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 self-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Namuru opened the case he had withdrawn and revealed a thick vest, full of pockets, heavy with explosives and the automatic pistol.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. “Nav 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 hill 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 display, Namuru set off in the direction of the compound.
“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 breakin.”
“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.