“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.”