They walked toward Base Ops, the series of offices Ichiro was always taken to when visiting the base to discuss incidents between airmen and civilians. There was a large crowd standing around General Wentworth's office.
They pushed through the crowd, and then Murdock turned to speak to Ichiro. "I'm going to put you onto Captain Jamison," the man said. "He saw the whole thing. Do you know him?"
"I've spoken to him on occasion about the conduct of his men," Ichiro replied, leaving out his personal dislike of the man.
The area outside Wentworth's office was roped off with yellow tape. APs stood guard within the perimeter. A captain stood near the stairs, smoking a cigarette and talking animatedly with another AP. Ichiro didn't need to ask Murdock if this was Jamison. He looked just as he sounded on the phone.
"Hank!" Murdock called, walking Ichiro and Natsume over to the man. "I have someone I'd like you to meet."
Jamison turned to them, and Ichiro recognized the man with him immediately. It was Sergeant O'Brian, who had given him so much trouble after the explosion at the pachinko parlor.
"Hank Jamison," the man said as he extended his hand.
"We've spoken before," Ichiro said, ignoring the outstretched hand.
"So we have," Jamison replied, the smile fading from his lips.
"What have you got?" Ichiro asked.
"Here's what I've pieced together," Jamison said, leading him up the short staircase to the office. "This civilian, name of... Reeves, comes in here early this afternoon. He presents his passport at the gate and is allowed inside."
"Reeves, did you say?" Ichiro asked.
"Yeah," O'Brian said from the bottom of the stairs. "The bastard you took away from me the other night. This wouldn't have happened if..."
"Easy," Jamison said, narrowing his eyes. "Anyway, this Reeves character walks over to this office. A few minutes later he leaves the base."
"Where do you come into all this?" Ichiro asked.
Jamison put his hand on the doorknob. "I was walking over here to have lunch with the general when I saw a civilian leaving. I didn't think much about it until I opened the door.'1
Jamison turned the knob and pushed the door open. A woman who might have been pretty once lay on the floor, arms and legs splayed, her head tilted to one side, eyes wide. The whole top of her head was missing.
Ichiro looked on with eyes accustomed to death, but that didn't stop him from experiencing a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. A waste.
"Her name is Rebecca Davis," Jamison said. "She was a... friend."
"What did you do when you found her?" Ichiro asked.
"I probably should have called the gate right then to try and stop that guy, but I didn't. I ran in to the general's office to see if he was all right."
They moved to Wentworth's office. The general was sitting in his chair, slumped over the desktop as if he was asleep. Jamison walked to the body and lifted it slightly by pulling on the hair. The face had already turned gray, a grimace permanently etched across his mouth. The whole front of his uniform was soaked with blood that was already drying. Before Jamison settled the head back on the desk, Ichiro looked at its surface closely.
"This," Jamison said, pointing to the floor as he continued, "Is what I think we'll discover to be the murder weapon."
They all bent down and looked at a Beretta 92-SBF that had apparently been dropped on the floor. Bolan had carried a Beretta, but Ichiro wasn't sure that it was the same model. Even so, the 92-SBF had become standard issue for the U.S. Armed Forces, its availability highly probable on a base the size of Yokota.
He took a pen out of his pocket and stuck it through the trigger-guard. "Do you mind?" he asked, picking it up before the man could answer.
"As a matter of fact, I do," Jamison said, and Ichiro set the gun down immediately. "This is a problem for the Air Force to handle. You have no jurisdiction here."
"So sorry," Ichiro said as he got down on all fours and began searching the floor, Natsume getting down to help him.
"What are you doing?" Jamison asked.
"Looking for expended cartridges," Ichiro replied.
"I told you it's not your problem," Jamison said angrily. "What I want is for you to help us outside the gates. This man is loose on Japanese territory. Unless you mount a major manhunt and find him, your government is going to hear from my government and heads are going to roll, yours probably the first."
"I understand," Ichiro said.
"So go on and do it," Jamison snapped. "That bastard could be halfway to Osaka by now."
"Why do you think that this man killed General Wentworth?" Ichiro asked.
"Terrorist, most likely," Jamison said. "Wanted to disrupt the base... and he's done a pretty good job of it."
"Thanks for your time," Ichiro said and walked out of the room.
He didn't speak until he and Natsume were out of earshot and moving back toward the gate. "What do you think?" he asked the sergeant.
"Makes no sense," Natsume said. "No cartridges, hardly any blood on the desk..."
"I think he was killed somewhere else," Ichiro said, "and brought back to his office."
"What did you find on the gun?"
"The serial numbers had been filed off, not the Executioner's style. Neither was leaving the gun behind. And hadn't he been frisked at the gate coming in? That's common practice if one doesn't have a work permit."
"What are you going to do?" Natsume asked.
Ichiro looked at the ground. They had reached the gates and been waved through. His cruiser, with its lights flashing, was blocking a lane in front of the base. "I've got to put out an all-points bulletin for Mack Bolan," he said, climbing behind the wheel. "I can't hold it back any longer."
"They may say you've held it back too long," Natsume replied. "You could lose your job over this one."
"I figure to," Ichiro said and put the car in gear.
* * *
The pine and larch forests gave way to the black, chunky volcanic terrain of Kamiyama as the road wound up past the Chokoku-no-Mori, the Forest of Sculptures, where a number of the famous sculptors of the twentieth century had combined their work in a magnificent outdoor display. The road was precarious, a single lane etched out of the mountainside. Bolan was almost where he wanted to go — the cable car across Kamiyama.
It was early evening now, and most of the park area was closed. Bolan goosed the accelerator to put some distance between himself and the jeep as he covered the last kilometer of steep grade before pulling into the small parking area.
He climbed out of the car and ran to the edge of the lot, looking back down the mountain. He could see the jeep making its way up. Bolan knew that he had a couple of minutes.
A small bright red building with a gift shop attached housed the cable cars, which climbed straight up the mountainside to Owakudani, an active volcano that belched continuous streams of yellow sulphurous vapor into the hazy sky.
He ran up to the gift shop just as a young man with long hair and a tight red jacket was locking up.
"Do you speak English?" Bolan asked.
The boy rolled his eyes. "This tourist business, mister."
"I need to start the cable cars," Bolan said.
"We closed," the teenager said. "Come back tomorrow."
Bolan pulled a fistful of American money out of his pocket and showed it to the boy. "Do you know what this is?" he asked.
"You bet." The boy smiled widely and reached.
Bolan gave him half the money. "All you have to do is tell the four soldiers that will soon be here that I took the cable car up the mountain. Understand?" Bolan asked.
The boy was staring at the money in Bolan's hand. "Bait and switch," he said. "I understand, okay?"
"Okay," Bolan said. "Start a car up for me, will you?"
"No sweat."
Bolan could hear the jeep's engine whining up the hill. Just before it got to the parking lot, he slid under the Mercedes and lay on the cold ground.
The jeep squealed to a stop, blocking the Mercedes' exit, then Bolan saw jungle-booted feet running past his position. A quick exchange followed between the APs and the boy, then the airmen were in a gondola, heading up the mountain.
Bolan slid out from under the car and moved back to the boy, who sat by the turning gears that wound and unwound the cable. The boy smiled at the Executioner as he walked up. The car was already a hundred feet higher up the mountain.
"Domo arigato," the Executioner said and gave the boy the rest of the money. He noticed a lever near the boy's leg. "Does this shut it off?"
The smile faded, and the boy looked curious. He quickly showed Bolan the forward and reverse controls, plus the different uses for the levers.
"You'd better go," the Executioner said. "Have a safe trip home."
The boy left, and Bolan casually pulled the lever to jerk the machine to a halt. He looked up the mountainside; the gondola, its momentum stopped, was swinging back and forth on the wire.
Bolan shook his head. It was sure a lot easier to lose them than catch them. He reflected on the tough nature of Ichiro's job.
The Executioner walked back to the cars, taking a few minutes to go through the jeep to see if it would provide him with any information. The car itself was clean, but in the pocket of an airman's jacket, he found a rig — a syringe and spoon and small rubber hose used to mainline drugs. He also found a large packet of cocaine. These clowns not only pushed the poison, they used it.
A phone was ringing inside the cable housing. Whistling, Bolan walked back to the place and picked up the black receiver.
"You son of a bitch," the voice on the other end screamed. "You goddamned..."
Seconds later SMG fire rattled from the gondola, raking the building. Bolan pulled back a touch, avoiding it easily. He hung up the phone. Within a minute it rang again.
"I wonder," he said when he picked it up, "how long one of those cars can stay suspended in one place without straining and breaking the cables?"
"You son of..."
Bolan hung up again.
He looked up at the car dangling hundreds of feet above the sloping ground. A yellow fog surrounded it as the sky darkened. Bolan left the building to retrieve his shoulder harness from the trunk. He pulled Big Thunder out of its military webbing before returning to the office.
The phone rang again. He picked it up.
"What do you want?" the voice asked.
"Who am I speaking to?" Bolan replied.
"This is... Jeffries. What do you want?" The strain he was under was evident in his tone.
"I wonder if my .44 slugs will go through the walls of your cable car?" Bolan asked.
"No, don't..."
Bolan set the phone down and sighted up at the still swinging car through the open windows. He had a good view of two sides and most of the bottom. The Executioner aimed at the bottom and squeezed off a round. Within seconds he was answered by the rattle of handguns and automatic fire. It died down quickly and Bolan returned to the phone.
"You guys shoot off your ammo like you've got a bunch of it," he said. "I guess my shot must have gone through, though."
There was no answer.
"Now if you don't tell me, I'll just have to try another."
"No, no. It went through, you asshole, all right?"
Bolan waited a few seconds, then fired at the gondola, the shot ringing out through the mountains. Then he fired another round. Bolan thought he heard a scream in the dying echoes of the shot.
The phone rang again. Bolan picked it up. "Hello?"
Jeffries was breathing hard. "All right," he rasped. "What do you want?"
"Tell me everything you know about Operation Snowflake and tell me now," Bolan said.
"Captain Jamison set up this deal a couple of years ago with the Sonnojoi. I think he gambled a lot and got hooked up with these people through the Yakuza." Jeffries stopped, taking a ragged breath before continuing. "He spent a few months getting us out of jail and setting us up as APs so that we could help him."
"Help him how?"
"Dirty work," Jeffries said. "We do pickup and delivery work, maybe shoot a few scabs, stir up a little political trouble in our own way. We also smuggle arms off the base for the Sonnojoi to use. All of it lowers our price on the coke."
"What about the cocaine?"
"We don't take that onto the base. We park it at a roadside and leave it with Jamison and O'Brian."
"How does it get onto the base?"
"I don't know. They don't trust us to know that part. We load it up when the time comes and ship it out. They don't want us slicing any of it off for ourselves, I guess."
Bolan laughed. "They don't want you shooting your mouth off about where it is," he said. "What about Dr. Lawrence Norwood? How does he figure in all this?"
"Who's he?"
Bolan leaned out the opening and fired at the gondola.
"I swear to God!" Jeffries screamed. "I swear I don't know!"
"What about the night at the pachinko parlor?"
"We were told to take out any Americans that were there. That's all, I swear!"
Bolan gazed up at the gondola in perplexity. All this jibed with the story Prine had told him. It was like a puzzle, with each man knowing only his piece. Jamison ran a tight, careful ship.
"How long is the operation going to run?" Bolan asked.
"The heat's on," Jeffries replied. "The captain had a meeting yesterday and told us we were making one big score and backing off for good. It's all supposed to go out tomorrow night."
"How?"
"Two KC-135s are taking used equipment back to salvage in the States. We're putting the stuff on board and getting out with it. Captain Jamison has our orders set and everything."
"You believe that?" Bolan asked. "You really think he'd take all of you out with him?"
"He's our captain," the man said with ruffled pride. "You gonna let us down now?"
"How many people have you killed, Jeffries?" Bolan asked. "Between the four of you, how many people have you killed for Captain Jamison?"
"I dunno," The man said. "Fifteen. Twenty."
"And how many people do you figure are hooked on or dead because of the poison you send back to the States?"
"Hey, it's just coke, you know?"
"Yeah," Bolan said. "I know."
He hung up the phone and went back to the jeep. He took out the rig he'd found in there and opened it, removing the syringe. The jeep had an extra five-gallon tank of gas attached to its back. He stuck the needle into the container and sucked out a syringeful of gasoline.
He moved to the front of the jeep and injected the gas into the tire on the driver's tire. Then he got into the jeep and eased it out of gear, letting it roll back a couple of feet so that he could back out the Mercedes.
The phone was ringing when he went back into the building. Instead of answering it, he put the machine in reverse and cranked it up. The gondola shook to a start and came back down the mountain.
He walked slowly back to the Mercedes and drove away. He had hard info for Wentworth now, enough to stop those planes and to lock up Jamison and his bunch. Dr. Norwood and his hydrogen bombs were still a mystery, but perhaps subsequent investigation would clear that up.
He was nearly a mile down the hill when he heard the roar of the jeep hurrying to catch him. The downgrade was steep, and it was possible to build up quite a bit of speed coming down. He found a shoulder that afforded a good view back up the hill and pulled over to watch.
The jeep kept coming, closing on him. A quarter of a mile away the tires had heated up sufficiently for the gas to explode in a burst of spontaneous combustion. The jeep jumped, then rolled off the road, careening down the mountainside with the rending of metal and a trail of fire.
Bolan watched it hit bottom far below him, then pulled back onto the road and headed off toward Hashi-san's dwelling, thinking of how he'd brought his own brand of reality to the serenity he had viewed tha
t morning.
11
The rain had started again. It came hard this time, as if making up for the day's dry spell. Kendo Ichiro stood looking out the window of Tokyo Police Administration, watching it wash the skyscrapers and wondering what he'd do for a living once Commissioner Kawabata got through with him.
"Let me understand this, Lieutenant," Kawabata said from behind his desk, his eyes occasionally drifting to the sumo wrestling matches on the small TV set that sat before him. "You captured a dangerous international terrorist, let him walk away from your jail, had information that tied him to a gunfight on the highway, an explosion at Fuji, the murders of American military personnel at a nightclub and the destruction of a factory, yet you never put out a major alert on this man until after he committed the cold-blooded murder of the American commander of a military base."
"Yes, sir."
"And on top of that, you've been conferring with him by telephone and, in fact, shut down the entire subway system at great expense and nuisance to the city in order to check out a lead this terrorist gave you."
"Yes, sir." Ichiro turned from the window and walked around to sit on the chair he had pulled up by the desk.
Kawabata stared at him. The commissioner was a political appointee who understood very little about the guts of police work and its intuitive nature.
"Give me a reason why I shouldn't ask for your badge and gun right now," he said.
Ichiro looked the man in the eye and saw no warmth there. "I didn't just let him walk out of my jail," he said. "Uniformed police came and set him free with an authorization that was signed by you, Commissioner. The... terrorist, as you call him, has only gone after criminals."
"It has not been proven that the Sonnojoi are criminals."
"All right. He had good evidence about the explosion on Fuji and I followed through with him, hoping to find Dr. Norwood."
Kawabata took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "The radiation found at the site of the explosion is hardly what I'd call overwhelming evidence. Now if he had produced Dr. Norwood..."
"He says Dr. Norwood is suffering from severe radiation poisoning."
The commissioner turned his head and watched the contest on television. "More speculation."
Code of Dishonor Page 11