a geological map that he spread on the ground.
Keegan was experienced with a transit himself, and he’d never seen a survey conducted like this. The stranger seemed more interested in merely confirming his location than in establishing a baseline. He watched as the man casually tossed the clipboard into the underbrush and stepped to the front of the car and stared at the engine again as if hypnotized by it. Only when he seemed to shake himself from his thoughts did he reach inside the car and pull out a rifle.
Keegan had seen enough to know the trespasser was acting too strange for a county surveyor who was out to shoot a little game on the side, and certainly not while dressed in a business suit and knotted tie. He rode his horse closer, coming up quietly behind the stranger, who was intent on trying to insert a shell into the rifle, an act that seemed foreign to him. He didn’t hear Keegan approach from his rear. Any sound from the hooves of the horse was muffled by the soft earth and dry grass. Keegan reined in when he was only eight meters away and eased the Mauser from a leather case tied to his saddle.
“You know you’re trespassin’, mister?” he said, resting the gun in the crook of one arm.
The driver of the brown car jumped and wheeled around, dropping a shell and banging the gun barrel on the door. Only then did Keegan recognize him as an Asian.
“What do you want?” the startled man demanded.
“You’re on my property. How did you get in here?”
“The gate was open.”
It was as Keegan thought. The hunters he’d missed had forced the gate. “What are you doin’ with a surveyor’s transit? Who do you work for? You with the government?”
“No… I’m an engineer with Miyata Communications.” The English was heavily Japanese-accented. “We’re scouting a site to set up a relay station.”
“Don’t you fellas ever get permission before you run around private property? How in hell do you know I’ll let you build one?”
“My superiors should have contacted you.”
“Damn right,” Keegan muttered. He was anxious to return home for supper before daylight faded. “Now you better move along, mister. And the next time you want to drive on my land, you ask first.”
“I deeply regret any inconvenience.”
Keegan was a pretty good judge of character and could tell by the man’s voice he wasn’t the least bit sorry. His eyes warily kept focusing on Keegan’s Mauser, and he seemed edgy.
“You plan on doing any shootin’?” Keegan nodded at the highpowered rifle the man still awkwardly gripped in one hand, muzzle wavering toward the darkening sky,
“Target shooting only.”
“Well, I can’t allow that. I have cattle roamin’ this section. I’d appreciate it if you’d pack up your gear and leave by the way you came in.”
The intruder acted agreeable. He quickly broke down the surveyor’s transit and tripod, placing them in the trunk of the car. The rifle he placed in the back seat. Then he came around to the front of the car and peered under the open hood.
“The engine is not running properly.”
“Will it start?” Keegan asked.
“I believe so.” The Japanese surveyor leaned in the window and turned the ignition key. The engine fired and idled smoothly. “I go,” he announced.
Keegan failed to notice the hood was lowered but not latched. “Do me a favor and close and wrap the chain around the gate behind you.”
“I will gladly do so.”
Keegan threw him a wave, slipped the Mauser back in its case, and began riding off toward his ranch house, a good four kilometers away.
Suburo Miwa gunned the engine, turned the car around, and headed down the road. Meeting up with the rancher in such desolate country was unforeseen, but in no way jeopardized his mission. As soon as he put two hundred meters between the car and Keegan, Miwa suddenly slammed on the brakes, leaped out, snatched the gun from the back seat and raised the hood.
Keegan heard the engine revolutions die and he turned and stared over his shoulder, wondering why the car had abruptly halted.
Miwa held the gun tightly in sweating palms and aimed the muzzle until it was only a few centimeters from the compressor of the air conditioner. He had volunteered for this suicidal mission without reservation when asked because he felt it was an honor to give his life for the new empire. Other considerations were his loyalty to the Gold Dragons, the promise made by Korori Yoshishu himself that his wife would be well taken care of financially for the rest of her life, and the guarantee his three sons would be accepted and funded through the finest university of their choice. The inspiring words of Yoshishu as Miwa departed for the United States ran through his mind one last time.
“You are sacrificing for the future of a hundred million of your country’s men and women. Your family will honor you for untold generations. Your success is their success.”
Miwa pulled the trigger.
64
IN A MILLISECOND, Miwa, Keegan, the car, and the horse were vaporized. An enormous brilliance of yellow light flashed and then became white as it burst across the rolling ranch land. The shock wave followed like a vast invisible tidal wave. The fireball expanded and seemed to grow and lift from the ground like the sun rising over the horizon.
Once the fireball broke free of the ground and surged into the sky, it became fused with the clouds and turned purple from glowing radiation. It sucked behind a great swirling stem of radioactive soil and debris that soon formed into a mushroom cloud that soared to thirteen kilometers, only to eventually fall wherever the winds carried the pulverized dust.
The only loss of human life was Keegan and Miwa. Scores of rabbits, prairie dogs, snakes, and twenty of Keegan’s cattle were killed, most of them by the shock wave. Four kilometers away, Mrs. Keegan and three hired hands suffered only cuts from flying glass. The hills shielded the buildings from the worst of the blast, and except for a few shattered windows, there was little damage.
The fiery explosion left behind a huge crater a hundred meters wide and thirty meters deep. The dry brush and range grass ignited and began to spread in a great circle, adding black smoke to the brown dust cloud.
The dying shock wave echoed through the hills and canyons. It shook houses and swayed trees in the small surrounding cattle and farm towns before rumbling over the Custer battlefield at the Little Bighorn, 112 kilometers to the north.
In a truck stop outside Sheridan an Asian man stood beside a rental car, ignoring the people talking excitedly and wildly gesturing toward the rising mushroom cloud in the distance. He peered intently through binoculars trained on the cloud that had risen out of the evening gloom and was now high enough to be illuminated by the glow of the sun fallen below the horizon.
Slowly he lowered the glasses and walked to a nearby telephone booth. He inserted a coin, dialed a number, and waited. He spoke a few soft words in Japanese and hung up. Then, without even a glance at the cloud boiling through the upper atmosphere, he got in his car and drove off.
The blast was recorded at seismograph stations located around the world. The closest to the epicenter was the National Earthquake Center on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. The seismographic tracings abruptly bounded back and forth across the graph recorders, alerting geophysicist Clayton Morse to an earth movement as he was about to knock off for the day and drive home.
He frowned and then ran the data through a computer. While his eyes remained locked on the computer monitor, he dialed Roger Stevenson, the director of the center, who had called in sick that day.
