Nemuro Nishitsu shook his head. His slit eyes sought the desktop absently.
"No," he said. "They will not come by land. They know, just as I do, that the crossing through the desert would not go unchallenged."
"Then what?"
"They will send no troops. It is too late for that. In less than twelve hours their greatest hero will be hanged, his last moments of agony to be seen on their television. No assault force could hope to act in time to prevent that. Instead, they will send a plane."
"And we will shoot it down!" Isuzu cried. "I will alert our air defense forces."
"No," Nishitsu said coldly. "I forbid it! For this is the fruition of my plan. A city so isolated that once captured it cannot be retaken. The American military, if they have any stomach, must resort to the unthinkable to wipe this stain of shame from their land."
"You cannot mean . . ."
"Think of the irony, Jiro kun. America, the mightiest nuclear power in the world, invulnerable to invasion, immune to attack, forced to obliterate one of their own cities with one of their own weapons. In one stroke, the shame of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be as if it never transpired. With the dropping of one bomb, Nippon is avenged. Think of how proud our emperor will be."
Jiro Isuzu stood stunned. His mouth opened like a gulping fish. He could not force from it the words he wanted to speak.
Nemuro Nishitsu smiled tightly. Then his face quirked up in surprise. He sneezed. His hands fumbled around the desk for a box of Kleenex.
In the White House Situation Room, the President shut off the television. He turned to face the stony array of faces that was his Secretary of Defense and his joint Chiefs of Staff. Everyone knew what was on the President's mind, but no one ventured to speak before the commander in chief did.
"We can't let this happen," he croaked at last. He reached for a glass of water, gulped it down greedily, and then cleared the frog from his throat. "I want a bomber ready to go, but not until I give the word. There may still be a way out of this dilemma."
The Joint Chiefs rushed to their telephones.
At Castle Air Force Base, in Atwater, California, a B-52 bomber from the 93rd bombardment wing was designated for the Yuma mission. A single nuclear bomb was cocked and placed in her bomb bay. The pilots took their seats and went through a cockpit check. They had not yet been given their orders, but they had a sickening inkling of what those orders might be.
In the Yuma Desert, a man continued walking with an inhumanly measured gait. His eyes, like burning coals, were fixed on the horizon beyond which lay the blacked-out city of Yuma, Arizona. His regular, mechanical strides made no imprint in the endless sands.
Chapter 20
On Christmas Eve the sun set slowly on Yuma. It disappeared behind the Chocolate Mountains, leaving the still light of its passing. It was magic hour.
At precisely 5:55, a man appeared on the crest of a hill overlooking the city. He paused, the rags on his emaciated body a memory of desert utilities, his white T-shirt as brown as brick dust, and his black chinos a powdery beige.
No one noticed the man as he stood, immobile as a presentiment, his empty hands hanging from his thick wrists like dead nerveless things. But everyone heard him.
In a voice like thunder he spoke, and even though there were over fifty thousand people living in the city sprawled under his burnt-coal gaze, each pair of ears heard his words clearly.
"I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; Death, the shatterer of worlds. Who is this dog meat who challenges me?"
Nemuro Nishitsu heard those words and sat up in alarm. He had been dozing in his chair. He reached for his cane and climbed stiffly to his feet. Quickly he sat down again. His legs felt weak.
"Jiro kun," he called in a dry, raspy voice. "Jiro!" Jiro Isuzu came running. His face was stark with bewilderment. "You heard it too?" he demanded. "Find out who that was," Nishitsu said. "But first, help me to the couch. I do not feel well."
"What is wrong?" Isuzu asked anxiously as he wrapped Nishitsu's arm around his shoulder. He levered the old Japanese from the leather chair, surprised at his lightness, frightened by his frailty.
"It is nothing," Nishitsu rasped as he allowed himself to be half-led, half-carried to a couch. "A cold, perhaps. It will pass."
"I will summon a doctor. Even a cold at your age is not to be taken lightly."
"Yes, a doctor. But first, locate the source of that voice. For it fills me with dread."
"At once, sir," Jiro Isuzu said, and sped off.
Ninth A. D. Minobe Kawasaki scanned the darkening horizon with his Nishitsu binoculars. The voice had come from the south, he felt certain. He sat up in the turret seat of the T-62 tank. Word had just reached him from Imperial Command Headquarters-formerly the mayor's office-to capture the author of those unearthly words that had boomed over the city. Kawasaki thought they must have come from the lungs of some god or demon.
His gaze ran along the line of a near hill. The preternatural blue of the sky was shading into indigo. Already there was the faint suggestion of stars.
He gave out a cry when the lenses came in contact with a magnified pair of eyes that burned him with their awful gaze. Those eyes made him think of dead planets spinning in a cold void.
Unsteadily he recovered the glasses and sought out the figure again. The face that held those eyes was not that of a god, he saw. They were set in skull-like hollows on an emaciated face. The throat was blue, as if painted. It was not paint, however. The color was too organic for paint. The neck was horribly bruised, as if broken. The skin of the face and bare arms was sunburned a lobster red.
Then, to Kawasaki's horror, the eyes seemed to fix upon him and the figure started down the hill in a jerky, stumbling, yet purposeful stride.
"Driver!" he called. "The one we seek is coming this way. "
The T-62 leapt into action. Kawasaki primed the turretmounted .50-caliber machine gun. He was afraid, even though the figure he rushed to intercept held no weapons in his hands.
Kawasaki lashed his driver up and down the streets. The figure had disappeared after it reached the base of the hill, making it difficult to determine which road he would take into the city. Kawasaki was forced to guess. He guessed correctly, he learned as the tank turned a corner onto a residential street. It stopped at the edge of the desert. And walking up that street like a corpse come back to life, was the dead-eyed man.
He came steadily, fearlessly, like a machine. Kawasaki's orders were to bring the man in alive. He began to regret them. His voice lifted. "I carr upon you to surrender to Imperiar Occupation Force."
The man made no reply. His empty hands swung at his sides lifelessly. Kawasaki turned the snout of his machine gun at the man's thin chest. He could almost count the ribs outlined by the snug T-shirt fabric.
The man didn't flinch. He advanced purposefully, his dusty feet utterly soundless as they trod the asphalt. On a hunch, Kawasaki reached into the turret hatch for the turret control lever. He goosed it until the smoothbore cannon lined up with the man's chest. Annoyed that the powerful cannon maw did not hinder the dead-eyed man's advance, Kawasaki dropped the machine-gun muzzle and sent a short burst into the man's path.
A section of pavement erupted. The man walked over it unconcernedly.
"I do not have to take you arive," Kawasaki called. It was a lie, but he didn't know what else to say. If he was forced to kill, how could he explain bringing back an unarmed corpse?
Kawasaki put a second burst over the oncoming man's head. It proved unpersuasive. He came on as if utterly unafraid of death.
Or, Minobe Kawasaki suddenly thought, as if he were already dead.
"Driver!" he ordered in Japanese. "Approach that man. Slowly!"
The tank started forward. The smoothbore muzzle was bearing down on the man's chest like the finger of doom. If both man and tank continued along their stubborn paths, the maw would ram the man, knocking him down. That was Kawasaki's intention.
The distance between them shrank. It was several yards. Then three. Then six feet. Then two. One.
Just when a collision seemed unavoidable, the man's right hand came up as if jerked by a string. That was as much as Minobe Kawasaki saw, for he was suddenly knocked off his perch. He struck the hull of the tank and slipped over the side. He missed being drawn into the big rollers only by inches. Kawasaki realized his narrow escape only later. The sound, a horrendously flat crack of a noise, beat upon his eardrums. He clapped his hands to his ears, thinking it had been an explosion.
Minobe Kawasaki felt it was safe to open his eyes only after the ringing in his ears ceased. He looked up fearfully. He was relieved to find he still had all his body parts. Then he saw the tank. It had come to a dead stop. The driver's helmeted head was turned around in his seat to look back at the turret.
Minobe Kawasaki's eyes went wide with incredulity. The turret of the tank was no longer sitting on its ring mount. The top flange of the great steel mount had that bright graininess of sheared metal.