“Do you have the coordinates?” Rice asked, his eyes never leaving the moon-bathed waves below.
Mercer read the coordinates of Kenji’s estate from the map provided by Dick Henna. Eddie Rice punched them into the navigational computer, waited as the machine processed them, then glanced at the readout. Banking the helicopter, he lifted her over the cliffs and headed inland. The moonlit scenery below them was a gray blur, the Sea King beating through the sky at nearly 140 knots, at times below tree top level.
Mercer trusted Rice’s flying implicitly. He had no choice.
They rocketed over mountains only to plunge down the other side, the helicopter never more than a hundred feet from the ground.
“Ever done flying like this before?” Mercer asked, trying to act casual though his knuckles were white as he gripped the seat.
“Sure,” Rice replied. “ ’Course that was in Iraq, where there weren’t as many mountains or trees or buildings to smear against.”
Mercer tightened his grip.
“You ever done anything like this before?” asked Rice.
“Sure,” Mercer mimicked Rice’s deep baritone. “ ’Course that was in Iraq, where there weren’t any wise-ass pilots.”
Rice laughed, then yanked the helicopter skyward to avoid a tall stand of trees thrusting up from the jungle.
As the terrain flattened out, Rice began to whistle. Mercer recognized the song as Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” He knew exactly how Eddie felt.
“We’re about ten miles from your coordinates,” Rice announced a few minutes later.
“Okay, the target is a compound in the middle of an old pineapple plantation. There will be a clearing about two miles north. It used to be an equipment storage area when the plantation was operational. There’s an abandoned shed on its southern edge. We’ll land there.”
Rice didn’t reply. He was watching the ground below. The low jungle canopy retained a semblance of regimentation from when it had been planted fields. He slowed the chopper to thirty knots.
“There,” he said, spotting the clearing as he crabbed the helicopter to starboard.
Mercer saw the open ground a moment later, an area of about an acre; the abandoned metal building stood at its far end, the corrugated roof sagging in the middle.
“Ugly country in thirty seconds,” Mercer said into his microphone, informing the SEALs in the cargo hold.
Rice used the last scrap of jungle cover before bursting into the clearing. The rotors kicked up a cloud of fine dust, cutting visibility down to nothing. He landed the big chopper by feel alone, settling her as close to the building as possible. Had there been paint on the huge storage garage, the Teflon rotors would have scraped it off.
By the time Mercer jumped from the chopper, the SEALs had already secured the building and the surrounding area. There was no one else in the vicinity.
The air was hot and incredibly humid; Mercer’s clothing stuck to his body like a clammy film and the chirping of insects sounded unnaturally loud after his hours in the chopper. He buckled his combat harness around his lean waist, cinching the shoulder straps so they were snug but not binding. After pulling his MP-5 from the duffel, he threw the empty bag back into the chopper and turned to Rice.
“You know what to do?”
“I’ll wait here until you contact me.” Rice held up a miniature walkie-talkie given to him by one of the SEALs. “If I don’t hear anything by five a.m., I’m outta here.”
“Right.”
Mercer looked at his watch, 9:35. In nine and a half hours the President would unleash the nuclear warhead and destroy the volcano two hundred miles north. A few minutes after that, Hawaii would become an independent country.
MV John Dory
Although she was forty feet under the surface, the John Dory still felt the turbulence above that rolled her about fifteen degrees port and starboard. The radio operator clutched at a ceiling mounted support as he waited to gain Captain Zwenkov’s attention. Zwenkov was once again in muted conference with the weapons officer, going over the firing solutions for the vessel’s bow-mounted Siren missile for the tenth time.
“Captain,” the radio man interrupted, “flash message received from the mainland.”
Zwenkov turned, cocking one bushy eyebrow in question.
“The message read ‘green,’ repeated for five seconds, sir.”
“Very well.” Zwenkov glanced at his watch. 2200 hours.
This was the eleventh such message he’d received. He’d expected the “red” code by now, authorizing him to launch his missile, but it had not come. If it didn’t come until the next scheduled contact in two hours, he would barely make it to the Hawaiian coast before dawn to extract the commandos.
“All right, Weapons Officer, one more time if you please.” And they ran another plot for the nuclear missile.
Evad Lurbud collapsed the portable antenna and powered down his radio. Using his mangled left hand had caused a bright wave of blood to seep out from under his hastily applied bandage. He let the pain wash over him, gritting his teeth to keep from screaming.
That he had survived four hours since the attack on Ohnishi’s house was due mainly to his extensive KGB training. That he had survived the destruction of the house itself was little short of a miracle.
Once the bombs had detonated and the glass house had begun to shatter, Lurbud’s dive under the table on Ohnishi’s breakfast balcony had saved his life. The table had protected him from the exploding glass. When the main structure of the house tumbled, the balcony had fallen outward, carrying Lurbud with it. He landed on the lawn forty feet below, astonished to find himself alive. But by no means had he escaped unscathed.
His right shoulder joint had dislocated and his legs, torso, and face were severely lacerated by shards of glass. His right eye had been punctured so that the clear fluid within leaked down his face and dripped into the collar of his battle jacket.
With such massive injuries, the body’s main defense is to go into shock. But there are many forms of shock, depending on the strength of the person. As endorphins and adrenaline coursed through him, Lurbud struggled to remain conscious and focused. After nearly twenty minutes, Lurbud began to move. Slowly at first, he raised himself onto his hands and knees, then to his feet. All that remained of Takahiro Ohnishi’s palatial home were heaped piles of shattered glass and an empty skeleton of tubular struts. Lurbud staggered into the debris to search for the radio that would link him to the John Dory.
Where the scything weight of the falling building had sliced through a victim, the mound of glass was stained crimson by gallons of blood. In the dim moonlight, the blood looked black, but Lurbud could tell that dozens of such bloody piles dotted the charnel ruin.
Systematically he checked each body, scraping off the accumulated glass with the butt of his weapon to expose a recognizable portion. Korean and Russian alike had been diced so finely by the shards that easy identification was impossible.
With only fifteen minutes to spare before his next scheduled contact with the submarine, he found the bloody mass that had once been his radio carrier. Of the man, there was little more than strips of flesh, but the radio, in its armored plastic pack, had survived the cascade undamaged.
Propped against the sanguine heap, Lurbud made his first broadcast, repeating the word “green” for five seconds. Finished, he fell back against the pile, shards and chips digging into his flesh unnoticed.
Fighting the exhaustion brought on by the battle and loss of blood, Lurbud tended his wounds, winding a bandage around his mangled hand and gently mopping his sightless eye socket. To dull the ache growing in his skull, he shot a full syringe of morphine into his arm from the medical kit the radio man had also carried.
He recognized immediately how one could become addicted to the drug. Despite the pain clawing at his tortured body, his spirits had never been better. He felt buoyed and knew that he would survive to have his revenge against Kenji. All else faded in importance to him; the submarine, the volcano, even his own condition, as long as he could have his revenge. The van that the Russians had used to get to Ohnishi’s estate was only a mile or so away. He could drive to Kenji’s house and make him pay dearly for the suffering he’d caused.