Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  So to shut up his ex-wife, Pete had taken both brats out to trick-or-treat, and once they’d bagged enough candy to rot their teeth and launch their future dentist’s bills to the moon, he’d caged them in the back of the car and set off for the North Shore to finish his daddy duties with a bang of fireworks.

  His eyes returned to the road.

  If not for the inadequate causeway bisecting Stanley Park and crossing the entrance to the harbor as the Lions Gate Bridge, the mountainside population would be larger. Decades ago, when the Guinness family built the bridge to their British Properties, three lanes would have seemed an extravagance, a freeway from one woodlot to another. But now, unless you drove the long route around the harbor, this was the only crossing that connected the bedrooms of the North Shore with the downtown office towers.

  “He got chocolate peanuts!”

  “Crybaby!”

  “He won’t share, Daddy!”

  “That’s enough!” Pete was fed up with the antics of these urchins on a sugar high. He scowled at them in the rear-view mirror, and that’s when he was blinded by a light from above just a second before—craaack!—the windshield bowed under the weight—

  Pete shrieked in horror!

  —of a black skull mottled with charred meat.

  On reflex, he wrenched the steering wheel toward the oncoming lane, causing a head-on collision, the first in a chain reaction of collisions along the bridge, which ended in a twenty-car pileup and dozens of injuries.

  It was an honor to die as a Thunder God.

  In the closing months of the war, the Japanese had developed what they hoped would be the ultimate kamikaze weapon: a piloted glider bomb called the ohka, the “cherry blossom.” Manned by a pilot facing certain death, the ohka would be carried to its target on the belly of a mother plane, then set free like a baby coming down the birth canal. As the ohka’s three rocket engines accelerated to over 550 miles per hour, the pilot—honored as a Thunder God—would guide it straight toward an enemy ship.

  “Hissatsu!”

  Kaboom!

  And you went to Yasukuni Shrine as a god.

  Technically, this old prop plane qualified the yakuza pilot as a kamikaze, not a Thunder God. But his uncle had guided an ohka to its target during the war, and was forevermore revered by his family, so now the cancer-ridden pilot fantasized that he was a Thunder God too.

  Having dropped his dead weight onto the Lions Gate Bridge, Tokuda’s henchman targeted his propeller at the billowing sails out on the harbor. Then, pushing the controls forward to turn his plane into a dive bomber, he gave it full throttle.

  The Thunder God descended in a power dive.

  Sgt. Dane Winter was striding up the street when a woman walking toward him raised both hands to her face like Munch’s The Scream and cried, “My God, no!”

  His plan was to hike across downtown to False Creek and up over Burrard Bridge to the south shore, where he’d follow the creek-side walk to his condo. Jackie had been caught in a delay at work, so he’d told her to let Chuck drive her car to Mud Bay Airport to pick up the plane. Dane would drive her down to the convention center to meet up with Joe after his rehearsal. From there, Jackie and Joe could drive Dane’s car to the Mounties’ airport on Sea Island, and Chuck could pick them up there for the fireworks.

  “What about you?” she had asked.

  “I’ll walk home,” he’d said. “The exercise will do me good, and I can pretend I’m out trick-or-treating like when I was a kid. That solves your problem.”

  So that’s what they had done. Joe and Jackie had driven off, while Dane spent half an hour touring the convention center. How he wished he could have hooked his grandfather up with Joe. Think of the war stories those two vets would have shared!

  Now he was walking home.

  The shock etched into the woman’s face prompted the Mountie to whirl around just in time to see a miniature version of 9/11 unfold before his eyes. A single-engine plane came dive-bombing out of the sky and rammed into the convention center, hard enough to shiver its pilings and shake the canvas sails that lined its length like a typhoon hitting a windjammer. The plane exploded on impact, and flames blew back from its tail. One wing was blown off and propelled into the air. The sergeant caught the registration letters as it pinwheeled down to the street.

  “Lewis. Special X.”

  “Rusty,” Dane said into his cellphone as he dashed toward the crash site, “a plane just struck the convention center. I’m on the scene. I need a registration checked with Transport Canada.”

  “Shoot.”

  “C-DKYZ. I want the name of the registered owner and the airport the plane calls home.”

  Why?

  By the time DeClercq and Macbeth had dried off, got dressed, and rushed out to the chief’s car, the traffic along Marine Drive and up Taylor Way was completely stalled. That left them no option but to hoof it.

  All the way down Sentinel Hill to the gridlocked approach to the bridge, DeClercq and Macbeth were busy on their cellphones. He was directing the Mounted’s response to what bore the hallmarks of a terrorist attack, while she was informing ambulance crews to carry in their stretchers from wherever they were bottlenecked. It would be hours before vehicles on the Lions Gate Bridge could move an inch.

  Boom!

  Boom!

  Boom!

  The show must go on, so as the pair huffed up the incline to the crest of the bridge, where headlight beams from the piled-up wrecks stabbed in all directions, the storm overhead fractured into pyrotechnic shards. The blasts turned the blood on the bridge redder, and the sky, as if torn asunder by the fireworks, opened up and poured down rain.

  Boom!

  Boom!

  Wee-ooh! Wee-ooh! Wee-ooh! ...

  The night was full of screaming sirens, some responding to Halloween hijinks and others to the plane crash, but up here the screams were human. Screams from injured drivers trapped until the Jaws of Life could extricate them. Screams from pedestrians pinned to the bridge by cars that had jumped the sidewalks. Screams from those laid out on the roadway and receiving first aid. And screams from two trick-or-treating kids—one the Frankenstein monster, the other the wicked witch—being hauled from the back seat of a smashed-up car at the hub of the carnage.

  A car with a driver slumped at the wheel and a body smashed on the windshield.

  “Daddy’s hurt!” wailed the witch, the dye in her black rat’s nest of backcombed hair trickling down her anguished face.

  “Is he dead?” cried the monster, struggling to break loose from the hold of the good Samaritan who had pulled him out of the car.

  The bawling witch was going into hysterics.

  Weaving his way to the wreck, DeClercq crouched down to face the traumatized pair.

  “Hello. My name is Robert. I’m the policeman who’s going to see to your dad. Are you hurt?”

  “Daddy’s hurt!” the witch sobbed, then she threw herself into the chief’s arms.

  “Are you okay, son?”

  “Yes,” the monster sniveled, shivering from shock and his rain-soaked clothes.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Stuart.”

  “And your sister’s?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “At home. We don’t live with Dad.”

  Over the girl’s shoulder, DeClercq caught sight of several uniformed cops and ambulance workers sprinting through the curtain of rain from the North Shore. He forked his fingers at two of the constables and motioned them over.

  “Sir?” said the female, recognizing him.

  “Stuart, Sarah, I want you to go with this constable. She’ll phone your mom and get you home. I’ll take your dad to doctors at the hospital.”

  The female cop scowled. She obviously thought babysitting duties were beneath her.

  “Get over it,” DeClercq warned beneath his breath. “And find your heart.”

  His eyes dropped to her name tag, and h
er flinch said that she knew she’d just blown any chance she might have had of joining Special X.

  The male constable caught on. “I’ll take them, sir,” he said.

  “No. She’ll do her duty. We don’t need shirkers here. We have a crime scene: the hood of this car. Find a way to build a tent to preserve forensics. And pass me your flashlight.”

  The chastised officer took both kids by the hand and gently tugged them away.

  Crawling into the back seat of the car, the chief reached forward to check the neck pulse of the driver. Nothing. The head-on collision had caved in his face. No airbags.

  DeClercq switched on the flashlight.

  What a mess!

  At 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, it takes an hour to cremate the human body. This cadaver had burned for only as long as it took it to plunge from the plane, so while the body squashed on the windshield was charred black on the outside, it was as pink as ever within.

  The beam of the flashlight caught something strange. Preserved in the mash of internal organs in a way that reminded DeClercq of a fossil caught in amber were the brittle, charred bones of one scorched hand. It struck the Mountie that one of the fingers was missing, and he recalled yesterday’s discussion with the Japanese diplomat about yubitsume, the yakuza finger-cutting ritual.

  But this wasn’t a pinky.

  It was a missing ring finger.

  What, if anything, did that mean?

  Then the flashlight beam picked out something else. Patches of iron were stuck to the corpse, which was also dusted with white powder of some sort. From those clues and the brilliant glare he’d seen in the sky at Macbeth’s, DeClercq deduced that whoever had taken this dive had been wrapped like a mummy in something that bound thermite to his flesh.

  The chief had seen thermite used to weld railroad tracks in place, and he also knew that it had been used during the Second World War to purify uranium for the Manhattan Project.

  These were the residues.

  Okay, the Mountie said to himself, think this through.

  Someone seeks revenge against a fingerless man. No one dumps a body this publicly unless he’s making an important statement. So up goes a plane with a human thermite bomb aboard, and down comes the charred victim onto the Lions Gate Bridge. Then whoever committed the crime crashes the plane into a convention center that’s playing host to Pacific War vets.

  Why? wondered DeClercq.

  “DeClercq.”

  “Chief, it’s Dane. I’m at the crash site.”

  From the hump of the Lions Gate Bridge, the chief superintendent had a bird’s-eye view of the sergeant’s location. He gazed southeast along the seawall walk, over the figurehead of the Empress of Japan, and past the Nine O’Clock Gun to Canada Place.

  Vancouver’s answer to the Sydney Opera House, the landmark on the south shore of Burrard Inlet was Canada’s pavilion for Expo 86. Seen from afar, it resembled a sailing ship, with its bright white fabric sails billowing along what appeared to be its hull but was in fact a pier extending into the harbor. The Pan Pacific Hotel soared at its landward stern. A domed IMAX theater was the figurehead at its prow. And in between was the convention center, whose long docks were home base for cruise ships doing the Alaska run. Tonight, however, those docks were bare, and instead of sea traffic, a kamikaze plane had struck Canada Place amidships.

  “How bad is it?” DeClercq asked.

  “It could be worse,” said the sergeant. “The plane was too light to do major damage. It slammed into the west side of the main meeting hall and broke apart. The pilot hurled out of the cockpit and smashed in through the jagged glass. I’m standing over the upper half of him. The lower half must be back in the plane. A smear of blood runs across the floor. Tonight was only a rehearsal, so the hall was all but empty. The only person dead is the Japanese pilot.”

  “Japanese?” said DeClercq.

  “Yeah, there’s one of those kamikaze scarves around his brow. And guess what? During his flight from the cockpit to this final resting place, he must have lost his prosthetic finger. I’m staring at a missing pinky, Chief.”

  No sooner had Dane punched off than his cellphone jangled.

  “Sergeant Winter.”

  “It’s Rusty Lewis. Transport Canada has tracked the plane.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s from a small airfield down near the border. I can’t get hold of the owner, but it’s called Mud Bay Airport.”

  “Corporal Hett.”

  “Jackie, it’s Dane. Where are you?”

  “Air Services. It’s nuts here. They’re waiting to respond to a crash downtown. Chuck won’t be able to land.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?”

  “No. They’re keeping the airwaves clear.”

  “I don’t know what it means, but there’s something you’ve got to know. The plane that crashed tonight was from Mud Bay Airport. Chuck wasn’t the pilot. I’m looking at the guy as we speak. He’s Japanese. And he’s missing a finger.”

  “Yakuza?”

  “Looks like that to me. We can’t reach the airport owner, so we don’t know who rented the plane. If you’re out of contact with Chuck, you’d better get down to Mud Bay. A worst-case scenario would be that he got hijacked for his plane.”

  Whup, whup, whup ...

  As the RCMP Eurocopter approached the blacked-out airfield, the pilot kicked in FLIR—forward-looking infrared—to pick up any heat signatures. That would tell them if there were bad guys lurking about.

  “Body heat,” the pilot told Jackie through the headphones. “Only one. In the open. On the ground.”

  “Check it out,” said the corporal.

  Not Dad, she prayed.

  As the helicopter traversed the airfield, a string of lights flashed red-blue, red-blue on the roofs of the patrol cars that were speeding down the rural road to secure the airport’s perimeter.

  “Light him up,” Jackie said, and a spotlight knifed down, pooling around a man sprawled in a bloody puddle near the gate.

  “There!” said Joe, pointing. “In the shadows.”

  The pilot keyed the chopper’s mike to switch on the airport’s ramp and runway lights, and there, beside the line of buildings, with its doors open, sat Jackie’s car.

  “Set us down,” she said.

  The overhead rotor blew waves of rain out in concentric circles, so the pilot jockeyed the Eurocopter far enough away from the car to preserve forensic clues. As cops from the patrol cars swarmed toward what appeared to be a run-over security guard, Jackie jumped from the cockpit and sprinted to her car.

  By now, she knew that a body had been dumped on the bridge, and that the ring finger seemed to be missing from its right hand. So the instant her flashlight beam glinted off her dad’s signet ring—a ring that bore the insignia of the U.S. Air Force—she knew her father had died a death too horrible to comprehend.

  The ring was still on his finger.

  And the finger was on the dash.

  “Find anything?” Joe called from a decent distance away. Her grandfather knew better than to traipse across a possible crime scene.

  There was no need for Jackie to reply. The moment she turned to face him, the old man could see the answer in the pain around her eyes. She was tough, but he was tougher, for Joe was a veteran of both the Depression and the Pacific War. So when he held his arms wide open to embrace her, Jackie swiftly closed the gap between them. Both Hetts, however, knew that no matter how hard they clung to each other, that gap would always be there, for the generation connecting them had been snatched away.

  “Why?” Jackie choked. “Why kill Dad?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time,” Joe mumbled flatly.

  “No!” she replied, gritting her teeth. “There must be more. Why? Why? Why!”

  Hickam’s Flag

  Potsdam, Germany

  July 16, 1945

  On May 8, 1945, less than a month into Harry S. Truman’s presidency, Nazi Germany surrendered.

&n
bsp; So that left the “Japs.”

  How Truman felt about the “Japs” was a matter of record. “I think one man is just as good as another, so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman,” he once wrote. “Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.”

  In his hatred of the Japs—Truman called them “savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic”—the president wasn’t alone. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor—Roosevelt’s “date which will live in infamy”—had enraged America to its racial core. Hitler’s war was white on white, but the fight with Japan was different. The Japs were the Other; comic books portrayed them as bucktoothed yellow monkeys. Some GIs in the Pacific War collected scalps or ears as trophies.

  Admiral William Halsey told men going into battle, “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs. The only good Jap is a Jap who’s been dead for six months.”

  The motto of the U.S. Marines was: “Remember Pearl Harbor—Keep ’em dying.”

  The commander of the Tenth Army at the Battle of Okinawa, General Joseph Stilwell—also known as “Vinegar Joe”—wrote, “When I think of how these bowlegged cockroaches have ruined our calm lives it makes me want to wrap Jap guts around every lamppost in Asia.”

  As Truman put it, “When you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast.”

  That’s why the American flag that flapped at the meeting of Truman, Churchill, and Stalin in Potsdam, Germany, in July was the same Stars and Stripes that had flown from the flagpole at Hickam Field during the Japanese sneak attack.

  Remember Pearl Harbor.

  Truman did.