Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  “And when is all this meant to happen?”

  “Tomorrow.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to waste any more time before I can prove to my father that I’m fit to be his son.”

  Good, thought Lyn.

  Today it will be.

  I’ll use my brother as a Trojan horse and sneak right past the men guarding Tokuda.

  The Big Bang

  Tinian, Mariana Islands

  August 6, 1945

  The crewmen of this huge plane didn’t realize it, but they were about to change the world in what would soon be one of history’s three most famous aircraft, behind the Kitty Hawk and the Spirit of St. Louis.

  “Tower to Dimples Eight-two. Clear for takeoff.”

  At 2:45 a.m., Colonel Paul Tibbets thrust four throttles forward and sent the sixty-five-ton Enola Gay down Runway A at the world’s largest airfield. Fire trucks and ambulances were parked every fifty feet along both sides of the airstrip, ready to respond if something went wrong. With twelve men, seven thousand gallons of fuel, and a single five-ton bomb onboard, the lumbering machine carried an overload of fifteen thousand pounds. If something did go wrong, there’d be hell to pay.

  The runway ended at a cliff, where the ground gave way to black sea. The men were heading for Iwo Jima, more than six hundred miles and three hours away. In the spacious area behind the cockpit, Sergeant Joe Hett was busily at work, as were the navigator, the radioman, and the flight engineer. Back of them, just below the long, padded tunnel that ran over the bomb bay, linking the front and rear compartments, there was a round, airtight door that accessed “Little Boy.”

  Like the others, Joe wore a survival vest with fishhooks, a drinking-water kit, a first-aid package, and emergency food rations. A parachute harness with clips for both his chest chute and a one-man life raft were cinched over green overalls and covered by a flak suit that would provide protection against shrapnel. Strapped to his waist was a Colt .45. His only identification was the dog tags around his neck.

  As a precaution, Col. Tibbets also carried a small metal box with twelve capsules of cyanide. At the first sign of trouble, he would hand them out so that each man—should he find himself on the verge of capture—could choose between the lethal poison and a bullet to his brain. The other alternative was no alternative at all. When they saw the bomb aboard the Enola Gay, the Japs would be determined to learn its secret, by whatever means necessary.

  But that secret was something even the crew didn’t know.

  That something big was up was obvious. On December 17, 1944—the forty-first anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first Kitty Hawk flight—the 509th Bomb Group had been assigned, under Tibbets’s command, to fly special single-bomb B-29s. But only Tibbets knew why. High-altitude drops were practiced back home in the States until the group was deployed to Tinian, an island in the Pacific. Before long, the 509th had become the butt of jokes and the object of sneers by other fliers, who gave the crews a hard time because of their lack of combat blooding.

  Finally, General Curtis LeMay—old “Iron Ass” himself—had issued the order for Special Bombing Mission No. 13. “The bomb you’re going to drop is something new in the history of warfare,” the men had been told. “It is the most destructive weapon ever produced. No one knows exactly what will happen when the bomb is dropped from the air. That has never been done before.” At midnight on August 6, they had gathered in the crew lounge at the Tinian airfield. Declaring that the weapon they were about to deliver had the potential to end the war, Tibbets had said, “Do your jobs. Obey your orders. Don’t cut corners or take chances.”

  Then a truck had driven them to the Enola Gay.

  Joe’s first impression when he saw the scene at the runway was that he was Clark Gable at the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind. The plane was lit up by klieg lights and mobile generators, and a crowd of about a hundred—including reporters and film crews—milled around the bomber. Had the MGM lion stuck its head out of the cockpit and let loose a roar, Joe would not have blinked.

  “This way!”

  “Smile!”

  “Look serious!”

  “Look busy!”

  Reporters shouted as flashbulbs burst in the already blinding glare. Then, after one more group photo, Tibbets had shut down the carnival with a simple order to his bombing crew: “Okay, let’s go to work.”

  One by one, the men had clambered up the ladder to the hatch behind the Enola Gay’s nose wheel, and now all were en route to hit Japan.

  With what kind of bomb? Joe wondered.

  As the plane burrowed through the inky night, Tibbets gave the tail gunner permission to test his weapons. The gunner had a thousand rounds to defend the bomber against attack. He fired off fifty shots in a jarring burst, filling the fuselage with the rattling noise of war and his turret with the stench of cordite and burnt oil. The tracers arced into the sea.

  “Judge going to work,” Tibbets radioed back to Tinian’s tower at 3:00 a.m.

  As agreed, the tower didn’t respond.

  Time for the explosives expert to arm the bomb. There had been too many B-29 crashes at the airfield to chance detonating the weapon on takeoff. But now that they were safely in the air, the expert could get to work. He swung open the circular door and, followed closely by his assistant, lowered himself through the hatch that fed into the bomb bay.

  Curious, Joe left his battle station and stuck his head into the hole to watch this critical stage of the mission. The “gimmick”—a term used for the bomb—was clamped to a special hook and dangled over the long doors of the bay. The bomb was about ten feet long and twenty-eight inches in diameter. Four thick cables like umbilical cords ran from it to a control panel in the area aft of the cockpit, where the ordnance man could monitor the gimmick like a doctor does a woman in labor.

  With their backs to the open hatch, the demolitions team looked like a pair of mechanics working on a car. The ordnance man stood ready to pass tools to the explosives expert while he carefully placed gunpowder and an electrical detonator into the open casing. Then, after sixteen turns had tightened the breech plate, he sealed the armor, and Little Boy was armed. That’s when Joe noticed the antennae sticking out of the nose.

  What were they for?

  Before the two men climbed out of the hold to check the circuits on the monitoring console, the beam of the flashlight swept forward into the dark of the bay. In Joe’s imagination, he saw this torpedo-like “fish” streaking through the water in Pearl Harbor, a moment before it slammed into the guts of a battleship.

  Then he recalled that Life photo of him—outrage flashing in his eyes—shooting up at the Zero as it skimmed over Hickam Field. He knew that day had—relentlessly, inevitably—brought him to this one.

  He couldn’t put it any better than “Iron Ass” LeMay, the man in charge of this mission, who’d said:

  “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

  Half an hour before the plane was scheduled to reach Iwo Jima, at 5:52 a.m., Tibbets unstrapped himself from the pilot’s seat, handed the controls to his co-pilot, and went back to spend a few moments with each of the crew. When he got to Joe’s station, the elevators gave a distinct kick to the Enola Gay as “George,” the automatic pilot, began to fly the bomber.

  “Red, have you figured out what we’re doing this morning?”

  “Colonel, I don’t want to get put up against a wall and shot,” Joe replied jokingly, referring to the unwritten commandment that the crew keep their mouths shut.

  “We’re on our way now. You can talk.”

  Joe knew that the plane was carrying some sort of new superexplosive. “Are we hauling a chemist’s nightmare?” he asked.

  “No, not exactly.”

  “How ’bout a physicist’s nightmare?”

  “Yes,” Tibbets confirmed.

  Joe recalled a phrase he’d once read—though with little idea what it meant—in a popular science journal. “Just a question, Colonel,” he said now.
“Are we splitting atoms?”

  Without responding, Tibbets returned to the cockpit. Switching off “George,” the pilot began the climb to nine thousand feet, the altitude at which the Enola Gay would rendezvous with two Superfortresses, the Great Artiste and No. 91. Outside the cockpit, to the east, a waning moon appeared in the banks of cloud. Ahead, the sky was deep blue with cirrus wisps as night gave way to dawn. By the time the bombers met up over the porkchop-shaped island of Iwo Jima, the world was an iridescent pink.

  With the Enola Gay in the lead, the three B-29s formed a loose V heading up the “Hirohito Highway” to Japan.

  It was 5:05 a.m., Japanese time.

  An hour and a half later, the ordnance man again swung down into the bomb bay to unscrew three green plugs in the middle of the weapon and replace them with red ones.

  Tibbets used the intercom to address the crew.

  “We are carrying the world’s first atomic bomb,” he said, using the word “atomic” for the first time.

  Several men gasped.

  One let out a long, low whistle.

  “When the bomb is dropped, we’ll record our reactions to what we see. This recording is for history. Watch your language, and don’t clutter up the intercom.”

  Dead air hung in the fuselage, then Tibbets came back on.

  “Red, you were right. We are splitting atoms.”

  “It’s Hiroshima,” the colonel announced after hearing the weather report. The Straight Flush, one of three weather scouts patrolling over different cities, had gazed down on Hiroshima from six miles up through a gap ten miles wide in the clouds. Sunlight shone through the hole like a spotlight, as if to say of the target, “Here it is!”

  Fifty miles out from ground zero—the Aioi Bridge—the world’s first atomic bomber was lined up to drop its deadly cargo.

  In the nose, the bombardier leaned forward against the headrest that had been specially designed for this drop.

  “IP.” Initial point, the navigator reported.

  “On glasses,” Tibbets ordered through the intercom.

  The crewmen had Polaroid goggles like those worn by welders, and they knew that the knob at the bridge of the nose should be turned to the setting that let in the least amount of light. By slipping them on, nine of the twelve were plunged into darkness. The pilot, the bombardier, and the radar monitor still had work to do. Before putting his goggles on, the airman who was keeping a log of the mission scrawled, “There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target.”

  Thirty seconds to go.

  “Hiroshima coming into view!” shouted the bombardier.

  “Stand by for the tone break—and the turn,” warned Tibbets.

  Eyes glued to his viewfinder, the bombardier spied dark buildings hunkered down on the fingers of land that reached into the deep blue of Hiroshima Bay. The six forks of the Ota River flowed brown and muddy. Roads across the city were metallic gray. A gossamer haze shimmered over the 300,000 souls below, but the bombardier could still make out the T-shaped Aioi Bridge as it moved inexorably into the crosshairs of his bombsight.

  “I’ve got it!” he yelled.

  He turned on the tone signal that filled the ears of the crew with a low-pitched, continuous hum, telling them that the B-29 had entered the automatic synchronization of the final fifteen seconds of the bombing run.

  At eight-fifteen, the bay doors snapped open and Little Boy dropped from its hook. When the umbilical cords ripped away, the tone signal in the plane was instantly killed. The abrupt lightening of the bomber bounced it ten feet up in the air.

  “Bomb away!” came the shout from the nose as Tibbets swung the Enola Gay into a steep, right-hand power dive to hightail it out of there before all hell broke loose.

  Forsaking his bombsight, the bombardier gazed down through the Plexiglas to watch Little Boy drop. The “gimmick” wobbled a bit until it picked up speed, then it vanished earthbound with a sonic shriek.

  Inside the gadget, a timer tripped a switch. Juice zapped from the batteries toward the detonator. At five thousand feet above Hiroshima, a barometric, height-detecting switch activated a small radar set. Its transmitter bounced radio waves from the ground to the strange antennae that Joe had noticed on the bomb. The radar readings flipped the final switch in the chain at just under two thousand feet above the city, closing the circuit that sent electricity to the detonator.

  Bang!

  Forty-three seconds after the drop and almost six miles down from the Enola Gay, the bomb’s detonator ignited the explosive powder in its casing. That blast propelled a five-pound atomic “bullet” of uranium 235 along the six-foot barrel of an internal cannon, where it rammed into the “target,” a seventeen-pound hunk of uranium 235 fixed to the muzzle, to produce “crit,” critical mass.

  BWAMMMMMMM!

  This atomic explosion!

  Seen from the bomber, the brilliant dot of purplish-red light above Hiroshima might have been the Big Bang that created today’s ever-expanding universe. God only knew how many people were fried in the next few seconds, as a searing fireball blasted out for miles. Like an overexposed photograph, the sky was filled with a bright white light. Inside the plane, the crew members were protected by their dark goggles. As near as Joe could tell, Hiroshima had ceased to exist.

  Joe could taste the intensity.

  It tasted like lead.

  In place of the city, the crew got a glimpse of hell. Firestorms raged across the land, and a gigantic, funnel-like column of air—a physical manifestation of the explosion itself—rose up at the speed of sound. Its core was hellfire red. The smoke was purplish gray. Someone yelled something unintelligible, and the Enola Gay was slammed by the ear-splitting din that shells make when they blow right beside you.

  “Flak!”

  “The sons of bitches are shooting at us!”

  “There’s another one coming!”

  As the intercom was overwhelmed by pandemonium, a few of the crew were thrown from their seats in a bone-jarring crash. Whatever had hit them a moment ago now hit them again, bucking the bomber up from its flight path.

  “That wasn’t flak. Stay calm,” Tibbets announced. “That was the shock wave bouncing back from the ground. There won’t be any more. Let’s get our recordings going.”

  Eleven miles from Hiroshima, the Superfortress began to orbit the devastated city. As the men waited to express their thoughts for posterity, they peered out at a huge mushroom cloud. The monstrous black plume was shot through with flames, the head billowing out for miles as it roiled up past the Enola Gay at thirty thousand feet and continued to rise.

  “My God,” someone whispered. “What have we done?”

  Stunner

  Vancouver

  November 1, Now

  This isn’t happening to me! How dare someone do this to Dad! Let me get my hands on him for five minutes! Life will be gray without Dad in it! Wrong place, wrong time! That’s how it is! Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance: the five stages of grief were colliding in Jackie’s battered heart and mind like boxcars slamming each other in the midst of a train wreck.

  Her initial concern had been Joe. He didn’t look well. Though he tried to put on the brave face of his generation—the Depression and the war steeled men like Joe to overwhelming loss—the health problems of an old man undermined his will. She and her granddad had leaned on each other for support through the midnight hours, but soon it was obvious to Jackie that Joe was struggling to shore up his crumbling front for her sake.

  “Red?” she said as they drove away from Special X.

  “Uh?”

  “Your face suits your name.”

  “It’s my blood pressure.”

  “You need sleep. I don’t want you having a heart attack or a stroke on me.”

  “I need my pills.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Back in the hotel room.”

  “Let’s go get ’em. Then I’ll take you home with me. Unless you’d ra
ther be alone?”

  “Would you?”

  “To be honest, yes. I feel a desperate need to run. If I don’t work this tension out, I’ll explode.”

  “Go do what you gotta do.”

  So having dropped her granddad off at the hotel, after extracting a promise that he’d take something to help him sleep, Jackie went home, changed into her running gear, then drove Dane’s car to the North Shore and parked in a cross street that ended at the seawall. Along False Creek, or around Stanley Park, or here at the foot of the mountains, this city had a multitude of oceanside walks.

  From Dundarave Pier, Jackie began jogging east with the wind at her back. The tide was high and waves were crashing over the stone wall, drenching her with spray if she timed the ebb and flow wrong. Within the hour, dawn would ignite the horizon, flushing the sky beyond the Lions Gate Bridge and the lonely cone of Mount Baker in Washington State.

  Splash ...

  Splash ...

  Splash ...

  Puddles spewed out from her runners.

  The surest way to keep her emotions under control was to concentrate on trying to make sense out of what had happened. That she was officially off the case was a certainty, for no one knew better than the chief how personal involvement in a murder could cloud your judgment. DeClercq had run gauntlets like this when his first wife and his daughter were murdered, and again when his second wife got caught in crossfire. Having learned the hard way, he’d insist that Chuck’s murder was investigated by cops with cold minds.

  Still, she’d rather play the cop and try to do something useful—like come up with a motive to pass on to Special X—than break down under emotional stress and cry her heart out for her dad.

  Splash ...

  Splash ...

  Splash ...

  When she heard that a Japanese pilot had intentionally crashed a plane into the Canada Place convention center, Jackie’s reaction was that of any North American in the post 9/11 world: “It’s got to be terrorists.”