Godzilla at World's End (6 page)

He doubted that the ship was operated by a Russian intelligence agency now - though it was possible. But such ships were easily purchased from the cash-starved Russian government these days. A private business consortium might own it. Or just an individual entrepreneur. The ship might not even be manned by Russians, but Sendai's well-honed instincts told him it was.

Captain Sendai approached the video monitor. With the flick of a switch he pulled up the images he had taken of the ship a few hours before. He studied the outline, noting that the forward thirty-millimeter twin antiaircraft guns had been replaced by a single-tube weapon of uncertain origin. He increased the magnification ... The weapon looked like a harpoon gun.

Is it possible that the patrol ship was modified to serve as a whaler?
Sendai wondered for a moment before quickly dismissing the notion. There was no place to cook or store whale blubber on such a small craft.

Sendai increased the magnification once again. Suddenly, the Cyrillic script on the side of the vessel became clear. Sendai could read Russian - he had learned while patrolling the Kuril Islands, which both Japan and Russia claimed as their own.

"
Ordog
," he muttered aloud - the Russian word for "devil."

Well
, Captain Sendai thought.
Something is very wrong with this ship, but there is nothing I can do about it now. After the submarine is refueled and resupplied, I will go hunting for it again, however.

Sendai was suddenly certain that the patrol vessel was looking for Godzilla. The creature had been spotted in these waters in the last several weeks, which explained why this part of the sea was all but deserted.

But what do the Russians want with Godzilla?
the Japanese captain wondered. Whatever the reason, Captain Sendai was certain that the crew of that ship was up to no good ...

***

"Captain Korsov! Captain Korsov!" Podynov cried frantically through the thin wooden door of the captain's quarters. "We have located the creature."

The door flew open. "Are you sure?" Korsov demanded. The first mate nodded.

"It is too big to be anything else," he replied.

"Put the ship on red alert!" Korsov ordered. A moment later, alarms echoed throughout the
Ordog
as the eighteen-man crew took up battle stations.

A moment after he entered the bridge, Korsov had assessed the situation. The blip on the sonar was unmistakable, and the Geiger counters also indicated an unnaturally high level of radiation emanating from the shape ahead of them.

Korsov scanned the horizon with his binoculars. The surface of the sea did not hint at what swam beneath it.

Silently, a huge man in a sealskin parka approached the captain. His bronze skin gleamed in the red lights of the bridge. The man's head was shaved, and he wore a whalebone loop in his nose. Korsov turned and faced the man.

"Take over the harpoon," Korsov commanded. The man nodded once and quickly left the bridge. Silently, he moved out onto the bow, toward the huge harpoon gun mounted there.

"Where is the creature?" Korsov demanded of his sonar man.

"Five hundred meters ahead of us," the young technician replied. "And twenty meters down."

"We'll bring him to the surface soon enough," Korsov stated. Turning to his first mate, he gave the command to launch depth charges.

***

With the impact of the first explosion, Godzilla opened his huge maw and roared angrily. Bubbles burst from the creature's mouth, churning the sea around him into a froth.

A second and third explosion quickly followed. None of them were near enough to harm the monster, but Godzilla became as curious as he was annoyed.

The creature raised his reptilian eyes and headed for the ocean surface ...

***

"There he is!" Podynov cried, stepping away from the depth charge launcher even as another explosive metal cylinder rolled onto the launch cradle.

All heads on the
Ordog
turned as Godzilla's three rows of dorsal spikes broke the surface. The sea seemed to roil, bulging into a huge dome right before the monster's head rose above the white-tipped waves.

Godzilla scanned the horizon, his feral eyes narrowing when he spotted the gray ship floating in the distance.

But to the crew's surprise, Godzilla was not up for a fight that day. Instead of approaching the
Ordog
, Godzilla turned and swam in the opposite direction.

"Full speed ahead!" Korsov commanded, his narrow, predatory smile looking like a scar on his skull-like face.

Everyone on the bridge felt the tension emanating from Captain Korsov as the chase began. They knew their commander was a warrior, a hunter. This was his element.

"Harpooner? Can you hear me?" Korsov demanded over the ship's radio.

The bald man gripping the gunstock on the bow of the bobbing ship turned, tapped his headphones, and nodded to Korsov through the bridge windows. Then he turned back to face the prey that swam before him.

Slowly, inexorably, the
Ordog
was gaining on Godzilla. And only now did the utter insanity of his mission occur to Captain Korsov.
All this for a few gallons of blood and tissue samples
, he thought.

Of course he understood why his shadowy employers wanted the material. Godzilla's flesh was an enigma. Its properties of instantaneous regeneration were well known, but not fully understood. So far, only the Japanese and the Americans had supplies of Godzilla's DNA to study, and they weren't sharing them with anybody.

But the European pharmaceutical company that was paying Korsov's employers wanted their own supply of Godzilla cells, and were willing to pay a lot of rubles to get it. Korsov's employers convinced the pharmaceutical company that the
Ordog
's special equipment was perfect for the task.

So who was Korsov to question his bosses, as long as they were paying him so well?

"We are almost in range, Captain!" Podynov cried as the
Ordog
approached Godzilla. The ship was leaping out of the water now as it slammed into the creature's wake at a speed of nearly forty knots. The crew on the bridge had to hang on or risk being dashed to the deck. The man at the wheel, a seasoned veteran of the sea, hung on with white knuckles but pushed grimly onward.

Suddenly, Godzilla's tail thrashed out of the water on the
Ordog
's starboard side. The tail towered over the ship, then crashed into the waves only a moment later. The resulting spray battered the ship, almost capsizing the
Ordog
.

"Man overboard!" Podynov cried. Korsov turned. He saw a flurry of activity on the deck. One of the men had been swept into the sea. Korsov could see that the man was quickly disappearing in the distance behind them.

"Captain, we have to turn back!" Podynov cried.

"No!"
Korsov commanded. "Our goal is worth the sacrifice. We go forward!"

The men on the bridge exchanged apprehensive glances, but they obeyed their captain.

Korsov clutched the bridge control panel and gazed through the windows. Godzilla raised his head out of the water and bellowed. The roar seemed to vibrate through the ship and shook the crew's courage.

"Prepare to fire the harpoon!" Korsov cried into the radio.

On the bow of the ship, the harpooner pulled the parka's hood off his shaven head and peered through the gun sight. His captain's voice crackled through his headphones.

"Aim for the neck," Korsov directed.

The silent man at the gun squinted into the sight, focusing the crosshairs on a portion of Godzilla's throat right below the pointed ears. The charcoal gray flesh rippled.

The harpooner held his breath as he squeezed the trigger. With a
whoosh
of escaping gases, the harpoon leaped out of the tube and shot across the waves, dragging a thick line behind it. The harpoon struck Godzilla exactly where the harpooner had aimed.

As the point of the harpoon embedded itself in Godzilla's thick hide, secondary hooks emerged from the main bolt, digging deeper into the monster's flesh and anchoring the harpoon in place. The clear hollow plastic tube that was embedded in the center of the harpoon's long steel connecting cable soon filled with greenish fluid as the ship's pump began its work.

On the bridge, Podynov looked at Captain Korsov. "The pumps are on-line!" the first mate announced. He checked the gauge on the control board in front of him. "The tanks are beginning to fill with the monster's blood."

Godzilla suddenly dipped his massive head, pulling the harpoon's line taut and dragging the
Ordog
's bow down into the waves. With a scream of surprise, the harpooner lost his grip on the gun-stock and was swept into the sea.

This time no one bothered to cry "man overboard." They knew that Korsov would not endanger the mission to save a man's life - any man's.

"The first tank is full," Podynov cried, switching over to the second of three 150-gallon tanks in the hold of the fast patrol ship. Godzilla continued to surge forward, dragging the ship behind him like a child tugging on a bathtub toy.

Two minutes later, Podynov switched to the third and final tank. Godzilla had not slowed his forward momentum. Indeed, the creature seemed oblivious to the tiny ship he was dragging behind him through the increasingly rough surf.

Korsov peered over the first mate's shoulder, wondering how long the hull of the
Stenka
-class ship could withstand such a buffeting. The gauge on the control panel indicated that the third tank was nearly full.

"Prepare to cut the cable loose," Korsov announced with a note of triumph. Podynov lifted the plastic cover on the detonator that would set off the explosive bolts to sever the nearly indestructible steel cable.

"Now!" Korsov cried. Podynov's chubby finger stabbed the detonator button, but nothing happened. He turned to Korsov with an expression of obvious panic etched on his face.

"The bolts did not detonate, Captain!" he cried.

"I know that, you fool," Korsov cried, pushing the man aside and checking the control panel's connections. Everything seemed to be in order.

Suddenly, the
Ordog
dipped again as Godzilla lowered his reptilian head and pulled the cable taut. The patrol ship was almost swamped, and a powerful wave washed over the bow and slammed into the bridge, shattering a window.

"Captain!" Podynov cried, fear in his voice. His face was bleeding where he had been struck by a shard of window glass. "What do we do?" he whined.

"Get out there and cut the cable!" Korsov commanded, thrusting an ax from the emergency stores into the startled first mate's hands.

"But the cable is made of titanium steel," Podynov continued to whine. "It is indestructible!"

"Do it!"
Korsov shouted forcefully, pushing the man off the bridge and out onto the deck. The first mate was followed by three other sailors, all clutching axes. The men stumbled to the harpoon gun, clutching safety handles along the way. As soon as they arrived, they began hacking on the cable, sending sparks into the gray twilight.

But after a minute of hacking, Podynov's ax shattered in his hand. The first mate dropped the broken handle and stared forward.

"Oh, no," he muttered, his eyes widening in horror.

Godzilla dived beneath the waves.

As the monster's head dipped beneath the surface, the cable went taut, pulling the
Ordog
into the crashing waves. A huge fountain of spray shot into the air as the tortured hull of the
Ordog
literally broke apart. Men and chunks of metal flew through the air like falling leaves.

In a moment the ship was swamped, and the crew of the
Ordog
was drowned or torn apart by the force of the ship's destruction.

As Godzilla disappeared beneath the surface of the Sea of Okhotsk, he dragged the ragged remains of the
Ordog
and its doomed crew with him.

Minutes later, deep under water, the explosive bolts that held the ship fastened to Godzilla finally blew up, as they were programmed to do by the owners of the ship.

Three giant bags inflated around the tanks full of Godzilla's blood and tissue as another hatch blew open, throwing the tanks free of the sinking hull.

Slowly, the three tanks floated to the surface. A powerful radio beacon began to broadcast the tank's location on a special frequency, and a bright signal light on top of the tanks began to flash intermittently.

Thirty minutes later, as the sun set, a helicopter appeared on the darkening horizon. The aircraft ignored the debris and corpses floating in the area and flew directly toward the tanks. In another minute, the chopper's crew lowered a retrieval hook.

As soon as the tanks were pulled from the waves, the helicopter circled the area once again, then flew toward the Russian coast with its precious cargo - a cargo that was worth the sacrifice of many lives to obtain, as Captain Korsov of the ill-fated
Ordog
had insisted.

Even his.

Monday, November 13, 2000, 0900 hours
Joint Headquarters, 82nd Airborne Division
U.S. Army XVIII Airborne Corps
Fort Bragg, North Carolina

Private First Class Sean Brennan's heart raced as he approached the regimental headquarters building. For the hundredth time in an hour, he wondered why he'd been summoned here in such an unorthodox manner.

He feared he knew the answer and secretly dreaded that today would be the day the truth came out.

I must have been crazy to think I could get away with it
, he thought glumly. He removed his cap and rubbed his hand over the military stubble on his head - a nervous habit he'd had since he was a kid back in Massachusetts.

As Private Brennan approached the structure - which looked more like a big colonial house than the military command center for one of the busiest regiments of the U.S. Army - he felt a sense of awe mingled with rising fear and apprehension. He had never been this close to officer country before. Yet the building itself was deceptively innocuous-looking. Only the cluster of satellite dishes on the roof and a much larger array of microwave towers nearby hinted that it was anything more than the home of a wealthy civilian.