War of the Sun (33 page)

Was it true? Was he really growing facial hair for the first time in his young life?

He drew out the razor-sharp knife from his belt and studied his skewed reflection on the gleaming blade.

It
was
true! There were definitely signs of hair growing through on his chin and upper lip. He was delighted. He’d sprouted a thin goatee over night.

He lowered the blade to find the seven Cult officers standing before him again. They were bowing, mumbling.
Groveling.

“This is getting uncomfortable,” Soho told them with his newfound haughty exasperation. “What is it that you want?”

“We ask only a minute of your time, sir,” the eldest of the group pleaded. “It is extremely important.”

He wiped the ooze from his mouth and face and slowly shook his head.

“One-half minute,” he said, “and only if you promise not to disturb me for another forty-eight hours.”

The seven officers exchanged worried looks, and then all seemed to shrug at the same time.

“One-half minute,” the oldest officer agreed.

Soho pulled one of the lovelier girls around him closer to his thigh and took another long drag of the hash pipe.

“Well, you have twenty-eight seconds left,” he informed the officer.

The man inched forward a little and bowed one more time. “We really only have one question, sir…”

“And it is?”

He crept forward just a few steps more.

“Well, sir,” he began, his voice barely above a whisper. “Now that we’re redeploying all our troops as you ordered, what shall we do next?”

Soho stopped drinking from his coconut in mid-sip.

“
I
told you to redeploy
what?”

The officer looked genuinely startled. “Our occupation forces, sir,” he answered shakily, “our entire army on the West Coast of America is being pulled out, redeployed. So are our troops in this part of the domain. We have emptied all the garrisons. On your orders, sir. Don’t … don’t you recall?”

Soho thought about it for a moment. Something about what the officer was saying sounded familiar, almost as if he’d been thinking about this very thing just moments before.

But it was gone now.

“Of course I remember,” Soho lied. “Do you really think that …”

The officer was suddenly bowing like crazy. “I meant not to offend, sir,” he was saying between grunts. “Please forgive my …”

Soho held up his hand and the man went suddenly still.

“You have eighteen seconds left,” Soho said, happily sucking on the hash pipe again. “To finish your question, I mean …”

The officer, certain that he’d just avoided a quick death, coughed and started again. “Sir, our redeployed forces are simply awaiting your further orders.”

Soho stopped a moment to think again.

“Just how many of our troops are we talking about?” he asked.

The officer bowed quickly, almost proudly. “Twenty-five divisions. Two hundred and ninety-two thousand combat soldiers. Several thousand support and supply groups. We are moving them day and night, on both aircraft and ships, from California as well as the islands on our Pacific rim. There has never been a military maneuver of this scale in the history of …”

“Have them solidify their present position,” Soho suddenly heard himself say. “They must prepare immediately for an attack from the air as well as the sea.”

The senior officer was stunned. “At their
present
position, sir?”

“That is what I said, isn’t it?” Soho replied, really not quite sure himself.

“Yes, sir,” the officer stumbled. “But our present position is little more than a staging area. Our port of redeployment. It’s extremely crowded at the moment, and grows worse as more and more of our troops arrive. Surely you mean for us to
expand
our perimeters. To take the high ground, build our positions in depth, and …”

“No!”
Soho suddenly screamed. He knew this would upset him. “I said solidify our
present
position. For an attack from the air and from the sea.”

The six other officers were now gritting their teeth and staring at the ground. It was happening again.

The senior officer began to speak again, but Soho was done with him.

“You are dismissed,” he said coolly.

The officer looked him square in the eye for a moment, but quickly shrank away. “Yes, sir …”

The senior officer fell back into the ranks of his six comrades. They bowed as one and began to sadly troop away.

“Just one more thing,” Soho called after them, freezing them in their steps.

“Yes, sir?” the senior officer asked.

Soho took another long drag of his hashish.

“Exactly where is our present position?”

All seven officers went pale at once.

“Right where you stated in your orders, sir,” the senior officer gasped his answer. “The place they used to call Pearl Harbor.”

Washington

G
ENERAL DAVID JONES REACHED
into his bottom desk drawer and came out with a bottle of no-name whiskey.

“I’ve been saving this for a special occasion,” he told the other two men sitting in his small, cluttered Pentagon basement office. “This just isn’t what I had in mind.”

The two men nodded in grim agreement. They were still wearing their black camouflage uniforms, their faces were still covered in charcoal paint. They even had their laser-sighted M-16s by their sides. Neither had had the time to change since their lightning-quick trip from occupied California to Washington.

They were Jesse Tyler and Bobby Crockett, better known as the Cobra Brothers. It was they whom Jones had sent to enemy-held Los Angeles to get some hard intelligence on the ground. It was they who, after finding and interrogating a Cult prisoner, flew directly to DC via a high-speed Texas Air Force C-2 aircraft.

And it was they who bore the mysterious news that the Cult was pulling out of the American mainland and redeploying to, of all places, Pearl Harbor.

“It makes no sense,” Jones said, pouring three drinks into paper cups. “It wasn’t like we were ready to attack them—or even start harassing them. They’ve got the numbers. In weapons. In transport. In pure manpower. And they’ve got the nukes. So why the hell are they pulling out?”

Crockett took a sip from his drink. “Maybe our original plan worked,” he said, grimacing at the bad yet effective booze. “Maybe by knocking off Hashi Pushi—or causing him to do the job himself, I mean—the Cult is literally falling apart. The officers out in the field just figured that when the Holy Word stopped dribbling down from Tokyo, it was time to pack up and go home.”

General Jones sipped his drink too. “I only wish that was the case, Bobby,” he said gloomily. “But it doesn’t add up. If the Cult
was
disintegrating, would their people on Okinawa have stuck around and fought like they did? And where did all those battleships the Task Force reported go?”

“And where the hell are those subs?” Jesse Tyler added.

Jones downed his drink and poured out three more.

“We’ve been looking for them around the clock,” he confirmed, “and we haven’t turned up so much as a bubble.”

“That’s scary,” Crockett said. “They could be anywhere by this time.”

“It’s all these Cult troops in Hawaii we’ve got to concentrate on,” Jones said, throwing a folder on the table. “Take a look at these …”

He spread a dozen or so high-altitude photos across the desk. They showed the tens of thousands of Cult troops massed in and around Pearl Harbor.

“Look at the fortifications these guys are building,” he told the chopper pilots. “And all those AA and SAM sites. We’ve also heard they’ve shipped out any civilians left on Oahu to the other islands, but not before stealing all of their food and water.”

“Sounds like the bastards plan on staying for a while,” Tyler said. “And expecting a fight.”

“That’s just what Hawk said when I talked to him,” Jones said. He went on to explain that he’d had a long conversation with the Wingman earlier in the day via a jimmy-rigged secure line set up in the
Fitz
’s CIC. The Task Force had been slowly limping eastward since the titanic battle on Okinawa. With the mysterious new developments on the West Coast, Jones had no choice but to order them to remain on combat alert and be ready for action—or as ready as they could possibly be.

“And what are his thoughts on this situation?” Tyler asked. “Does he have any ideas on what the hell we should do?”

“He certainly does,” the general replied, pouring out three more stiff shots. “Drink up, boys. You’ll need it after I tell you just
what
he has in mind …”

Seal Cove, Old State of Maine

Al Nolan, a.k.a. “Ironman,” was having a bad day.

First of all, his right index finger hurt. He’d spent the last eight hours recording data on his hand-held electronic notepad, and all that button-pushing had strained a ligament or something.

Second, he’d been standing before the 160,000-gallon saltwater aquarium for most of that time, and the damp conditions were already beginning to give him a head cold.

But third, and most of all, he was bored.

The big tank was the centerpiece of the New American Aquatic Institute, an organization devoted solely to the study of mammal marine life.

In the tank were two dolphins, each about three years old.

By trade, Ironman was an accountant, a numbers cruncher, and one of the best. He took the job as head accountant at the Institute simply because of the research conducted with dolphins there. In a matter of months, he had put the organization back in the black and showed them how to stay financially solvent for many years to come—no easy task in light of the catastrophic upheavals suffered by America in recent times.

In gratitude, the Ironman was given complete run of the aquarium, for the Institute had also come to respect his self-taught knowledge of the intelligence potential of dolphins.

Nolan was now probably the most knowledgeable researcher on dolphin intelligence on the American continent. In fact, he knew
so
much about them that he felt no further study was needed—and this was the source of his boredom. He felt it was time to act on the knowledge he’d gathered. Time to use the dolphins’ intelligence to solve one of the world’s most intriguing mysteries.

But with the country and the globe still in a constant state of confusion, the priority for Nolan’s grand search was very, very low, to say the least.

The dolphins in the tank began to cavort, possibly beginning a mating ritual. Al stepped closer to the eight-inch-thick tempered glass. He didn’t want to miss a thing.

Just then, the radio-phone down the hall rang. Nolan, the only one around, was momentarily torn between getting the phone and continuing to watch the dolphins. Finally, he grudgingly tore himself away from the tank and answered it.

He would soon be very glad he did.

“Ironman?
Hey, Ironman?
Can you hear me?”

Nolan couldn’t believe it. “Hey, Hawk—is that you?”

“Sure is. But I don’t have much time to talk, and I’ve got to ask you a big favor, old friend …”

Fifteen minutes later, Nolan hung up the phone, completely overwhelmed by what he had heard. Suddenly he wasn’t bored anymore.

Without hesitation he went to his quarters, threw together a suitcase of clothes, and grabbed a fresh box of Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils. Before he left, he lifted up a loose floorboard in his bedroom and took out a small steel box. In it was his most prized possession: his Rolodex of names from the old days, when he’d worked as the top logistics man for the U.S. Navy’s most secret projects.

Once packed, he went back to the tank. The Institute assistants would have to care for the dolphins for the time being—but he needed one last look. He loved the animals so much, tears came to his eyes. It was no surprise that the Greeks believed dolphins were once human beings. The animals’ intelligence, and especially their individual personalities, were indeed quite human-like.

And though he knew his scheme to use them to unravel one of history’s most perplexing riddles would have to be put on hold for now, he was more confident than ever that it would indeed happen someday.

This was because in return for his unique services, Hawk Hunter had promised to help him do so.

Ten minutes later, Nolan was heading for a tiny nearby airstrip where an unmarked T-45A Goshawk Navy Trainer and pilot were waiting for him. It was ready to whisk him down to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C.

Then it would be a quick trip to the underground command center of the Pentagon, where a simple room with several telephones awaited him.

From there, the Ironman would work his magic.

Panama

I
T WAS AS IF
they’d come out of nowhere.

One moment the lust-sticky streets of Sin City were being plied with their usual disreputable patrons of pimps, hookers, drug dealers, and insurance salesmen.

In the next, they were filled with heavily-armed soldiers running from doorway to doorway, waving their weapons at anyone who dared to stop and question what was going on.

Edsel Xavier was the chief of the small security force employed by the criminal cartel which ran Sin City. It was his bad luck that all of his bosses were vacationing in the Kingdom of Brazil this day. Their absence made Xavier the acting mayor of the canalside hedonist heaven. It was a position he accepted with the utmost reluctance.

When the soldiers came for him, Xavier was where he always was on early Monday mornings: playing cowgirls and cattle rustlers at the Happy Accident Motel, with his hired guests the Sin City triplets. The soldiers didn’t knock before they kicked the door in. In a flash, Xavier went from sucking on STT Number Two’s garishly-painted breasts to staring down the barrels of six very recently greased M-16s.

Two of the triplets fainted dead away at the sight of the black-camouflaged soldiers; the third wet her pants. Xavier tried vainly to escape by an open window, but was cuffed by two of the soldiers and thrown back onto the disheveled, modality-scattered bed. The women were revived and permitted to go. Xavier was allowed to put on his pants, boots, and undershirt, but his cowboy hat, spurs, and plastic bull horns were left behind.