by Allen Steele
‘I wouldn’t exactly call him a target,’ he said. ‘That implies that we’ve picked him for assassination. I prefer the term “opposition.”’
‘Forgive my choice of words,’ she replied stiffly. She wiped down the counter, then opened the microwave to polish the inside. ‘Yet the question remains. If you were a crewman aboard the Boston, why would you be sent, considering the chances that you could be recognized by L’Enfant?’
Nash shrugged. ‘Fair question…but let’s play on equal terms for a change.’ She looked quizzically over her shoulder at him, but said nothing. ‘That is, instead of my giving you all the answers and you avoiding my questions, why don’t you be a bit more open with me for a change. A little more cooperative. Okay?’
Miho looked away; for a few moments, Nash was certain that he had lost her again. Sasaki was a tough lady, he had to admit. She was capable of building fortifications around herself that no one could breach, raising and lowering the drawbridge at will. Even if she was not a professional agent, she was astute enough to have mastered one of the cardinal tricks of the trade: the ability to get others to talk while revealing only as much information about herself as she chose to give. And now, she might clam up permanently…
Instead, she picked up the coffee pot and walked back to the table, stopping to refill Nash’s mug before sitting down across from him. ‘Fair enough,’ she said haltingly. ‘We seem to be sharing the same general objectives, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be…cooperative with each other.’
She paused, then added with frost in her voice, ‘At least in professional matters.’
Nash looked at her closely; she met his eyes with aloof composure. ‘Don’t take offense,’ he said softly, ‘but what you just said…the way you said it…makes it sound like you think I’m out to seduce you.’
She blushed and looked away, but for a second her enigmatic smile returned. ‘Isn’t espionage a form of seduction?’ she asked.
‘You’re dodging again.’ Nash traced the rim of the hot mug with his fingertip. ‘Look, Miho, let’s get one thing straight. I’m no James Bond and you’re definitely no Mata Hari. You’re a very lovely woman, but I’m here strictly on business, and that doesn’t include trying to get you into bed, even if I was so inclined.’
Her eyes remained locked on the window, yet she seemed to thaw slightly. ‘You don’t mean that.’
He didn’t allow his own gaze to waver. ‘Yes, I mean that, so come off it already. It’s getting in the way.’ He let out his breath, and added, ‘Besides, it’s beginning to piss me off.’
Sasaki looked back at him again, then ducked her head in embarrassment; her long black hair swept forward, veiling her face. He heard her murmur something; it was unintelligible and in Japanese, but it sounded like an apology. When she raised her head again, he was surprised to see a smile which didn’t vanish immediately.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I understand. It’s just that…’
She stopped, then went on, choosing her words carefully as her expression became serious again. ‘It’s just that Japanese women have had to endure much sexism,’ she continued, ‘even more so than Western women. There’s an unspoken assumption among my countrymen that, if you’re thirty-two years old, have a doctorate in astrophysics, and have been assigned to Mars as a member of a scientific investigation, you must have slept with a few men to get there. It’s built upon centuries of traditional prejudices which have yet to completely die, and I’ve had to deal with that assumption throughout my career. After a time, you begin to assume that every man who asks you to cooperate…’
‘And if he’s a spy…’
Sasaki grinned sheepishly. ‘Yes. Especially if he’s an American spy…’
‘Then he’s using double-talk for something else on his mind,’ Nash finished. Sasaki blushed again, but this time she didn’t hide her face. ‘And then there’s the tension between you and Boggs. An old affair, I guess.’
Her eyes widened in alarm and shock. ‘Did he tell you?’ she demanded. Her voice was an urgent whisper, despite the masking throb of the airship engines, and she glanced over his shoulder at the passageway leading to the open hatch of the gondola.
‘No…and he didn’t need to. To quote one of our great Americans, John Dillinger, “I may be dumb, but I ain’t stupid”.’ He didn’t add that she herself had just confirmed his suspicions. He also had to reconsider his evaluation of her; Sasaki was good at keeping secrets, but she was no pro. ‘There was once something between you two. A blind man could see that.’
Sasaki hesitated, then slowly nodded her head. ‘My last tour at Cydonia Base…and it didn’t last longer than one night spent together. I thought I had put it behind me when I left.’
‘But then you come back,’ Nash surmised, ‘and look who’s waiting for you at Arsia Station.’ She winced and nodded again. ‘Well, it’s none of my business, but you’re going to have to put those feelings away. We’re entering into some dangerous business here and the three of us are going to have to depend on each other. If you want to slap him and me both, wait until after we’ve left Cydonia…but you’re going to have to trust both of us until then.’
He grinned and shook his head. ‘Believe me, Miho, you could throw yourself nude into my bunk tonight and I still wouldn’t do a thing about it. All that testosterone just fogs the brain.’
Miho gave another quick, shy smile. Composing herself, she straightened in her seat and poured coffee into her own mug. ‘Yes,’ she replied, all her former coolness having returned, ‘but I think you’re the one who is avoiding questions now.’
Nash picked up his coffee and took a sip. Unlike the brew on the Lowell, at least Sasaki’s coffee didn’t taste like caffeine-enriched motor oil. ‘There were ninety-eight men and women aboard the Boston,’ he said, ‘and most of them did little more than swab decks and polish bulkheads…myself included. For a year after I got off the boat I didn’t want to even look at a mop. I was an enlisted man, not an officer, nor did I ever visit officer country. I was just another swabbie barely out of my teens and that’s about it…and that was almost two decades ago. The company compared photos of me when I was in the service and recent pictures, and decided that the chances of L’Enfant recognizing me under another name were less than one in a hundred.’
He rubbed at his new beard. ‘And that’s even without the face hair, of course, Exodermic pseudoskin-grafts were briefly considered…I’ve worn ’em before…but those last only a little while before they begin to peel off. The company doctors determined that they wouldn’t have survived biostasis, and no one thought it was necessary for me to go through permanent plastic surgery. In any case, they don’t think he’ll pick up on me. We’re only going to be there for a few days.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But that’s only half an answer. Why did they pick you for this assignment?’
‘Well, I went into the Navy airship corps after I left sub duty, so as far as establishing a workable cover, it…’
‘I know that already. You’re still not answering the question.’
It was now Nash’s turn to be reticent. He played with the mug as he cast his gaze out the window, watching the ancient stones of Mars as they drifted past. ‘Because,’ he said at last, ‘I was on the Boston the night the Takada Maru was torpedoed.’
There had been a full moon on the wavecrests of the Philippine Sea the night the Boston intercepted the Takada Maru one hundred and sixty miles south of Osaka Harbor; the faint lights of the Japanese mainland glowed orange-silver on the northwestern horizon. The tramp freighter had been running without lights, trying to dash through the blockade, but its hull was too big to avoid sonar contact by the attack sub.
Within a few minutes of the first pings on the sonarman’s scope, the boat surfaced five hundred yards in front of the freighter. The captain ordered the radio operator to hail the vessel with instructions to heave-to and prepare for boarding under UN General Resolution 819; an identical Morse c
ode signal was sent by the ensign manning the spotlight in the sail. There was no reply from the Takada Maru’s bridge, although the freighter did slow all engines to a stop. After several minutes and more failures to establish communication with the freighter, the captain ordered an armed boarding party of twelve men to launch two inflatable Zodiac boats and proceed to the ship, where they would place its captain under arrest and search the vessel for contraband plutonium.
Among the members of the boarding party was Seaman August Nash.
‘The captain…L’Enfant…had strict orders about what to do if he stopped a Japanese vessel during the blockade.’ Nash stared down into his coffee mug as he spoke. ‘It wasn’t made public, but he was not supposed to open fire on any ship that didn’t obey the blockade. In a worst-case scenario, he was supposed to let them through and simply report the incident via FLTSATCOM.’
‘We never knew about that,’ Miho said.
‘You weren’t supposed to. It wouldn’t have helped if Japan was aware that the blockade was a paper tiger.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Fact is, we had no authority to direct hostilities against blockade runners if they resisted boarding…just take their registry numbers and pass them to the Navy, to confirm the info being relayed by the spysats. If the ships voluntarily obeyed the blockade, we could stop and board them, arrest the crew and search the holds…but except for warning shots across the bow, under no circumstances were we to engage any vessels that didn’t stop when we told them to.’
He sipped the lukewarm coffee. ‘Even so, it should have been a by-the-numbers operation, same as two other boardings which had been made by the Trafalgar and the Bush during Operation Sea Dragon…but something went wrong.’
Nash raised the mug again for another sip, then put down the mug. ‘So there I was, on the hull, helping to get my boat ready for launch, when I heard someone in the sail yell that the ship was moving. I looked up, and for a moment I could have sworn that the freighter was moving…’
He shook his head again. ‘But it could have been anything, Miho. When you get bright moonlight on high sea like that, it can cause optical illusions. It could have been the freighter moving forward to ram us, or it could just have been the ship being rocked by the tide.’ He shrugged. ‘But in another second, it hardly mattered either way. We felt the hull tremble under our feet as the tubes were flooded and the torpedo bay doors opened. Then…’
Nash snapped his fingers. ‘The captain ordered two torpedoes to be fired.’
He stopped talking as he remembered the horror of that night. Somewhere in the depths of his half-empty mug, in the black shallows of the cold coffee, he could see the twin, silver-tinted furrows of the torpedoes as they sliced through the dark water, racing toward the Takada Maru. In the instant before they hit, he could hear high-pitched Japanese voices screaming in panic…
Then there were the explosions, barely a second apart from one another, as the torpedoes connected with the forepeak fuel tanks in the freighter’s forward section.
‘There were forty-eight men and women aboard the Takada Maru.’ Sasaki’s voice was cool and nearly emotionless, devoid of either anger or accusation. ‘About half were killed outright by the explosion. The rest died by drowning, including the ones who jumped overboard but were dragged down by the undertow when the…’
Nash looked up at her. ‘You think I don’t know, that? You think I didn’t hear them? I was there, for Chrissakes!’
For a second Sasaki was startled by the vehemence of his reply; she sank back in her seat, staring at him. Then she calmly folded her arms across her chest. ‘You could have tried to rescue some of them.’
‘It went down fast…’
‘Nonetheless…’
‘Yeah. That was brought up during the inquiry. The captain…dammit, L’Enfant, I mean…gave the same reason for that as he gave when asked why he ordered the firing of the torpedoes. Seawolf-class boats were notoriously unstable on the surface. They couldn’t maneuver very well when they weren’t completely submerged. When the freighter started to move…’
‘If it moved.’
‘Yeah. When it seemed to move, if you accept L’Enfant’s testimony, he believed that he couldn’t avoid a ramming other than by making a crash-dive. And since he had twelve of his men topside, he couldn’t sacrifice them by giving that order.’ He slowly shook his head. ‘So he ordered the firing of the torpedoes.’
The incident had caused worldwide controversy; the press, along with public opinion, was almost evenly divided between calling captain Terrance L’Enfant—whom the British tabloids had taken to labeling Terrible Terry—either a courageous commander who had made a split-second decision to save his crewman, or a war criminal and mass-murderer the like of which had not been seen since the Nicaraguan War. Subsequent investigation of the incident hadn’t helped to dispel the ethical conundrum; when the Ballard Corporation, under the auspices of the World Wildlife Federation, sent deep-sea submersibles down to the wreckage of the Takada Maru, it was found that the freighter had indeed been carrying casks of Czech plutonium. Fortunately, none of the containers had been broken open by either the torpedo explosion or the freighter’s final journey to the ocean floor, but it was charged that he had nearly caused the Pacific coastal shelf to be contaminated with the most dangerous poison known to man.
The controversy could not be ignored by the board of inquiry. There were too many ambiguities in the case for anyone to arrive at a clean verdict, especially in regard to the key question of whether the Takada Maru had been in motion, powered by its own engines during the critical moments when the sail watch had reported seeing the vessel move toward the Boston. There were no survivors of the Takada Maru to provide eyewitness testimony, and the Boston’s own sonar officer had been unable to provide a clear answer as to whether he had heard the sound of the freighter’s screws in motion or—as the prosecuting lawyers charged—simply deep-sea background noise, such as whale calls, which could have been misconstrued as the cavitation of screws. In a sensationalized disclosure of the hearings, the sonarman failed a standard hearing test administered by the court; it turned out that his hearing had been impaired by wax build-up in his ear canal. Even then, it was difficult to tell whether this had helped or hurt L’Enfant’s case.
After two months of deliberation, the board acquitted Terrance L’Enfant of charges of criminal negligence and disobedience of orders. By then, the Secretary of the Navy had already relieved L’Enfant of his command and had removed him from active sea-duty, with his naval rank redesignated from captain to commander. He was quietly sent ashore and reassigned a nondescript desk job at the US Naval Institute as a ‘senior tactical advisor’—a form of oblivion in the Navy’s vast bureaucracy. Japan’s importation of reprocessed plutonium had ceased almost immediately after the sinking of the Takada Maru, and L’Enfant’s name soon vanished from public awareness, even in Japan.
And then, many years later, he said something during a speech at Annapolis which had captured the attention of the top brass…
‘Anyway, that’s part of the reason why the company sent me.’ Nash tapped his fingertips on the table, then laced his hands together. ‘I served under L’Enfant and I was aboard the Boston when the Takada Maru was sunk, so they figure that I can tell whether the man has gone over the edge again.’
Miho Sasaki gazed at him with remote impassivity. ‘So you think he was…over the edge, as you say, when he fired the torpedoes?’
Nash wasn’t hesitant in his reply. ‘Completely. That ship wasn’t on a ramming course. He was a trigger-happy paranoid then and I think he’s a trigger-happy paranoid now.’ He spread his hands apart. ‘At least, that’s my supposition.’
‘Then why didn’t you say anything to the board of inquiry?’ Her eyes narrowed as she peered across the table at him. ‘You didn’t, did you?’
He sighed and looked away. ‘Miho, an enlisted man doesn’t go running to a high-level board of inquiry, claiming that his captain has gone nuts, w
hen all he did was stand on deck. It just…isn’t done.’
Her face was as stolid as the rocky landscape passing beneath them. ‘Nonetheless, doesn’t your failure to bear witness make you as culpable as…?’
Nash suddenly felt his temper beginning to boil over. ‘Jesus, lady!’ he snapped. ‘You don’t know what the hell you’re…!’
There was a soft cough from somewhere over his shoulder; Nash turned around and saw Boggs standing in the passageway, looking both amused and irritated. In the heat of the argument, neither of them had heard him come up from the gondola.
‘’Cuse me,’ Boggs said, ‘but we’ve got a couple of standing rules on the Akron and one of ’em is that if you need to have a fight, at least close the hatch so that the rest of us don’t have to listen to you.’ He cocked his head toward the galley next to him. ‘The other rule is that you first remove any sharp instruments. We run a clean ship here, and I don’t like having to mop up somebody’s blood.’
Nash’s abrupt flare-up died as suddenly as it had risen. It was hard to tell whether or not Boggs was being ironic. ‘Sorry, W.J.,’ he murmured. He glanced over at Sasaki, who was avoiding looking at either of them, hiding her face with her hand, obviously embarrassed. ‘And it wasn’t a fight,’ he added. ‘Just a disagreement…’
‘Over ancient history,’ Miho said, sotto voce. She glanced at Nash. ‘And personal ethics.’
Nash refrained from retorting back to the dig. Boggs stretched his arms behind his neck and yawned. ‘Well, personally, I couldn’t give a shit if it was over who’s faster, the Coyote or the Road Runner. I came back here to let you guys know we just received a radio message from Cydonia.’
Both of them instantly forgot their disagreement; Nash turned around in his seat, and Sasaki impulsively rose from the table. ‘What’s the story?’ Nash asked.