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Hope was hanging in and rising. Slightly less than two hours to go, and Big Ben was barreling over the seabed with Mother's Breath securely gripped in the pincers of its manipulators. Like the final minutes of a ball game when the outcome and score are still in doubt, the tension inside the C-5 Galaxy and in the White House was becoming heavier as the operation approached its peak.
"He's eighteen minutes ahead of schedule," said Giordino softly, "and looking good."
" `Like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread,' " Sandecker quoted absently.
Giordino looked up quizzically. "What was that, Admiral?"
"Coleridge." Sandecker smiled apologetically. " `The Ancient Mariner.' I was thinking of Pitt down there, alone in the deep with millions of lives riding on his shoulders, centimeters away from instant cremation--"
"I should have been with him," Giordino said bitterly.
"We all know you'd have locked him up if only you'd thought of it first."
"True." Giordino shrugged. "But I didn't. And now he's staring at death while I sit here like a store-window dummy."
Sandecker gazed at the chart and the red line showing Pitt's course across the seafloor to the B-29, and from there to the detonation site. "He'll do it and come out alive," he murmured. Dirk is not the kind of man to die easily."
Masuji Koyama, Suma's expert technician in defense detection, stood behind the operator of a surveillance radar display and pointed out a target to Yoshishu, Tsuboi, and Takeda Kurojima, who were grouped around him.
"A very large American Air Force transport," he explained. "Computer enhancement shows it as a C-Five Galaxy, capable of carrying an extremely heavy payload for great distances."
"You say it is acting most strangely?" said Yoshishu.
Koyama nodded. "It approached from the southeast along a course toward the American Air Force Base at Shimodate, an air traffic corridor used by their military aircraft that passes within seventy to a hundred kilometers of our island. While tracking it, we observed an object detach itself and fall into the ocean."
"It dropped from the aircraft?"
"Yes."
"Could you identify it?" asked Tsuboi.
Koyama shook his head. "All I can tell you is it appeared to fall slowly, as if attached to a parachute."
"An underwater sensing device perhaps?" mused Kurojima, the Dragon Center's chief director.
"A possibility, although it looked too large for a sonic sensor."
"Most odd," mused Yoshishu.
"Since then," Koyama continued, "the aircraft has remained over the area in a circular holding pattern."
Tsuboi looked at him. "How long?"
"Almost four hours."
"Have you intercepted voice transmissions?"
"A few brief signals, but they were electronically garbled."
"Spotter plane!" Koyama snapped as if seeing a revelation.
"What," inquired Yoshishu, "is a spotter plane?"
"An aircraft with sophisticated detection and communications equipment," Koyama explained. "They're used as flying command centers to coordinate military assaults."
"The President is a vicious liar!" Tsuboi hissed suddenly. "He laid a smoke screen and falsified his position to stall for time. It is clear now, he intends to launch a manned attack on the island."
"But why be so obvious?" Yoshishu said quietly. "The American intelligence knows well our capacity to detect and observe targets of interest at that range."
