* * * * *
"Stop the car," said Schwanberg suddenly.
They were through the Atsugi base perimeter, but there was still half a mile to go before the airship. "We're not there yet, Paul," said Palmer, who was driving.
"STOP THE FUCKING CAR NOW, YOU ASSHOLE!" shouted Schwanberg.
Startled, Palmer jammed his foot on the brakes and the medium-sized embassy Ford fishtailed to a halt. He waited in silence. Schwanberg had no manners at the best of times, but when he was in one of these moods all you could do was keep your head down.
"Cut the fucking lights, Chuck," said Schwanberg deliberately. "All of them."
Palmer switched off the lights.
The two men sat in darkness and stared out through the windshield of the car. The airship was ahead of them, silhouetted against the night sky. The airfield lights showed the ground crew moving about their business. They were dwarfed by the immense mass of the gas-filled envelope.
Schwanberg removed his Browning, checked the clip by touch and feel, and slammed it home again with the palm of his hand. Humans were devious shitheads, but there were some things in life you could rely on. Put a couple of 9mm hollow-points in a target's kill-zone, and he, or she, ceased to present a problem. God knows, he'd proved it often enough. The back of the neck was best. The victim dropped as if poleaxed.
"It's a hell of a plan, Paul," said Palmer quietly.
Schwanberg turned toward him, his face suffused with rage. "That's the problem, you stupid fuck," he snarled. "It's a terrific plan, and that goddamned Irishman thought it up. So what else did he think up?"
Palmer had seen Schwanberg have these feelings before. It was as if the man had an additional sense dedicated solely to his survival. They would embark on an operation and then for no reason that Palmer could ever figure out, Schwanberg would suddenly pause and think. Sometimes he would proceed as if nothing had happened. Other times, he would arbitrarily cancel the project. Again and again, he had been proved right. It was no small reason why he had been able to succeed as a player in this dangerous game for so long.
"I don't think he has thought up the ending on this one," said Palmer reassuringly. The words just came to him. He was not particularly articulate, but he felt good about this mission and he had complete faith in Schwanberg's ability to pull something out of the hat if anything went wrong. And he wanted to fly in the airship. He had never been in one before.
Schwanberg's mood suddenly switched. He had been worried, but now he felt confident again. Chuck was right. They were in control.
"Let's go," he said. Palmer restarted the engine. Schwanberg was now laughing. "‘Hasn't thought up the ending on this one,’" he repeated. "Too goddamn right."
Palmer joined in the laughter as he drove the short remaining distance to the airship.
* * * * *
Two hours later, after a host of checklists — most relating to the mission — the airship was released from its tethering mast and the mission team were airborne.
Below, the Spider and Yoshokawa waved and then were quickly lost in the darkness as the airship climbed to 1,500 feet.
Fitzduane stared out one of the windows at the panorama below and ran through the operation plan one more time, trying to consolidate his overall mental model of what had to be done. Checklists were necessary and all very well, but the endless items covered tended to buzz around distractingly in your mind and then weigh you down with detail. Fitzduane now sought a clear overview. He was keenly aware that, prepare as you might, the operation was highly unlikely to go according to plan. His opponents were clever and devious people who would have their own agendas. He had to try to prepare for the unexpected.
He smiled to himself. Another way of looking at it was to anticipate the unknown, and that was a decided contradiction in terms. Well, all you could do was give it your best shot and then make sure that you acted with reasonable grace under pressure. And the last element was luck.
Summarized — and there were a few interesting moves to add to the scenario — the basic plan was simple. Fumio Namaka had been enticed out of his normal heavy security to meet Fitzduane in the seclusion of the walled gardens surrounding Hodama's villa. The villa would be searched by two representatives of both parties to ensure there were no hidden surprises, and then the two principals and one driver each would be allowed in. Then the conference would commence. It would be held in the open garden under floodlights, so that everyone could see everyone else and to minimize the chance of eavesdropping. If it rained, there was the adequate protection of the open-sided summer house.
Fitzduane had been far from sure that Fumio would agree to an open-air meeting, but logic was on his side. It did make sense to have all involved in plain sight, and Fumio Namaka was known to be paranoid about being bugged. As an additional concession, Fitzduane had agreed that Fumio could enter the villa grounds first, immediately after the initial search, so that there would be no opportunity for any ambush to be set up.
The first twist in the plan was that it would not be Fitzduane in the second limo. But from then on, it was up to the players on the ground, with just a little help from on high.
The requirement of having a tactical edge, if at all possible, had been drummed into Fitzduane when serving under Kilmara in the Congo. There he had found he had a natural talent for thinking this way, and its application had been accelerated by being repeatedly shot at. In modern high-technology combat, so much of death was random, but it still made a difference to have an edge.
Fitzduane had been taken aback by the Tokyo MPD airship when he had first seen it floating past his bedroom window at the Fairmont, but he had very quickly taken it for granted. And it was this fact that all Tokyo residents seemed to regard the craft in the same way that had given him the idea of using it.
Vast though it was, it was such a regular feature of the Tokyoskyline, it was, for all practical purposes, invisible.
A further curious but helpful fact about the airship was that it was very hard to judge its proximity. Most people knew the approximate size of a helicopter or aircraft and cold make a rough guess at range, but the airship was seldom seen by people on the ground, so range estimation in its case was problematic in the extreme. If you do not know the size of something, it is virtually impossible to estimate distance unless there is a familiar object at the same distance.
What this boiled down to was that you could use the airship as a monitoring platform for activities on the ground below without attracting any undue attention. An extension of that premise was that you could shoot from it, too. Of course, the other side could shoot back, but at least there was the consoling fact that a modern airship could not do a Hindenburg. Early aircraft got their lift from ultravolatile hydrogen, which was a fair definition of an accident waiting to happen. Today's birds had switched to the much more expensive but more stable helium. You could fire an incendiary round into helium and no reaction would occur.
The stability of helium was the good news. The bad news, if hostiles started shooting at you, was that an airship of the Tokyo model was an easy target to acquire and a hard target to miss. Then, having found the overall target, a hostile would not have to be a rocket scientist to work out that the vulnerable humans were likely to be in the gondola below. And better yet, flying slowly.
Maximum speed was only just over seventy-five miles an hour. In reality, if shooting did start, their initial projection through speed would be considerably less. They would be optimized for monitoring, which would mean hovering or traveling at a purely nominal rate, and the airship's acceleration left a great deal to be desired. The thing was supposed to float serenely. It was not designed to hot-rod.