turned to Tompkins, who was frustratingly twisting dials and knobs. “I’m sorry, but the transmission was broken at the other end. There’s nothing I can do.”

“That’s fine,” Admiral Morrison said dryly. “You’re dismissed.”

Tompkins gratefully hurried from the room.

“Can we trust him?” Paul Barnes asked. “I mean, he’s a Jap after all.”

“Shut your fucking mouth, you racist son of a bitch.” Morrison was on his feet the instant Barnes finished speaking. “Shinzo wears the uniform of the United States Marine Corps. You question the integrity of one of my boys again, and so help me Christ I’m going to tear you a new asshole.”

“Let’s calm down here, gentlemen,” Dick Henna said soothingly. “But Admiral Morrison has a point. We start second-guessing the motivations of our own people and we might as well go home and wait for Armageddon.”

“I guess it’s started,” the President said slowly. Every man knew he meant a civil war. “The great melting pot has been simmering for two hundred-plus years and it’s about to boil over. Unless this situation ends within a few hours, the news from Hawaii will light a powder keg in every big city in America. It’ll make the Los Angeles riots of 1992 look like Mardi Gras.”

The President was silent for five long minutes. His most trusted advisors knew he was making a decision that might very well condemn the United States to the bloodiest war ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.

The compassion they felt for him could not make the decision any easier.

His shaggy head was bowed over the table and his lips moved silently. Was he praying, or asking advice of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, who was said to wander the White House? He raised his head, his shoulders squaring.

“Tom.” Admiral Morrison looked the President square in the eye, awaiting his orders. “I want a Tomahawk cruise missile armed with a nuclear warhead launched at the volcano. If there is a Russian sub out there guarding it, it’ll be destroyed by the blast.”

So it was war. The United States was going to fight and perhaps lose everything democracy had created. Once again race would plunge America into a civil war, but this time there would be no North and South, no Mason-Dixon Line. The boundaries had blurred in the decades since then. Now the battles would be fought in every state and every town.

“Then order the Kitty Hawk and the Inchon to stand off, suspend all flights, and steam out of the area. I don’t want them anywhere near Hawaii, is that clear? Tell the commander at Pearl to throw down their weapons and surrender the base.”

A sigh ran through the room.

“I would rather sacrifice Hawaii than risk a war. Maybe their secession will start a chain reaction and this country will disintegrate, but I’m willing to take that risk. I can’t order our troops to kill Americans no matter what the consequences.”

Tears ran unashamedly down his cheeks.

“Sir.” Dick Henna was the first person to speak. “What about Mercer? We haven’t even given him a chance.”

“Dick, he’s only one man. We’re talking about a massive revolution supported by God knows how many people.”

“Mr. President,” Henna persisted, “what if he’s right that this revolution is being masterminded by an outside influence? If he can cut that off, there will be no revolt.”

“I spoke to the Russian president no more than two hours ago, Dick. He had no idea what I was talking about. Mercer was wrong about the Russians being involved. This whole thing was strictly Takahiro Ohnishi’s.”

“And what if this is something the Russian government didn’t sanction?”

“That’s a bit too far-fetched for me to believe. This is a massive operation. There’s no way the head of the country wouldn’t know about it.”

“Ask your predecessors about Iran-Contra sometime,” Henna retorted sarcastically.

The President ignored the remark.

“About the Russian government not sanctioning this operation, it may not be that far-fetched,” Paul Barnes said, polishing his glasses.

“What do you mean?”

“This afternoon, the body of Gennady Perchenko was fished from a river in Bangkok. If you recall, Perchenko was the Russian ambassador to the Bangkok Accords, the one who outfoxed us into signing away any legal rights to that new volcano.”

“Was there any indication of foul play?”

“In my business, there’s never any indication, but I’d stake my career that he was murdered. Also, an informer reported seeing Ivan Kerikov flying into Thailand a few days before Perchenko’s death.”

“Who’s Ivan Kerikov?”

“A real cagey KGB operator, sir. My contacts in Moscow tell me that there is a massive manhunt on for him even as we speak. It seems he has a record of working outside the fold and right now he’s under arrest for misappropriation of government funds, equipment, and personnel, and a dozen other charges, including murder.

“He’s come to the attention of the CIA a few times over the years. He ran a team of assassins and torturers in Afghanistan during the early 1980s and he was somehow connected to the Korean Air jumbo jet shot down in September of 1983. Most recently he took over Department Seven of the KGB.

“Department Seven is one of those groups we know very little about. They don’t seem to have any active agents or any real goals. They just act as a sort of think tank as far as we can figure. Now, if Perchenko’s death can be linked to Kerikov then we have a definite connection between the volcano and this Department Seven.”

Sam Becker had been reading the file handed to him earlier, with the photos, and now he looked up sharply. “We have that connection.”

“What do you have, Sam?” The President caught the strength behind Becker’s voice and drew from it.

“On Paul’s request last evening, I had the archive sections at Fort Meade pull anything they had on Soviet geologists from the fifties and sixties. The records were sketchy, but we just got lucky.”

Since its inception, the National Security Agency at Fort Meade was the repository for every scrap of intelligence gathered from around the world. There was more computer power in the sprawling complex than anywhere else on the planet, and it was used to decipher even the most oblique reference or cryptic message from enemy and ally alike. If something had ever been put in print, spoken about over a phone line, or bounced off a satellite, NSA had a record of it. From the personal advertisements in the Johannesburg Star to mundane conversations between two sisters in Madrid to the dying gasps of three cosmonauts who secretly suffocated aboard the Soyuz space station in 1974, it was all stored on the magnetic tapes in NSA’s archives.

Becker held up his slim file. “This is from the archive director, Oliver Lee. According to Lee, personnel records from a research laboratory near Odessa show that Olga Borodin has been drawing a decent pension from the state since an accident claimed her husband on June 20, 1963. Given the parameters of the search, her name caught Lee’s attention, and after a bit more research he found that the laboratory was part of an agency called Department Seven. It seems the CIA knows more about Department Seven than we do but the connection is obvious. Olga Borodin is the widow of a geologist named Pytor Borodin.”

“You mean the Russian specialist on bikinium?” Henna interrupted.

“So, Dr. Mercer was right. The Russians are involved, just not their government.” The President was truly shocked. “Kerikov must be the mastermind and Ohnishi merely a pawn. The man’s got balls, I’ll say that much, but knowing this doesn’t help us any. We still have a coup taking place in Hawaii and a valuable resource about to fall to this Ivan Kerikov.” The President swiveled to face Henna. “What do you propose?”

“Give Mercer until dawn,” Henna said. “If he has a plan, at least give him that much time. You saw from that last transmission that it’s almost dark in Hawaii. Tonight should be relatively calm. The guardsmen don’t have the right equipment for night fighting. If we don’t hear anything by sunrise, continue with your plan, blow up the volcano and surrender the islands to Ohnishi.”

The President leaned back in his chair for a moment, staring at the soundproofed ceiling tiles, fingers laced behind his head. He made his decision quickly. “All right, I’ll give Mercer until seven A.M. local time, then I want that volcano obliterated.”

Henna stood to leave the room. Mercer had arrived on the Inchon ten hours earlier and Henna had promised to get in touch with any final news.

“Dick?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Why do you trust Mercer so much?”

Henna paused by the elevator door, his arms full of papers and files. “I’m basically a cop, sir, and cops learn to trust their instincts.”

Despite the sophistication of the equipment in the White House Communications Room, Henna spent twenty frustrating minutes waiting for a connection to the Inchon and another ten for Mercer to be tracked down aboard the 778-foot assault ship and brought to the radio.

“About time you called.”

“You’ve got until seven tomorrow morning your time,” Henna said without preamble. “So you better have one hell of a plan in that Machiavellian mind of yours.”

“What happens at seven?” Mercer asked airily.

“A cruise missile blows up Borodin’s volcano and the President surrenders the Hawaiian Islands without a fight.”

“Talk about your serious deadlines.” Mercer paused, absorbing this latest piece of information. “Well, I’d best be off, then. Any parting advice?”

“Yeah. Right now Pearl Harbor is a war zone and we can only assume the rest of the islands are equally inflamed.”

“I’m surprised it’s stayed calm as long as it has. What else?”

“We’ve found a definite link between the coup and a Russian KGB director named Ivan Kerikov. He’s the mastermind. He was last seen in Thailand but may be on Hawaii by now. Oh, yeah. I’ve had a team monitoring ham radio operators from Hawaii for the past couple of days. A guy there named Ken Peters, who works for one of the television stations, got hold of one of my people in California. He suspects that one of their reporters, Jill Tzu, may have been kidnapped by Ohnishi. She was doing a real in-depth exposé on him when she vanished.”

“Dudley Doright to the rescue. What else?”

“Just that Ohnishi’s mansion is heavily guarded by some real fanatics, so be careful.”

“Don’t worry, Dick. I have no interest in Ohnishi’s house. He’s just a willing accomplice, not the linchpin.”

The signal from the Inchon faded. Henna knew that Mercer had cut him off.

He settled the phone back into its cradle. If Mercer wasn’t going to Ohnishi’s mansion, then where was he going? And if Ohnishi wasn’t the principal in this affair, who was?