“Compelling and visionary. DiMercurio’s characters run as deep as his submarines themselves!” --Joe Buff, author of Crush Depth and Thunder in the Deep "DiMercurio really knows his subs...his characters step right off the sub deck and onto his pages." --Larry Bond "A Master Rivaling Tom Clancy." --Publishers Weekly "Terrific." --San Francisco Examiner "Thrilling." --Associated Press "Superb storytelling." --Virginia-Pilot/Ledger Star

Excerpts of Barracuda Final Bearing,
a novel by Michael DiMercurio, 1996

PROLOGUE
SEA OF JAPAN

ALTITUDE 20,000 METERS

The cockpit shuddered as the ramjet engine shut down, fired its explosive bolts and detached, the pilot's flickering display showing the propulsion module tumbling into the sea below.

"Phase two," the pilot murmured in Japanese into his boom microphone. "Aircraft stable in full glide. Descending on glide path at nineteen thousand meters."

There was no need to maintain radio silence the electronics saved the voice data, video camera images and avionics telemetry into a magnetic bubble memory and transmitted a compressed burst once every five to ten minutes on a constantly changing frequency with time-varying encryption codes aimed in a beam to randomly selected Galaxy multipurpose satellites. The communications suite was frontier technology, Japanese technology, the most advanced in the world. Maj. Sushima Namuru would continue to transmit despite the fact that this was the most secret human intelligence operation ever taken on by the Japanese Self Defense Force.

The cockpit hummed from the instruments and the gyro. Namuru half closed his eyes, at one with the airplane, which moments before had been a high-speed jet and was now gliding silently, its polymer airframe and fabric skin making it invisible to radar, its lack of an engine making it invisible to infrared scanners, its lifting surface shape eliminating much of the wingtip vortex swirl making the flight whisper quiet. The plane was a prototype, named Shadow-star by Namuru, the name resonant with meaning to him. For a moment he saw images of the morning, his goodbye to his wife and young son, the send-off party with his squadron of Divine Wind flyers, his time alone in the shrine, feeling his ancestors surround him, giving their approval.

He glanced at the tiny camera eye set in the overhead, the one that monitored him and his reactions, hoping that someday his son would see the video and have pride in his father. Namuru's reverie ended two seconds after it had begun, his attention now taken up in his display screen, its three-dimensional display of glide slope superimposed over the terrain model so real that despite working with it for years, Namuru was still tempted to reach out and touch the objects in the display. The screen was all Namuru needed to fly the plane there were no windows to the world outside. The only thing the display was unable to do was allow a windowless landing approach; for that a pilot still needed a real view. But on this mission, Namuru's Shadowstar would not be landing.

The aircraft passed over the line marking Greater Manchuria's territorial waters, then soon flew over Greater Manchuria's coastline. Namuru shook his head slightly, amazed at how close this new barbarian nation was to Japan, just across the Sea of Japan, the state once divided between Russia and China, but now' a united threat merely 300 kilometers from Japan at its closest point, the distance between Tokyo and the Greater Manchurian capital of Changashan only 1050 kilometers, well inside the range of the old Russian SS-34 nuclear-tipped missiles. The missiles were supposedly destroyed under the United Nations ban on nuclear devices years before Greater Manchuria's formation, but if they were, Namuru's mission would not have been ordered.

The intelligence brief, held an hour before his takeoff, detailed the satellite data that pointed to a nuclearweapons storage depot in the sleepy railhead town of Tamga 200 kilometers northeast of Port Artom, the city the Russians had called Vladivostok. The evidence was frightening. That a ketojin, a savage, like Len Pei Poom could form a nation of barbarians so close to Japan could not be permitted. Especially if they were in possession of nuclear missiles . . . Namuru almost longed for decades past when the Soviet Union and China and America were too busy threatening each other to be a danger to Japan. But now that Japan was alone it would be up to him, Namuru himself, to give his commanders the intelligence they would require before taking action against this threat.

Namuru watched the glide path on the display. The glider had floated silently to an altitude of 5000 meters, completely undetected, now within twenty kilometers of Tamga. The computer flashed up the countdown to aircraft destruct. Scarcely a minute now. Namuru glanced at the pilot-monitor camera as he spoke.

"Phase three. Two minutes to aircraft destruct. As yet no sign of detection."

YOKOSUKA, JAPAN, TWENTY-FIVE KILOMETERS

SOUTH OF TOKYO

YOKOSUKA CENTER

"Please remain seated," the man in the business suit said, his voice quiet but full of authority. The officers in the command center remained at their consoles, glancing briefly, respectfully up at Prime Minister Hosaka Kurita as he walked slowly among the rows of equipment with his escort, Gen. Masao Gotoh, the chairman of the Joint Staff Council. Gotoh led Kurita to an isolated area of the dark room, the command corner, where an enlarged screen four meters wide and two meters tall flashed views fed by the defense computer network. The screen was split, one-half of it showing a helmet and oxygen mask, the only signs that a person was present the eyes, the other screen half showing a terrain model with superimposed computer graphics. It was gibberish to Prime Minister Kurita. Gotoh explained, his own eyes on the display.

"These are the transmissions from Colonel Namuru in the Shadowstar aircraft. We are seeing them at a five- minute delay from real time since the data is recorded, compressed and relayed at a burst to a satellitethat way it is unlikely he would be detected even against an advanced adversary. Against the Greater Manchurians, he is invisible. In a few minutes Namuru's aircraft will put him down near the Tamga weapons depot. We will be monitoring him as he executes his mission."

Kunta took a peek at his watch and settled into a leather command chair, his eyes unblinking as he took in the screen.

"What if something happens to him? What if he's caught?"

Gotoh smiled to himself, knowing Kurita had been fully briefed, but also knowing the older man liked richness of detail. Briefings alone were not enough for him.

"Colonel Namuru and the other Divine Wind War- riors have an implanted chip with a small chemical canister surgically placed in their abdominal cavities. On a signal from the satellite, the chip will release a small dose of poison into Namuru's body. Thirty seconds later he will be dead. There is no antidote."

The Prime Minister nodded. The two men watched the data display in silence.

"You can see him here preparing for the aircraft to destruct," General Gotoh said, the pilot's image busy in the cockpit.

Suddenly the screen image bounced violently, then winked out.

The Shadowstar glider sailed at 150 kilometers per hour, 3000 meters over the scrubby hills, four kilometers outside of Tamga. The cockpit's computer display numerals reached the single digits, rolled too quickly to one, then zero. The aircraft self-destruct sequence began.

The polymer of the airframe was as strong as aluminum when in solid form. Running through the skeletal structure of the framing were hundreds of small polymer tubes and capillaries, all of them connected to a foillined polymer tank filled with a mixture of sulfuric acid and several advanced solvents. A small cylinder of highpressure nitrogen inside the top of the tank, on a cornputer signal, opened to the tank, the whooshing gas pressuring the fluid inside while a valve at the tank bottom snapped open, allowing the acid and solvent mixture to flow into the pipes and tubes and capillaries leading to the plane's airframe structural components. The walls of the tubes were machined precisely so that they would carry the acid to the remotest tubes just before dissolving themselves. The dissolving tubes then spilled the acid into the hollow regions of the airframe structures and along their outsides.

The polymeric composition of the airframe was chemically synthesized so that it reacted exothermically with the acid while dissolving in the solvents. Areas of the structure not directly in the wash of acid and solvents reacted from the heat of the adjacent melting structures, the acid molecules diffusing throughout the liquefying mass. Over the next twenty seconds, what before had been a network of solid curving beams and struts making up the shape of an airplane became a melting waxy semisolid, then a liquid, then finally as the reaction rate increased, a vapor. The airplane's lifting body shape melted into a large teardrop, the liquid flying off into the slipstream behind it, the liquid turning to a plume of gray smoke, until all that was left of the aircraft was the egg-shaped carbon composite cockpit module, now tumbling end-over-end to the rocky slopes below. Inside the cockpit Namuru felt the aircraft shake, then tremble violently as the wings and tail liquefied and vaporized, the module encasing him spinning toward the earth. The g-forces of the spin knocked Namuru about the cockpit, straining his five-point harness, threatening to break his neck. Namuru wondered if the computer were still active. If it had malfunctioned in the breakup of the airframe, the cockpit module would fall dumbly into the ground below, shattering at terminal velocity of 160 kilometers per hour. He fought the dizziness of the spinning cockpit and the massive g-forces to reach his gloved hand for the manual parachute lever. He had just managed to brush it with his fingers when the explosive bolts blew off the drogue chute panel, ejecting a streamer from the rear of the cockpit module, stabilizing the wildly spinning egg until one second later the main chute blew out, luffing in the slipstream gale until it filled, the cockpit module settling below it. The cockpit egg now drifted gently down to the slope of a craggy hill a hundred meters below. Namuru had only a moment to inhale to clear his head before the module hit the mountainside, the impact considerable even under the canopy of the main chute.

Namuru hurried to punch the cockpit rupture button, knowing that the computer would wait only two minutes for him to activate it before seif-destructing. The worst thing that could happen on this mission was his capture, and if he had arrived unconscious, the computer would kill him before allowing him to be taken. He pulled the cover from the rupture command switch and toggled it down and the cockpit module split in half, opening cleanly along a prescored material weld. The top of the module pulled up and away from the bottom on pneumatic cylinder struts, allowing a cold wind and diffuse but glaring winter light into the module. Namuru unlatched a case from the bulkhead of the capsule and hauled himself out into the cold of the outside and stepped away from the cockpit. Seconds later the module began to smoke and sizzle, burning until there was nothing left but a black molten pool of carbon, melted fiber optics and singed liquid crystal.

Namuru opened the case he had withdrawn and revealed a thick vest, full of pockets, heavy with explosives and the automatic pistol. He put on the vest and took out equally heavy pocketed pants that he strapped onto his thighs and fastened with Velcro seams. He kept his helmet on, since it contained two cameras, one that gave Yokosuka Center a view of what he himself saw, a second with a fisheye lens focused on his face. He pulled a small folding spade from a utility pocket and covered the smoking ruin of the cockpit and the parachute with earth dug from the rocky frozen ground. He stepped back after a few minutes, sweating despite the chill, realizing the job was far from perfect but still would only be noticed by someone stepping on top of it.

He ditched the shovel, pulled the pistol out of his vest, screwed on the long silencer and snapped a large clip into the gun. He then thrust the piece into a soft holster set into his vest and withdrew high-powered binoculars and a black rubber box with rounded edges about the size of a steno pad. The pad had heavy elastic straps on the back and a removable cover on the front that now revealed a liquid crystal display. Namuru strapped the pad onto his left forearm, then ran a small wire between his watch and the pad, switching the watch into digital compass mode, its satellite receiver turned to the orbiting Galaxy geostationary multipurpose satellite. A thumb pressure on the display turned the unit on, the display flashing a question mark. He raised the pad to his lips and whispered his password, which this hour was "blue." The display flashed to life, bright and colorful, although the light from it faded to black if the screen were observed even slightly off from directly in front of it at a distance of thirty centimeters.

"Nay display, vector to Tamga weapons depot," Namuru whispered to the pad. An overhead satellite photograph view of a hilly rocky region flashed onto the display, the scene showing an eerie depth from the three-dimensional effect. The green of the trees and ground cover were broken by several roads, a winding rail track and the roofs of several small buildings, with what appeared to be an expansive flat plateau among the buildings. A yellow grid flashed up over the landscape, with a blinking circle on the crest of a hit! to the south of the compound. Namuru noted that the circle was within two kilometers of the center of the complex and since the circle was his own position, he would have an easy hike to the base perimeter. He looked up into the cloudy sky for any sign of the sun, but it was buried in thick overcast. He made a full turn, looking and listening for observers in the scrubby growth around him. All was quiet. The pad computer aural sensors were tuned to pick out man-made noises and would alert Namuru by buzzing the flesh of his forearm, but until that function proved itself it was not to be assumed that it worked. After a last glance at the pad disph Namuru set off in the direction of the compound.

YOKOSUKO CENTER

"So how will he get through the perimeter fence and security?" Prime Minister Kurita asked, watching raptly as the screen display jiggled and showed Major Namuru walking through the thick trees on the downslope of a mountain leading to the Tamga valley. The view on one panel of the display showed the trees and underbrush approaching the camera; a second panel showed a fisheye-lens view of a puffy-looking face beaded with sweat, the eyes wide and hyper alert; the third panel revealed a grid superimposed on a bird's-eye view of the valley with a flashing circle nearing a fenceline surrounding a military compound.

"Not a problem," General Gotoh replied, glancing from the screen to Kurita's lined face, then back to the display. "Namuru has gas for dogs, a silenced automatic for human guards, shorting cables for electrified fences. We've spent six months training him in the use of every security measure we know. He's consistently penetrated them 78 percent of the time."

"Seventy-eight percent doesn't sound like it's passing."

"That is against Japanese technology perimeter security," Gotoh said, typing into a keyboard in front of his control console. "Against gaijin methods, he will be more than the equal of a security detail."

"Tell me again how he is going to get inside the bunker, if that is what it is."

"He'll shoot the guards," Gotoh said simply, his eyes still on the display, careful not to let a flicker of annoyance cross his face at Kurita's insistenCe on covering briefing material over and over.

"Does he have to do that? It would seem to imperil the mission, draw attention to the break-in."

"True, Prime Minister. But guards of nuclear weapons are trained, conditioned is perhaps a better term, to shoot intruders. They call it Deadly Force Authorization. It means shoot first and forget the questions. The quickest way to penetrate the security around a nuclear weapon is to surprise the guards and kill them. Even then, one's life expectancy is numbered in the minutes, perhaps only seconds. That's why Namuru has the cameras. If he's shot we'll still have the data."

"What about the time delay? They might disconnect and destroy his camera before we know what happened."

"Unavoidable, I'm afraid, sir. But it is unlikely that if Namuru and his gear is captured that the gaijin Greater Manchurians could understand that he is transmitting. By the time they realized it, we would know all that Namuru knew."

In the panel monitoring Namuru's view a bush flashed close to the camera, then rolled away to reveal a length of fencing between two trees. The right panel showing the navigation display changed, a graph replacing the aerial photograph, the graph pulsing with circular curves.

"The fence is electrified with high voltage," Gotoh announced. The view from Namuru's helmet blurred as he approached the fence. Namuru's hands flashed in and out of view, attaching a cable to the fence, just before the fireball exploded and the screens again went blank. Namuru looked at the fence as his computer pad flickered with the electromagnetic signature of 11,000 volts surging through the aluminum cable braided through the fence. What could be seen through the fence was limited, since there were more trees there and little else.

Namuru snaked out the electrical cables that were in the back of the heavy vest, uncoiled the heavy insulated wires, withdrew the lengths of copper rods half a meter at a time. He screwed the copper rod lengths together, until there was a two-meter-long copper rod, then attempted to force the rod into the ground. It went in halfway, then had to be tapped with a rubber mallet from another vest pocket until the rod was buried in the ground with only five centimeters protruding.

Namuru hid the mallet under a bush. At least after this, he thought, much of the weight he'd carried in would be left behind. He took a cable and attached it to the top of the copper rod with a heavy copper clamp. The other end of the cable he attached to a large alligator clip, then stepped back to inspect his work. He unfastened the computer pad and digital receiver watch, his vest and his utility leggings so that most of the metal objects were removed from his body. He put on the thick 100,000-volt rubber gloves. His boots were already wrapped in insulating material, one of the reasons his feet were so uncomfortably hot.

He took a deep breath, studying the cable winding through the aluminum mesh fence. The idea was to get his cable attached to the live electrical cable in the fence, thereby grounding the voltage to the copper rod in the earth. The live wire would then short its potential to ground, either tripping the electrical circuit at the generator or melting the wire at the connection to the rod. If he did this right the power would blast through the grounding mechanism and disrupt the entire circuit so that he could cut through the fence. But if he mishandled the operation 11,000 volts of power would pass through his body. That had happened to one of the Divine Wind officers in penetration training. The high voltage had blown off the man's legs and one of his arms, stopped his heart and left him a smoking wreck. The training chief had cut the power, and the ambulance crew had revived the man, and he had actually lived for two days, the incredible pain of those days carved on his terrified burned features when they had buried him. A horrible way to die, a worse way to live. Namuru prayed, just don't let it leave me burned and maimed.

He lunged with the alligator clip and hit the high voltage fence cable with it. The fireball had no sound, only a fist of pressure. Namuru saw the light expand to the size of a zeppelin and surround him as it smashed into him and blew him off his feet and sent him flying into the woods. "What happened?"

"Looks like he took a shock," Gotoh said, his voice a monotone. The screens remained blank.

"And he's dead?"

"Too early to say, sir." Gotoh had risen to hover over another younger officer at a neighboring console. The officer tapped furiously at a keyboard, stopping occasionally to manipulate a mouse, then typing again. "We're addressing the satellite now trying to get Major Namuru's cameras to work again. If we can reestablish a link with his instrumentation we might be able to determine what is going on."

The screen flashed a momentary broken image, then went dark again. Gotoh and Kurita waited.

"How long do we wait?"

"The mission brief calls for a four-minute delay before the satellite signals the chip with the poison canister in the major's abdomen," Gotoh said.

"How long has it been?"

"We were already on a five-minute delay from real time when the major got hit with the electricity. We saw it three minutes ago. I'd say Major Namuru has another sixty seconds before the computer aborts the mission and calls down to the chip to inject the poison."

The screen flashed, then held. The camera view from Namuru's helmet stared straight up at the sky, the boughs of two trees breaking the featureless clouds. The face-monitoring camera came up next. Namuru's face was burned on the left side, his eye gone, the flesh seared and melting. His right eye was shut and swollen.

"Prime Minister, I don't think we should wait for the mission computer. We should abort now. Namuru's gone." Kunta stared at Namuru's burned and disfigured face.

"I agree, General."

Gotoh gave the order to the officer on the control console, who nodded and made the commands as if they had nothing to do with killing a fellow officer.

"The signal is out, sir," the officer reported.

"He'll be dead in thirty seconds if he isn't already," Gotoh said.

Kurita looked up at the screen. "We need another plan. We still must find out if Len Pei Poom has nuclear weapons. He could be targeting Tokyo even now."

Namuru was burned from the inside out. His flesh felt hot and running on his left side, his face aching and puffy. His whole body ached, he couldn't move. He concentrated for what seemed hours trying to move his right hand, finally able to move it upward. In the next ten minutes he used the hand to lift himself so that he was sitting up. He couldn't see out of his left eye. He reached for his face and felt the burned flesh, hard and crumbling. He crawled through the brush to find his watch and the computer pad. When he found them, the corn. puter pad had melted into a puddle of plastic. The watch was also destroyed, the satellite above having given the signal to abort the mission. Which meant that his poison capsule should have been released and he should be dead.

Except that the electrical fireball must have fried the chip inside him. But if there had been enough power to kill the chip, there might have been enough to fracture the poison canister. It could be leaking even now, he thought. He had only hours to live but then that was the whole idea of this mission.

He managed to stand, shaking when he finally made it. He took some water from his vest, then tried to pui it on. It was too heavy and he was too weak. He would have to go in without it. He bent over the vest and pulled out the pistol, a spare clip, the two gas bottles, small collection of electronic boxes and a small pack of film, then adjusted his helmet, wondering if the cameras were still operating. The circuits checked out he shouk still be transmitting. He wondered if there was anyone on the other end. He stepped slowly toward the fence, saw the blackened hole the fireball had blown in it. He crouched down, walked through and limped to the trees, his strength coming and going erratically.

With the computer pad gone, he was operating on memory. The satellite photo had pictured a wide flat mound of earth, the kind used to conceal an underground bunker. The earth mound would be behind two rows of outbuildings from where he was, just beyond the trees. Moving through the trees to the far edge, he saw the outbuildings and began walking unsteadily through the exposed ground to the cover of the buildings. if the cameras weren't working, the mission was over.

The two black dogs runaing silently toward him were within ten meters before he saw them with his one eye. "Prime Minister! General!"

The lieutenant from the command center, Gotoh saw.

"Sir, the major. He's alive. He's inside the compound"

"General, what happened to the poison?" Kunta asked.

"I'm not sure, sir. Perhaps the electrocution damaged it."

"What else could fail on this day," Kurita mumbled. The two men hurried back to the command center, returning to the control corner they had abandoned minutes before. The left screen was unsteady with the blur of movement, the transmission fading in and out, the software freezing the image rather than allowing the display to go black during the short transmission interruptions.

During one short interruption Kurita saw the frozen image of the exposed fangs of a large black dog leering angrily at the camera as it lunged. The eyes were red and furious, the mouth hungry and lethal. Kurita unconsciously felt his throat.

The dogs had gotten too close. If he had still been able to use the computer pad, the motion detector would have alerted him to the animals ten seconds before, but that was in the past. In an adrenaline rush he grabbed a gas bottle with each hand, aiming as best he could with only one good eye, the streams of gas jetting out at the dogs in a loud blast, a white cloud forming around him. He clamped his mouth shut, hoping he could keep from inhaling the gas. The lab techs had assured him the nerve gas was active only on animals, not humans, but after seeing it demonstrated, he wondered. The dogs, already flying through the air to get to his throat, were dead before they hit him, the two bodies knocking him to the ground, the sounds of the dogs' gasping expulsions of breath in his ears as their bodies spasmed through reflex nerve actions.

Namuru got up, replaced the bottles in his belt and withdrew the automatic pistol. He was within ten meters of the objective now, the hump of earth covering the suspected bunker rising over his head. The slope of the dirt was too regular to be natural. There was definitely something buried here. Namuru closed the clump of trees at the edge of the earth embankment and had a momentary impression of the two armed guards in their helmets and flak jackets. Namuru sprayed them with a single silenced burst from the pistol, more than two' dozen Teflon-jacketed rounds exploding inside their bodies. He had shoved the pistol into his belt, the barrel scalding hot, while the guards were still on their feet, slowly collapsing to the ground. As the two liquid thumps came from their impact with the earth, Namuru cradled the keypad entry box in his hands.

The keypad required a password numeric sequence be entered to open the blast doors of the bunker. Namuru pulled the cover off, reached into his belt for the electronic boxes, none of them bigger than a matchbook,, and selected the proper one. He placed the box over the number pad, hit a button on the face of the box and waited. Twenty seconds later a small crystal display blinked as the box talked to the keypad. Finally the keybox surrendered, the heavy steel blastdoor groaning as it moved its rusted mass, one panel sliding right, the other left, opening into the darkness of the bunker. As it opened, Namuru pulled the pistol from his belt and dropped the electronic box, which was already sizzling and melting into a self-destruct sequence.

Namuru rushed into the opening, firing at the dim shapes of the inside guards, none prepared for an intruder. His eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness as he ejected the spent clip of the weapon and inserted another, the only replacement ammunition he had brought He almost smiled as he saw the missiles in the dim light of the dusty overhead lamps. He stepped over the bodies of four guards for a better look, glancing up to see if he was being followed. So far all was quiet. He only needed another minute.

Namuru had spent years studying nuclear weapons. He could recognize and identify any production nuclear missile made by any nuclear power, past or present. And the missiles on the dollies in front of him were definitely old Russian SS-34's medium-range ballistic missiles. Theater nuclear weapons able to reach any major city within 1500 kilometers. Most of the missile bulk was devoted to warhead rather than rocket fuel, which was why their range was so short. But Tokyo was only 850 kilometers away. It was not enough for him to identify the missile model, however Namuru's mission was to determine beyond any doubt that they were truly nukes, not just dusty hulks of the old SS-34s, or some unknown conventional model of the warhead with conventional high explosive mated to the SS-34's rocket stage.

All nuclear warheads, he knew, emitted neutron radiation. Especially an older Russian model. The neutron flux from the plutonium warhead would be enough to cloud a special filmstrip. Namuru stepped over to the weapon body, going through a yellow rope with the three-bladed circular radiation warning sign on it, and attached one of the filmstrips to the nearest warhead, then a strip on the next, and one on the furthest. There were at least twenty missiles in this end of the bunker and there would be no way to have time to test them alL Namuru counted to ten, then pulled the films away, crouching below the weapons. He put each film through a developer and waited another ten seconds, then held the processed film to the light. All three were clouded.

All three had been exposed to high dosages of neutron flux.

All three weapons had nuclear warheads. Which meant Manchuria could attack Japan and bring her to her knees.

Which meant that the war would begin in days when the high command attacked this facility.

Namuru thought he heard a voice. He pocketed the films and ran out the blast door and into the open, amazed that his body could function after the electrical jolt, but then realizing he was operating on pure adrenaline. He ran past the outbuildings to the trees, and beyond to the burnt-out hole in the fence. There was noise now, a rising siren just starting off on the other side of the bunker, gathering pitch and volume until it howled, an old-fashioned air-raid alarm. He heard the roar of truck engines as he dived through the fence opening and made it back to the trees, where he had stashed his vest and leggings.

He was almost finished.

"So it is true," General Gotoh said.

"The weapons?"

"They are nuclear," Gotoh said to Kurita as both men watched the screen, Namuru's view of the missiles clear in his helmet-mounted camera. Namuru had apparently just gotten rid of the ifim and begun his escape. "Did you see the film? It clouded. Only neutron radiation can do that so quickly. And only nuclear fuel or nuclear warheads would do that. The SS-34s are live, sir."

"What happens to Namuru now?"

"We give him a medal. And we keep watching." Namuru got the vest and leggings on and pulled the helmet camera out of the helmet by a coiled thread-thin wire, attaching the tiny camera eye to a limb on a tree, then backing away two meters so that the camera was looking at his face.

"Phase nine," Namuru said to the camera. "The weapons are SS-34s, at least two dozen of them. I have confirmed that they are nuclear. My extraction was successful but I am being pursued. This mission is now complete." Namuru listened for a moment, the sirens wailing behind him. He thought he heard footsteps in the underbrush.

It was time.

"To the victory of Japan," he said, and reached to the back of his helmet to pull the T-handle cord, down to his shoulder blade.

Kurita stared at the screen. Namuru's face was clearly visible, almost like a news reporter at a scene giving a description. The weapons were nuclear, he had said.

"To the victory of Japan," Namuru was saying as he pulled something down behind his back.

On the screen the explosion took Kurita by surprise. The detonation was severe enough to cause the transmission to freeze-frame several times as the satellite lost lock over the next second, the frames freezing the specter of Namuru's head being blown apart by his helmet lined with explosives. The screen shook as the vest apparently detonated, blowing the camera backward until the screen view looked up at the sky, then rolled over to look back toward the damaged fence. In a blur men could be made out running toward the fence, when the screen suddenly became snow and static, the static noise loud.

The officer at the control screen turned off the display.

"What happened?" Kurita heard himself say.

"Major Namuru's helmet, utility vest and leggings were fitted with explosives to blow his body apart. That way the Manchurians would have no way to identify him as a Japanese, not that their DNA-coding labs could ever match anything we have. The explosives also blew up his equipment so that there is nothing left for them to have that points to us. He was trained to detonate the explosives on camera so that we could verify that his self-destruction was complete. An excellent mission, Namuru did well," the general said.

"Next time, General, you might consider warning me that I will be witnessing a man's death in real time."

"Sir, it was not real time it was on a five-minute time-delay."

Kurita realized General Gotoh would never understand. But it was time now for Greater Manchuria to understand. Soon they would know that having offensive nuclear missiles, violating the UN ban, so close to Japan would cost them dearly.

"Call Minister Machue. Tell him to convene the Defense Security Council in one hour. Bring a disk of Namuru's mission but please edit out the last part."

"Yes, Prime Minister."

"And, General. Make sure your war plan is very carefully thought out."

"Yes, sir."

Kurita stared at the general for a long moment, then walked out, trying to banish the images of Namuru's death from his mind, but not succeeding.

USSDEVILFISH.COM Michael DiMercurio Princeton, New Jersey E-mail: readermail@USSDEVILFISH.COM