Gate

by Mayer, Bob

  Kuzumi woke up in agony, pain spiking through his back. He was in the back half of the plane, he could tell that, but there was no front half. Daylight streamed in. He could hear voices yelling in Russian. He reached down his side and with difficulty flipped open the holster holding his Model 94 pistol. For some reason he was having great trouble moving his arms. He pulled the pistol up and put the muzzle to the side of his head as he saw a Russian officer climb into the wreckage. Kuzumi pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  He pulled again, then remembered he had not pulled back the slide to chamber a round. He reached to do it but a jackboot slammed down on his right hand, pinning it to the floor of the plane. Kuzumi could feel bones crack in his hand.

  The Russian officer stooped over and took the pistol. The man laughed and shook his head as he tucked the souvenir into his belt. Then he spit in Kuzumi’s face as other soldiers clambered into the wreckage. They dragged Kuzumi out of the remains of the plane. He spent a few days trussed there at the airfield, lying in his own excrement and in agony before a senior officer arrived. They cleaned Kuzumi up and took him on a Russian plane to a camp in the middle of Siberia. Kuzumi had only a glimpse at it as they dragged him off the plane to the prison building. He didn’t see the world outside that building for eight years.

  Kuzumi looked down at his right hand. The fingers had never healed properly. Nothing had. The Russians had used every injury he suffered in the crash for their torture and then made new ones.

  Eight years. Eight years of needles directly into his spine where the bone had been broken. The nerves manipulated to bring forth pain. Eight years of the fingers being bent back again and again and again. The drugs, the lack of sleep and food. The water dripping through his cell. The illnesses. The total lack of communication with any human being other than his torturers. Then the brief moments where they reversed the process and lavished food and rest upon him for a day or two to make the lack even more noticeable. Then they would kick the door open and take it all away and begin the torture anew.

  But they let him keep the picture. He now knew why. To remind him of another life and to quicken his breaking under their control. But it had worked the opposite way. The picture gave him strength. There was life out there. Or so he had thought. So he had thought for those eight long years.

  Kuzumi leaned back in his wheelchair. The Russians had wanted information. They had seen the blast from Genzai Bakudan. They had known of the program from their own spies. They wanted the secret of the atom. But Kuzumi had never spoken. Never said a word. No matter what they did. For eight years. The Russians got their secrets to develop a bomb elsewhere and when they finally exploded their first one, Kuzumi was no longer valuable in that capacity.

  The Society saved him. The Russians no longer needed the secrets in Kuzumi’s head. A bullet in the brain would have been par for the KGB men who controlled his fate. But the Society made Kuzumi valuable to the Russians through a discreet Red Chinese agent. They offered money, minerals, and other valuables for the wreck of a body that Kuzumi was. There was a discreet exchange of man for treasure on one of the small Kuril Islands that were in dispute between Russia and Japan.

  Kuzumi never walked again. He was returned to Hokkaido. And found out the strength he had drawn from the picture was long gone. So he had embraced the Society that had saved him with all his heart and soul, knowing that never again would he open a space in there for another human being.

  Kuzumi took the picture and refolded it. He put it back in the box. The Russians had gone through great lengths for eight years trying to unlock the secret of Genzai Bakudan. Now, what were the North Koreans after and how much of a price were they willing to pay?

  CHAPTER 6

  SAN FRANCISCO

  MONDAY, 6 OCTOBER 1997

  10:45 PM LOCAL

  “.. and on top of all that, you didn’t get paid.”

  Lake removed the special satellite phone from his ear and looked at it for a second, then put it back. “At least I didn’t kill everyone this time,” he said.

  “Thank God for little favors.” Feliks’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Where are your friends now?”

  Lake looked out the grimy windshield of the battered Bronco II. He’d checked the homing device as soon as he’d got back to his hiding place and tracked down the bug he’d planted in the Ingram. It had led him to this section of the San Francisco port. He’d parked behind a large abandoned dumpster with a clear view of the trawler the electronic device told him the Koreans—or, more accurately, the guns the Koreans had stolen—were on board. He relayed that information to Feliks along with the name of the ship: Am Nok Sung.

  “It’s flying the South Korean flag,” Lake added. He’d stolen the Bronco II two days ago from the outer parking lot of the airport after making sure its parking ticket had just been issued that morning. It wouldn’t be missed for several, days and Lake planned on dumping it sooner than that.

  “I’ll run the registry on the ship,” Feliks said. “I don’t understand why the South Koreans would be running an operation in the United States.”

  “There’s no love lost between the Koreans and the Japanese,” Lake said.

  “Do you think they might be connected to the event the other night?’’ Feliks asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lake said. “There’s no indication they are except that they went to the Patriots to get weapons, but they could have picked that information up anywhere.”

  “What do you think they have planned?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Lake said, a little tired of the questioning. “That’s why I’m sitting here watching them.”

  “Let’s not get some friendlies killed with weapons we sold,” Feliks said. He paused. “I’ve got the registry information on the Am Nok Sung coming up on the screen right now. It might be flying the South Korean flag, but it’s registered in Nigeria. That’s a pretty common practice to save on registration fees.”

  “Who registered it?” Lake asked. A burst of static rippled through the phone and he pulled the phone away from his ear for a second.

  “That will take a while,” Feliks said. “We found the message that recruited Starry and Preston on the Internet. I’ll have a copy put in your drop, but it’s not much help. It simply gives them an agency to call and leave a message with their own number. We checked the agency and the drop was paid for in cash. No one remembers who placed it. It was discontinued after two weeks.”

  “A dead end,” Lake said. He was surprised at that. The computer whizzes at the Ranch should have been able to do more. Unless, of course, whoever had placed the message was as smart as they were. Which pointed beyond the Patriots, who weren’t exactly known for their collective IQ level.

  “We’re scanning the Internet, looking for any other similar messages in case whoever sent the first one sends another to get it done right this time.”

  Not likely. Lake thought. He was beginning to respect whoever was pulling the strings here.

  “By the way,” Feliks added, “who fired the other shots last night? The ones that saved your butt?”

  “I don’t know.” Lake had been asking himself the same question all day. He knew it meant one of two things: either he was being followed or the Koreans were being followed. He’d used all his skills earlier in the day when he’d stolen the Bronco and gone to the meet site to make sure he wasn’t followed, so that left the latter as the only viable possibility. He told Feliks that.

  “Well, if you don’t figure out what these people are up to in the next couple of days I’m going to have to tip off the ATF and have them recover the guns,” Feliks said. “That will also take care of our Korean problem.”

  “They’re moving,” Lake said.

  “Excuse me?”

  Lake watched a party of six men wearing long tan raincoats walking down the gangplank off the trawler. “The Koreans are moving,” Lake repeated. “I’ll send you a postcard when they get to their destination. Out.” He turn
ed off the satellite phone and watched. He had no doubt that each man had a MAC-10 hidden under his raincoat.

  The men moved to the end of the pier and turned to the east, following the waterfront. Lake started the engine and began following at a considerable distance; his direction finder told him that one of the men was carrying the MAC-10 with a bug in it, so he didn’t have to keep them constantly in sight.

  *****

  In the crane control room, Nishin also waited until the men were out of sight, then he carefully climbed down. He had spotted the Bronco II when it had pulled in. He now regretted his decision of the previous evening to save the gun dealer; the man was turning out to be a nuisance. Nishin assumed he wanted his money, although how he had found the North Koreans’ ship concerned Nishin.

  Nishin slid into the darker shadows and followed the band of Koreans. He watched as they broke into the first two cars they found parked and hot-wired them. As they drove off, Nishin quickly broke into another car around the corner and did the same.

  *****

  Not very subtle. Lake thought as he watched the Koreans steal an old model Ford LTD and a newer Camaro. They’d simply broken the glass on the driver’s side, unlocked the doors, and climbed in. They at least had the expertise to smash open the steering column and get the engines started.

  He followed the two-car convoy southeast along Columbus Avenue. He noticed a black pickup following farther back and made a note to keep an eye on it. What he did not notice, because it was out of sight, was the white van four blocks back, following the entire procession.

  Directly ahead, Lake could see the bulk of the Trans-america Pyramid filling the night sky. Columbus Avenue ended at the base of the pyramid and the Koreans turned to the half-right, going down Montgomery Street. The black pickup was still following.

  “One big happy family,” Lake muttered.

  The procession continued until they were on I-80, heading for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The toll was only for westbound vehicles and traffic this time of evening was relatively light. Glancing in his rearview mirror, Lake could tell that the black pickup was holding its position. The two stolen cars were ahead in the far-right lane and scrupulously staying at the speed limit. They were on the lower level of the bridge, along with all the other eastbound traffic.

  Lake didn’t like his position between the Koreans and whoever was trailing. He was too close to the Koreans, and there was a good chance they would detect his presence.

  He didn’t want to take a chance, though, and go behind the pickup, since he didn’t know who was at the wheel of that vehicle. For all he knew there were other Koreans in it.

  They approached Yerba Buena Island, the midpoint for the four-and-a-half-mile bridge complex. If the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t so near, the Bay Bridge would perhaps be better known to those outside of the San Francisco area. Finished within a few months of its more famous sister in 1936, it had two levels, with westbound traffic on the top five lanes and eastbound on the bottom five. A quarter million cars a day crossed the bridge, and its partial collapse in the 1994 earthquake had caused massive commuter problems for the Bay area.

  The bridge actually consisted of two major sections. The western, which Lake was coming to the end of, consisted of two suspension bridges, attached in the middle by a central concrete anchorage which was sunk deep into the center of the bay. The eastern part of this section touched land at Yerba Buena Island, bore through a tunnel in the island, then hit the other section of the Bay Bridge, which was a cantilever bridge built on over twenty piers leading into Oakland.

  Lake passed under the last tower of the western suspension section. He was a hundred feet behind the Camaro, which was right on the bumper of the LTD. Both cars slipped into the mouth of the tunnel and Lake kept his distance. He glanced in his rearview mirror; the pickup was also keeping its place.

  As Lake returned his attention to the front, he automatically pulled his foot off the gas pedal. The brake lights on the Camaro were bright red in the tunnel ahead. Lake heard the squeal of rubber as the Camaro spun about. A car in the other lane narrowly avoided collision, swerving out of the way. Lake slammed his foot on the brake as the headlights of the Camaro fixed on his windshield.

  He halted but the other car didn’t. The front bumper of the Camaro smashed into the left-front grill of the Bronco II, jolting Lake forward against his seat belt, then his head snapping back, bouncing against the headrest. The Camaro pinned the Bronco against the wall of the tunnel, the right- front side of the truck hitting concrete.

  Two men jumped out of the Camaro, MAC-10s at the ready. Lake ducked before they fired, the bullets shattering the windshield above him, showering him with broken glass.

  He unbuckled his seat beat and slithered between the front seats into the back where the backseat was down. Bullets continued to stream by over his head. He added a few rounds of his own with the Hush Puppy, shooting out the large window in the right corner of the cargo bay.

  Lake gathered himself and dove out through the opening he had just created. He bounced off the right wall of the tunnel, grunting as he felt pain jar through his shoulder. Hitting the pavement, he rolled, pistol at the ready, peering underneath his Bronco. He could see the legs of the Korean on the near side of the Camaro. He fired twice, both rounds hitting the man in the ankle, tearing his leg out from under him. Lake fired again at the prone figure, this time a head shot, killing the stunned man instantly. All of four seconds had elapsed since the accident and the only noise had been that of the collision and the bullets shattering glass.

  Now, there was the sound of another car coming to a hurried halt and Lake took a chance, popping his head up over the side of the cargo bay he had just come out of to see what the tactical situation was. He expected the LTD to be there, disgorging more gunmen, but was surprised instead to see the black pickup twenty feet away and a man leaning out the passenger side, a silenced Steyr automatic rifle in his hands. The man hosed down the second Korean, blowing blood and guts all over the right side of the Camaro. Lake froze an image of the man in his memory: Asian, more Japanese features than Korean, short and thin, and from the way he handled the gun, a professional at the job of killing.

  Lake’s visual inventory was brought to an abrupt halt as the man turned the smoking barrel of the Steyr in his direction. For the second time Lake dove for cover as bullets tore chips out of the concrete above his head. Lake fired underneath, but the man was inside the pickup and all Lake could shoot at was the tires.

  The firing suddenly ceased and Lake heard a vehicle accelerate away. He carefully edged his head around the rear of the Bronco. The pickup was gone. Two smashed vehicles and two dead bodies. He watched the pickup disappear down the tunnel to the east.

  “Fuck,” Lake said, standing up and dusting off broken glass from his clothes. There was a bottleneck of frightened motorists in their cars to the west but no sign of police yet. Lake reached into the front of the Bronco and pulled out his homing device. There was nothing else in the truck that could identify him.

  Lake brought the muzzle of his weapon up as a white van wove its way through the halted cars and raced up to him. He had a perfect sight picture on the driver who leaned over and threw open the passenger door. “Get in!” the man yelled.

  Another Japanese, Lake noted, keeping his weapon steady. He heard sirens in the distance.

  “Get in!” the man repeated. The sirens were getting closer.

  Lake hopped in, keeping his weapon trained on the driver. The man took off, heading west. They passed through the tunnel and out into the night air on the other side of Yerba Buena Island, onto the eastern section of the bridge.

  “I don’t see them,” the driver said, peering ahead.

  “And you are?” Lake asked.

  The driver’s attention remained focused ahead. He appeared to be young, somewhere in his mid-twenties by Lake’s best guess. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a very nice dark gray suit. Lake pressed the barrel of
his pistol into the side of that suit and repeated his question. “Who are you?”

  “Yariyasu Araki,” the man replied.

  Lake spared a glance out the windshield. There was indeed no sign of either the pickup or the LTD. “And you are with?” Lake asked.

  “Japanese CPI,” the man said. “I assume you are with a United States government agency,” he added.

  “Why do you assume that?” Lake asked. He knew what CPI was: a secret arm of the Japanese government, the Central Political Intelligence, a cousin to the Ranch, formed after the Tokyo gas attacks a few years back. Its mission was to keep track of Japan’s fringe groups. The covert world was a small one, and despite all the secrecy the various agencies had an idea of each other’s existence on a level unknown even to their own governments.

  “I intercepted your recent satellite communication phone conversation with what appeared to be your boss,” Araki said.

  Lake was impressed. The Ranch’s equipment was top-notch and the satellite phone was supposed to be totally secure.

  “Also, you were following the Koreans,” Araki continued.

  Lake wasn’t sure whether to take Araki for what he claimed, but since Lake had the gun in the man’s side, he wasn’t overly concerned at the present moment about the veracity of the other man’s claim. With his right hand, Lake flipped open the cover on his direction finder and turned it on.

  Araki glanced over as they descended into Oakland. “You have a fix on them?”

  Lake nodded. “They’re northeast.”

  Araki stayed with I-80 as it turned to the north and ran along the bay.

  “Coming up on due east,” Lake reported.

  Araki took the University Avenue exit and, first chance he had, pulled into a parking lot. “Do you mind?” he asked, pointing at the gun which Lake still had poking into his side.

  “Actually, I do mind,” Lake replied, keeping it in place. “I have no proof you are who you say you are and I just had two different groups of people shoot at me for no reason that I know of. So forgive me if I’m not exactly in the most friendly mood.”