War of the Sun (12 page)

Hunter had to be careful and stay off the main roads that led directly to the castle, knowing they’d be heavily used by the military. To this end, he ducked down the first side street that he came across after leaving the zoo.

It was almost totally ablaze. He had to run down the middle of the cluttered alley, dodging dozens of burning timbers that were crashing down all around him. Still more soldiers had died horrible deaths here, some of them the victims of their own exploding ammunition. Leaping over several dangerously sparking electrical wires, he finally made it to the end of the street, turned right, and dived into the doorway of the first building that was not yet on fire.

He had to catch his breath, but it was difficult. The fire, growing in intensity with each passing second, was sucking up all the oxygen. Hunter knew he had to keep going.

Three steps back out into the street, he was suddenly blown flat on his face by a tremendous explosion. The building that he had just left burst into a million pieces, accompanied by a tremendous roar which sounded like thousands of gunshots going off all at once.

Hunter rolled to the curb and was behind a red-hot steel telephone pole, M-16 at the ready. When he looked over his sights, he saw what was making the noises: firecrackers. He had temporarily taken shelter in the doorway of a fireworks factory. But he had no time to admire the irony of the moment. Taking a series of short, quick breaths, he started out again, racing at breakneck speed down the street.

Turning another corner, he literally ran into a patrol of Cult military police. They were wildly drunk on
sake,
and were carrying armfuls of stolen items. Hunter couldn’t believe it. How greedy could these people be? Even as the city was burning down around them, they were on a wild looting spree.

One soldier, who only had one hand full, spotted Hunter, raised his AK-47, and squeezed the trigger.

But nothing happened. His gun had jammed, possibly due to the hellish temperature. Or maybe it had not been cleaned properly. A full burst of his tracer rounds stitched across the looter’s chest and an instant later he fell to the ground, his dying hands still groping not for his gun, but for the stuff he’d stolen. He also began crying for help. But instead of aiding him, his comrades tore the stolen goods from his hands and then resumed running full-speed down the street.

Hunter sprinted down another side street. As he reached the far corner, he felt a rumble under his feet and began to run even faster. As he reached the end of the block, he dived head first into a shallow ditch just as the entire cobblestoned street lifted off the ground from the detonation of an underground gas main. Hundreds of blocks of concrete began to rain down around him. Yet he was off again, dodging and twisting, and barely escaping being crushed by the rain of these deadly projectiles.

The heat was becoming stifling now as he tried to stay a block or two ahead of the firestorm. But even the flame-reflective weaving in his flight suit could not handle the extreme temperature. The air was filled with the popping sounds of automobile tires bursting. Off in the distance he heard more controlled explosions, indicating desperate attempts by the Cult engineers to create firebreaks. But he knew that the situation was pathetically beyond their control by this time.

He moved over to a wider, shorter street, a place where, judging from the X-rated murals on the sides of buildings, an open sex market had apparently once flourished. Everywhere he looked, the paint on these garish portraits was beginning to smolder and peel. Trees were bursting into flames. Even the steel street signs were starting to melt. Even worse, the road itself was buckling from the heat.

He saw a small stream nearby suddenly disappear, instantly turning to scalding-hot steam. He saw more wild animals. He saw more soldiers simply explode into flames. He could hear a symphony of human screams. Huge explosions. Gunfire. The ear-splitting crackling of the approaching fire. Above it all the haunting wails of hundreds of sirens rose up into the sky, which was now black with smoke and completely blocked out the bright early-morning sun. It was as if the entire city had been shoveled into Hell itself.

Hunter just kept on running; he was almost to his destination. But making his way past the roaring fires that blazed on either side of him, he began to slowly sink into the softened blacktop. Each step became more difficult than the last, and finally he became completely stuck in the hot, gooey tar, the flames beginning to close in on him.

Now what?
he asked himself.

Suddenly, the ground below him collapsed, and he felt himself falling into the darkness, right into a giant water conduit. Clutching his M-16 to his chest, he was sucked feet first and carried through this pipe of surging hot water for what seemed to be forever. He thought his lungs were about to burst when he shot up into the air from the force of the raging water.

He couldn’t believe his good fortune: he’d splashed back down into the moat that surrounded the castle of Hashi Pushi.

Yet he quickly realized he’d been thrown into another nightmare. Hundreds of soldiers had abandoned their posts and fled the burning castle for the safety of the water in the moat. But all these cowards had either drowned from the crush of the panic or from the machine guns that fired down on them from the parapets above. Now the moat was choked with their bloated dead bodies.

Hunter slowly floated to the base of the castle wall, where he climbed out and scrambled up to a small oak door that looked like it hadn’t been opened in a hundred years. He expertly cracked the lock with his K-bar knife, and with the barrel of his M-16, slowly pushed the door open.

“I wonder if anyone’s home?” he whispered to himself.

H
ASHI PUSHI FELT HIS
right temple and found it was ice-cold. Things seemed to be getting dark. He checked his pulse and found it had slowed considerably.

“Soon,” he whispered glumly to himself. “Very soon now.”

Before him stood the seven top officers of his Home Island Air Defense Command. They were babbling something, but he wasn’t really paying much attention.

“May I repeat, sir,” the top air defense officer was saying. “We are under attack from the air. More reports are flooding in every minute. The situation is getting desperate. Can’t you hear the commotion outside? That’s the enemy burning down the city. They might even be using nuclear warheads on us!”

Hashi Pushi looked down from his throne at the seven gaudily-uniformed officers, tears forming in his eyes once again.

“The Blood Pool never lies,” he said, more to himself than to any of them. “It is not lying now.”

The seven Cult officers had a right to be concerned—and confused. It was clear that some kind of an attack was on. But just exactly what was happening, they didn’t know. All the Cult’s major airbases were still intact, as well as their weapons factories and ammo dumps—yet all of the country’s major communications centers had been destroyed by the enemy aircraft. And a good portion of Tokyo was in flames.

Now the officers in charge of his airborne defense were before the deranged leader, begging for his orders to take off and catch the attacking aircraft.

They told him that no fewer than twelve squadrons of their air defense fighters were available to be scrambled to counter the enemy aerial attack. They were equipped with what constituted the Cult’s most formidable air force, more than 100 super-modified Dassault Etendard fighters. They promised their Supreme Commander that every enemy pilot would be shot down and his body eaten—alive, if necessary—by scores of Hashi Pushi’s most rabid civilian followers.

“Why was I made a turtle?” Hashi Pushi was asking himself, grim and rhetorical, staring at his unwashed, bumpy fingernails. “Why not a tiger? Or a polar bear?”

Totally mystified, and now on the verge of panic, the second-highest-ranking officer present stepped forward to plead the case.

“Sir, surely you can hear the explosions. You can see the flames. We must launch our airplanes now to stop this.”

But Hashi Pushi did not give the order for them to take off. Instead, he summoned the woman in charge of his harem and, to the bafflement of his air defense officers, told her, “Bring me the woman with Cherry Blossom hair.”

It was the second violinist of the Hi-Si Orchestra who saw him first.

The musician was halfway through the 391st rendition of “The Firebird.” He and his colleagues had been playing in front of Hashi Pushi for so long, their fingers were bleeding. They had listened in on the bizarre conversation between Hashi Pushi and his air defense officers, since departed. They’d also heard another group of officers beg the Cult leader to order something called “the Fire Bats” into action—but Pushi had ignored them as well. Now they could hear the explosions outside getting closer by the minute. They could smell the smoke from the fires. They knew that some kind of disaster was approaching the palace—and fast.

Yet they continued to play on.

The violinist had just finished a
doreesimo
when he looked up and saw a tall man in a dirty black suit and a black helmet standing in the concealed doorway not twenty feet from Hashi Pushi’s throne. On the floor directly behind this man lay three very still bodies; the musician recognized them as members of Hashi Pushi’s personal guard.

The violinist looked back toward Hashi Pushi. Sitting on the overweight leader’s bulging lap was the young girl brought to him about ten minutes before. Even from this distance and through bleary, tired eyes the violinist saw that the young girl was hauntingly beautiful, of delicate skin and lithe body, and possessing the most enchanting long red hair.

Hashi Pushi had already removed her kimono and his dirty robe and was now apparently attempting to have sex with her. The musician couldn’t imagine a more embarrassing scene: the clumsy, intoxicated behemoth trying to enter the tentative, terrified, apparently-drugged young girl. Yet, after much squirming and grunting, it appeared that Hashi Pushi had successfully penetrated her, if only momentarily.

That’s when the man in the black suit and helmet coolly walked into the hall. The conductor of the Hi-Si saw him now too, yet he continued to direct his musicians through the worn-out piece of music, providing a bizarre soundtrack for what was about to happen.

Two guards immediately appeared off to his right, but the man in the helmet dispatched them with a lightning-quick burst from his machine-gun. Two more guards appeared on the balcony right above him, but the man in the helmet quickly spun around, riddled them with the strange phosphorous bullets, and turned back again, all in the blink of an eye.

Hashi Pushi had finally taken notice by now. He unceremoniously dropped the unclothed young girl from his lap. Her skin was soaked in sweat, a small amount of blood, and other bodily fluids. She immediately crawled away, over the bodies of two guards and out a side door. The immense Cult leader seemed completely paralyzed now; suddenly his world was crashing down upon his gold-encrusted throne. The cream of his personal guard lay dead or dying all around him. He was unable to summon more help. The tremendous roar of explosions and panic was pouring in from outside.

His eyes went wide as the man in the black suit approached him with calm yet determined steps.

“Yushi-ma shmo shee-mashi!”
Hashi Pushi bellowed. Loosely translated, it meant: “I was a turtle! Why?”

It was as if Hashi Pushi expected the man in black to have an answer. Instead, the man did something very strange. He reached into his belt, came up with a pistol, and threw it onto Hashi Pushi’s ample lap.

“Kushi-ma Doshima,”
the man called to him in broken yet understandable Japanese. “You have the first shot.”

The man then lowered his rifle and braced himself, to all minds waiting for Hashi Pushi to pick up the gun, aim it, and actually shoot at him.

But Hashi Pushi fooled them all.

The Cult leader did study the gun for a moment, and then turned to the man in black and smiled.

“Yakishi, muri-san do-ki-yimo,”
he said, his voice morbidly calm. “You have finally arrived. I thank you.”

Then Hashi Pushi put the gun to his own cold temple and blew his brains out.

Aboard the USS
Fitzgerald,

16 hours later

I
T WAS A NIGHT
of celebration.

The carrier’s large mid-deck hangar had been converted into a huge party room and was now packed with hundreds of crew members from all four ships of the Task Force. There was plenty of food, booze, and music. Backslapping and congratulatory handshakes abounded. The intoxicated chatter ranged from newly-elaborated war stories, to good-natured dirty jokes, to plans for when they all got home. In all, it was the relaxed, triumphant atmosphere that went with a job well done.

Operation Long Bomb was a complete success—of that there was no dispute. Hashi Pushi was dead, killed not by Hunter, but by his own hand. And with the head thus cut off the murderous snake, the huge mercenary army he commanded inside Japan would soon be in total disarray. Even more, the destruction of the Home Island’s immense communications network would at the very least cause havoc among the rest of Hashi Pushi’s far-flung legions.

Best of all, everyone from the TF Squadron had made it back from the airstrike alive and well.

So it seemed then that a celebration of sorts was definitely in order for everyone involved.

Everyone except Hunter.

He sat alone on the aft signal officer’s platform deck, the metal extension which hung out over the side near the very end of the ship. High in the west, a bright and full hunter’s moon lit up the sea and sky almost like daylight. The strains of music and conversation barely reached him from the ship’s party below. But occasionally he would very clearly hear a spontaneous cheer of joy and relief. Sometimes those cheering would invoke his name.

But the music he heard was not coming from the party. Rather it was coming from inside his head. The mournful strains of the orchestra that had been playing when he had entered Hashi Pushi’s throne room were still echoing in his ears. And he didn’t know why.