Clive Cussler - Dragon

“The engine is not running properly.”

“Will it start?” Keegan asked.

“I believe so.” The Japanese surveyor leaned in the window and turned the ignition key. The engine fired and idled smoothly. “I go,” he announced.

Keegan failed to notice the hood was lowered but not latched. “Do me a favor and close and wrap the chain around the gate behind you.”

“I will gladly do so.”

Keegan threw him a wave, slipped the Mauser back in its case, and began riding off toward his ranch house, a good four kilometers away.

Suburo Miwa gunned the engine, turned the car around, and headed down the road. Meeting up with the rancher in such desolate country was unforeseen, but in no way jeopardized his mission. As soon as he put two hundred meters between the car and Keegan, Miwa suddenly slammed on the brakes, leaped out, snatched the gun from the back seat and raised the hood.

Keegan heard the engine revolutions die and he turned and stared over his shoulder, wondering why the car had abruptly halted.

Miwa held the gun tightly in sweating palms and aimed the muzzle until it was only a few centimeters from the compressor of the air conditioner. He had volunteered for this suicidal mission without reservation when asked because he felt it was an honor to give his life for the new empire. Other considerations were his loyalty to the Gold Dragons, the promise made by Korori Yoshishu himself that his wife would be well taken care of financially for the rest of her life, and the guarantee his three sons would be accepted and funded through the finest university of their choice. The inspiring words of Yoshishu as Miwa departed for the United States ran through his mind one last time.

“You are sacrificing for the future of a hundred million of your country’s men and women. Your family will honor you for untold generations. Your success is their success.”

Miwa pulled the trigger.

64

IN A MILLISECOND, Miwa, Keegan, the car, and the horse were vaporized. An enormous brilliance of yellow light flashed and then became white as it burst across the rolling ranch land. The shock wave followed like a vast invisible tidal wave. The fireball expanded and seemed to grow and lift from the ground like the sun rising over the horizon.

Once the fireball broke free of the ground and surged into the sky, it became fused with the clouds and turned purple from glowing radiation. It sucked behind a great swirling stem of radioactive soil and debris that soon formed into a mushroom cloud that soared to thirteen kilometers, only to eventually fall wherever the winds carried the pulverized dust.

The only loss of human life was Keegan and Miwa. Scores of rabbits, prairie dogs, snakes, and twenty of Keegan’s cattle were killed, most of them by the shock wave. Four kilometers away, Mrs. Keegan and three hired hands suffered only cuts from flying glass. The hills shielded the buildings from the worst of the blast, and except for a few shattered windows, there was little damage.

The fiery explosion left behind a huge crater a hundred meters wide and thirty meters deep. The dry brush and range grass ignited and began to spread in a great circle, adding black smoke to the brown dust cloud.

The dying shock wave echoed through the hills and canyons. It shook houses and swayed trees in the small surrounding cattle and farm towns before rumbling over the Custer battlefield at the Little Bighorn, 112 kilometers to the north.

In a truck stop outside Sheridan an Asian man stood beside a rental car, ignoring the people talking excitedly and wildly gesturing toward the rising mushroom cloud in the distance. He peered intently through binoculars trained on the cloud that had risen out of the evening gloom and was now high enough to be illuminated by the glow of the sun fallen below the horizon.

Slowly he lowered the glasses and walked to a nearby telephone booth. He inserted a coin, dialed a number, and waited. He spoke a few soft words in Japanese and hung up. Then, without even a glance at the cloud boiling through the upper atmosphere, he got in his car and drove off.

The blast was recorded at seismograph stations located around the world. The closest to the epicenter was the National Earthquake Center on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. The seismographic tracings abruptly bounded back and forth across the graph recorders, alerting geophysicist Clayton Morse to an earth movement as he was about to knock off for the day and drive home.

He frowned and then ran the data through a computer. While his eyes remained locked on the computer monitor, he dialed Roger Stevenson, the director of the center, who had called in sick that day.

“Hello.”

“Roger?”

“Yes, speaking.”

“God, you sound terrible. I didn’t recognize your voice.”

“The flu has really knocked me out.”

“Sorry to bug you, but we just received a strike.”

“California?”

“No, the epicenter is somewhere around the Wyoming-Montana border.”

There was a brief silence. “Odd, that area is hardly classed as an active quake zone.”

“This one is artificial.”

“Explosion?”

“A big one. From what I can tell on the intensity scale, this one reads like it’s nuclear.”

“God,” Stevenson muttered weakly, “are you sure?”

“Who can be sure about these things,” said Morse.

“The Pentagon never held tests in that part of the country.”

“They haven’t alerted us to any underground testing either.”

“Not like them to conduct testing without alerting us.”

“What do you think? Should we check it out with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?”

Stevenson may have been laid low with the flu, but his mind was perfectly healthy. “Leapfrog the system and go to the top. Call Hank Sauer, our mutual friend at the National Security Agency, and find out what in hell is going on.”

“And if Sauer won’t tell?” asked Morse.

“Who cares? The main thing is we’ve dumped the mystery in his lap, and now we can go on watching for the next big one due in California.”

Sauer didn’t tell what he didn’t know. But he recognized a national emergency when he heard one. He asked Morse for additional data and immediately passed on the information to the Director of Central Intelligence.

The President was aboard Air Force One flying to a political fund-raising dinner in San Francisco when he received the call from Jordan.

“What’s the situation?”

“We have reports of a nuclear explosion in Wyoming,” answered Jordan.

“Damn!” the President cursed under his breath. “Ours or theirs?”

“Certainly not ours. It has to be one of the bomb cars.”

“Any word of casualties?”

“Negligible. The blast took place in a lightly populated part of the state, mostly ranch land.”

The President was fearful of posing the next question. “Are there indications of additional explosions?”

“No, sir. At the moment, the Wyoming blast is the only one.”

“I thought the Kaiten Project was on hold for forty-eight hours.”

“It is,” Jordan said firmly. “There hasn’t been enough time for them to reprogram the codes.”

“How do you see it, Ray?”

“I’ve talked to Percy Nash. He thinks the bomb was detonated on site with a high-powered rifle.”

“By a robot?”

“No, a human.”

“So the kamikaze phenomenon is not dead.”

“It would seem so.”

“Why this suicidal tactic now?” asked the President.

“Probably a warning. They’re reasonably certain that we have Suma, and they’re hedging their bets by trying to fake us out of a nuclear strike while they desperately struggle to reprogram the detonation codes for the entire system.”