"Though this is not yet general knowledge," Colonel Briteis announced, "I am authorized to inform you of this, Mr. Townsend ...

"Right now, even as we speak, a previously unknown monster is raging through the Russian Republic. That creature came from the mysterious pit in Antarctica - we know that - and so did at least two other creatures who have not yet shown their ugly faces."

The colonel paused and stood up to his full height.

"Someone or something at the South Pole has declared war on humanity, Mr. Townsend, and it's up to the Airborne Rangers to put a stop to it."

Yuri Gagarin Highway.

Five kilometers outside Baikonur Cosmodrome.

"Yes, yes, run along to Moscow, you chicken-t.u.r.d little peasant cowards!" the officer bellowed loudly from his position in the command hatch of the speeding T-80 main battle tank.

"The big, bad monster has you all on the run. And whom do you call? Why the heroes of the Russian Army, of course!"

Sergeant Yuri Chevakov twirled the corners of his handlebar mustache as he directed more venom at the fleeing populace who choked the two-lane highway. The refugees were fleeing in the opposite direction from which the tanks were coming, hindering the soldiers sent to do battle with the mysterious creature.

"Get out of the way, you fools!" Chevakov cried, waving a group of people away from a stalled Russian-built automobile that had died in the middle of the roadway. Without slowing, the T-80 slammed into the car, smashing it off the road, over a guardrail, and into a drainage ditch that ran parallel to the raised roadway.

Chevakov laughed as a civilian shook his fist at the pa.s.sing column of tanks.

"Yes, we are here to save your skins, comrades!" Chevakov cried. "You don't have to thank us."

The civilian was left to choke on the diesel exhaust of the tanks, which was polluting the late-afternoon sky.

With his bl.u.s.ter and bellicose voice, the Russian sergeant reminded his men of a parody of an arrogant czarist officer from the old days of the Russian Empire. Of course, no one ever said that to Chevakov's face.

If someone did, he would probably give him a good beating - and then buy the man a vodka, if he had any rubles in his pocket.

Yuri Chevakov was not the kind of man who held a grudge.

As the tank rounded a curve in the road, a boxy Russian-built Zil limousine came right at them at a fast clip. At the last minute, the driver of the car lost the game of chicken with the nearly fifty-ton tank. He swerved off the road and into the drainage ditch.

Before the car flipped over, Chevakov saw the pale face of a woman peering out from the backseat window of the black vehicle.

She was screaming.

"Yes, well," Chevakov said fatalistically as the tank rolled by. "Maybe next time you will remember to pay us soldiers more regularly with the money you earn from your capitalistic factory collectives!"

In the 1950s, when the cosmodrome was constructed, the area around Baikonur was a vast empty steppe. Since then, because of the huge and sprawling s.p.a.ce center, a whole city called Leninsk had grown up in the desert. It was a town of schools, tradesmen, businesses, and even a Palace of Culture.

But on this day, the inhabitants of Leninsk were fleeing their homes in the wake of the monster that had dropped out of the night sky hours before.

Now, as morning brushed the horizon, Sergeant Chevakov, at the head of the fast-moving column of T-72 and T-80 main battle tanks, could see the red fires of the cosmodrome burning in the distance.

"Here we come, monster," Chevakov cried, shaking his fist at the inferno that flickered on the horizon.

"Maybe the capitalists cannot kill giant monsters, but we Russians can!"

As he shouted those words, another huge explosion lit up the distant horizon. A plume of fire and smoke rose hundreds of feet into the sky. The initial blast was followed by several secondary explosions.

Chevakov pulled a map from his pocket and scanned it in the dim glow of his flashlight. He tried to orient himself and discover where the explosion had actually occurred.

"It looks as if our nation's s.p.a.ce program has been dealt another serious blow," the sergeant announced to no one in particular. "That fire over there was once the Energia-Buran pad ..."

Bridge of the Yuushio-cla.s.s submarine Takashio.

Sea of j.a.pan.

Captain Sendai slapped the control console in front of him.

"Course and speed?" he demanded.

The sonarman replied without looking up from his screen. "Still moving in the same direction and at the same speed, Captain," the man replied with crisp precision.

Sendai turned to his first mate. The second-in-command's face glowed softly in the red lights of the bridge.

"Estimated time of arrival?" Captain Sendai asked the first mate.

The man glanced down at the illuminated map table in front of him. "If G.o.dzilla continues to move at his present course and speed, he will reach Honshu in less than five hours, Captain Sendai," the first mate replied. As he spoke, his fingers traced the probable path of the monster.

Captain Sendai slumped into his command chair. "That's it, then," he announced. "We must notify the government of a possible landing by G.o.dzilla."

Three hours before, Captain Sendai's sonar had first picked up G.o.dzilla. The captain hadn't expected to find the monster in the Sea of j.a.pan - the last time he'd tracked the creature, he'd been in the Sea of Okhotsk, and he had been moving away from j.a.pan.

Something had turned the creature around. For some mysterious reason, G.o.dzilla was returning to the sh.o.r.es of Sendai's homeland.

"Helm," Captain Sendai barked, rising from his chair. "Blow the main ballast, and take her up ... We must break radio silence and send a warning immediately."

Fifteen minutes later, the Takashio floated on the water's choppy surface. The communications mast had been raised, but the radioman had failed to make a satellite link. Captain Sendai checked his computer log and knew exactly where the j.a.panese satellite should have been ... but for some inexplicable reason it was gone, or dead.

Sendai tried to raise another j.a.panese vessel. When that failed, he attempted to contact a U.S. Navy ship. But that effort was unsuccessful as well.

"d.a.m.n!" Sendai cursed. "Try to raise another ship. There must be some way to warn the mainland that G.o.dzilla is coming!"

Government Palace.

Plaza de las Armas.

Lima, Peru.

The meeting had just ended, and the details of the shift in command of the Destiny Explorer had been worked out. Now, Simon Townsend watched as the U.S. Army Airborne Rangers piled into two trucks parked outside the Government Palace.

The soldiers were in full combat gear and carried M-16 a.s.sault rifles, grenades, and an a.s.sortment of light weaponry. They were clad in camouflage BDUs and Kevlar "Fritz" helmets, and each man's bulky backpack seemed big enough to tip him over at any time.

Colonel Briteis directed the men as they mounted the trucks and loaded crates of spare ammunition. Simon closely watched the man who would now be commanding him. The airship designer had a definite distrust of soldiers, though Briteis seemed honest enough, if a little aggressive.

As Simon watched, Dr. Max Birchwood emerged from the palace, carrying a backpack and a laptop computer. He, too, was wearing army BDUs. Except for his slim physique and his wild and unruly beard, the kaijuologist looked just like the rest of the soldiers.

"Am I supposed to wear a uniform, too?" Townsend asked, only half-jokingly. Dr. Birchwood halted in his tracks and approached the airship designer.

"I know how you feel, Mr. Townsend," he said sympathetically. "I'm a scientist, too, and I've had a number of projects about which I cared very dearly pulled out from under me in my time."

"Well," Townsend said, relenting, "at least my daughter won't be making this trip. I'd hate to have to worry about her safety -"

Suddenly, the earth beneath the Plaza de las Armas began to quake. The ground itself seemed to ripple, and a great rumbling filled their ears. The soldiers reacted first. Most of them bailed out of the trucks and hugged the ground. Some of the men rolled under the trucks themselves as a tree branch dropped to the pavement nearby.

Dr. Birchwood tugged on Townsend's shoulder and pulled him away from the palace. Pieces of the building's facade began to drop off. In the distance, they could hear windows breaking and people crying out in alarm. Across the plaza, a wrought-iron lamppost tilted and fell into the street.

The quaking lasted for several minutes. Then, just as Simon Townsend began to think it would never end, it did.

A strange calm descended on the city. In the distance, sirens began to wail.

"Okay, okay, let's go," Colonel Briteis barked at his men as he clapped his hands. "Mount up and let's get moving!"

Reluctantly, the soldiers rose from their safe positions on the ground and climbed into the trucks. Dr. Birchwood and Simon Townsend stood nearby, listening as more sirens rose from the city around them.

Suddenly, a man in a Peruvian military uniform burst through the gate of the Government Palace and called to Colonel Briteis in Spanish. They exchanged words in an intense conversation. Dr. Birchwood and Townsend, both curious, approached the two soldiers.

"What's going on?" the kaijuologist asked. Colonel Briteis pulled off his Kevlar helmet and scratched his head.

"Colonel Torres here claims that a giant monster has broken out of the ground under one of the pueblos jovenes and is wrecking the city."

11.

ARMAGEDDON.

Parque Molinas, Miraflores.

Central Lima, Peru.

When the quake first began, Corporal Sean Brennan had ordered his men away from the airship's mooring mast and down onto the ground. Soon the vibrations had intensified, and he'd hugged the earth, too. This was the second major earthquake they'd experienced since arriving in Peru. The soldiers were becoming old hands at it.

You just had to know what to do until it pa.s.sed.

Out beyond the boundary of Parque Molinas, the crowds that had gathered in the streets to see the Destiny Explorer dropped to the pavement. The earth rumbled, windows shattered, and a marble statue in the center of the park began to sway. So did the temporary mooring tower and cargo elevator. The members of the INN ground crew began yelling, but there was nothing to be done.

Finally, the quake pa.s.sed. The mast and tower remained intact.

Then the sirens started to wail.

"This is worse than California," Bob Bodusky complained.

"Hey, look over there! "Jim Cirelli cried, pointing to an area of the city in the distance. Smoke began to rise in dark, rolling clouds. "Do you think something caught fire?"

Inside the observation deck of the Destiny Explorer, Nick Gordon and Robin Halliday spotted the cloud of smoke rising into the sky from the "new town" across the brown waters of the Rio Remac, on the other side of the city. From their vantage point high above the area of Lima called Miraflores, Nick and Robin had a pretty good view of the monster that suddenly emerged from the trembling ground!

Robin cried out when she saw the insectoid head rise above a cl.u.s.ter of wooden and paper huts and shelters that made up the shantytown. While she watched, entire structures leaped into the air as gigantic pointed claws lashed out at everything around them. People spilled out of those buildings, dropping into the pit from which the creature emerged.

"I've got to find my video camera!" Nick cried, tearing into his suitcase.

Ned Landson and Peter Blackwater were in the hangar bay saying good-bye to the Messerschmitt-XYB, regretting that they'd never tried out the toy on which both of them had worked so hard. They were joking about hijacking the XYB when they suddenly felt the airship shake. At first they thought it was just an errant gust of wind that had pushed the ship.

Then they heard the rumble of the Earth many feet beneath the airship. The boys ran to a view port in the hangar deck and peered outside - just in time to see a giant green monster crawl out of the pit in the heart of a shantytown!

"Wow!" Ned cried. "This is so cool in the extreme!"

Peter felt less enthusiastic. But Ned is a biologist, he reasoned. And that thing out there is a new form of life!

"I want a better view of this," Ned proclaimed.

"We're not going down there, are we?" Peter replied.

"Nope," Ned answered, grabbing his shoulder. "I know a way to the top of the airship!" With that, Ned dashed off with Peter in tow.

"Do you mean on top?" Peter asked nervously. "Like ... on the hull?"

"Sure!" Ned said as he began to climb a narrow ladder that ran through the center of the hull.

In the Plaza de las Armas ...

As soon as Colonel Torres brought the Airborne unit the news about the creature, the army trucks moved off. Together, Simon Townsend and Dr. Birchwood clambered into the back of one of the ten-ton, six-wheeled, camouflage-green vehicles.

The military column, led by Colonel Torres's Hummer, left the plaza and entered the streets of Lima. Already, the city was in chaos. People stumbled in every direction. Some carried possessions. Others dragged children behind them.