Jack Du Brul - Vulcan's forge

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.

Lurbud was lucid enough to know that he had to continue to make regular calls to the John Dory . Their action, if he failed to report, would surely jeopardize his chance at revenge on Ohnishi’s former assistant.

It had taken him nearly two hours to stagger and crawl to where the van was hidden, his mangled body leaving a vivid trail of blood across Ohnishi’s estate. The fifteen-mile drive north had taken another hour and a half; he had to stop about every ten minutes to allow his graying vision to return to normal.

Now he lay in a shallow ditch no more than one hundred yards from Kenji’s home, peering at it through night-vision binoculars. The view dimmed and blurred from pain and effects of the morphine as he strained to focus his one functioning eye.

The sprawling two-story house was not nearly as grand as Ohnishi’s, but it was very impressive. Constructed of dressed stones coated in beige stucco, the two main wings of the house spread from the central entrance like the blades of a boomerang. Each second floor window was a pair of French doors that opened onto narrow wrought-iron balconies. The fire-baked barrel tile roof and the expansive lawns betrayed the home as a former plantation from a bygone era.

A separate guest house sat on the other side of an Olympic-sized pool from the main structure. After making his latest report, Lurbud knew that he had two hours to concentrate on Kenji. He was professional enough to realize that in his condition, he was no match for the Japanese killer. He had to plan carefully. Kenji’s martial arts skill would render anything less than a long-range rifle shot useless. Therefore a diversion was needed to bring the Oriental out of his home and within range.

Lurbud slithered further into the ditch to get a better view into the rooms and hoped that something would present itself.

Way Hue Dong was the head of Hydra Consolidated, the Korean consortium that had bought the volcano from Ivan Kerikov. His grandson, Chin-Huy, sat at Kenji’s desk smoking a fragrant Romeo y Julietta cigar. He was young, not much past twenty, but he possessed the eyes of an old man, eyes that had seen many things in the service of his family. When his grandfather had ordered him to lead the fifty-man contingent of troops to Hawaii, Chin-Huy had not questioned, merely obeyed.

His family had sent him and his older brothers to some of the most dangerous places on earth in search of profit. Whether it was poached ivory from war-torn Angola or stolen artifacts from the ravaged jungles of Central America, the younger members of the family had responded with vigor and initiative.

This mission, though potentially dangerous, had proved quite easy for young Chin. His local contact, Kenji, had done much of the work necessary to ensure that the family would not be bothered when they seized the volcano. Chin’s men held the airport under the auspices of Hawaii’s more fervent national guardsmen and few had had to be used at Pearl Harbor to incite the assembled students to open fire at the military compound. The only difficulties had been at Ohnishi’s house, where more than twenty of his men had been cut down by a failed commando strike, presumably American.

All in all, Chin’s role had been minor. All that remained now was confirmation from the mining ship en route to the volcano that its target was in sight. That would not take place for another ten hours or so. Once his family had possession of the volcano, Chin would recall his troops, making sure that their withdrawal would bring a swift end to the state’s unrest. The violence now gripping Hawaii served only a limited purpose. Once the volcano was secure, it was best that the islands quieted.

“Your rewards will be great, Kenji. What do you plan to do with them?”

Kenji did not like the young man sitting languidly in his chair. Chin was brash, uncouth, and obnoxious.

“Do not speak too quickly; everything is yet to be settled.”

“That commando team fell for your ruse perfectly — they attacked the wrong house, just as you planned.” Chin waved his cigar in a dismissive gesture. “The volcano is within our grasp, surely you no longer worry.”

“Ivan Kerikov believed that the volcano was within his grasp and Takahiro Ohnishi believed that Hawaii was within his, too. Both men were wrong. I will not believe that we are successful until the mining vessel anchors at the volcano site.”

“Ach,” Chin said, then launched into another story of his own bravery in the face of adversity.

He had told Kenji nearly a dozen such stories earlier in the afternoon, before Kenji had set out to murder Ohnishi. Chin’s tales of bravado had a whining tone to them, as if daring Kenji to doubt them. Since Chin had not volunteered to lead his troops in the assault on Ohnishi’s mansion, Kenji needed no proof of the boy’s true character. Kenji had grown weary of the stories and the boy, yet listened as if rapt. It was expected of him.

Chin summed up, “If I could survive that and still keep the diamonds with me the whole time, surely I will get us out of this.”