Crossover Earth '98
Bad Day in Tokyo Ken St. Andre
It was a simple plan. All he had to do was load a briefcase with plastic explosives, walk into the Tokyo Stock Exchange with the hundreds of brokers who entered every day, something he could easily do because he was a licensed stock broker on the Tokyo Exchange. Leave the suitcase near the center of the floor, walk away, detonate it from outside. The explosion would kill hundreds, and bring chaos on Japanese business, causing who knows how many hundreds or thousands of others to die from the disruption in business.
But somehow the plan went wrong for Miku. He had walked past the guards at the front door hundreds of times in the last few months, but this time as he tried to go through, a young woman standing near the doorway suddenly pointed at him and shouted, "That man! He has a bomb!"
The armored guards reached for their sidearms. People began to scream and run away from him. Miku cursed under his breath--how could she know? He threw the briefcase at her and the blasted guards, turned and started to run away.
His other hand was on the detonator in his pocket.
The young woman put her hands up to keep from being hit in the face by the flying briefcase, and more or less caught it. Her face registered only horror.
"Stop or I'll shoot!" cried a guard. Miku knew he had no more time. He pressed the detonator and dove for a doorway.
WWWHHHHHAAAAAAARRRRROOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM!
A tremendous explosion rocked the building as a sheet of flame annihilated the briefcase and everything within five feet of it. The young psychic died instantly, as did the two guards nearby. About a dozen people in the near vicinity were fatally wounded by flying debris and inferno gasses surging away from the center of the explosion. The shock wave caught the leaping Apocalypse Now agent and carried him through the door. He slammed into a fat man, and they both went down with serious injuries.
Dozens of people were dead or injured, and there was serious damage to the building. The video cameras that had caught Miku's image on film were shattered by the blast, and the film inside them was destroyed. In the confusion Miku was but another blast victim, rushed to Tokyo general hospital along with dozens of others. When he awoke, he remembered to recite the trigger phrase for his amnesia. After that he no longer recalled carrying the bomb or being a member of Apocalypse Now. The authorities never caught him.
The German branch was quite happy with the result. Their little bit of impromptu train sabotage had worked much better than the Japanese attempt on the stock exchange. Head man, A. Paco Llypse sent the Japanese branch a sharp rebuke for their sloppy work, and told them to concentrate on their food poisoning attempts with the fugu and other sushi delights.
Paco put aside the report from Japan. It was a complete fiasco. The Apocalypse Now flyers emitted by the bomb caused only anger in Japan, and the attempt had done little damage. If the organization was to have the desired effect, he needed an action that would affect millions instead of a few dozen or a few hundred people at a time. He needed something like an assassination that could spark off a war.
He wondered idly who that could be. His eyes chanced to fall on a newspaper headline: POPE URGES PEACE WITH MUSLIM NATIONS. A gleam came into his eye and a plan began to form. The Goddess would be instrumental to his next attack on civilization.
. . . to be continued