Barracuda: Final Bearing

He took a deep breath, studying the cable winding through the aluminum mesh fence. The idea was to get his cable attached to the live electrical cable in the fence, thereby grounding the voltage to the copper rod in the earth. The live wire would then short its potential to ground, either tripping the electrical circuit at the generator or melting the wire at the connection to the rod. If he did this right the power would blast through the grounding mechanism and disrupt the entire circuit so that he could cut through the fence. But if he mishandled the operation 11,000 volts of power would pass through his body. That had happened to one of the Divine Wind officers in penetration training. The high voltage had blown off the man’s legs and one of his arms, stopped his heart and left him a smoking wreck. The training chief had cut the power, and the ambulance crew had revived the man, and he had actually lived for two days, the incredible pain of those days carved on his terrified burned features when they had buried him. A horrible way to die, a worse way to live. Namuru prayed, just don’t let it leave me burned and maimed.

He lunged with the alligator clip and hit the high voltage fence cable with it. The fireball had no sound, only a fist of pressure. Namuru saw the light expand to the size of a zeppelin and surround him as it smashed into him and blew him off his feet and sent him flying into the woods.

“What happened?”

“Looks like he took a shock,” Gotoh said, his voice a monotone. The screens remained blank.

“And he’s dead?”

“Too early to say, sir.” Gotoh had risen to hover over another younger officer at a neighboring console. The officer tapped furiously at a keyboard, stopping occasionally to manipulate a mouse, then typing again.

“We’re addressing the satellite now trying to get Major Namuru’s cameras to work again. If we can reestablish a link with his instrumentation we might be able to determine what is going on.”

The screen flashed a momentary broken image, then went dark again. Gotoh and Kurita waited.

“How long do we wait?”

“The mission brief calls for a four-minute delay before the satellite signals the chip with the poison canister in the major’s abdomen,” Gotoh said.

“How long has it been?”

“We were already on a five-minute delay from real time when the major got hit with the electricity. We saw it three minutes ago. I’d say Major Namuru has another sixty seconds before the computer aborts the mission and calls down to the chip to inject the poison.”

The screen flashed, then held. The camera view from Namuru’s helmet stared straight up at the sky, the boughs of two trees breaking the featureless clouds. The face-monitoring camera came up next. Namuru’s face was burned on the left side, his eye gone, the flesh seared and melting. His right eye was shut and swollen.

“Prime Minister, I don’t think we should wait for the mission computer. We should abort now. Namuru’s gone.”

Kurita stared at Namuru’s burned and disfigured face.

“I agree. General.”

Gotoh gave the order to the officer on the control console, who nodded and made the commands as if they had nothing to do with killing a fellow officer.

“The signal is out, sir,” the officer reported.

“He’ll be dead in thirty seconds if he isn’t already,” Gotoh said.

Kurita looked up at the screen. “We need another plan.

We still must find out if Len Pei Poom has nuclear weapons.

He could be targeting Tokyo even now.”

Namuru was burned from the inside out. His flesh felt hot and running on his left side, his face aching and puffy. His whole body ached, he couldn’t move. He concentrated for what seemed hours trying to move his right hand, finally able to move it upward. In the next ten minutes he used the hand to lift himself so that he was sitting up. He couldn’t see out of his left eye. He reached for his face and felt the burned flesh, hard and crumbling.

He crawled through the brush to find his watch and the computer pad. When he found them, the computer pad had melted into a puddle of plastic. The watch was also destroyed, the satellite above having given the signal to abort the mission. Which meant that his poison capsule should have been released and he should be dead.

Except that the electrical fireball must have fried the chip inside him. But if there had been enough power to kill the chip, there might have been enough to fracture the poison canister. It could be leaking even now, he thought. He had only hours to live — but then that was the whole idea of this mission.