Kamikaze (28 page)

Samurai Sword

November 3, Now

Knock, knock ...

“Enter,” said DeClercq, turning from the Strategy Wall, where he was taking down the photos and reports that had given him an overview of the yakuza case.

Wearing the service dress uniform of the U.S. Air Force, Colonel Joe “Red” Hett stood framed in the doorway. A “full bird colonel”—which is how the military distinguished him from lesser ranks—he wore silver eagles affixed to his epaulets. A military historian and strategist at heart, the chief superintendent grasped the symbolism of the American rank insignia. Gold is the deepest in the earth. Silver is higher. Railroad tracks run across the land. Oak trees soar skyward. Birds fly above them, but not above the stars. So stars are saved for the highest ranks: generals and admirals.

Hett saluted.

DeClercq saluted back.

“The full Monty? What’s up, Colonel?”

“I came to thank you.”

“The dress blues are for me?”

“The girl you saved is the most important person in my life.”

“
You
saved her, Colonel. Offering yourself up as bait took a lot of guts.”

“That decision was easy. You called the hard ones.”

“In your case, it was actually a constable named Singh.”

“Thank Singh for me.”

“I will.”

The Mountie motioned the colonel to one of the chairs facing his U-shaped desk and then sat down in its partner. Beyond the windows, it rained, rained, rained.

“When do you leave for sunny New Mexico?”

“I thought I’d stick around a while and enjoy your weather. Truth is, I’m living in overtime, and I’m going to spend a few weeks of it with Jackie.”

“I’m told your son was cremated. I’ll give her time off so you two can take his ashes home.”

“We’re going to spread them here. I like the tradition of laying a warrior to rest where he fell in battle. There’s a rock with a strange name off Stanley Park—”

“Siwash Rock?”

“Right. Siwash Rock. The legend that goes with it is about clean fatherhood. What better epitaph could there be for my son? We plan to scatter Chuck’s ashes there on Veterans Day. Remembrance Day, to you. A name I think fitting, by the way. Jackie will remember her dad every time she jogs by.”

Knock, knock ...

“Enter,” said DeClercq.

Both men turned toward the door, where Sgt. Dane Winter stood with a sword in his hand.

Again, Hett wondered if Winter was bedding Jackie. He hoped so. A good-looking couple. And he might greet a great-grandchild before he passed on.

“I saw you downstairs,” the sergeant said, “and thought you might want this. It’s the hara-kiri sword that took Tokuda’s life. Prints on the handle matched Yamada’s. There’ll be no trial. So the sword is yours as a war trophy.”

The colonel stood up and received the weapon as he might have a flag from his son’s coffin. With one hand gripping the handle and the other holding the sheath, he yanked them an inch or two apart like samurai do in the movies.

“Have you read
From Here to Eternity,
Sergeant?”

“No,” said Winter.

“I knew James Jones. He was at Pearl Harbor.”

“Sir?”

“And I know the ending of his book by heart:

“ ‘Mother, do you think the war will last long enough so I can graduate from the Point and be in it? Jerry Wilcox said it wouldn’t.’

“ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I
don’t think it’ll last that long.’

“ ‘Well, gee whiz, mother,’ her son said, ‘I
want to be in it.’

“ ‘Well, cheer up,’ Karen said, ‘and don’t let it worry you. You may miss this one, but you’ll be just the right age for the next one.’

“ ‘You really think so, mother?’ her son said anxiously.”

“Written when, Colonel?”

“1951.”

“So Jones got it right?”

“Yes,” replied Hett. “Vietnam came along in time for my son, and but for a twist of fate in where she was born, my granddaughter would likely have been in Iraq. Hetts have served in every conflict since the American Revolution.”

“Your loss is our gain.”

“We’re a warrior nation. You might have noticed that. Oh, but we do love our wars. We love to thump our chests and wave Old Glory. But ever since I dropped that bomb, we’ve been cursed. The Korean War left us with that threat. The Vietnam War was bogus and an utter defeat. And now the oil hawks have taken on
millions
of vengeful suicide bombers, and the new kamikazes will be coming for us from here to eternity. Our enemies have our number. They see our Achilles heel. We’re unable to win a guerrilla war. We fear body bags, which is why we hide them from sight. We want to do our shock-and-awe killing from the height of the
Enola Gay.
Our enemies, on the other hand, parade their dead through the streets and swear in blood to follow them to the grave.”

The colonel slammed the sword back into its sheath.

“Do me a favor, Sergeant?”

He handed Winter the hara-kiri sword.

“Take this to the Lions Gate Bridge and hurl it into the sea. I’m an old man, and the Pacific War was a
long
time ago. I really don’t have the stomach for this sword.”

Author’s Note

This is a work of fiction. The plot and the characters are products of the author’s imagination. Where real persons, places, incidents, institutions, and such are incorporated to create the illusion of authenticity, they are used fictitiously. Inspiration was drawn from the following non-fiction sources:

Allen, Thomas B., and Norman Polmar.
Code-name Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan—and Why Truman Dropped the Bomb.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Alperovitz, Gar.
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of an American Myth.
New York: Knopf, 1995.

Archer, Bernice, and Kent Fedorowich. “The Women of Stanley: Internment in Hong Kong, 1942-45.”
Women’s History Review
5, no. 3 (1996).

Arroyo, Ernest.
Pearl Harbor.
New York: Metrobooks, 2001.

Axell, Albert, and Hideaki Kase.
Kamikaze: Japan’s Suicide Gods.
London: Pearson, 2002.

Banham, Tony.
Not the Slightest Chance: The Defence of Hong Kong, 1941.
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004.

“The
Enola Gay
and the Atomic Bombing of Japan.” The History Channel, 1995.

Feifer, George.
Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb.
New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992.

Ferguson, Ted.
Desperate Siege: The Battle of Hong Kong.
New York: Doubleday, 1980.

Ferrell, Robert (ed.).
Dear Bess: The Letters From Harry to Bess Truman, 1910-1959.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1983.

Frank, Richard B.
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.
New York: Random House, 1999.

Giovannitti, Len, and Fred Freed.
The Decision to Drop the Bomb.
New York: Coward-McCann, 1965.

Gow, Ian.
Okinawa 1945: Gateway to Japan.
London: Grub Street, 1986.

Great Battles of World War II.
London: Marshall Cavendish, 1995.

Hersey, John.
Hiroshima.
New York: Knopf, 1996.

Hill, Peter B. E.
The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

“Hiroshima: The Decision to Drop the Bomb.” The History Channel, 1995.

“Hiroshima: Why the Bomb Was Dropped.” ABC Nightly News, 1996.

Johnson, E. Pauline [Tekahionwake]. “The Siwash Rock.”
Legends of Vancouver.
Vancouver: David Spencer Ltd., 1911.

Kaplan, David E., and Alex Dubro.
Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Life Magazine.
Pearl Harbor: America’s Call to Arms.
New York: Time-Life Books, 2001.

Lindsay, Oliver.
The Battle for Hong Kong, 1941–1945: Hostage to Fortune.
Staplehurst, UK: Spellmount, 2005.

——. The Lasting Honour: The Fall of Hong Kong, 1941.
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978.

Lord, Walter.
Day of Infamy.
New York: Henry Holt, 1957.

McKenna, Brian. “Savage Christmas: Hong Kong 1941.”
The Valor and the Horror.
Toronto: National Film Board of Canada, 1992.

“Okinawa: The Last Battle.” The History Channel, 1983.

Pearson, Helen. “Human Genetics: Dual Identities.”
Nature
417 (May 2, 2002).

Prange, Gordon W., with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon.
At Dawn We Slept.
New York: McGraw Hill, 1981.

——. Dec. 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor.
New York: McGraw Hill, 1988.

Robertson, David.
Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes.
New York: Norton, 1994.

Saga, Junichi.
The Gambler’s Tale: A Life in Japan’s Underworld.
New York: Kodansha International, 1991.

Seymour, Christopher.
Yakuza Diary: Doing Time in the Japanese Underworld.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996.

Takaki, Ronald.
Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

Thomas, Gordon, and Max Morgan-Witts.
Enola Gay.
New York: Stein and Day, 1977.

Time-Life Books/BBC.
Secrets of WWII: Target Okinawa: The Greatest Sea/Air Battle in History.
London: Nugus/Martin Productions, 1998.

Truman, Harry S.
Memoirs.
Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1955, 1956.

Wheeler, Keith.
The Road to Tokyo.
New York: Time-Life Books, 1979.

Whiting, Robert.
Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan.
New York: Vintage, 2000.

Willmott, H. P.
The Second World War in the Far East.
London: Cassell, 1999.

Yahara, Colonel Hiromichi.
The Battle for Okinawa.
Translated by Roger Pineau and Masatoshi Uehara. New York: Wiley, 1995.

The fictional portrayal of Harry Truman is based largely on the above primary and secondary sources, including Truman’s memoirs and his letters to Bess Truman (edited by Robert Ferrell).

General Curtis E. LeMay—known as “Iron Ass” and “Bombs Away LeMay” by one side, and as “Brutal LeMay” by the other—directed both the firebombing and the atomic
bombing of Japan. The LeMay quote “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age” actually refers to Vietnam and appears in his autobiography,
Mission with LeMay: My Story
(New York: Doubleday, 1965), which was co-authored by MacKinlay Kantor. In the Stanley Kubrick film
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,
the gung-ho, cigar-chomping, “acceptable casualties” character of General Buck Turgidson, portrayed by George C. Scott, was inspired by LeMay.

Slade

Vancouver, B.C.