Labyrinth of Night (26 page)

There had been a full moon on the wavecrests of the Philippine Sea the night the
Boston
intercepted the
Takada Maru
one hundred and sixty miles south of Osaka Harbor; the faint lights of the Japanese mainland glowed orange-silver on the northwestern horizon. The tramp freighter had been running without lights, trying to dash through the blockade, but its hull was too big to avoid sonar contact by the attack sub.

Within a few minutes of the first pings on the sonarman’s scope, the boat surfaced five hundred yards in front of the freighter. The captain ordered the radio operator to hail the vessel with instructions to heave-to and prepare for boarding under UN General Resolution 819; an identical Morse code signal was sent by the ensign manning the spotlight in the sail. There was no reply from the
Takada Maru’s
bridge, although the freighter did slow all engines to a stop. After several minutes and more failures to establish communication with the freighter, the captain ordered an armed boarding party of twelve men to launch two inflatable Zodiac boats and proceed to the ship, where they would place its captain under arrest and search the vessel for contraband plutonium.

Among the members of the boarding party was Seaman August Nash.

‘The captain…L’Enfant…had strict orders about what to do if he stopped a Japanese vessel during the blockade.’ Nash stared down into his coffee mug as he spoke. ‘It wasn’t made public, but he was not supposed to open fire on any ship that didn’t obey the blockade. In a worst-case scenario, he was supposed to let them through and simply report the incident via FLTSATCOM.’

‘We never knew about that,’ Miho said.

‘You weren’t supposed to. It wouldn’t have helped if Japan was aware that the blockade was a paper tiger.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Fact is, we had no authority to direct hostilities against blockade runners if they resisted boarding…just take their registry numbers and pass them to the Navy, to confirm the info being relayed by the spysats. If the ships voluntarily obeyed the blockade, we could stop and board them, arrest the crew and search the holds…but except for warning shots across the bow, under no circumstances were we to engage any vessels that didn’t stop when we told them to.’

He sipped the lukewarm coffee. ‘Even so, it should have been a by-the-numbers operation, same as two other boardings which had been made by the
Trafalgar
and the
Bush
during Operation Sea Dragon…but something went wrong.’

Nash raised the mug again for another sip, then put down the mug. ‘So there I was, on the hull, helping to get my boat ready for launch, when I heard someone in the sail yell that the ship was moving. I looked up, and for a moment I could have sworn that the freighter
was
moving…’

He shook his head again. ‘But it could have been anything, Miho. When you get bright moonlight on high sea like that, it can cause optical illusions. It could have been the freighter moving forward to ram us, or it could just have been the ship being rocked by the tide.’ He shrugged. ‘But in another second, it hardly mattered either way. We felt the hull tremble under our feet as the tubes were flooded and the torpedo bay doors opened. Then…’

Nash snapped his fingers. ‘The captain ordered two torpedoes to be fired.’

He stopped talking as he remembered the horror of that night. Somewhere in the depths of his half-empty mug, in the black shallows of the cold coffee, he could see the twin, silver-tinted furrows of the torpedoes as they sliced through the dark water, racing toward the
Takada Maru.
In the instant before they hit, he could hear high-pitched Japanese voices screaming in panic…

Then there were the explosions, barely a second apart from one another, as the torpedoes connected with the forepeak fuel tanks in the freighter’s forward section.

‘There were forty-eight men and women aboard the
Takada Maru
.’ Sasaki’s voice was cool and nearly emotionless, devoid of either anger or accusation. ‘About half were killed outright by the explosion. The rest died by drowning, including the ones who jumped overboard but were dragged down by the undertow when the…’

Nash looked up at her. ‘You think I don’t know, that? You think I didn’t hear them? I was
there,
for Chrissakes!’

For a second Sasaki was startled by the vehemence of his reply; she sank back in her seat, staring at him. Then she calmly folded her arms across her chest. ‘You could have tried to rescue some of them.’

‘It went down fast…’

‘Nonetheless…’

‘Yeah. That was brought up during the inquiry. The captain…dammit, L’Enfant, I mean…gave the same reason for that as he gave when asked why he ordered the firing of the torpedoes. Seawolf-class boats were notoriously unstable on the surface. They couldn’t maneuver very well when they weren’t completely submerged. When the freighter started to move…’

‘If it moved.’

‘Yeah. When it
seemed
to move, if you accept L’Enfant’s testimony, he believed that he couldn’t avoid a ramming other than by making a crash-dive. And since he had twelve of his men topside, he couldn’t sacrifice them by giving that order.’ He slowly shook his head. ‘So he ordered the firing of the torpedoes.’

The incident had caused worldwide controversy; the press, along with public opinion, was almost evenly divided between calling captain Terrance L’Enfant—whom the British tabloids had taken to labeling Terrible Terry—either a courageous commander who had made a split-second decision to save his crewman, or a war criminal and mass-murderer the like of which had not been seen since the Nicaraguan War. Subsequent investigation of the incident hadn’t helped to dispel the ethical conundrum; when the Ballard Corporation, under the auspices of the World Wildlife Federation, sent deep-sea submersibles down to the wreckage of the
Takada Maru,
it was found that the freighter had indeed been carrying casks of Czech plutonium. Fortunately, none of the containers had been broken open by either the torpedo explosion or the freighter’s final journey to the ocean floor, but it was charged that he had nearly caused the Pacific coastal shelf to be contaminated with the most dangerous poison known to man.

The controversy could not be ignored by the board of inquiry. There were too many ambiguities in the case for anyone to arrive at a clean verdict, especially in regard to the key question of whether the
Takada Maru
had been in motion, powered by its own engines during the critical moments when the sail watch had reported seeing the vessel move toward the
Boston.
There were no survivors of the
Takada Maru
to provide eyewitness testimony, and the
Boston’s
own sonar officer had been unable to provide a clear answer as to whether he had heard the sound of the freighter’s screws in motion or—as the prosecuting lawyers charged—simply deep-sea background noise, such as whale calls, which could have been misconstrued as the cavitation of screws. In a sensationalized disclosure of the hearings, the sonarman failed a standard hearing test administered by the court; it turned out that his hearing had been impaired by wax build-up in his ear canal. Even then, it was difficult to tell whether this had helped or hurt L’Enfant’s case.

After two months of deliberation, the board acquitted Terrance L’Enfant of charges of criminal negligence and disobedience of orders. By then, the Secretary of the Navy had already relieved L’Enfant of his command and had removed him from active sea-duty, with his naval rank redesignated from captain to commander. He was quietly sent ashore and reassigned a nondescript desk job at the US Naval Institute as a ‘senior tactical advisor’—a form of oblivion in the Navy’s vast bureaucracy. Japan’s importation of reprocessed plutonium had ceased almost immediately after the sinking of the
Takada Maru,
and L’Enfant’s name soon vanished from public awareness, even in Japan.

And then, many years later, he said something during a speech at Annapolis which had captured the attention of the top brass…

‘Anyway, that’s part of the reason why the company sent me.’ Nash tapped his fingertips on the table, then laced his hands together. ‘I served under L’Enfant and I was aboard the
Boston
when the
Takada Maru
was sunk, so they figure that I can tell whether the man has gone over the edge again.’

Miho Sasaki gazed at him with remote impassivity. ‘So you think he was…over the edge, as you say, when he fired the torpedoes?’

Nash wasn’t hesitant in his reply. ‘Completely. That ship wasn’t on a ramming course. He was a trigger-happy paranoid then and I think he’s a trigger-happy paranoid now.’ He spread his hands apart. ‘At least, that’s my supposition.’

‘Then why didn’t you say anything to the board of inquiry?’ Her eyes narrowed as she peered across the table at him. ‘You didn’t, did you?’

He sighed and looked away. ‘Miho, an enlisted man doesn’t go running to a high-level board of inquiry, claiming that his captain has gone nuts, when all he did was stand on deck. It just…isn’t done.’

Her face was as stolid as the rocky landscape passing beneath them. ‘Nonetheless, doesn’t your failure to bear witness make you as culpable as…?’

Nash suddenly felt his temper beginning to boil over. ‘Jesus, lady!’ he snapped. ‘You don’t know what the hell you’re…!’

There was a soft cough from somewhere over his shoulder; Nash turned around and saw Boggs standing in the passageway, looking both amused and irritated. In the heat of the argument, neither of them had heard him come up from the gondola.

‘’Cuse me,’ Boggs said, ‘but we’ve got a couple of standing rules on the
Akron
and one of ’em is that if you need to have a fight, at least close the hatch so that the rest of us don’t have to listen to you.’ He cocked his head toward the galley next to him. ‘The other rule is that you first remove any sharp instruments. We run a clean ship here, and I don’t like having to mop up somebody’s blood.’

Nash’s abrupt flare-up died as suddenly as it had risen. It was hard to tell whether or not Boggs was being ironic. ‘Sorry, W.J.,’ he murmured. He glanced over at Sasaki, who was avoiding looking at either of them, hiding her face with her hand, obviously embarrassed. ‘And it wasn’t a fight,’ he added. ‘Just a disagreement…’

‘Over ancient history,’ Miho said,
sotto voce.
She glanced at Nash. ‘And personal ethics.’

Nash refrained from retorting back to the dig. Boggs stretched his arms behind his neck and yawned. ‘Well, personally, I couldn’t give a shit if it was over who’s faster, the Coyote or the Road Runner. I came back here to let you guys know we just received a radio message from Cydonia.’

Both of them instantly forgot their disagreement; Nash turned around in his seat, and Sasaki impulsively rose from the table. ‘What’s the story?’ Nash asked.

‘Slight change of flight plan,’ Boggs said. ‘They’ve asked us to make our first landing at the D & M Pyramid instead of at the base camp. Seems they want to get that MRV off-loaded and ready to go ASAP.’ He shrugged slightly. ‘Makes good sense, since we would’ve had to double-back to the D & M Pyramid anyway. Saves us a touchdown, so that’s fine with me. Our present ETA is oh-six-thirty tomorrow, shortly after local sunrise. Shin-ichi and Paul are going to be there when we arrive, so Miho’s going to have her reunion a little sooner than she expected.’

Before Sasaki could say anything, Boggs raised his hand. ‘That’s the good news. Now here comes the bad.’ He unzipped a breast pocket of his vest and pulled out a folded sheet of computer printout. ‘This just came over the mojo from Arsia,’ he said as he handed the flimsy to Nash. ‘Read it and weep.’

Nash unfolded the fax and laid it out on the table. Printed across the top half of the page was a Mercator projection of the Martian northern hemisphere; on the left side of the map, above the Arcadia Planitia due north of Olympus Mons, was a large dot-matrixed swirl. Arcane bar-graphs of meteorological data were printed below the map, but Nash didn’t need to interpret them; the message on the lower half of the page spelled it out succinctly:

ARSIA STATION TO USS. 8-28-32 1410:37:05 MCM

*** URGENT ***

NOWCAST CENTER UPDATE FROM MARSAT-2 REPORTS SEVERE REPEAT SEVERE DUST STORM DEVELOPING IN ARCADIA PLANITIA (MAP REF. 145 DEGREES NORTH X 43 DEGREES WEST) STOP BEARING EAST TOWARD ACIDALIA PLANITIA STOP ESTIMATED PRESENT WINDSPEED 55 KILOMETERS AND INCREASING STOP STORM ETA AT CYDONIA BASE BY 1800 MCM 8-31-32 AT VERY LATEST STOP NO KIDDING BOGGS THIS IS A KILLER STOP RETURN TO ARSIA ASAP STOP END MESSAGE

8-28-32 1411:17:10 END TRANSMISSION

Nash looked up from the printout at Boggs. ‘It’s your call,’ he said softly. ‘Are you turning us around, or are we still landing in Cydonia?’

‘Oh, we’re still making touchdown in Cydonia tomorrow, all right.’ The pilot picked up the flimsy and shoved it back in his pocket. ‘The storm’s still on the other side of the planet, so the leading edge won’t hit Cydonia until late Tuesday afternoon. But I’m not taking any chances with it. We’re out of there by Monday evening…Tuesday morning at the very latest, and by then we’ll be skinning the cat.’

‘Pardon me?’ Miho asked. ‘Skinning the cat…?’

Boggs’ lips pursed into a grim smile. ‘Southern expression, darling. Put another way, it means we’ll be fucking with the gods if we stick around here very much longer.’

He looked at Nash again. ‘Do whatever you gotta do there in a hurry, pal, and get back on the ship. I’m serious.’

Boggs then turned and started walking back to the gondola.

T
HE TERRAIN CHANGED
overnight as the
Akron
flew out of the Chryse Planitia; in the first light of dawn, the sun’s amber rays fell across the craters and etched sharp shadows on the crested hills of the Cydonia region. It was a rugged, inhospitable land, as unearthly as any landscape on Mars…yet no more alien than the D & M Pyramid which loomed before them.

At first glance, seen on the distant horizon, the pyramid looked like a natural mountain; Nash was initially unable to distinguish it from the surrounding highlands, even after Boggs pointed it out to him through the flight-deck windows. Then, as the airship gradually grew closer and the pyramid began to take on form and detail, he was stunned not only by its sheer enormity, but also by the increasingly apparent fact that the mountain was the result of intelligent labor.