Kamikaze (19 page)

Black Rain

Knock, knock ...

A pause.

Knock, knock ...

Again.

In his dream, Joe Hett awoke to knocking on his door, an insistent rapping that was a harbinger of official business. Throwing back the covers, he swung out of bed, slipped into his slippers and tugged on his terry-towel bathrobe, then shuffled through his house to confront whoever was at his door.

Knock, knock ...

“Hold on,” Joe said in his dream, sliding off the burglar chain and thumbing back the lock. When he swung wide the door, he came face to face with two uncomfortable men in USAF uniforms.

“Colonel Hett,” said the Southerner with the higher rank, “I regret to inform you that your son, Captain Chuck Hett, was killed in combat in Vietnam.”

Knock, knock ...

“Jesus Christ!”

Joe’s eyes snapped open and he jerked bolt upright in bed. His heart pounded in his throat and cold sweat beaded his forehead. For an instant, he was relieved that it had only been a dream—that Chuck had not been killed in Vietnam—but then it sank in that his son was dead all the same.

Throwing back the covers, Joe swung out of bed. Slipping into his slippers, he pulled on his bathrobe and cinched the belt around his waist. Then he shuffled across the hotel room to the door and undid the various anti-burglary devices.

Knock, knock ...

“Hold on,” Joe said, as he had in his dream, and he opened the door to two men dressed in the red serge uniform of the RCMP.

“Colonel Hett,” said the Mountie with the higher rank, “I’m Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq. This is Sergeant Dane Winter. We have reason to believe that your granddaughter, Corporal Jacqueline Hett of my section, Special X, has been kidnapped.”

“Jesus Christ!” said Joe.

Joe himself had been a part of U.S. Air Force “notification teams,” and he knew the drill by heart. The dead or missing member’s commander or an officer of equal or higher rank would arrive at the door with a chaplain and a doctor or nurse, if available. The brass would be in USAF dress blues: matching coat, trousers, and tie, with a lighter blue shirt. Metal rank insignia would glitter on the coat, and a service cap would be tucked under one arm.

What threw him here was the color.

Both Mounties wore scarlet, and each had a weaponless Sam Browne, riding breeches, high boots, and brown leather gloves. Rank and insignia pins and medals gleamed on their chests. And of course, each held the Stetson hat.

“I know what you’re thinking,” DeClercq said.

“You do?” said Joe.

“You wish you were home so America could handle this.”

“No disrespect intended, Chief Superintendent, but history doesn’t condition us to have confidence in redcoats.”

“Do you want this uniform to instill confidence in you? Or do you want it to instill purpose in us?”

Joe was plumbing for any sign that he could trust this Horseman. Earlier, Jackie had said to him, “DeClercq’s the sharpest cop I know. We can leave the manhunting to him.” But she was talking about tracking down a killer after Chuck was already dead. This was his beloved granddaughter alive in some thug’s clutches.

Still, he found what he was looking for in DeClercq’s bearing. Usually, a passing of the burden occurs at times like this. The notification officer has tragic information that he must pass on to somebody else. As soon as the news is delivered, the weight of the burden shifts. The officer can do little to comfort the upset recipient, and the bearer of the bad news finds relief in having discharged his duty.

But not here.

For what Joe sensed was that the Mountie was
taking on
a burden, as if the effect of his news on Joe was the effect on him too. And then the colonel recalled something else
Jackie had said: “He’ll track down whoever killed Dad as much for
himself
as he will for us.”

“She’s your granddaughter,” DeClercq said, “but Corporal Hett is under
my
command. We have a call to arms in the Mounted for ordeals like this: ‘A member is down.’ You have my promise. I’ll not leave her behind.”

The old man nodded. That’s what he had to hear. The last thing he thought he’d be doing in his eighties was girding himself for battle. But if this was where the battle was, this was where he’d fight it. Old though he might be, Joe still had the right stuff. He had steeled himself in the Pacific so many decades ago, and he found the fortitude to do it once more.

“Fill me in,” he said.

“After she dropped you here last night, we think Jackie went for a jog,” the chief began. “She parked Sergeant Winter’s car in a cul-de-sac off the North Shore seawall, and it was later found abandoned by the local police. The same MO we saw with your son.”

“Jac can take care of herself. We trained her in self-defense from the time she was a girl.”

“We think that she was waylaid by professionals. And that this hood is behind it.”

DeClercq showed the colonel a photo.

“I had a beef with this guy at the airport,” said Joe.

“We know. His name is Genjo Tokuda. He’s a retired godfather of Tokyo’s yakuza.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“I think we just found out. I thought your son died
because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Jackie’s snatching is too great a coincidence.”

“And the kamikaze attack?”

“Crashing the plane into the Pacific vets’ convention was designed to blindside us while the real target is in play. Grabbing Jackie—like the murder of your son—is a means to that end.”

Joe stared at the photo. “He’s about the same age as me.”

“Tokuda was in the Pacific War. We checked,” said Winter.

“Stationed where?”

“China. Hong Kong. The South Pacific. And finally, Okinawa.”

“That’s a long time to hold a military grudge.”

“It’s more than that.”

“How so?”

“You served in the 509th Group, Colonel. Jackie told me you flew in the
Enola Gay.
”

Joe took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.

“You think Tokuda holds the same grudge that Tokyo’s governor gave voice to after 9/11?”

“What’s that?” asked DeClercq.

“The governor said that September 11 was nothing like the kamikaze attacks in the Pacific War. He said it more closely resembled the indiscriminate attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

The colonel glowered at the photo. “I think you’re right,” he said. “Tokuda wants
me
.”

Hiroshima, Japan

August 6, 1945

The all-clear siren had sounded at 7:31 a.m. to tell the war-weary citizens of Hiroshima that it was safe to come out of their shelters for the day and go to work. By a quarter after eight, as rush hour got under way, the streets were bustling. Seen from above, Hiroshima resembled a human hand. Its fingers poked into the bay where the commander of the Japanese fleet had waited for the first triumphant radio reports from the forces attacking Pearl Harbor. Already, the cruel August sun beat down on the deep blue sea and the six brown finger-forks of the Ota River. Within the clusters of wooden houses with their black-tiled peaks and rooftop vegetable gardens, people lit ovens to cook breakfast or read the
Chugoku Shimbun.
Outside, the byways were abuzz with people in trolleys, on horse carts, on bicycles, and on foot. In a throwback to the days when the Imperial Cavalry had trampled all before it, officers at Hiroshima Castle rode to work on horseback. At the moment, a prince on a white stallion cantered across the Aioi Bridge.

Six miles above the city, in the
Enola Gay,
that bridge moved into the bombsight that was aiming Little Boy.

Hiroshima Castle sat on the palm of the hand. The four-hundred-year-old moated citadel was the command center of the Imperial Army. In its shadow stood several armaments factories and the
Gaisenkan,
the “triumphal hall” from which so many soldiers had embarked and to which so few would
return. In the cells of the castle, American prisoners ate bowls of mush. With forty thousand Japanese troops in residence, the yard outside was full of men doing calisthenics.

The strange thing is that no one heard the blast.

A noiseless flash of light—whiter than any white most Japanese had ever seen—cut across the sky like a sheet of sunlight. In that first millisecond, the fireball was more than a hundred million degrees Fahrenheit. Those close to the blast were vaporized. Some left behind permanent shadows where their own bodies had shielded brick and concrete. The ghost of a painter up a ladder, about to dip his brush into a paint can, was etched on the face of a building. A coachman, hand up and whip in the air, and his horse were cast as silhouettes on a bridge. In the hospitals, all the X-ray plates were exposed.

Within seconds, 78,000 died and 51,000 were injured. Death took a quarter of the population, and a third of the casualties were soldiers. At Hiroshima Castle, just nine hundred yards from the epicenter, stone columns were rammed straight down into the ground.

The castle vanished.

The heat flash ignited fires a mile away. The eyes of those caught gazing up as the weapon exploded melted into their sockets and dribbled down their cheeks. Steel doors and stone walls glowed red. The asphalt pavement turned to tar.

Hiroshima had been built to burn. Ninety percent of the closely packed houses were constructed of wood, and seventy thousand buildings instantly went up in flames. The raging
firestorm consumed everything in its path. The dome of the Museum of Science and Industry was stripped to its steel frame. Burned-out cars, trucks, and trolleys and crumpled bicycles tumbled along the streets. Any trees left standing were black and bare of leaves, their limbs stretched heavenward as if begging for mercy. So intense was the heat even a mile away that men’s caps were etched into their scalps, kimono patterns were tattooed on women’s bodies, and children’s socks were fused to their legs.

The bomb caught them going and coming. First came the explosion. Morning commuters were snatched off the streets and hurled through the air. Workmen were buried alive. Water mains snapped, and glass shards shot in all directions. Atop Mount Futaba, an officer whose uniform was torn off by the blast extended his sword as the signal for his dead anti-aircraft crew to open fire.

Then came the implosion.

Tongues of fire licked up through the dust-choked miasma, and the seething mass at the purple-red core of the explosion sucked in superheated air. Uprooted trees and airborne doors, roofs, and strips of matting got lost in a whirlwind. The boiling mushroom cloud blotted out the sun, plunging Hiroshima into atomic darkness.

Within the hour, black rain began to fall.

Oily, gooey, and inky with radioactive soot, drops of moisture the size of marbles teemed down onto the blazing ruins from nine o’clock on. In some parts of the wasteland, it rained for more than an hour, splattering gobs of uranium waste around with vengeful abandon.

Panicked people screamed that the Americans were showering Hiroshima with gasoline as a prelude to torching it and setting fire to those still living.

Was that the plan?

Were they to be burned alive?

Or was this their fate?

Were they being gassed?

For there was the odor in the air, the “electric smell” produced by nuclear fission.

At that moment, only one thing was certain:

Two billion American dollars will buy an awful lot of bang for the buck.