Black Wind

by F. Paul Wilson

  Over the fence? That could only be—

  "You're sweating, Mr. Cruz," said the second civilian. "Is something wrong?"

  "No, sir," Matsuo said quickly. "Very hot, yes?"

  Still that intense scrutiny. "I don't think so."

  Matsuo glanced past him at a squad of Marines marching along the dock. They were scrutinizing the IDs of everyone they saw. And they were coming this way!

  This is it, he thought. It's all over.

  Visions of prison cells and firing squads marched before his eyes. Yet he stood rooted to the spot, refusing to give himself away. He would wait till the last second. If he couldn't bluff his way out, then he would have to act. No trials, no public humiliations, no endless waiting for the blindfold and the bullets. He would see it all settled right here on the dock.

  The squad was less than a hundred feet away when a burst of gunfire shattered the stillness. Matsuo was jolted by the noise, as were the men at the table. The marines turned and ran off in the direction of the shots, leaving Matsuo staring after them.

  He took no pleasure in the relief that flooded through him. He had a dreadful feeling about those shots.

  * * *

  Matsuo held his breath as another marine came trotting up to the table a few minutes later. His pistol was holstered. He didn't whisper as he spoke to the civilians.

  "We got him."

  "A Jap?" said the first civilian. "What was he after?"

  "We'll never know," said the marine. "He's dead."

  Matsuo fought to hold his composure as an invisible band tightened around his throat. So casual: He's dead. It had to be Sachi. A friend, a good man, a brave man, one who would have been the most loyal of all Americans if his own country hadn't turned against every principle it was supposed to stand for and betrayed him.

  He's dead.

  Matsuo now understood the significance of Sachi's hurling his radio into the marshes. With the end of the war, he had seen himself as an orphan, a man without a country. Perhaps he hadn't wanted to live like that. So he'd provided a diversion for Matsuo.

  "Cruz? Are you deaf, Cruz?" the first civilian said. He was holding the papers and orders out to him. The second was walking off with the marine. "I said you can board."

  Matsuo nodded, not trusting his voice. He hurried up the gangplank and did not look back.

  * * *

  Matsuo was given no time to mourn Sachi. He was put to work immediately upon checking in. The galley was in chaos due to a large number of Navy personnel aboard as passengers to Pearl Harbor. The messing facilities were taxed to the limit and all galley hands were working at double time. Matsuo was glad for it. Three other Filipinos were in the galley crew and the hectic pace allowed them only a few moments with him. They greeted him with bursts of Spanish in passing which he managed to understand and answer tersely with a few phrases he remembered from his days in Panama. From the very first, he adopted a surly, sullen attitude that invited no small talk. It seemed to work: for the most part they left him to himself.

  Within hours of passing under the Golden Gate Bridge, Matsuo found the atomic bomb. He was on his way back from supplying the wardroom amidships with fresh coffee when he saw it. Not hidden away—right there in the open on the hangar deck, a fifteen-foot crate fastened down with steel straps and guarded by four armed marines. He stood among the other crew members and passengers staring at it. Nobody seemed to know what it was, just that it was supposed to end the war. He heard comments about germ warfare—that seemed to be the accepted explanation—and for that reason, everyone was giving the crate a wide berth. Matsuo had to admire the secrecy under which the Americans had developed their weapon.

  When he got back to the galley, he was handed a tray stacked with a double lunch. He was given directions and told to deliver it to the flag lieutenant's cabin.

  Flag lieutenant's cabin? That meant this was a flagship. For whom? Was there an admiral on board, or was the ship returning to the war zone to meet him? He wondered what rank of officer he would find.

  Matsuo was startled when a US Army captain opened the door to the cabin. Army?

  He would not allow Matsuo inside to place the tray, insisting on taking it himself and quickly closing the door. Matsuo decided he should learn more about that cabin.

  An hour later he returned and knocked on the door again. This time a different Army officer—a major—opened the door.

  "You are through with lunch, sir?"

  The major nodded. "Yeah. Come on in."

  As Matsuo stepped inside, he caught a glimpse of some technical-looking equipment with an array of dials and meters before the other officer threw a sheet over them with an annoyed look.

  But it was the black cylinder in the middle of the floor that snared his attention—eighteen inches long and fastened down by metal straps welded to the cabin deck and secured with a big padlock.

  He pulled his eyes away and went about stacking the dishes and coffee cups. He left as quickly as he could, but the image of that cylinder stayed with him. Professor Kakihana's words came back to him about the bomb needing an isotope of uranium to fuel it. Uranium-235, he had called it. What if the equipment in the cabin was to measure radioactivity from the cylinder? What if that cylinder contained U-235? And wasn't the atomic bomb development a US Army project? That would explain Army officers on a Navy vessel.

  The more he thought about it, the more Matsuo became convinced that the flag lieutenant's cabin housed the heart of the atomic bomb. He would have to learn more about that particular area of the ship.

  He made sure he was available when the dinner tray needed delivering. And the breakfast tray on Tuesday morning. By lunchtime, it was, "Where's Cruz? This tray's gotta go up to officer country." He was sure by he could pick the lock and carry off the cylinder if he had enough time. But then, what would he do with it?

  He took a cigarette break on the fantail deck that night and watched the Pacific churn luminescent in the cruiser's wake. The stifling humidity of the night had brought the crew and passengers up in search of a cool breeze. They had dragged cots and mattresses and sleeping bags along. Every hatch and every vent was open. Matsuo was no nautical engineer, but he knew that if a torpedo blew a hole in the hull below the waterline under these conditions, the ship would go down in minutes.

  Fortunately, the chances of running into a Japanese submarine in the Eastern Pacific these days were nil. But it gave him a bad feeling about the ship. Death seemed to hover over it. Last night he had awakened from a dream of blood-red water cut by gliding fins and filled with slashing teeth. His imagination was undoubtedly being fueled by the knowledge of the nature of the ship's cargo.

  His ears were still ringing from the gunnery practice this afternoon. Those big eight-inch batteries were deafening when they let go. And even after they stopped, the silence was only relative. The whine of the turbines below never slackened. The ship was making good time—too good. All four engines were running at top speed and edging her toward thirty knots.

  They're in a hurry.

  And with good reason. The sooner they delivered the atom bomb, the sooner it could be dropped, and the sooner the war would be over. I'd hurry, too.

  He reached into his pocket and fingered the lengths of wire he had filched from the machine shop. They varied in gauge from eighth-inch copper to hair-fine steel. He had a pair of needle-nose pliers to bend them to order.

  All he needed was time alone in the flag lieutenant's cabin.

  That time came the next morning when he stopped by the cabin to pick up the breakfast dishes. No one answered his knock. Both officers had been up and dressed when he had delivered breakfast so the odds of someone being asleep inside were slim. Matsuo checked up and down the corridor. Empty. A few bends in the heavy copper wire yielded a makeshift key for the clumsy latch-bolt lock under the door handle. His third try brought a solid click as the bolt slid back. He was about to push the door open when he heard voices coming from the gangway at the near end
of the corridor. One of them sounded familiar. Rather than duck into the room, he relocked the door and stood where he was, as if waiting.

  "—afraid to say anything in sick bay. Afraid I'd give myself—" The voice cut off as the two Army officers entered the corridor and saw Matsuo.

  "Sirs!" Matsuo said, feigning surprise. "I have been waiting for you to answer the door!"

  "We just had a tour of the ship," one said.

  He opened the door and let him in to pick up the dishes. Matsuo hid his bitter disappointment as he eyed the cylinder longingly. He might never get another chance.

  When the Indianapolis rounded Diamond Head at 8:00 A.M. the next morning, the public address system announced that they had set a new world's record for the 2100 miles between the Farallon lightship and Oahu. The ship charged into the narrow mouth of Pearl Harbor and let off its passengers, but none of its crew. While it refueled, Matsuo looked toward Ford Island and got a sad, twisting feeling in his chest when he saw the remains of the Arizona still settled on the harbor bottom, covered by rainbow sheets of oil still leaking to the surface from below.

  By 5:00 P.M. they were on their way out to sea again, making full head toward Tinian. Without all those extra passengers to feed, the pace in the galley now seemed quiet and sedate. Time should have dragged, but the week's trip across the Central Pacific to the Marianas seemed to fly. Although he was constantly on watch for an opportunity to enter the flag lieutenant's cabin alone, the days were never long enough to provide one, and the nights were each an interminable headlong rush across the dark sea under blackout conditions.

  Since the Army officers never left their cabin after lights-out, Matsuo allowed himself to relax at night, to go "off-duty" in a true sense and sit on the deck with other crew members and listen to them talk. He felt safe out here in the dark. He could let the role of Mariano Cruz slip away and be just another faceless voice in the night. Occasionally, he would throw out a comment when prodded, but mostly he would listen.

  They were young, and he found most of them likable—except when they talked about "Dirty Japs." They had their differences in many areas, but were uniform in their feelings toward Japan. They hated the Dirty Japs and were going to make them pay for Pearl Harbor and for Bataan and for all the lousy treatment they had given American prisoners throughout the war; and yet they were fascinated and awestruck by the suicide charges, kamikaze planes, and kaiten torpedoes that the Dirty Japs hurled against them.

  Matsuo ached to explain the cultural differences to these youths just as he had explained them to Hiroki, and twice he had caught himself on the verge of speaking. It would be dangerous to expose the slightest hint of sympathetic knowledge regarding the Dirty Japs. He could expect no more understanding from these guys than from his own brother.

  In times alone he would sit in the dark and wonder at the path of his life. He felt as if he had been robbed of all say in where it led him, that he had lost control and was now at the mercy of two huge, unseen opposing forces, one setting up obstacles, another helping him overcome them. The threads of his life and of others around him seemed to be drawing toward a common destiny.

  And where would that be? Tinian?

  He could not forget that last sword-dream, either: Frank and Meiko together again… without him.

  During the week-long voyage to Tinian, Matsuo perfected an almost foolproof method of eavesdropping on the Army officers. He would stand outside their cabin door with a tray half-loaded with dirty dishes. If he heard one of them approach the door, he would retreat down the corridor. If someone entered the corridor, he would simply walk away from the doorway as if he had just left the room.

  The vigil yielded little useful information other than the fact that theirs was not the only atomic weapon. They referred to this particular bomb as Little Boy, but Matsuo learned that another bomb was ready, one called Fat Man. Then, on Wednesday night, half a day away from Tinian, the subject of targets for Little Boy came up.

  "Well, Tokyo is out," said one of the officers. "The big boys feel the Emperor will be more valuable alive after the war."

  Matsuo's spirits rose upon hearing that—at least someone in America had insight into the Japanese mind. But they soon plummeted.

  "A number of cities have been saved for the bomb. I don't know which one they'll choose. I think Groves is pushing for Kyoto."

  Matsuo reeled away from the door. Kyoto! They couldn't. They wouldn't burn out the city that housed the soul of Japan.

  But deep inside, Matsuo knew they would indeed. Gladly. He had to stop Little Boy.

  THE MARIANA ISLANDS

  The Indianapolis reached the Marianas the morning of its tenth day out of San Francisco. Matsuo crowded on deck with the rest of the crew as Tinian hove into view. They were all excited, jostling for position to see if they could spot something on the little island that would give them some clue as to the nature of this superweapon that was supposed to end the war. They saw sheer, rusty brown cliffs rising from the water, topped by typical tropical vegetation. The island was a rough oblong, five miles by twelve, with no mountains to speak of, but it supported the biggest airfield in the world.

  Matsuo glared at the island. This was where the B-san squadrons loaded up their bombs and took off on the daily raids that were reducing Japan to rubble. And this was where the atom bombs would be loaded and sent to destroy Kyoto.

  He had to fine some way to delay the arrival of the bomb without getting himself killed. All he needed was enough time to get to Japan. Once there, he would tell the Supreme Command what he had seen and bring the war to a halt. He could save Kyoto and everyone in it.

  But he was helpless. The U-235 was sitting in a cabin on the deck below him and he couldn't get to it. Maddening.

  A flash of color to his right caught his attention. Army beige. After momentary paralysis at the sight of both Army officers leaning on the rail, peering toward the island, he was pushing roughly through the other sailors and running belowdecks as fast as his legs would carry him.

  The corridor outside the flag lieutenant's cabin was deserted. Matsuo slipped the ready copper wire key into the lock and entered. Once he was sure the cabin was empty, he fairly leaped upon the locked-down cylinder. But before touching it, he studied it, memorizing the exact position of the padlock, the metal straps, everything, even down to the tilt of the steel ring in the cylinder's top. Then he went to work on the padlock.

  A tough one, and he hadn't tried something like this since his boyhood days in San Francisco. Time. He needed time and had none. His body wasn't helping, either: tremors in his hands, thumping in his chest, sweat coating his fingertips and making the wire slip instead of turn. Every slip ate time, irreplaceable time. He concentrated on Nagata's teaching: Control the breathing, flow into the wire…

  Suddenly he felt the twisted wire catch the tumblers. He gave it a sharp turn and almost cheered aloud when the shackle popped out of the padlock case. He flipped the metal straps aside and pulled the cylinder free.

  Heavy—lead heavy. He began unscrewing the end piece, using the ring for leverage. It was a fine thread. Two full turns moved it only a sixteenth of an inch. He kept turning, repeatedly drying the perspiration from his hands. How long did he have? How much luck could he count on?

  Finally, the end fell free. Inside was another cylinder about the length and diameter of his forearm. He slid it out and laid it on the floor. He immediately began screwing the outer cylinder lid back into place. He was drenched with sweat now and his hands were slipping all over the slick metallic surface. When the lid was fully tightened, he dried the cylinder with a napkin, slipped it back under the metal stays, turned it just so, and refastened the padlock.

  Matsuo stepped back and surveyed his work. Was that how he had found it? It seemed right. He picked up the breakfast tray he had delivered earlier, placed the inner cylinder on it, and covered it with a napkin. One last check to be sure he hadn't left any of his makeshift picks behind, then he was out the door,
locking it behind him, and off down the hall carrying the tray before him. All he had to do now was find a hiding place for the inner container, and hope the Army officers would not notice any change in the lead cylinder's weight—nor the missing tray and napkin.

  An hour later he was back on deck with the rest of the crew watching as the aviation crane lifted the fifteen-foot crate from the hangar deck. The Indianapolis had anchored about half a mile offshore and a bargelike craft had come alongside. Matsuo watched with relief as two seamen brought out the now-empty uranium cylinder suspended by its ring on a pole between them. The two Army officers following behind gave no sign that anything was wrong.

  For the first time since he had boarded the ship, Matsuo allowed himself to believe he might actually have a chance at pulling this off.

  * * *

  Meiko pushed the tiller hard to leeward and ducked under the swinging boom as she brought the little sampan about. As the crude lugsail filled with air, she let out the mainsheet and headed southward along Saipan's west shore on a broad reach. The island's cloud-wreathed mountains reminded her of Maui and a pang of remorse and remembrance undulated through her chest.

  She was getting the feel of the boat. She had spent many a summer sailing Sagami Bay, but the sampan was waterlogged, which made it heavy and clumsy, though once it was on a tack, it held true. She was dressed in a faded sarong and had a tangle of fishing nets in the bow. Should the need arise, she was all set to play the part of an island fishing woman. Hopefully, she would be left alone until after dark. Then she would point the little boat south toward Tinian.

  She gazed at the low mound of land rising from the sea. Tinian… only four miles away. Matsuo was due in today and if all went as she planned, she would meet him there tonight.

  This had not been easy to arrange. She had known that Matsuo's friends in Naval Intelligence—and they were many—had been baffled and angered by the Navy's refusal to send a submarine to bring him back to Japan. Meiko was sure Hiroki and the Kakureta Kao were behind the betrayal but she dared not voice her suspicions because she had no way of backing them up. Shigeo and some other of Matsuo's closest friends took up the cause with Naval Intelligence—Matsuo must be saved.