Barracuda: Final Bearing

“Major Namuru’s helmet, utility vest and leggings were fitted with explosives to blow his body apart. That way the Manchurians would have no way to identify him as a Japanese, not that their DNA-coding labs could ever match anything we have. The explosives also blew up his equipment so that there is nothing left for them to have that points to us. He was trained to detonate the explosives on camera so that we could verify that his self-destruction was complete. An excellent mission, Namuru did well,” the general said.

“Next time. General, you might consider warning me that I will be witnessing a man’s death in real time.”

“Sir, it was not real time — it was on a five-minute time-delay.”

Kurita realized General Gotoh would never understand.

But it was time now for Greater Manchuria to understand. Soon they would know that having offensive nuclear missiles, violating the UN ban, so close to Japan would cost them dearly.

“Call Minister MacHiie. Tell him to convene the Defense Security Council in one hour. Bring a disk of Namuru’s mission but please edit out the last part.”

“Yes, Prime Minister.”

“And, General. Make sure your war plan is very carefully thought out.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kurita stared at the general for a long moment, then walked out, trying to banish the images of Namuru’s death from his mind, but not succeeding.

CHESAPEAKE BAY

Rear Adm. Michael Pacino settled into the seat of the Sea King helicopter and stared out the window, the beautiful vista of the Chesapeake unwinding beneath him.

Pacino was only forty-two years old though he felt much older. He was tall, over six feet two, his frame slim but solid. He was still able to wear the uniforms he had worn when he graduated from the Naval Academy twenty years earlier; and from a distance he could be mistaken for a midshipman. Close-up the illusion continued for a moment because his almost gaunt face still had the shape of his youth, his emerald-green eyes sharp and clear, his pronounced cheekbones presiding over a straight nose and full lips. But then the clues to Pacino’s age came into focus — deep lines at the corners of his eyes, crow’s feet from staring out to sea or peering through periscopes, face tanned and leathery and losing the resilience it had once had, as if he had spent years in the sun, though actually the coloring was the result of severe frostbite he had suffered in an arctic mission that had gone wrong. The skin of his hands and arms was likewise damaged. His hair was thick but had turned white, not a single dark pigment remained of the jet-black hair he had once had. Rumor had it that the last mission he had commanded, so highly classified that even some of the brass weren’t cleared to hear about it, had frightened the last of the black from his head. In any event, the effect of his skin, his white hair, and his gauntness made Pacino’s rank of rear admiral seem less odd, since most men of his rank were twenty years older than Pacino. Pacino’s khaki shirt collar displayed the two silver stars of flag rank, and he wore a gold dolphin pin above his left breast pocket, a plain black phenolic name tag above his right pocket reading simply pacino, and a white-gold Annapolis ring on his left ring finger. In the seat of the big chopper, he wondered what Richard Donchez wanted to see him about. An hour before he had just taken the first bite of his working dinner with his aide, a young lieutenant named Joanna Stoddard, when his secretary came in.

“Admiral Donchez called from Fort Meade, sir,” the secretary said. “He’s sending a chopper to pick you up.”

“He say what’s on his mind?”

“He said he knew you’d ask and told me he wanted to give you an urgent briefing, and that all I could say was Scenario Orange. He said you’d know what that meant.”

He had been startled to hear Donchez use the term “Scenario Orange.”