Aerial Bombing of Dejima

The Chief Cabinet Secretary strips the Prime Minister of her office for having asked the United Nations to broker the Dejima crisis. She is placed under guard in a disused room of the building alongside Aramaki, Proto, and Togusa. Divided though they are, the group is far from finished: Aramaki produces a small-caliber pistol, and Proto, Section 9's bioroid, reaches the net and links up with the team's Tachikoma units. Through them he pulls the building's blueprints, current details of the Dejima operation, and the Prime Minister's whereabouts, letting Togusa and the Chief set out to free her and rein in the situation.

Out at Dejima, the Major and the rest of the team ride a commandeered military helicopter onto the island, only for a swarm of Jigabachi aircraft to cripple the rotor before they can land. Kusanagi leaps clear ahead of the crash to hunt for Kuze, while the others are ordered to bring the missing plutonium before the UN inspectors. Complicating everything, Section 4 has been sent after the same plutonium and mistakes the Section 9 operators for militant refugees, touching off a running firefight through the streets.

Kuze marches a small refugee band armed with Stinger missiles to the island docks, where they down the E2C Hawkeye that had been jamming communications, restoring the refugees' access to his cyberbrain. From them he learns the scale of the assault: the Army and Navy are pounding Dejima with airstrikes, missiles, and naval guns, and they have seeded the air with radiation scrubbers to keep the refugees' nuclear fallout from escaping. The island stays safe from a ground push only because its single land bridge lies destroyed, yet the military is already hauling in portable bridging gear to rebuild the approach. As Section 9 scrambles to stop the battle, the Tachikomas watching over Dejima stumble onto a troubling discovery.

This twenty-fourth installment of 2nd GIG was directed by Masaki Tachibana from a script by Kenji Kamiyama. It aired in Japan on December 4, 2004, and in English on May 13, 2006, sitting between The Day the Bridge Falls and To the Other Side of Paradise.