He would wipe that damned, hateful Japanese city off the face of world maps forever. He owed it to his family, and it would be his last gesture; even if he was captured, even if he was killed, he would go down in the annals of history as the man who finally destroyed the Japanese nation.
The one-megaton nuclear warhead yielded a destructive force of one million tons of conventional TNT explosive, fifty times more powerful than the Fat Man atomic bomb that had fallen on Nagasaki back in 1945, and over sixty times more powerful than the Little Boy which had laid waste to Hiroshima.
Japan, Wu considered, hadn’t had a lot of luck with nuclear weapons over the years; and it was only going to get worse.
One of the most densely populated metropolises in the world, an average of more than six thousand people lived in every square kilometer of the city; and Wu knew that the downtown area was even more densely packed, with up to twenty thousand citizens per square kilometer.
A one-megaton warhead set to explode two and an half thousand meters above the city in order to maximize blast effects would have a lethality rate of nearly one hundred percent out to a radius of three kilometers — over half a million people would die instantly.
Out to eight kilometers, lethality would be fifty percent, leaving another million and half dead.
So within only a small area, just over two hundred square kilometers of central Tokyo, fatalities would be over two million, and that was purely from the blast. How many more people would perish from the burns, the collapsing buildings, the traffic accidents, the inevitable panicked stampede as people fled the city, the hurricane-force winds, the firestorms, the radiation?
Wu could only hazard a guess, but it would be many millions more, he was sure; and all from the little Dong Feng missile that sat behind him, launch tube ratcheting into position, elevated to point skywards.
Such a small weapon — almost the same as the medium-range missile which had hit the USS Ford and started this whole thing in the first place — but capable of creating so much death.
He couldn’t wait.
Like the missile which had hit the Ford, this variant was equipped with the WU-14 hypersonic glide vehicle; even with prior warning, at a speed of Mach Ten, there would be no chance of anyone stopping it.
Yes, he thought happily, I will have my revenge.
12
Cole saw it first, the olive-green metal launch tube standing tall of the pines which surrounded the small clearing.
‘There,’ he said, pointing through the windshield of the attack helicopter, and the Chinese team picked up on it, the pilot acknowledging it immediately, swinging the aircraft down towards the missile truck.
Cole prayed he wasn’t too late, knowing that Wu would be targeting Japan, almost certainly Tokyo, his fears for his estranged daughter pulsing through his heart.
Before Cole could say another word, the helicopter started taking gunfire, soldiers down below firing up at them through the trees.
Cole and the team fired back out of the open doorways, laying down a stream of fire into the tree line; and then the chopper was directly above the clearing and the pilot opened up with the wing-mounted cannon, 23mm high-velocity rounds showering the small clearing, tearing the truck and the two other cars that had accompanied it to pieces.
Men ran for cover, scattering like flies.
The damage to the launcher looked severe, but Cole had to be sure; they could take no chances.
‘Take us down,’ Cole ordered the pilot.
13
The son of a bitch!
Where had that chopper come from?
Damn them all to hell!
And where had his men run off to? Some were laid on the grassy clearing, bodies torn apart by the cannon fire, but others were nowhere to be seen, having run away into the woods.
Cowards!
Wu spat with disgust, even as he took over the controls of the Dong Feng.
It was ready, absolutely ready, fuelled and ready to go, all the data inputted, all he had to do was just reach in and enter the codes; enter the codes and press the launch button, that was all.
As he started furiously typing in the code, his mind filled only with the thoughts of his revenge, of Tokyo’s annihilation, General Wu never heard the helicopter coming in behind him.
Zhou Shihuang, on the other hand, did hear it; saw it, too, through the sights of his Hongying-5, the Chinese version of the venerable Russian SA-7 Grail shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile launcher.
And as soon as he saw it, he fired, the 1.15kg direct-energy blast fragmentation warhead streaking through the clean mountain air towards the incoming helicopter.
14
‘Incoming! Incoming!’ yelled the pilot as he saw the heat signature on his monitors, and then everyone could hear it, the high-pitched shriek as the missile honed in on their aircraft.
Cole clung tight to the sides as the pilot banked heavily, thought he would slide right out but stopped inches from the edge; two others weren’t so lucky, falling out to the plain below.
Cole’s hand shot out to catch a third soldier sliding past, helping him back inside as the helicopter leveled again, and then dipped savagely to the other side.
Cole saw the exhaust fumes of the missile as it shot past below them, relaxed for a moment, then felt the sudden, shocking, heart-wrenching impact as it hit the chopper; understood in an instant that it must have pulled back round and hit from the other side.
‘We’re hit!’ screamed the pilot as the cabin exploded in sparks, then flames, the whole of one side gone now, three more soldiers pulled out into the clear air behind them.
Cole hunkered down as the pilot struggled to control the bird, its tail rotors gone now as it entered into a terrible spin.
Cole looked out the open door at the ground below, coming up toward him faster and faster, turned to look at the flames heading across the cabin, already setting men alight, and did the only thing he could.
He jumped.
15
Zhou watched with satisfaction as the helicopter shuddered through the air, flames licking all the way through its interior, until the vehicle was out of sight, lost behind the trees.
But Zhou heard the crash as it landed hard, the explosion as the fuel tanks finally went, and saw the flames licking high up into the sky.
Portable rocket launchers like the one he had used were standard equipment on the mobile missile launchers, kept for last-minute area defense. If the crew had managed to keep from panicking, they would have thought to use it themselves.
But, like so many people, they had lost their courage and fled.
But Zhou had remembered, and had done what needed to be done.
He personally couldn’t care less about striking back at the Japanese; what use would it do them now? But he also didn’t begrudge General Wu his revenge, and knew he owed the man; without his timely intervention, Zhou would be in jail right now for killing the son of that governor.
So he would wait for Wu, let him launch the missile, and then help him get out of there.
He was walking casually back over the clearing towards the missile command truck when he saw him, and despite himself, he allowed the shock to register across his face.
The American was here.