War of the Sun (34 page)

Placed in the back of a HumVee, Xavier was driven at high speed to the Sin City’s mid-sized airfield, two miles away. The two-runway airstrip was now servicing both a wide array of attack helicopters and large C-141 troop-laden cargo planes. A huge Chinook helicopter was parked at the far edge of the airstrip. Xavier was taken inside. The big chopper was outfitted inside as an aerial battle command center. At one end was a large desk jammed with computers, maps, and communications equipment. Behind this desk sat an enormous black man wearing a major general’s uniform of the United American Armed Forces.

He politely but firmly explained to Xavier that the shock troops which had descended on Sin City were members of the elite 23rd Battalion of the Football City Special Forces Rangers. He was their provisional commander. His name was Major Catfish Johnson.

The conversation with Johnson was brief: he asked Xavier how many armed men he had under his command. Xavier replied the number was fifty-seven within Sin City’s city limits. Johnson then made a fifteen-second speech telling Xavier that it was in his best interests to order his men to report to the airport immediately and surrender their weapons. Xavier didn’t argue. A radio was provided and he quickly put out the word to his small security force.

His men came straggling in just as the troops massed at the airport were moving out, a long stream of M-1 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and standard APCs leading the way.

Xavier was handcuffed and put in the back of Johnson’s HumVee. With the general himself behind the wheel, they tore off after the convoy heading toward the main locks of the canal three miles away.

Xavier’s spirits sank lower as they roared back through the heart of Sin City. All major intersections in the city were now under control of the heavily-armed invaders. The small radio station was surrounded with APCs and Bradleys, as was the satellite TV uplink facility which had provided Sin City with a wealth of pornographic films and features over the years.

Hungover and drug-starved, Xavier was slipping into a state of shock. The scale and precision by which the American troops had captured the city was mind-boggling. Even worse, it appeared they were intending to stay for good.

“This party is kaput,” Xavier kept mumbling over and over.

That he was not exactly correct would be his first big surprise of the day.

They screeched past the enormous hole in the ground which at one time had been the site of the tower used by the men operating the main lock control station of the stretch of the Panama Canal nearby and soon arrived outside the control station itself. Advance elements of United American troops had completely encircled the large, washed-brick facility by this time and the sky above the station was filled with circling helicopter gunships.

Xavier was taken out of the HumVee and marched up to the front gate of the facility. Inside he could see the confused faces of the station’s guard force staring back out at him. These men were employed by a private mercenary guard force totally independent from the town’s security units. These men were tougher, better-armed, and technically better motivated. In fact they were under contract from Sin City’s ruling cartel to hold the station with their lives should the occasion arise.

Xavier was given a bullhorn by the officer in charge of the American troops encircling the building. He didn’t need to be told what to do. He simply turned the thing on and told the men inside to give up.

After a short delay, a similarly-amplified voice replied that they were all hired to go down fighting. It added that their commander was at that moment trying to raise their main office located on the old island of Cuba for instructions, and most probably, reinforcements.

Xavier turned to Johnson and shrugged. The general, in turn, gave a signal to his communications man, who spoke three words into his radiophone. Within a few seconds, one of the circling Cobra gunships swooped down and laid a frightful barrage of 6.76 rockets on top of the main control house, vaporizing the large radio antenna there. A second Cobra delivered a second barrage to the station’s small satellite dish. A third gunship riddled the small shack which housed the station’s automatic telephone switching computer.

The firing lasted ten incredibly noisy seconds. By the time it was over, the control station and the men inside were cut off from the outside world. No sooner had the smoke cleared when the holed-up security troops were walking out with white flags above their heads.

Fifteen minutes later, the canal locks and the immediate area surrounding them were under the control of the Football City 23rd Battalion.

Xavier was brought up to the main control house and kept there under guard as American soldiers began working the control of the main locks, using elaborate operating manuals as their guides. Within minutes, Xavier saw a large gray-black cargo ship enter the small lake east of the canal and approach the locks. There was a similarly-sized ship behind it, and another one behind that.

The first ship was successfully guided into the main lock, raised up, and sent on its way to the Pacific. Xavier got a good look at the ship and saw that it was stocked to the decks with wooden crates and black-tarped containers. The second ship was similarly loaded, as was the third.

By the time the trio of cargo ships was processed, three more appeared. And then four more, and four more after that. Each one was stacked with what had to be tons of military supplies, all of it covered, all of it under the watchful eyes of heavily armed sailors.

Five hours later, Xavier had counted thirty-three ships having gone through the locks, their decks packed to capacity, all heading quickly to the Pacific, all of them flying the American flag.

He was still there twenty-four hours later. And the ships were still coming.

Vancouver, Free Canada

The airplane was spotted on Free Canadian air defense radar at ten minutes after midnight.

Two controllers stationed at Ladysmith on Vancouver Island tracked the aircraft as it passed within fifteen miles of the entrance to Vancouver Bay. They watched as it swept back and forth in an irregular search pattern, cameras in its nose cone undoubtedly snapping off hundreds of feet of infrared film. They were certain it was a long-range recon aircraft owned either by the Asian Mercenary Cult or someone in their employ.

Yet they did not pass an emergency report on to their commanders which would have triggered a scramble order to the nearest unit of Canadian jet interceptors. Rather they watched the airplane for the next ninety minutes as it went about a normal long-range photo reconnaissance mission undisturbed.

Its cameras had plenty to record: out from Vancouver Bay, through the Straits around Vancouver Island, and out into the cold North Pacific was a convoy of full-to-the-gunwales cargo ships that stretched for more than 150 miles. All of them packed with crates typical of military cargo. All of them heading toward the Hawaiian Islands.

Oahu, the next day

I
T WAS A VERY
happy group of Cult officers gathered around the large war table.

There were seven of them in all, the top commanders of the Asian forces who until recently had brutally occupied both the West Coast of America and the scattered islands of the South Pacific rim. Two officers were in charge of all the Cult land forces. Two represented the Cult’s naval arm. The remaining three were connected with the Cult air force.

Before them was a large composite photomap of the Pacific Ocean, highlighting the broad expanse of water between the American continent and the Hawaiian Islands. It was quite easy to comprehend the current situation. The map clearly showed a long stream of ships heading toward Hawaii from the Panama Canal Zone, and an even longer line heading down from Vancouver. Sailing in classic convoy fashion—spread out for antisubmarine defense—the lead ships of the twin convoys would be within 100 miles of Hawaii within 24 hours.

The officers had just heard a presentation from the officer in charge of aerial photo recon. His analysts had concluded that most of the vessels flowing out of Panama were cargo ships, and that most of those coming from Canada appeared to be carrying troops. There were more than 150 ships in all—some fairly modern military vessels, others little more than the no-frills, slapped together Liberty Ship-style cargo vessels popular in the post-Big War world.

By calculating their average displacement, cargo capacity, and range, the Cult’s top intelligence analysts determined that ten divisions of American or allied troops—210,000 men—and 23 million tons of ammunition and supplies were on their way to attack the Cult forces deployed on Oahu and in and around Pearl Harbor.

“It is Providence,” the top army officer declared. “The wisdom of our redeploying to this location is now very clear. We were unwise to doubt our new leader.”

“We can redeem ourselves,” said the air force commander. “It is the divine intervention we have been seeking.”

“It is true,” the naval commander added. “The foolish, lazy Americans are falling right into our trap.”

It was now three
A.M.

Major Sisan Mushi was hot, hungry, and tired. He’d been shouting orders at his men for nearly eighteen straight hours, and his voice was beginning to crack. He couldn’t really remember the last time he’d eaten anything—maybe it was the raw smelts he’d consumed with his morning tea two days ago. He’d taken a nap sometime after that, though it hadn’t lasted too long, for the noise of the commotion going on around him was much too loud for any kind of restful repose. And he hadn’t bathed in four days.

But work was progressing, though, and this is what made him happy.

He was in command of an 1800-man Cult construction regiment. At that moment, his men were putting the finishing touches on the second of two temporary airstrips they’d been building nonstop for the past seventy-two hours.

The irony that the site of these runways was close to what was once known as Hickam Field was lost on Mushi—he was not a student of history. A distant relative had flown a torpedo plane on December 7, 1941, but that’s about as far as his interest went regarding the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on that fateful day so long ago.

No—Mushi was a man of economics, a true mercenary. He was in it for the money. His orders were for his men to build the two simple crushed-gravel runways and do it in three days, and they were just about finished. That sixty-six of his men had died on this project—all from sheer exhaustion and hunger—didn’t faze him one whit. The mission was nearly complete, and when it was, he’d be handsomely paid. Everything else—including exactly what the runways would be used for—was more or less irrelevant for him.

Next to his instant airstrips, another construction crew was pouring the last of the concrete needed for a massive SAM emplacement. The missile site already had seventeen SA-6 launchers in place, each with three missiles, and when the cement finally hardened, six more would be added, making a grand total of twenty-three launchers and sixty-nine missiles. And this emplacement was just one of a string of fifty-two SAM sites which stretched along the inner coast of Pearl Harbor.

Seeing these sites now, lit by strings of bulbs and searchlights that reminded him of Firecracker Day back in Japan, Mushi heaved a sigh of true pride—not in any patriotic sense, but just for the sheer accomplishment of building the AA-defense line in such a short amount of time.

The Cult High Command had determined that a United American attack was imminent and that it would come in two forms: aerial and naval. The three-day orgy of building defense systems to counter the coming attack was the result of this determination.

Just how the enemy was going to attack was easy to figure out. Coming first from the air and then from the sea was, after all, how the Americans had pulled the sneak attack on Okinawa not long ago, a battle now known all the way down to the lowest private in the Cult forces. The struggle of the Cult martyrs on Okinawa was, in fact, the motivating factor for the massive mission of fortifying Pearl Harbor for the impending assault—at least for those who were paid so little, the economic return was not their prime motivation.

But unlike their recent attacks on the Homeland and Okinawa, this impending American action would not be a sneak attack. Everyone on the Cult side not only knew it was coming, they knew
how
it was coming.

Mushi knew it was really pretty simple. When it came down to it, after all the flash and bullshit, the United Americans were extremely predictable, as well as lazy. First of all, everyone knew the United Americans were airplane-happy—their top command was made up almost entirely of pilots. What other way would they choose to open an attack than with an airstrike? The Cult High Command knew the United Americans had access to nearly six squadrons of high-tech airplanes, most of them captured from the Fourth Reich. They also knew that along with their Free Canadian allies, the Americans could garner an impressive air-refueling capability. It would not be beyond their capabilities and foolish daring to launch a large number of these aircraft from the recently deoccupied West Coast, refueling them several times along the way and having them attack the Cult at Pearl Harbor.

And what would their targets be? The Cult communications network, what else? After all, the United Americans were convinced that by killing the eyes and ears and mouth of their enemy, they’d make the whole beast collapse. Along with this line of reasoning, then, it wasn’t too hard to imagine that the United Americans would attempt to seize an airfield or two in some fashion on which to land, refuel, and rearm these long-range aerial attackers.

Next, the Americans were probably planning to land a large body of troops—but not in a typical hit-the-beach style; even they were too smart for that. No, they would attempt a large insertion of men at one carefully selected point, hoping that the majority of them made it ashore, and then would be able to run rampant behind the defense lines. Again, this was how they’d done it on Okinawa. This is how they would try to do it here.