The highly modified Sea King helicopter touched down on the rooftop landing pad of Fukai Semiconductor’s headquarters building a few minutes before nine in the evening.
The strobe light on the machine’s belly flashed across the registration numbers and the stylized blue Seagull painted on the fuselage.
A short, slightly built Japanese man, dressed impeccably in a suit and tie, had been waiting in an elevator alcove. He hurried across the pad to the chopper as the hatch slid open. A pair of technicians in white coveralls came directly after him, guiding a motorized hand truck.
“Any trouble?” he called up to the helicopter crewman at the hatch.
“None getting down here, Endo-san. But they had to shoot their way off Sakhalin.”
Endo wanted to hit something, anger instantly rising up like bile in his throat, but he restrained himself. “Was the boat spotted?”
“No.”
Franz Hoffmann’s bulky frame filled the hatch opening and he shoved the Japanese crewman aside. “Is Ernst here yet?” he demanded in German.
Endo looked mildly up at the man. “Not yet, but I expect him to come for his payment very soon.”
“Well, let’s get this shit unloaded and verified. I want to get out of here.”
“Very good,” Endo said, and he stepped aside to let his technicians move in with the hand truck.
Hoffmann and the other East German, Otto Eichendorf, unstrapped the animal cages from the restraining rings in the chopper’s cargo deck, and carefully passed them out the hatch one by one, the sables and minks hissing and snapping wildly as they threw themselves against the wire mesh.
The Japanese technicians handled the cages with extreme caution, and when all four were loaded, they maneuvered the hand truck around and headed back to the elevator.
Endo had remained to one side, an unreadable expression on his face, the strobe light making him look pale, almost ghostly.
Hoffmann jumped down from the helicopter, and reached back inside for his Kalashnikov rifle.
“There’ll be no need for that here,” Endo said.
Hoffmann looked at him, startled, but then he relaxed and put the rifle back. “Right,” he said, and he stepped back as Eichendorf jumped down.
“Just this way, gentlemen,” Endo said graciously pointing the way toward the elevator.
The two East Germans turned and started across the landing pad. Before they got ten feet, Endo pulled out a Heckler and Koch VP70, nine-millimeter automatic, and fired two bursts of three rounds each, Hoffmann and Eichendorff stumbling and going down.
They were dead before they hit the deck.
“Strip their bodies and dump them at sea,” Endo said, without bothering to turn around as he headed toward the elevator. “And have someone clean up this mess immediately.”
“What about the others, Endo-San?” the crewman from the helicopter called.
“They have already been taken care of,” he said. The elevator came and he took it down to a sub-basement, still much work to be done before this night was over.
The pit had been carved out of the living rock three hundred feet beneath Fukai Semiconductor’s headquarters. Sixty feet on a side and fifty feet deep, the room and anything that happened within its confines was totally undetectable from outside, and from anywhere within the normal areas of the building above.
It had been built nearly thirty years ago for just the purpose it was finally being used for this night. All during that time Fukai’s most trusted aides and scientists had continually updated its equipment so that at any given time the place was a state of the art laboratory-factory for the assembly of nuclear weapons.
Endo watched from behind thick Lexan plastic windows in an upper gallery as one of the technicians wheeled a small equipment cart over to the four cages set side-by-side on a long steel table. The restless animals paced back and forth, stopping frequently to see what the human was doing.
The tech flipped a couple of switches on the piece of equipment that looked like a heart-cart. Two leads snaked from the front panel. The tech clipped one of the leads to the wire mesh of one of the cages, and poked the second lead inside that cage, the probe barely touching the side of one of the sables.
The animal leaped straight up, its back violently arching. Endo had the speaker on, and he heard the sable scream once before it fell dead.
There was pandemonium in the cages as the other animals went berserk, understanding instinctively what was happening. But within a couple of minutes all eight of them were dead, and the technician turned off the machine, unclipped the lead and pushed the cart away.
A pair of technicians, these dressed in radiation suits, came from behind a lead shield in the assembly area across the lab. One of them opened the cages and removed the animals’ bodies, handing them to the other tech who dumped them in a lead-lined bin. It was a simple precaution in case the animals had somehow become contaminated.
The bin would be buried in a hole bored one thousand yards into the bedrock beneath the laboratory level so that no radiation would ever be detected here, even if someone managed to penetrate this far.
Endo had turned that thought over many times, and he’d discussed it once with Fukai, who’d agreed that extraordinary measures would be taken to discover who was behind the… attack. Therefore every effort would have to be made to thwart the ensuing worldwide investigation.
When the last of the animals’ remains had been disposed of, the technician removed the false bottom from the first cage, and from within gingerly withdrew a gray cylinder about the size of an ordinary thermos flask, and cradling it in both hands very carefully handed it to the second technician.
There was little or no danger of harmful radiation at this point, because the cylinders they were handling were lead-lined containers for the weapons-grade plutonium.
But there was always the possibility of accidents, and every man working on the project understood that the amount of material they would be handling this evening constituted a critical mass.
It would take the precise mechanism of the bomb itself to cause the material to actually explode. But if a critical mass were to be accidentally assembled, a meltdown would occur that would kill everyone in the lab, and possibly burn as much as ten or fifteen yards through the solid rock. Nothing would live down here for a very long time to come; possibly as long as ten thousand years. So the technicians were all taking extreme care with their work.
Endo leaned forward on the balls of his feet, practically pressing his nose against the window so that he could get a better look. Power had always impressed him. It was one of the reasons he had gone to work for Fukai in the first place, and one of the reasons he’d become the old man’s right hand. For power, Endo would do anything.
Literally anything.
But this, now, below in the assembly laboratory, was the ultimate of powers on earth.
A few pounds of dull gray metal; not so heavy that a man couldn’t lift the weight, was enough to kill 100,000 people. Powerful enough to change the course of world events-witness what had happened because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Endo felt the flush of his bitter shame reach his neck, and he rocked back.
That would change, after all these years. The score would be evened.
Chapter 71
Kelley Fuller watched as McGarvey pulled on the single scuba tank, adjusted its weight on his shoulders, and fastened the Velcro straps holding his buoyancy control vest in place.
They were huddled out of the wind behind some rocks twenty-five yards below the highway, and barely six feet above the waters of the bay. In the distance, to the north, they could make out the lights of Fukai Semiconductor. It was 11:00 p.m.
“You still haven’t told me what you hope to find over there,” she said. “Or how you’re going to get inside. There’ll be security on the docks.”
