War of the Sun (32 page)

It was 1115 when Jones got Frost’s decoded message.

The general had been up since three
A.M.
, poring over a bevy of strange reports coming in from the various spy posts monitoring Cult activity on the occupied West Coast.

The truth was, Frost’s emergency message did not come as a complete surprise. In fact, the stack of fax lines and yellow-paper cable messages in front of Jones all reported some kind of puzzling event happening on the other side of the continent.

Just minutes before learning that
Fire Bats
One had disappeared, Jones had received a similar report from the people tracking
Fire Bats
Two. It, too, had dropped off their listening screens, and either was on the bottom running extremely silently or had left its usual patrol area. What disturbed Jones the most was that either position might be a prelude to a launch by both enemy subs.

Or it might mean something else.

Another report had come in to him from a spy cell operating on the ground just outside of LA. The message came in quick and garbled, but decipherable. It said the Cult ground forces were on the move just about everywhere in and around the city. Another report from an agent located near Santa Monica told of huge Cult convoys tying up traffic on the nearby freeways. Similar reports had come in from San Diego all the way up to Frisco.

By noon, Jones had more than fifty separate reports, all stating that the Cult was mobilizing for something big.

But what?

He had to find out. Jones picked up his secure phone and punched in a code which transmitted directly to the UA’s defense command center located on the other side of the Pentagon. With this simple action, the general was ordering all United American forces on full alert. A second quick call informed the Free Canadian government of the situation.

A third call was made to a private outfit out of Texas called Sky-High Spies. So far, Jones had been monitoring the situation on the West Coast via secondhand information. He wanted to see for himself what the hell was going on in California.

Four hours later, a dark, sinister shape was rocketing over southern California at an altitude of nearly 100,000 feet.

It was an SR-71 Blackbird, the ultra high-speed, high-altitude spy plane which had been unceremoniously retired back in the late 1980s. Its two-man crew—they were brothers, Jeff and George Kephart—had located the airplane two years before, hidden away in a bunker outside Mexico City. How it got there, no one knew, but the brothers had promptly bought the magnificent airplane and spent much of the ensuing time secretly getting it back in flying condition, using rebuilding diagrams drawn up by Hawk Hunter himself.

They were just getting to flight trials when the Second Axis invaded America. Once the Fourth Reich was ejected from the eastern part of the country, the Kephart Brothers went back to work and got SR-71 up and flying. They’d been doing secret recon work for Jones and the United American Armed Forces ever since.

Once the SR-71 reached the proper coordinate, Pilot Jeff told Brother George to get the cameras rolling. The SR-71 was so fast it could do 3000 mph, and its cameras were so powerful it could photograph the entire coastline of California in a mere twenty minutes.

Their run started directly over San Diego and lasted past Port Orford, in what used to be Oregon. Even though they were flying more than eighteen miles high—and thus way beyond detection by the Cult’s barely adequate AA radar systems—they really didn’t need the long-range lenses on their cameras to show them what was happening below.

Up and down the entire coastline, there were Cult troops massed on the beaches and at various staging points. From these locations, they and their equipment were being packed onto troopships. And those troopships were clearly setting sail.

It didn’t take a military genius to figure out what was happening: the Cult was pulling out of California.

The question was, why?

As soon as their photo run was completed and the camera bays checked, Brother Jeff turned the big plane east and booted its massive ramjet engines up to top speed.

They and the precious photographic evidence would be in Washington in less than an hour.

Azusa, Occupied California

Master Sergeant U Suk Bum was the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer in his unit.

But still he was not a happy man.

Although he had more than seventy men under his direct command, he knew that he would never be elevated to the better-paying Asian Mercenary officer corps simply because the Cult never promoted anyone who was not full-blooded Japanese beyond the rank of sergeant.

Bum was not Japanese; rather he was Korean—or Chinese, he really didn’t know. The point was that he was not born Nipponese, and therefore would never be entitled to the full benefits of what was actually the misnamed
Asian
Mercenary Cult.

Bum’s unit ran the supply line between downtown Los Angeles and the suburb of Azusa. As such, they were responsible for keeping the four divisions of Cult troops arrayed along the line supplied with bullets, bombs, water, and food. It had been an easy assignment during what was a tense but nevertheless leisurely occupation.

That was, until this morning.

Now his unit was being ordered to work harder than he thought possible. All four divisions along the Azusa Line were pulling out and heading for the LA docks. Bum’s trucks and men were responsible for driving them there.

But even with fifty troop trucks operating at once, it would take Bum’s unit dozens of trips and many, many backbreaking hours back and forth to move the 40,000-plus troops and their equipment. But the Cult High Command was demanding it be done by 0900 the next day or Bum and his men would face a firing squad. It was such an unreasonable mission, Bum had already been forced to break up an attempted mutiny of his ranks, shooting and killing two of his drivers who’d balked when he’d first given them their do-or-die orders.

Now it was close to midnight, and fully half of the four divisions had yet to mount up, never mind be driven the ninety-minute trip down to the docks. Bum was sitting in his broken-down staff car in a highway rest stop located on Route 395A, counting the number of his trucks that were passing by. Each one that was delayed or going slow meant he was one step closer to eating a bullet courtesy of his commanding officers. It was not a pleasant task.

At this moment his hate for the Japanese commanders reached its zenith. Though they claimed to be conquering the planet in the name of all Asians, Bum knew this was simply bullshit. In addition to being stingy and petty beyond all belief, his commanders were overtly racist toward the other non-Japanese Cult members, especially the certified Koreans. On the slightest whim, the officers would shoot any Korean who they believed was out of line, or, even worse, ship them back to one of the manufacturing facilities which dotted the South Pacific islands where nothing waited for them but a life of slave labor followed by a guarantee of a painful and terrifying death.

Bum sighed as the last of his trucks finally ambled by. There was no way they were going to make the 0900 deadline. And he had no doubt that his officers would make good on their threat to kill them all, starting at the top.

Bum got out of his car, lit a cigarette, then sat down on a nearby wall. Stretched before him was the panorama of Cult-occupied LA County. Despite the thick, omnipresent smog, it still looked like quite a prize, an uncomparable spoil of war for as far as the eye could see.

He drew heavily on his butt, contemplating the brightly-lit landscape. Too bad they were all leaving. He had actually come to like this place.

The next thing he knew, there was a gloved hand wrapped around his mouth and nose. He was yanked back off the wall and thrown into a high bramble bush. Two men were suddenly standing over him, dressed in black, wearing camouflaged ski masks and pointing laser-sighted M-16s at his heart.

Bum was instantly frozen with fear. Surely these were his executioners, sent by the Cult command to eliminate him.

Purely on instinct, he tried to roll away only to have one of the men kick him in the groin. After that he knew it was useless to struggle.

They dragged him down the embankment, across a dirty stream, and into a gully next to a water culvert. Finally they stopped at the end of the gully, throwing him against a concrete support adjacent to the culvert and kicking his legs out from under him. They searched him and, finding little, tied both hands behind his back.

Only then did they remove their masks. Bum couldn’t believe it: they were both Caucasian.

“Do you speak English?” one of them asked him gruffly, his M-16 not an inch away from Bum’s runny groin.

“Yes, I do,” he breathed, still petrified.

“Then get this straight,” the man ordered him, jabbing him with the snout of the M-16. “Answer my questions or you’re singing falsetto. Understand?”

Bum did.

“Why are you guys pulling out?” the second man asked him.

“Orders from the top,” Bum replied trembling.

The first man applied more snout pressure on Bum’s crogies. “Don’t be a wise-ass,” he said. “He asked you
why
you’re pulling out. Is it an evacuation before a nuke strike?”

Bum shook his head vigorously. He didn’t know much, but he was sure that the reason for the sudden withdrawal was not related to an impending nuclear attack.

“We are being redeployed to a major battle zone,” Bum told them, repeating what his commanding officer had told him.

“Redeployed?” the first man asked. It was the last thing he expected to hear.

Bum sensed right away that the men didn’t believe him. He was right.

The man slipped the safety off his M-16. “You’re lying.”

Bum was terrified beyond words now. “No—please, listen to me,” he pleaded. “If we were pulling out because they were going to nuke the place, do you really think it would be like this?”

He was referring to the traffic jam of troop trucks heading down into the valley on a number of nearby highways.

“You see? Everyone’s in a hurry,” Bum went on. “If they were going to drop a nuke, they would have given us orders to strip the entire countryside, and the time to do so. Believe me, I know them. They think they’re coming back.”

The two men still seemed unconvinced.

“And,” Bum hastened to add, “they’d be raping anything that walked. Of that you can be sure …”

On this, the two men grudgingly had to agree.

“Okay, then,” the second man said. “Tell us everything you know. Starting with where the hell you are deploying to.”

Bum was only too happy to oblige. It took him fifteen minutes to spill his guts. Times, dates, locations. Estimated troop strength. The works. When he was done, his captors were both angry and impressed. He had no doubts that they believed him.

“You’re one of the lucky ones,” the first man told him, finally removing the snout of the M-16 from Bum’s privates.

With that, they put their masks back on and took off down the culvert, leaving Bum still tied, but safe in the gulley.

Five minutes later, the Cult sergeant heard a slight mechanical sound off in the distance. Then, silhouetted in the full moon, he saw the shadows of two Cobra gunships rise into the sky and dash off at a low level to the east.

Two days later

T
HE PILOT NAMED SOHO
had never known such luxury.

He was surrounded by sixteen young women, all dressed in little more than leis and grass skirts. His chair was expertly woven of silk and bamboo. The coconut cup in his right hand was filled to the brim with some alcoholic concoction; the massive pipe in his left hand was filled with hashish.

Before him stretched a view of scenic beauty found nowhere else on the planet. The dramatic cliffs, the gently swaying palm trees, the friendly green ocean.

To the Cult high command on Okinawa, it had been known as Greater East Asian Warriors’ Association Military Manufacturing Facility Number Two, but soon after his arrival, Soho learned that the title was intentionally misleading. There was little military here, few “warriors,” no smog, and certainly no manufacturing. Rather, this was tropical heaven on earth.

This was Fiji.

He had no idea what time it was, no idea what day it was. And he really didn’t care. The traumatic events leading to his escape from Okinawa and his journey here were already slipping from his mind, oozing out of him like the greenish foam running out of the corners of his eyes, ears, and mouth.

The seven Cult high officers waiting off in a corner of the huge outdoor ballroom had been anxiously whispering since their arrival several hours before—but Soho had no idea what they were talking about. He had simply chosen not to speak with them at this time. Why would that make them uneasy? He’d given them their orders as soon as he’d arrived, and they’d assured him that they were being carried out at the moment.

So what was the problem? He was in paradise—there were as many girls for the taking as he could ever want. There was an abundance of drugs and liquor. And the food was outstanding.

He didn’t want to waste time trying to figure out how to conquer the world.

Mounted on stilts on the edge of the cliff overhanging the beach nearby was the pink Sukki jet. It was now covered in flower petals and multicolored blossoms. Six smoking urns surrounded it, their firepots billowing cinnamon incense. There had to be more than five hundred candles arrayed around it in wonderfully haphazard fashion. Despite the wind, they were all burning quite brightly. Nearby was the island’s native band, playing his favorite song on ukes and conch shells. He didn’t know the name of it—it was, in fact, Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite”—but he certainly liked the tune, so much so, he’d ordered them to keep playing it, over and over again, day and night. So far, they had complied.

He took a refill on his coconut drink and had the hash pipe relit. The warm wind felt so delightful on his face, he reached to touch it. But in doing so, he found a surprise. His face felt uncharacteristically rough with stubble, or at least, his chin was.