by Joe Weber
Susan caught the subtle change in his disposition. "It's a shame, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is," he agreed. "I'm convinced that humans are the most vicious, predatory animals on this planet."
The stories under the headlines explained about the anti-Japanese protests in Japan Town, known as Nihonmachi, a few blocks east of Fillmore Street. San Francisco police had been forced to arrest protesters and break up skirmishes at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park and at the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center.
One of the saddest stories recounted how Japanese students at the University of San Francisco had been pelted with raw eggs and water balloons filled with paint. Some had even been hit with rocks and bottles during the clash.
Steve motioned for their check, but Marcus and Susan insisted on splitting the bill three ways.
As they walked to their gate, Steve gave Susan a friendly smile. "Since you know all about me, warts and all, I'm anxious to find out more about you."
She returned the friendly gesture. "That's fair enough, but I don't want to bore you to death."
"You're in trouble now," Marcus laughed quietly and slowly shook his head.
"Trust me," Steve said while Susan rolled her eyes at Callaway. "I can handle it."
MISAWA AIR BASE, JAPAN
The low, ragged overcast seemed to hang suspended in a dark-gray hue a half hour after the sun had risen. The warm air was oppressively sultry and there was a total absence of wind on the crowded flightline. The humidity was peaked at 100 percent and a fine drizzle continued to bathe the home of the 432nd Fighter Wing of the United States Air Force.
East of base operations and the control tower, a multitude of McDonnell Douglas/Mitsubishi F-15 J air-superiority fighters from Japan's Air Self-Defense Force were being prepared for a practice mission. The Japanese Air Force controlled the airfield and adjacent air traffic, but coordinated all military activities with the U. S.
The air base was beginning to stir, and the smell of freshly brewed coffee permeated the muggy air. The quiet solitude of the sleepy morning was abruptly shattered when two afterburning turbofans belched hot air and roared to life. The high-pitched whine of the powerful engines cut through the air while the pilots went through their checklists.
After a radio check with the 432nd command post, known as Falcon Ops, the two men switched to clearance delivery and copied their Chuhi Two Departure with a Miyako Transition. Shortly thereafter, the two General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcons began taxiing toward the active runway.
Major Tony Lavancia, a combat veteran of Operation Desert Storm, was the leader for the scheduled training flight. The highly skilled pilot was well liked by everyone, especially the younger pilots, who were the recipients of his wisdom and years of aviation experience.
Behind and off to the side of Lavancia's wing, Captain Jeff McIntire watched his flight leader taxi over a large puddle of water. The spray kicked up by the fighter's exhaust blew past his wingtip and disappeared.
Although new to the squadron, "Gentleman Jeff" McIntire was an experienced fighter pilot who had recently been a top scorer at "Gunsmoke," the USAF air-to-ground weapons competition held at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas.
Many of his peers were convinced that Jeff McIntire, with his chiseled good looks and engaging personality, would be selected to fly with the Thunderbirds when he completed his present assignment.
When the two F-16s approached the end of the rain-soaked taxiway, the pilots switched to the control tower frequency. Seconds later they were cleared for takeoff on runway 28. Lavancia glanced at the fighter alert hangar, then taxied into position and waited for his wingman to align himself in trail and off to the side.
After a final check of their cockpits, the fighter pilots advanced their throttles and checked their engine instruments. When McIntire signaled that he was ready to roll, Lavancia released his brakes, then lighted the afterburner.
McIntire watched the tailpipe of his leader's plane spew a tongue of red-hot flames as his own afterburner ignited. The rapid acceleration pressed him into his seat while he jockeyed the controls to stay welded to his flight leader. Moments later, McIntire rotated his fighter when Lavancia raised his nose-wheel off the runway.
After the two jets were safely airborne, Jeff McIntire snapped his landing gear up at the moment he saw his leader's wheels start to move. Jeff would fly tight formation while his leader would concentrate on flying by instruments until the fighters broke out of the thick overcast.
The control tower personnel watched the sleek fighters lift off the 10,000-foot runway, then followed the flight path of the white-orange afterburners as the jets approached the low, uneven dark clouds.
McIntire was smoothly working his controls to stay in perfect position as the jets were engulfed by the gray, foggy haze. A moment later a blinding flash and violent concussion stunned McIntire. He fought the controls as the aircraft began rolling and the nose tucked down.
Without warning, the observers in the tower saw a bright flash, followed by a tremendous explosion. They stared in horror while one of the jets tumbled out of the gray sky. The Fighting Falcon had been reduced to a huge fireball spinning out of control.
I've got to get out! Jeff realized as he frantically reached for the ejection-seat handle. His last thought was two seconds too late to save his life. Mclntire's heart pumped the last surge of blood into his circulatory system as the ejection seat fired.
The shocked men in the tower watched a blazing pinwheel of jet fuel spray in every direction before the aircraft smashed into the ground. The stunned witnesses could feel the tower shake from the impact and explosion.
Filled with anger and grief, Major Tony Lavancia slowly walked around the crash site. The light rain that continued to drench the base had extinguished the last of the smoldering fires. Only a few wisps of gray-white smoke rose from the charred debris that had recently been a sleek, multimillion-dollar fighter plane.
His lip quivered when he thought about Jeff McIntire. The humorous, good-looking young man with the superior intellect and raw flying ability never knew what hit him. McIntire had ceased to exist when the spinning fighter hit the ground at the same moment the ejection seat fired.
His neck muscles ached with tension, but Lavancia ignored the pain and replayed the accident over and over in his mind. One moment Jeff was there, tucked in tight against his wing, and a split second later he was gone. Something wasn't right. There was simply no reason, no history of F-16s blowing apart in flight.
Something strange had happened to Mclntire's fighter, but Lavancia had no idea what. He was intimately familiar with every system in the F-16, yet nothing came to mind that could cause this kind of disaster if it failed.
The team of investigators who were probing the debris of the blackened, twisted wreckage knew who Lavancia was and paid little attention to him. They understood his desire to be left alone.
Lavancia was expected to report to the flight surgeon while the details of the flight were still fresh in his mind. Afterward he would attend a debrief to go over the sequence of events leading to the fatal crash. But that wasn't what the tormented pilot wanted to do, not by any stretch of the imagination.
All Tony Lavancia wanted to do was have a very stiff drink and purge his emotions. Still in his rain-soaked flight suit, he sat down on the perimeter of the deep crater and stared blankly into the scorched hole where his friend had perished less than an hour before.
Fifteen minutes later, Lavancia's commanding officer, accompanied by the base chaplain and the flight surgeon, walked to his side and helped him to his feet.
Chapter 7.
UNITED FLIGHT 187
When the dessert dishes were cleared and the movie began, Steve gave Susan Nakamura a fleeting look. She was sitting by herself across the aisle, reading reports from a stack of papers she had retrieved from her briefcase. The three of them would wait to discuss the incident at Pearl Harbor until they had complete privacy.
> Susan looked at Wickham and subtly motioned to the seat beside her, then neatly stacked her reading material on the foldaway tray. Her soft brown eyes narrowed and sparkled.
He secured his tray and moved into the seat next to Susan. "He went to sleep," Steve said in a low voice, "like he'd turned off a switch."
She leaned around him and glanced at Callaway. "He's the only person I know who could sleep through an earthquake."
"He doesn't waste any time," Wickham observed and fastened his safety belt. Ensconced in his seat, Steve turned to the alluring young woman. "So, you promised to tell me all about yourself."
She gave him a questioning look. "What would you like to know about me?"
There was an awkward moment before Steve made the adjustment to her straightforward style of conversation. "Actually, at the risk of sounding too forward, I'd like to know everything about you. It's not every day that I meet a Japanese-American who happens to be an FBI agent."
"You mean a Japanese-American FBI agent," Susan said patiently, "who happens to be a woman."
He swallowed and looked her straight in the eyes. "You're right, but you'll have to admit that's not something people in my line of work see every day."
"I suppose that's true."
"What made you decide on a career in the FBI?" Steve inquired innocently.
She turned slightly sideways to face him. "It's a long and boring story."
Steve could see that she was masking something that was very painful. "I didn't mean to upset you."
Susan relaxed her facial muscles and gave him a wide smile. "It's okay, believe me. I don't normally talk about it, but if you're really interested . . ."
"I'm really interested."
"When Pearl Harbor was attacked," she began without any sign of emotion, "my parents were newlyweds. They didn't have much money, so they were living with my mother's parents in East Los Angeles. Shortly after the war started, the FBI took my parents and grandparents right out of their home and placed them in a temporary war-relocation center."
Tilting her head, she stared absently out the window at the puffy white clouds, then pulled the shade to block the bright sunlight. "The relocation center was a section of converted stables at the Santa Anita racetrack."
Steve closed his eyes for a second and slowly let his breath out. He could only imagine the terror and degradation the innocent Japanese-Americans had felt.
"The saddest part about the internment," she continued, turning her head to look into Steve's eyes, "was that no one tried to sort out who was spying for Japan and who wasn't. If you were of Japanese extraction, you were guilty, period."
Maintaining eye contact, Steve gave her a soothing nod. "I know, and it wasn't fair, but we--"
"Many of the Japanese-Americans were kindhearted," she quietly interrupted, "loyal U. S. citizens, including my grandparents."
There was a long silence as Steve began to understand why Susan had been compelled to join the FBI. He suddenly had the clear impression that she was reading his mind.
"Sometimes," she said steadily, "when an organization does something so grotesque to innocent civilians, you want to challenge the system, to join the organization and rise to the top so you can work toward seeing that it never again happens to anyone, regardless of race or creed."
Susan quietly sighed while a nagging protest tore at her nerves. "I know that sounds idealistic, but I really believed that I could make a difference."
"And now?"
"Well, I suppose I've matured over the years," she conceded. "I realize now that I can't single-handedly change the system, but I still like to think that I've made an impact--in some small way."
She noticed the uncomfortable, almost grim look on Steve's face. "I didn't mean to get so serious."
"I'm sorry, Susan. I was just trying to imagine what your family must have gone through--the humiliation and absolute loss of pride and dignity."
"It was beyond belief," she replied sadly and looked down for a moment. "For years I lived with the psychological scars that my parents tried to conceal under a facade of smiles and happy talk. They pretended, for the sake of their children, that everything was wonderful, when deep inside they were living in mortal fear that a man with a badge might knock on their door at any moment."
Struggling to find the right words, Steve studied Susan's delicate hands and thin fingers. "How long was your family kept in the relocation center?"
"Almost four years," she answered sadly. "From December 1941 to September 1945. I'll never forget the dates.
"Actually," she continued, gathering her composure, "they were moved from the stables at the racetrack to another retention center--concentration camp is a more fitting description--in Amache, Colorado. They lived in cramped, partitioned compartments in rows of wooden barracks surrounded by sagebrush and barbed-wire fences."
Lost in her thoughts of the past, Susan looked down at the floor and recalled the afternoon her mother and grandmother unknowingly revealed the family's dark secret that had been kept from the children.
It was a warm spring day in Oakland when Susan's oldest sister discovered the awful truth. Sitting quietly under the open kitchen window, Betty Nakamura heard the two women alternately crying and talking about the atrocities of the detention camp.
Susan was six years old when she found out how her grandfather escaped the utter humiliation of being imprisoned in the wartime camp. He committed suicide by hanging himself with a strand of wire. Susan's grandmother awakened to find her husband dangling from a parallel beam that supported the pitched roof over their 8-by-10-foot room.
After a moment's hesitation, Susan glanced at the movie screen, then turned back to Steve. "At any rate, after enduring years of blazing heat and numbing cold, with hot dust storms in the summer and freezing blizzards in the winter, and suffering the embarrassment of sharing one bathroom with scores of other people, my family was finally released from Amache after the war ended."
Wickham frowned and shifted in his seat. He felt uncomfortable, as if he were prying. "That's when they moved to Oakland?"
"Yes. There was an American-owned company advertising jobs for the Japanese who had been detained in the wartime camps, so that's where my folks headed."
Susan paused. She liked talking about the close-knit family she loved, but it still hurt. "My father got a job with the company and my grandmother moved in with them. My parents, who were afraid to even take a day off for seven years, finally decided it was safe to have children by the early fifties. I was the last of four daughters."
Steve cast a quick look at Susan's attractive face, noting the soft eyes. "That must have been about--"
"Nineteen-sixty," she answered frankly, "and I'll fast-forward from there."
He started to protest and Susan gently shook her head. "I grew up in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood in Oakland, attended the University of California-Berkeley, and you know the rest of my story."
Steve was intrigued, but decided against asking her any more personal questions. "Marcus said that the Bureau is going to provide a car for us."
"That's right," she replied, casting a glance at Callaway, "but you'll need to take a taxi to your hotel. Our people will pick you and Marcus up at seven-thirty tomorrow morning."
"Aren't you going with us?"
"No. A friend is meeting me at the airport, and I'll be staying at my home."
Steve grinned and let his gaze linger on her eyes. "I look forward to working with you."
Susan laughed in her polite way. "The pleasure is all mine. After what I've heard about your exploits, this should be an interesting experience."
He laughed and then excused himself and walked to the rest room in the first-class section, noting that the elderly Japanese man was not on this segment of the flight.
LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
"Japan Air Sixty-Two cleared for the stadium visual runway two-four right approach."
The seasoned Japanese copilot keyed h
is mike and spoke with a slight accent. "Japan Air Sixty-Two cleared visual two-four right approach."
On its fourth trip from Tokyo, the shining new 747 descended and passed over the Santa Monica navigational fix at 7,000 feet. Continuing eastbound, the captain banked to the right when they reached the Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena.
The crew methodically went through their landing checklist while the airplane descended to 3,500 feet slightly east of the Harbor Freeway. Delayed three hours by a mechanical failure in the number-four engine, both pilots were fatigued and silently cursed the smog while they strained their tired eyes to locate the other airplanes in the busy skies over Los Angeles.
Sitting near the tail of the airplane, Mrs. Mayumi Fujitake surveyed the city and the sprawling coastal plain between the San Gabriel Mountains and the blue Pacific Ocean. On her first visit to America's motion-picture capital, the elderly great-grandmother was also enjoying her first ride in an airplane.
Her husband, Shozo, a more experienced air traveler, was still dozing as the 747 entered a shallow bank to intercept the final approach course to the runway.
Sweating profusely while he listened to the portable aircraft radio, Granville Penner sat in the back of the Chevrolet high-top conversion van and opened another lukewarm beer. When Japan Air Lines Flight 62 had not arrived on time, he waited approximately twenty minutes and then walked to a convenience store to call the airline.
After learning the new arrival time, the drug dealer with a felony record and two trips to the slammer bought a six-pack of Old Milwaukee and returned to the van.
The scintillating high from the crack cocaine was wearing thin, and the beer was giving him a throbbing headache, but Penner didn't care about the pain. Not today. He had $20,000 stuffed in his pockets and the promise of another $30,000 if he successfully completed his assignment. The money would be more than enough "talking cash" for a sizable down payment on a new burgundy Cadillac El Dorado and an extended vacation in New Orleans, the city where he was born and first went to jail.
Penner's newfound friend, a self-described affluent Japanese businessman, simply wanted the convicted rapist and burglar to use a .50-caliber machine gun to shoot a few holes in a Japanese airliner. Penner wondered why the small man with the gold and diamond Rolex wanted him to shoot at a Japanese airliner, but, then again, Penner never questioned motives when money was in front of him.