Kamikaze (18 page)

Bang!

Forty-three seconds after the drop and almost six miles down from the
Enola Gay,
the bomb’s detonator ignited the explosive powder in its casing. That blast propelled a five-pound atomic “bullet” of uranium 235 along the six-foot barrel of an internal cannon, where it rammed into the “target,” a seventeen-pound hunk of uranium 235 fixed to the muzzle, to produce “crit,” critical mass.

BWAMMMMMMM!

This atomic explosion!

Seen from the bomber, the brilliant dot of purplish-red light above Hiroshima might have been the Big Bang that created today’s ever-expanding universe. God only knew how many people were fried in the next few seconds, as a searing fireball blasted out for miles. Like an overexposed photograph, the sky was filled with a bright white light. Inside the plane, the crew members were protected by their dark goggles. As near as Joe could tell, Hiroshima had ceased to exist.

Joe could
taste
the intensity.

It tasted like lead.

In place of the city, the crew got a glimpse of hell. Firestorms raged across the land, and a gigantic, funnel-like column of air—a physical manifestation of the explosion itself—rose up at the speed of sound. Its core was hellfire red. The smoke was purplish gray. Someone yelled something unintelligible, and the
Enola Gay
was slammed by the ear-splitting din that shells make when they blow right beside you.

“Flak!”

“The sons of bitches are shooting at us!”

“There’s another one coming!”

As the intercom was overwhelmed by pandemonium, a few of the crew were thrown from their seats in a bone-jarring crash. Whatever had hit them a moment ago now hit them again, bucking the bomber up from its flight path.

“That wasn’t flak. Stay calm,” Tibbets announced. “That was the shock wave bouncing back from the ground. There won’t be any more. Let’s get our recordings going.”

Eleven miles from Hiroshima, the Superfortress began to orbit the devastated city. As the men waited to express their thoughts for posterity, they peered out at a huge mushroom cloud. The monstrous black plume was shot through with flames, the head billowing out for miles as it roiled up past the
Enola Gay
at thirty thousand feet and continued to rise.

“My God,” someone whispered. “What have we done?”

Stunner

Vancouver

November 1, Now

This isn’t happening to me! How dare someone do this to Dad! Let me get my hands on him for five minutes! Life will be gray without Dad in it! Wrong place, wrong time! That’s how it is! Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance: the five stages of grief were colliding in Jackie’s battered heart and mind like boxcars slamming each other in the midst of a train wreck.

Her initial concern had been Joe. He didn’t look well. Though he tried to put on the brave face of his generation—the Depression and the war steeled men like Joe to overwhelming loss—the health problems of an old man undermined his will. She and her granddad had leaned on each other for support through the midnight hours, but soon it was obvious to Jackie that Joe was struggling to shore up his crumbling front for her sake.

“Red?” she said as they drove away from Special X.

“Uh?”

“Your face suits your name.”

“It’s my blood pressure.”

“You need sleep. I don’t want you having a heart attack or a stroke on me.”

“I need my pills.”

“Where are they?”

“Back in the hotel room.”

“Let’s go get ’em. Then I’ll take you home with me. Unless you’d rather be alone?”

“Would you?”

“To be honest, yes. I feel a desperate need to run. If I don’t work this tension out, I’ll explode.”

“Go do what you gotta do.”

So having dropped her granddad off at the hotel, after extracting a promise that he’d take something to help him sleep, Jackie went home, changed into her running gear, then drove Dane’s car to the North Shore and parked in a cross street that ended at the seawall. Along False Creek, or around Stanley Park, or here at the foot of the mountains, this city had a multitude of oceanside walks.

From Dundarave Pier, Jackie began jogging east with the wind at her back. The tide was high and waves were crashing over the stone wall, drenching her with spray if she timed the ebb and flow wrong. Within the hour, dawn would ignite the horizon, flushing the sky beyond the Lions Gate Bridge and the lonely cone of Mount Baker in Washington State.

Splash ...

Splash ...

Splash ...

Puddles spewed out from her runners.

The surest way to keep her emotions under control was to concentrate on trying to make sense out of what had happened. That she was officially off the case was a certainty, for no one knew better than the chief how personal involvement in a murder could cloud your judgment. DeClercq had run gauntlets like this when his first wife and his daughter were murdered, and again when his second wife got caught in crossfire. Having learned the hard way, he’d insist that Chuck’s murder was investigated by cops with cold minds.

Still, she’d rather play the cop and try to do something useful—like come up with a motive to pass on to Special X—than break down under emotional stress and cry her heart out for her dad.

Splash ...

Splash ...

Splash ...

When she heard that a Japanese pilot had intentionally crashed a plane into the Canada Place convention center, Jackie’s reaction was that of any North American in the post 9/11 world: “It’s got to be terrorists.”

But that thought had forced her to ask, “Why would Japanese terrorists attack Vancouver?”

Japan, to her mind, wasn’t a hotbed of international terrorism. Of course, there had been that Sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system in 1995, when twelve people died and six thousand were injured. But that was an act of
domestic
terrorism by a religious cult trying to hasten the apocalypse. That sort of craziness could spawn in any country.

For a 9/11 parallel, you had to go back to 1972, the year three members of a terrorist cell called the Japanese Red Army landed at Tel Aviv’s airport and opened up with machine guns on a group of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, killing twenty-five and wounding eighty.

Still, why Vancouver?

Sucking in deep breaths of ocean air as she ran through the tunnel of night, Jackie thought back to the headlines she’d read on the day after 9/11.

“Kamikaze Terrorist Attacks.”

“Kamikaze Blitz on the U.S.A.”

At the time, that was a forgivable connection to make. During the Pacific War, Americans had reacted with disbelief to the Japanese kamikaze attacks. Sure, they’d been raised on Nathan Hale—“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”—but kamikazes actually
meant
it, and that scared the hell out of most Americans. So it was only natural to equate the human bombs of the Al-Qaeda attacks with the kamikazes of the past.

The similarities seemed striking.

Both the attackers of 9/11 and the kamikazes volunteered to sacrifice themselves for sacred beliefs. Both thought that they were inflicting divine punishment on their enemies. Both prepared themselves spiritually for the carnage to come. Both thought that their gods were watching over them, and that death had its own rewards. The Al-Qaeda
crews were told to shout “Allah is great!” as they struck, for that’s believed to incite terror in the hearts of infidels. And the kamikazes were told to yell
“Hissatsu!”
at warships as they crash-dived.

There was, however, a big difference.

The targets, Jackie thought now.

Splash ...

Splash ...

Splash ...

At both Pearl Harbor and Okinawa, the Japanese had aimed their planes at military targets: the warships, airfields, and armed soldiers of their enemy. Sneak attacks have always been a legitimate tactic in war—fighting men refer to them as “the element of surprise”—so America had the wherewithal to defend itself.

Not so with 9/11.

That involved the indiscriminate massacre of civilians.

So what to make of this?

Here, the plane had slammed into a ship-shaped conference center hosting military vets from the Pacific Theater. Quasi-civilians, but vets at heart. So did that qualify as a terrorist attack?

It has to be a long-simmering grudge, thought Jackie.

A vendetta by a Japanese vet—or his relatives—with a wound still festering from the Pacific War.

A kamikaze attack required a plane.

Mud Bay Airport had poor security.

And her father—a Pacific vet himself—was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Splash ...

Splash ...

Splash ...

Ironically, the rising sun was just about to conquer the overcast horizon beyond the Lions Gate Bridge and the torpedoed convention center. Having reached Ambleside Park at the foot of Sentinel Hill, with Gill Macbeth’s home at its crown, Jackie stopped running east and turned around. Across the water and against the distant lights of Point Grey, she glimpsed the black silhouette of Siwash Rock, just offshore from Stanley Park. Unlike the sandstone that had once surrounded it, this volcanic chimney had withstood erosion from the relentless sea to become one of the prominent landmarks of Vancouver.

It was no use.

She couldn’t hold back.

One look at Siwash Rock and Jackie burst into tears for her dad.

The way Jackie heard it, the story went like this.

Thousands of years ago, said a Squamish Indian chief, there was a noble and upright warrior whose wife was about to give birth. According to his religion, “clean fatherhood” was most noble and upright. That’s why the warrior and his wife walked down to where the sea met the shore of what is now Stanley Park.

“I must swim,” the warrior said.

“I must swim too,” said his wife.

It was a custom for both parents of an unborn child to swim until their flesh was so clean that there was no scent for the creatures of the wilderness to pick up. The scent of a human is fearsome to forest animals, and it was believed that parents would be fit to have their child only if there was no reason for such fear.

And so they swam in the turbulent waters of the narrows, just off Prospect Point.

Before the woman waded ashore and vanished into the forest, she said to her husband, “Come to me at sunrise, and you’ll not find me alone.”

On and on, the warrior swam so he would be spotlessly clean for his child’s first look at the world. The law of vicarious purity held that only a child unhampered by uncleanness at birth would have the opportunity to live a clean life.

But as he swam, a great canoe manned by four giants representing the deity paddled into the narrows.

“Get out of our way,” the giants ordered, for if their oars touched a mortal, they would lose their powers.

Ignoring them, the warrior kept on swimming.

“Move ashore,” they commanded.

The swimmer refused. “I won’t stop,” he declared. “Nor will I go ashore.”

“You dare defy the deity?”

“For my child to live a spotless life, I’ll defy anyone, including the deity himself.”

As the giants debated what to do, they heard the cry of a newborn child in the forests of Stanley Park. Because the warrior had placed his child’s future above everything else,
the deity decreed him to be an example for all men to come. As the warrior’s feet straddled the line where sea met land, the giants raised their paddles and transformed him to stone.

That’s why, today, the petrified image of
T’elch
stands as an erect and enduring sentinel at the entrance to the harbor. Like a noble-spirited and upright warrior, Siwash Rock is a monument to a man who kept his own life clean so that Clean Fatherhood would be the heritage of generations to come.

From now on, Jackie knew the sight of Siwash Rock would remind her of her dad.

All cried out and running with the wind in her face, Chuck’s daughter focused on the revolving beam of the lighthouse ahead, which winked just this side of DeClercq’s waterfront home. Suddenly, Jackie was tired and ready for sleep.

Splash ...

Splash ...

Splash ...

Not a soul had passed her during her pre-dawn jog. Not in this kind of weather. But as Jackie closed on the finish line in front of the cul-de-sac where she’d parked Dane’s car, she saw the first fellow runner of dawn come around the corner. He was bundled up in waterproof gear that she thought unsuitable for jogging, and his face was hidden by the hood. As they crossed paths, she nodded and said, “It’s
all yours.” Then, an instant after she discerned Japanese features in the cowl, the jogger karate-chopped her with the edge of his hand and, stunned, Jackie lost consciousness.