Kamikaze (11 page)

“Sugar Loaf Hill ... Chocolate Drop ... Strawberry Hill,” teased the propagandist. “Gee, these places sound wonderful! You can just see the candy houses with their white picket fences and the candy canes hanging from the trees, their red and white stripes glistening in the sun. But the only thing red about those places is the blood of Americans. Yes sir, those are the names of hills in southern Okinawa, where the fighting’s so close that you get down to bayonets and sometimes”—the announcer paused—“bare fists.”

And so it was.

American GIs and leathernecks died by the thousands in a drive to give meaning to Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr.’s, toast about walking “in the ashes of Tokyo.” Three thousand more crumbled from “battle fatigue”—nervous breakdowns that sent them to hospital. But still the Yanks kept coming. It was a relentless tide from blockhouse to blockhouse, pillbox to pillbox, bone vault to bone vault, across Cactus Ridge and then Kakazu Ridge, where twenty-two of thirty tanks were destroyed by mines, anti-tank guns, artillery, and mortar fire. The Americans withstood a banzai counterattack and kept on the move, as the fighting grew more hellish per man, per yard, per however you want to measure it.

Their gains averaged 163 yards a day.

The defenders let the rumbling tanks pass through their concealed positions, then they cut down the supporting
troops with flank fire, attacking the armor with satchel charges and flaming rags that forced the crews to bail out to be spiked by bayonets. “You can’t bypass a Jap,” the Yanks were heard to yell by those who grasped English, “because a Jap doesn’t know when he’s bypassed.”

Pocked with caves and strongly held by the defenders, the slopes of the Shuri Line became known as forbidden land. It was here that the Yanks—exposed to the big guns and mortars on the heights of Shuri Castle—had the most hellish time. Ishimmi Ridge, Dakeshi Ridge, Wana Ridge, and Wana Draw—they were the battlefields by mid-May. On Ishimmi Ridge, the defenders had two hundred isolated GIs pinned down in a last stand. For seventy hours, the Yanks had battled without sleep. Riflemen got blown to bits by mortars or were struck in the head by machine-gun fire. Blood was everywhere—in the weapons, on the still living, splattered all around. The dead lay where they fell, putrefying in the broiling heat. Wounded men, groaning because the morphine was gone, were propped up with rifles in their hands. Their grenades depleted and short of ammunition, the few unscathed GIs searched their dead buddies for cartridges and clips, and laid out all the bayonets for the hand-to-hand fight that was sure to finish them off.

The Marines on the ridge above Tokuda’s cave were ground down to human wreckage. You could smell the battle line before you could see it. Amid bandages, blood, and mangled flesh, men writhed in agony and died, whole chunks ripped out of them. Now was the time for a banzai charge, so Tokuda drew the samurai sword his father had
given him at the start of the war. He wormed through the bowels of the cave toward the jagged oval of daylight ahead, and that’s when he heard—
rumble, rumble, rumble
—the sound of one ... then two ... then three Sherman tanks nearing the hillside.

“Corkscrew and blowtorch.”

That’s what the Americans called the new technique they had developed to kill the Japanese in their caves.

One of the tanks was armed with the usual 75mm cannon. It made up the corkscrew part of the “blowing” party. As Tokuda closed on the cave’s exit, a blast from the cannon hurled a shell down the tunnel. Narrowly missing Tokuda as it screamed past, the shell exploded with such force that it slammed him into the rock wall. The guns of the other two tanks had been adapted to squirt a mixture of gasoline and napalm. These flame-throwing tanks were the blowtorch team. The last thing Tokuda saw before it all went black was a tongue of yellow fire streaming past his right flank, and the last thing he heard was his own shriek of pain as that half of his face got cooked alive.

Thunder God

Vancouver

October 31, Now

Three days a week, Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq was up before dawn for a six-thirty fencing workout with an old Hungarian master. Swordplay is ideal for keeping the body in shape. The classic fencer’s position—weight balanced between flexed legs, the hand with the foil feinting, thrusting, and parrying—mimics a yoga stance. And because swordplay is performed at lightning speed, it requires quick reactions and superb hand-eye coordination.

Three days a week, days he didn’t fence, the chief met the forensic pathologist, Gill Macbeth, after work for swordplay of a different—but no less vigorous—kind.

DeClercq was in as good a shape as he had ever been.

“What do you think of that?”

“Nevermore,” said Binky as the Mountie left the bedroom to wend his way out to the hot tub on the deck.

“A
lot
more,” DeClercq taunted, “if I have my way.”

“Ditch him, Gill,” Binky said. “He’s not good enough for you.”

“Srrit ... srreeew!”
whistled Gabby as Macbeth came naked out of the bedroom.

“Where’s the Viagra?”

“Ruffle my feathers, baby!”

“Your birds need a new shtick,” complained DeClercq.

“They have one,” Gill said, “for Halloween.”

The West African gray parrot and the green-winged macaw shared a roomy aviary-cum-solarium in the cedar-and-glass architectural marvel that Gill—thanks to a generous inheritance—called home. On her way to the fridge for a bottle of champagne, she peered in at Binky on his perch and quoted:

     
“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—

     
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!

     
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

     
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!

     
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

     
Quoth the Raven, ...

“Nevermore,” said Binky.

DeClercq laughed. “Binky’s a bad omen. But he doesn’t
look like Poe’s raven to me.”

“I’ll paint him black,” said Gill.

While the cop fetched a pair of champagne flutes from the bar, the pathologist slid back the glass door to the deck, where a pool and a hot tub overlooked the Lions Gate Bridge and Stanley Park. As Macbeth stepped out into the chilly autumn night, her skin puckered with goosebumps and her nose wrinkled from the smell of cordite wafting up from the fireworks on the beach.

Pausing in the doorway, Robert felt the embers of lust getting stoked again. Gill had bent over the hot tub to crank the knob, and now, as steam rose from the bubbling water, she circled around to the far side and stood face to face with him, her sexy silhouette outlined against the panorama of all those city lights.

What a woman! thought DeClercq.

When the lights shine on her, the stars shine on me.

With her eyes smoldering with mischief, she made a show of stepping into the tub. One foot, the other foot, and a shimmy down into the water as her convex hips, her concave waist, and her breasts sank beneath the frothy foam.

“Want to play footsie?”

“You bet,” he said.

She held the bottle of champagne above the water. “Let’s pop the cork and see how high it’ll fly.”

“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t—”

Suddenly, a blinding explosion seared the night sky beyond her, and a fireball plummeted to the earth.

“What was that?” exclaimed Gill, standing up and splashing water as she looked behind her.

“Whatever it was—” the cop began, but he didn’t finish the sentence.

From the aviary, Binky finished it for him.

“Nevermore,” squawked the bird.

“He got chocolate raisins!”

“Lucky me.”

“He won’t share, Daddy!” bawled the wicked witch.

“Share with your sister, Stuart.”

“All gone,” mumbled the Frankenstein monster through a mouthful of marbles.

“Big jerk!” cried the witch.

“Dad, she snapped off one of my neck bolts!”

“Sarah—”

“Daddy, he broke my witch’s hat!”

Pete knew he shouldn’t take his eyes from the road, but he chanced a peek in the rear-view mirror. Sure enough, one of the two collar bolts beneath the green face of the monster had been snapped off, and the pointed hat of the wicked witch drooped like erectile dysfunction.

“You’re a deadbeat dad,” Alice had bitched when he’d phoned last week to tell the wickedest witch of all that his child-support check would be late. “If the kids end up on crack, I’ll blame you. Get off your lazy ass and
be
a dad for Halloween.”

So to shut up his ex-wife, Pete had taken both brats out
to trick-or-treat, and once they’d bagged enough candy to rot their teeth and launch their future dentist’s bills to the moon, he’d caged them in the back of the car and set off for the North Shore to finish his daddy duties with a bang of fireworks.

His eyes returned to the road.

If not for the inadequate causeway bisecting Stanley Park and crossing the entrance to the harbor as the Lions Gate Bridge, the mountainside population would be larger. Decades ago, when the Guinness family built the bridge to their British Properties, three lanes would have seemed an extravagance, a freeway from one woodlot to another. But now, unless you drove the long route around the harbor, this was the only crossing that connected the bedrooms of the North Shore with the downtown office towers.

“He got chocolate peanuts!”

“Crybaby!”

“He won’t share, Daddy!”

“That’s enough!” Pete was fed up with the antics of these urchins on a sugar high. He scowled at them in the rear-view mirror, and that’s when he was blinded by a light from above just a second before—
craaack!
—the windshield bowed under the weight—

Pete shrieked in horror!

—of a black skull mottled with charred meat.

On reflex, he wrenched the steering wheel toward the oncoming lane, causing a head-on collision, the first in a chain reaction of collisions along the bridge, which ended in a twenty-car pileup and dozens of injuries.

It was an honor to die as a Thunder God.

In the closing months of the war, the Japanese had developed what they hoped would be the ultimate kamikaze weapon: a piloted glider bomb called the
ohka,
the “cherry blossom.” Manned by a pilot facing certain death, the
ohka
would be carried to its target on the belly of a mother plane, then set free like a baby coming down the birth canal. As the
ohka
’s three rocket engines accelerated to over 550 miles per hour, the pilot—honored as a Thunder God—would guide it straight toward an enemy ship.

“Hissatsu!”

Kaboom!

And you went to Yasukuni Shrine as a god.

Technically, this old prop plane qualified the yakuza pilot as a kamikaze, not a Thunder God. But his uncle had guided an
ohka
to its target during the war, and was forevermore revered by his family, so now the cancer-ridden pilot fantasized that he was a Thunder God too.

Having dropped his dead weight onto the Lions Gate Bridge, Tokuda’s henchman targeted his propeller at the billowing sails out on the harbor. Then, pushing the controls forward to turn his plane into a dive bomber, he gave it full throttle.

The Thunder God descended in a power dive.

Sgt. Dane Winter was striding up the street when a woman walking toward him raised both hands to her face like Munch’s
The Scream
and cried, “My God, no!”

His plan was to hike across downtown to False Creek and up over Burrard Bridge to the south shore, where he’d follow the creek-side walk to his condo. Jackie had been caught in a delay at work, so he’d told her to let Chuck drive her car to Mud Bay Airport to pick up the plane. Dane would drive her down to the convention center to meet up with Joe after his rehearsal. From there, Jackie and Joe could drive Dane’s car to the Mounties’ airport on Sea Island, and Chuck could pick them up there for the fireworks.

“What about you?” she had asked.

“I’ll walk home,” he’d said. “The exercise will do me good, and I can pretend I’m out trick-or-treating like when I was a kid. That solves your problem.”

So that’s what they had done. Joe and Jackie had driven off, while Dane spent half an hour touring the convention center. How he wished he could have hooked his grandfather up with Joe. Think of the war stories those two vets would have shared!

Now he was walking home.

The shock etched into the woman’s face prompted the Mountie to whirl around just in time to see a miniature version of 9/11 unfold before his eyes. A single-engine plane came dive-bombing out of the sky and rammed into the convention center, hard enough to shiver its pilings and shake the canvas sails that lined its length like a typhoon hitting a windjammer. The plane exploded on impact, and
flames blew back from its tail. One wing was blown off and propelled into the air. The sergeant caught the registration letters as it pinwheeled down to the street.

“Lewis. Special X.”

“Rusty,” Dane said into his cellphone as he dashed toward the crash site, “a plane just struck the convention center. I’m on the scene. I need a registration checked with Transport Canada.”

“Shoot.”

“C-DKYZ. I want the name of the registered owner and the airport the plane calls home.”