War of the Sun (19 page)

“Let me guess,” Hunter said. “Coca leaves, as in coke?”

The lead Extra seemed offended. “Coke? As in cocaine?”

“Isn’t that what it is?” Hunter asked.

The lead Extra shook his head slowly. “Where you been, baby? Coke was out years ago. This stuff is a vitamin plant. Gives you the energy to run around in all that smog.”

Hunter was mortified. He had just assumed the Hollywood types would be …

“So, you want some?”

Ever the diplomat, Hunter grabbed three leaves and started chewing, hoping to make up for having offended his hosts.

The lead Extra started laughing once Hunter had reduced the leaves to mouth mulch.

“Got him,”
he yelled to the others, who were now giggling. They were obviously coconspirators in the prank.

After another minute or so, they packed up, lowered their gas masks, and began moving down the trail again. While the three others were still occasionally chuckling, Hunter felt no different than before.

Whatever the leaves were, they had absolutely no effect on him.

A mile away, deep under the smog cloud, eight men were making their way up the main trail in single file.

The first four in line were unarmed and bound at the wrists. Barely clothed, these men hadn’t eaten a morsel of food in days. Their bodies were covered with welts, cuts, and bruises, and their noses were bleeding from lack of a proper breathing apparatus. Though they were once men of substantial esteem—all were former stockbrokers on the Tokyo Exchange—they were now simply slaves.

Behind them were four Cult soldiers. Besides wearing a standard-issue gas mask, each soldier also carried a shovel as well as an AK-47. To the trained eye, the mix of equipment gave away their mission. These weren’t simply prison guards. They were executioners, about to eliminate the quartet of “native” slave laborers who were no longer of use to them.

This sad parade left the main trail and turned a sharp corner which revealed a clearing bordered on three sides by a deep pit. Hundreds of shell casings were scattered about the clearing; off to one side was a large metal barrel containing powdered lime.

Knowing what was about to happen, and forlornly resigned to their fate, the weary prisoners took their positions at the edge of the pit. Each soldier then took one shovelful of the lime and threw it onto the prisoners’ heads and chests, then took another to cover their torsos and legs.

Then the soldiers picked up their rifles again, marched off twenty paces, and lined up in a row. While the prisoners awaited their death in silent terror, a good-natured argument broke out among the Cult soldiers as to who would get to fire first. When this was decided by the Cult version of bucking-up, the losing soldiers taunted the winner to shoot his prisoner in the groin instead of the heart, as had been mandated by the Cult’s Rules of Executing Undesirables in an effort to save bullets.

After much laughing and poking, the first executioner agreed to shoot the man in his abdomen. As his friends moved a few paces in back of him, the designated shooter turned his attention toward the first prisoner and then took careful aim.

His comrades laughingly began a countdown, shouting through their gas masks: “Four … three … two … one …”

But when they got to zero, the man with his rifle raised didn’t pull the trigger. Instead he just stood there for a moment, seemingly paralyzed. His friends looked at him blankly. What was wrong with him? He seemed to be gasping for breath. Was something wrong with his mask?

After a few long seconds, the man turned back toward them to reveal a long, steel-stemmed dart shot directly into his left eye socket, the wound bleeding so profusely it was filling up his gas mask’s goggles and snout.

The man finally let out a long, painful, muffled scream and toppled over, his throat already stiffening from acute curare poisoning. After ten excruciating seconds, his stomach and windpipe seized on him, causing him to throw up and choke to death on his own vomit.

His comrades instantly raised their weapons, but it was way too late. Each man received his own blow dart filled with curare: two to the eyes, the third, appropriately enough, in his groin. In less than twenty seconds the four-man execution squad was dead.

Only then did Hunter and the three Extras emerge from the underbrush.

Even before the lime-covered prisoners realized that their lives had been saved, Hunter and the Extras had dragged the soldiers’ bodies over to the edge of the pit and kicked them in. For the first time Hunter saw the pit was filled with the skeletons and rotting corpses of less fortunate prisoners.

“They throw lime on them so the animals won’t eat the bodies,” one of the Extras explained. “If they did, then the Cult couldn’t eat the animals.”

Hunter took one look at the lime barrel and then back down at the four Cult bodies.

“I don’t think we should do them the favor,” he said, disgusted. “Those guys deserve to be someone’s dinner.”

The Cult guards at the main gate to the Okinawa Underground Manufacturing Facility never knew what hit them.

In their last few moments of life, however, they had beheld a strange scene. The firing squad patrol that had been dispatched to eliminate four no-longer-productive slave laborers just thirty minutes before had come marching back down the trail, its four prisoners still alive, covered with lime, and, inexplicably, wearing gas masks.

The gate guards couldn’t fathom what had happened. The frequent executions usually went off without the slightest complication.

Two of the four gate guards walked out to meet the returning patrol, their weapons lowered and uncocked, the faces behind their gas masks etched with curiosity. Neither man got to say a word. Each quickly received a large knife in the throat, ensuring that he died without a scream. Before their two remaining comrades knew what was happening, they were cut down by a hail of bullets from a silencer-equipped 9mm pistol.

Leaving the bodies and their weapons in the care of the liberated prisoners, Hunter and the Extras boldly moved on. Once they were inside the perimeter of the facility’s large main entrance, it was easy to mix in with the hundreds of similarly clad gas-masked Cult soldiers, all of whom were either moving in or out of the facility’s entrance cave mouth, not speaking, not looking up, like hundreds of mindless drone ants.

It was that easy. Hunter and his companions simply walked in through the main entrance and down the large crowded man-made tunnel that ran straight into the mountain’s side. They walked along this passageway for nearly ten minutes, until they were literally on the other side of the mountain. It was here that they saw the secret airstrip that Hunter had theorized the last Zero had escaped into. He couldn’t help but admire the scale of the work done by the Cult soldiers. The airstrip was large enough to handle dozens if not hundreds of airplanes, yet with the covering over its huge entranceway, it was practically invisible from the outside.

They followed the sound of rhythmic pounding coming from the other end of the gradually sloping tunnel. Whatever the Cult was manufacturing here, the work was obviously being done deep in the bowels of the mountain.

It took another twenty minutes of walking down the crowded descending passageway before they saw the greenish reflection of halogen lights up ahead. Hunter tapped his breast pocket twice for good luck. He was about to accomplish the major part of this recon mission—to ascertain exactly
what
the Cult was building deep inside the vast underground chambers.

Whatever was ahead of them, it certainly sounded impressive; the constant mechanical pounding was almost ear-splitting by this time.

Still, Hunter was not quite prepared for what he saw.

For as they rounded the last bend in the tunnel they found themselves on a crowded metal walkway which looked out on the biggest aircraft hangar that Hunter had ever seen, underground or otherwise.

All four of them were simply astonished.

As far as they could see, thousands of airplanes—almost all of them Zeros—were parked wing-to-wing, all with either torpedoes or blockbuster bombs strapped under their wings.

Hunter swallowed hard.

“Holy canoli,”
he muttered under his breath.

The lead Extra and his men were similarly amazed. Though they’d been on the island for almost two years, they’d never dreamed the underground facility which had been slowly killing off the island was so vast or elaborate.

And this was just the first level.

The chief Extra cocked his head to his left and Hunter turned to look. A large freight elevator had opened up and six more Zeros were pushed out on the floor. As that one closed and dropped down for more, another elevator next to it opened and six more planes were pulled out, like clockwork.

Hunter and his comrades boldly walked over to the elevator and stepped inside. The “hangar rats,” dressed in immaculate white smocks and pants, and wearing a fancier style of gas mask, paid little attention to these “killers” who were bumming a ride.

The elevator descended all the way to the lowest floor, the rhythmic pounding that Hunter and the Extras had first heard as they’d entered the facility growing ever louder and louder. The elevator stopped and the doors lifted open. Now the pounding was breaking the decibel barrier. Hunter stepped out and again was simply astounded by what he saw.

Before them lay a complete state-of-the-art aircraft factory, one that featured hundreds of computers, robots, and
VDT
screens, yet totally manned by native slaves, all of them either chained to their stations or shackled as they moved around the heaviest sections of aircraft from place to place. Hunter saw that anytime one of these slave laborers faltered, he was pulled off the line and consigned to a trio of soldiers dressed exactly like him, who put him in a holding pen. Then another healthier slave was in turn assigned to that position, knowing full well the fate if he failed to produce for these masters.

“This is sick,” Hunter whispered.

He’d seen enough. Signaling to the lead Extra, the three of them walked over to what was the holding pen for depleted slaves. They silently took charge of the latest ten unfortunates consigned to death and prodded them into the freight elevator. As they rode up to the main level, the elevator stopped at three different floors, each revealing a separate factory: one for torpedoes and blockbuster aerial bombs; another for the sole manufacture of small arms, heavy machine guns and their ammunition; and a third which appeared to be dedicated to the manufacture of uniforms. It was evident that this was in fact the busiest; racks upon racks of fatigues, boots, helmets, and webbing were being turned out by the minute.

Hunter was almost numb by this time. He felt like he was walking through a nightmare, a reprise of the heavy state of mind he carried leading up to his special targeting mission. The vast underground industrial sprawl was even more frightening, simply because it presented such a concrete example of just how strong the Cult was—even without Hashi Pushi. There was no way Jones or any of them could have imagined something like this. It defied imagination. What chilled him most was that the facility was so large, he was sure it had been set up for more than just keeping the Cult’s occupying armies supplied. The place had obviously been built by people who had much bigger and grander expansionist ideas in mind.

The last of whatever exhilaration remained from the successful airstrike on Japan drained out of him at that moment. His hunch on the carrier had been sadly correct. The battle against the Cult was far from over.

They were out of the main gate and back up into the jungle within forty-five minutes, setting their “prisoners” free along the way. Then, after a hurried farewell and a promise to meet again, the Extras proceeded back up the mountain out of the smogged-in valley while Hunter rushed back through the bush to his Harrier’s hiding place.

He had much to tell them back at the Task Force.

Aboard the
Fitzgerald

T
HE YOUNG ENSIGN POURED
out two cups of thick, black coffee and delivered one to the captain.

If there was one person on the bridge who looked like he needed some caffeine, it was the carrier’s extremely harried-looking commander.

“Sugar, sir?”

Ben Wa turned toward the ensign and shook his head no.

“Why start now?” he asked, accepting the enormous cup of joe.

Ben had been many things in his life: stunt pilot, a member of the Thunderbirds, mercenary fighter jockey. But never in his wildest dreams did he ever think that he’d be commanding a major fighting vessel like the
Fitzgerald.

But here he was, sitting in the captain’s chair, pumping down the coffee, and counting the new gray hairs on his head. A lot of people were counting on him. The fifteen hundred men on the
Fitz,
the thousand or so other men aboard the
New Jersey,
the
Tennyson,
and the
Cohen.
The millions of people back in America.

“Things are in tough shape when they have to put an Air Force guy in charge of a carrier,” he said for the hundredth time. “No wonder Yaz is in such bad shape.”

The bridge door opened, and JT came in like a gust of wind. He helped himself to the coffeepot and then slumped into the seat next to Ben.

“What’s the latest situation?” Ben asked him.

“Fucked up on all points,” JT replied.

Ben just shook his head. “Okay, let’s have it.”

JT took a small notebook from his pocket. “Item one: we are low on all kinds of fuel. Same with the other three ships. Item two: we are low on food. Same with the other three ships. Item three: we are low on fresh water. Same with the others.

“Item four: there’s no word from Hawk. Nothing on the radio. Nothing on the long-range stuff.

“Item five: we’ve been so lucky no Cult ships or planes have seen us sitting out here that it’s just a matter of time before our luck runs out. If that happens, we can throw up about four of those very banged-up jets and start praying. If they can’t stop whatever’s coming at us—like submarines, for instance—and Wolf’s guns can’t do it, then we will be the deadest ducks in military history.”