Pitt looked at Ingram. “Were Dennings and the crews on Guam and Midway part of Colonel Tibbets’ Five-o-ninth Bomber Squadron?”
“Again, we don’t know. Eighty percent of the records have been destroyed. We can only guess that General Groves, the director of the Manhattan bomb project, and his staff came up with a complicated backup plan at the last moment because there was great fear the firing mechanisms on the bombs might not work. There was also the possibility, although unlikely, that the Enola Gayor Bock’s Car might crash on takeoff, detonating their bombs and wiping out the entire Five-o-ninth and leaving no trained personnel or equipment to deliver additional bombs. And on top of all that, there were a host of other dangers staring Groves and Tibbets in the face—the threat of Japanese bombing attacks on Tinian, mechanical failures during flight, forcing the crew to jettison their bombs in the sea, or being shot down by enemy fighters or antiaircraft fire during the mission. Only at the last minute did Groves see the dark clouds gathering around the bomb-delivery operation. In less than a month’s time, Major Dennings and the Demons, along with the crews on Guam and Midway, were given rush training and sent on their way.”
“Why was all this kept from public knowledge after the war?” asked Pitt. “What harm could the story of Dennings’ Demonscause nearly fifty years later?”
“What can I say?” Ingram made a baffled gesture. “After thirty years passed and it came up under the Freedom of Information Act, a pair of political hack appointees decided on their own that the American public, who paid their salaries by the way, was too naive to be entrusted with such an earth-shaking revelation. They reclassified the event as top secret and filed it away in the CIA vaults at Langley.”
“Tibbets got the glory and Dennings got deep-sixed,” Weatherhill said, waxing philosophical.
“So what does Dennings’ Demonshave to do with us?” Pitt put to Ingram.
“Better you should ask Curtis.” Ingram nodded to Meeker and sat down.
Meeker stepped up to a blackboard on a side wall and took a piece of chalk in one hand. He drew a rough sketch of the B-29 and a long, uneven contour line representing the seafloor that stretched across the board’s surface and ended with a sudden rise that was Soseki Island. Thankfully to all in the room, he didn’t squeak the chalk. Finally, after adding in a few geological details on the sea bottom, he turned and flashed a warm smile.
“Clyde has only given you a brief peek at our satellite surveillance and detection systems,” he began. “There are others that have the capability of penetrating through an impressive distance of solid material and measuring a vast array of different energy sources. I won’t bother to get into them—Clyde and I aren’t here to teach a class—but will simply reveal that the explosive device you placed inside the electrical network of the Dragon Center did not do the job.”
“I’ve never laid an explosive that failed to detonate,” Weatherhill growled on the defensive.
“Your charge went off all right,” said Meeker, “but not where you set it. If Dr. Nogami was still in deep cover inside the command complex, he could tell you the explosion occurred a good fifty meters from the electrical junction center.”
“No way,” Stacy protested. “I watched Timothy set the charge behind a bundle of optical fibers in an access passage.”
“It was moved,” Dr. Nogami said thoughtfully.
“How?”
“The inspector robot probably observed a slight drop in the power pulse, searched, and found the charge. He would have removed it and notified his robotic control. The timer must have set off the charge while it was being carried through the corridors to robotic control for investigation.”
“Then the Dragon Center is fully operational,” Mancuso said with grave foreboding.
“And the Kaiten Project can be primed and detonated,” added Stacy, her face displaying lines of disappointment.
Meeker nodded. “We’re afraid that’s the case.”
“Then our operation to knock out the center was a bust,” Weatherhill said disgustedly.
“Not really,” Meeker explained patiently. “You captured Suma, and without him the cars can’t be detonated.”
Stacy looked confused. “What’s to stop his fellow conspirators from setting off the bombs?”
Pitt threw Nogami a bemused look. “I suspect the good doctor has the answer.”
“A small bit of information I picked up after becoming chummy with the computer technicians,” Nogami said with a wide smile. “They allowed me to wander freely in their data center. On one occasion I stood behind a programmer and looked over his shoulder when he punched in data concerning the Kaiten Project. I memorized the entry code, and at my first opportunity I entered the system. It gave the bomb car locations, which you had already obtained, but I became stymied when I attempted to insert a virus in the detonation system. I discovered only Suma had access to the detonation codes.”
“So no one but Hideki Suma can launch the Kaiten Project,” Stacy said in relieved surprise.
“A situation his henchmen are working like hell to correct,” answered Meeker. He glanced around at the MAIT team. “But congratulations are still in order, you pulled off a winner. Your efforts effectively shut down the Dragon Center, causing the Japanese to reprogram their prime and detonate systems, and giving us enough time to put together a plan to destroy it once and for all.”
“Which, if I’m not sidetracking your lecture,” said Pitt quietly, “brings us back to Dennings’ Demons.”
“You’re quite right,” acknowledged Meeker. He hesitated while he sat on a desk. Then he began cutting toward the heart of the briefing. “The President was willing to lay his political life on the line and sanction a nuclear strike against the Dragon Center. But he called it off when word came of your escape. Your operation bought him some time, not much, but enough to accomplish what we’ve planned in the few hours we’ve got left.”
“You figure on setting off the bomb inside the B-Twenty-nine,” Pitt said, his eyes half closed in weariness.
“Not exactly.” Meeker sighed. “It will have to be removed and placed a short distance away.”
“Damned if I can see what damage it will cause to an island almost forty kilometers away,” Giordino muttered.
“A group of the finest oceanographers and geophysicists in the business think that an underwater atomic blast can take out the Dragon Center.”
“I’d like to know how,” Stacy said as she swatted at a mosquito that had found one of her bare knees.
Meeker refaced the blackboard. “Major Dennings could not have known, of course, that his aircraft crashed into the sea and fell to the seafloor close to a perfect location to remove a serious threat to his country forty-eight years later.” He paused and drew another jagged line that traveled under the sea bottom from the plane to Soseki Island and then curved southward. “A section of a major Pacific seismic fault system. It travels almost directly beneath the Dragon Center.”
Nogami shook his head doubtfully. “The center was constructed to withstand a major earthquake and a nuclear strike. Exploding an old atomic bomb, providing it can still detonate after five decades under saltwater, to cause a shift in the fault would prove a wasted effort.”
“Dr. Nogami has a sound argument,” said Pitt. “The island is almost solid rock. It won’t sway and shift during a heavy shock wave.”
Meeker said nothing for a moment, only smiled. Then he swung the axe. “No, it won’t sway and shift,” he repeated with a fiendish smile, “but it will sink.”
63
ABOUT FIFTY KILOMETERS northeast of Sheridan, Wyoming, as the crow flies, just south of the Montana border, Dan Keegan sat on a buckskin quarter horse searching for signs of trespassing hunters. While washing up for supper he had heard the distant rumble of two gunshots and immediately told his wife to put his fried chicken in the oven to warm. Then he gathered up an old Mauser bolt-action rifle and saddled up his favorite riding horse.