Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  Oily, gooey, and inky with radioactive soot, drops of moisture the size of marbles teemed down onto the blazing ruins from nine o’clock on. In some parts of the wasteland, it rained for more than an hour, splattering gobs of uranium waste around with vengeful abandon.

  Panicked people screamed that the Americans were showering Hiroshima with gasoline as a prelude to torching it and setting fire to those still living.

  Was that the plan?

  Were they to be burned alive?

  Or was this their fate?

  Were they being gassed?

  For there was the odor in the air, the “electric smell” produced by nuclear fission.

  At that moment, only one thing was certain:

  Two billion American dollars will buy an awful lot of bang for the buck.

  Captain Mitsuo Fuchida—the pilot who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor—got no reply from the airport tower as he flew toward Hiroshima. Everything had been fine yesterday afternoon when he took off, but now there was a strange mushroom cloud billowing over the city. Only as he came in to land did he grasp that all that remained of Hiroshima was fire, smoke, and rubble.

  The airport was more than two miles from ground zero, but it too had succumbed. The shock wave had blown the windows out of runway buildings. It had shattered the glass of cockpits that faced the city and caved in fuselages until they looked like crescent bananas.

  In his immaculate white uniform, gloves, and shoes, the stunned captain walked toward Hiroshima. At the entrance to the airport, he ran into an exodus of mangled refugees, a long line of living corpses fleeing from hell. Their hair scorched to the roots, their faces blotted by raw burns, some with mouths unable to stretch wide enough for food, they hobbled toward him on makeshift crutches or leaned on one another for support.

  As he pressed on toward the devastated city, Fuchida was met by one grotesque tableau after another.

  Blackened and bleeding, her skin dangling in shreds, a stumbling mother clutched a dead baby to her breast.

  Completely naked, his clothes scorched off, a blind man dragged his wife by the hand, unaware that she had abandoned him back along the road when the flesh of her arm had sloughed off like an elbow-length glove.

  “Itai! Itai!”

  It hurts! It hurts!

  So many times did Fuchida hear those words that eventually—at least in his mind—the agony seemed to fuse into one shrill shriek.

  Soon, the living gave way to the dying and the dead. Pus-oozing people sat on the ground, retching and waiting for death. On the waterfront, corpses floated in and out with the tide. Cadavers clogged the gutters, and bodies blocked the streets. Sick, blistered horses hung their heads off bridges. Hiroshima reeked like a charnel house. And near the city center, a whole square mile had simply disappeared.

  Wandering through the ruins, Fuchida shook his head.

  “Tora! Tora! Tora!” had sunk to this!

  Hibakusha, they called them.

  “Survivors of the bombing.”

  The lucky ones were those killed outright. For them, death came in the blink of an eye. But those still around were ticking time bombs, for radiation had damaged their cells. The first stage of what would become known as “radiation sickness” included nausea, headaches, diarrhea, malaise, and fever.

  About two weeks later, the second stage took hold. Hair blanched white, then fell out altogether. Pale and shaky, weak and tired, the afflicted couldn’t concentrate. And what had been a low-grade fever spiked as high as 106.

  The blood disorders set in a month after the blast. This third stage saw people grow so anemic that they might as well have been ghosts. Almost all the nurses and doctors were dead, so agony became sheer torture. Gums began to bleed, and blood spots the size of grains of rice and hemorrhages as big as soybeans appeared. Women had miscarriages, and menstruation ceased. Men became sterile. Finally, many began convulsing and vomiting up blood. Often, their gagging went on for ten days straight before they collapsed and expired.

  Hiroshima was the ancestral home of Genjo Tokuda and his family. His father, his mother, his sisters, his brother, his wife, and his only child—a four-year-old boy—had all survived the initial blast of the bomb dropped by the Enola Gay. They would have to wait for radiation sickness to kill them slowly.

  By the time the American conquerors released Tokuda from their prisoner-of-war camp, all but his wife were gone. He went home to Hiroshima, only to find that she was in the final stages of bleeding out. He stayed with her until she gagged to death in his arms. Then he laid her to rest with the remains of the last child he would be able to sire, for radiation and the damage done to his genitals by the American flame-thrower on Okinawa had rendered him sterile as well.

  That day, standing amid the ashes of what had once been his family’s Shinto shrine, where his father had taught him the Way of the Warrior and bequeathed him the two samurai swords, Genjo Tokuda swore a sacred oath to the kami gods.

  Before he too was laid to rest, he would see that the killers who’d manned that bomber—the Enola Gay—suffered the same pain that he was suffering now.

  Sushi Chef

  Vancouver

  November 1, Now

  Fish.

  She could smell fish.

  Not fishy fish, like fish that’s about to go bad, but fresh fish, of the sort served at a sushi bar.

  Sushi.

  Yum!

  Who’d have thought?

  When Jackie was a girl, she had hated fish. Luckily, her mom and dad were meat-and-potatoes people who’d had no affinity for fish either, so she’d never been forced to eat the wretched stuff.

  Vancouverites, however, were mostly fish fans—well, what would you expect, it being the West Coast and all?—so once Jackie had been posted here, she’d found herself repeatedly supping on teriyaki cooking in the company of a sophisticated school of raw-fish freaks.

  “Go on. I dare you.”

  “Yuk,” she told her first patrol partner.

  “Don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “A bellyful of worms.”

  “It takes more than ten years of training to qualify as a sushi chef. It’s an art, Jackie.”

  “Gimme a break.”

  “If you knew Sushi like I know Sushi, oh, oh, oh what a treat ...”

  Hett laughed.

  “Close your eyes and open wide.”

  “Then what? ‘Lie back and think of England’? Wasn’t that Queen Victoria’s advice for losing your virginity?”

  “I double dog dare you.”

  “Oh! Since you put it like that ...”

  And so it had gone, until at last she’d chanced a nibble of salmon. And now—a full-fledged sushi-ite—she ate just about anything harvested from the Pacific.

  Still, how could this smell be sushi?

  Surely she sniffed the sea?

  For the last thing Jackie remembered before someone had doused her lights was going for a pre-dawn run on the seawall to calm her jittery nerves and clear her overwrought mind.

  This had to be the ocean.

  She struggled to open her eyes.

  And damn, if Jackie wasn’t sitting by a sushi bar.

  As near as she could tell, this sushi bar was built into the lower level of a mountainside house. Beyond the threshold, steps ascended under a veil of overhanging towels, and Jackie could look down on Vancouver through bamboo blinds on the windows. The pale wood interior was hung with paper lanterns, and graced with floral arrangements and bonsai trees.

  With her mouth gagged and her wrists and ankles lashed to the limbs of an executioner’s chair, Jackie looked toward the square bar in the center of the room. A tsu—a sushi expert—always sits at the counter so he can see his food being prepared. And so it was with Tokuda, whom the kidnapped Mountie recognized from both her grandfather’s run-in at the airport and the photo pinned to DeClercq’s Strategy Wall. As she eyed the octogenarian, who was relishing the dishes set before him by his personal sushi chef
, Jackie wondered if he was making a point by sitting sideways at the bar so she would have to face his ugly scar.

  She knew enough about sushi to comprehend that the itamae—the “board man”—was a master chef. He patrolled his sushi bar like a boxer does the ring, stepping lightly from side to side in a white kimono tunic that was belted at the waist. Around his brow was tied a white hachimaki scarf of the type worn by kamikaze pilots. The tunic was spotless. His hair was cut short, and his fingertips had been scrubbed to ensure the level of cleanliness demanded by his art.

  Slice ...

  Slice ...

  Slice ...

  The glittering blade of his sushi knife had been shaped on natural stone, and he slashed it across the cutting board with flourishes that were deft, swift, and uniform. The knife was honed on one side only, so it left each layer of fish—cut slightly on the bias—with dissimilar surface textures. Swinging his arms and pivoting his torso as if this were a floor show, the itamae reduced a hairy crab and an ominous coil of purple octopus tentacle to bite-size pieces that went onto small beds of glutinous rice and were dabbed with wasabi.

  Bowing respectfully, the chef served Tokuda a palette of underwater colors: white from squid and yellowtail; blue from mackerel and eel; yellow from sea-urchin roe and tamago; red from salmon and tuna.

  “So deska?” he inquired. Okay?

  The yes-man watched his master pop the tidbits into his mouth, the rice side up so his tongue could savor the fish flavor.

  “Hai,” replied Tokuda.

  That pleased the chef no end. Anticipating his kumicho’s every need, he poured him a cup of sake from a bottle kept warm in a tub of hot water.

  Jackie might have been a voyeur in an exclusive gentlemen’s club. To the Japanese, everything to do with fish—catching, cutting, cooking, and making sushi—was men’s work, and the yakuza was also a men’s organization. Courage is the attribute most admired by gangsters, for if there’s a turf war, a yakuza is expected to fight to the death. Because they don’t rumble like men, women can’t be trusted, and they aren’t seen as strong enough to withstand interrogation. They’re born to be mothers and to serve the needs of their husbands, and so are forbidden to join yakuza gangs.

  Why am I here? Jackie wondered.

  Scrape ...

  Scrape ...

  Scrape ...

  The sushi chef was using the heel of his knife to scrape the sinewy meat from the shoulder of a tuna into a fluffy mousse that he then heaped on seaweed with finely chopped scallions and finished off with the raw yolk of a quail egg.

  To renew his palate, Tokuda was nibbling gari, thin shavings of pickled ginger.

  Having served his boss the tuna, the chef was reaching for a pot of mild green sencha tea when the old man finally decided to acknowledge Jackie’s presence by swiveling a quarter-turn around on his stool.

  If looks could kill, thought Hett.

  “Hai,” said the chef, as if to an unspoken order. Raising a counter leaf to exit from the sushi bar, he rolled out what seemed to be a mobile serving tray and pushed it across the hardwood floor to the executioner’s chair. The tray had a lift-up cover designed to keep food hot, but today the stainless-steel coffin held a set of gleaming knives.

  The chef selected one.

  Please, no! Jackie thought.

  She was still wearing her rain-soaked jogging suit. With one hand, the itamae pulled the collar out from her neck, and with the other, he made a slash down the front of her chest. For a moment, Jackie feared she had been slit from jaw to navel, but the razor-sharp blade had only parted her clothes.

  Her sweatshirt gaped open, flashing her bra.

  A flick of the blade’s tip and that was sundered too.

  So cold were the eyes of the sushi chef that he might have been a fish himself.

  Squeeze ...

  Squeeze ...

  Squeeze ...

  He fondled her breast as if he was checking the ripeness of fruit in a market, or ...

  Oh, God. No!

  Checking its bias for slicing.

  Suddenly, a closed-circuit TV on the wall to Jackie’s right came to life. A security camera caught the image of an approaching car. Tinted windows hid the faces of the occupants, but someone within must have punched a remote control. The camera watched as the garage opened to swallow the car, and after the door closed, the screen went dead.

  Tokuda said something in Japanese. One of his words was “musuko.”

  For an extradition hearing, Special X had once sent Jackie to Japan, so she knew that word translated as “son.” She wondered if Tokuda was saying that his son had arrived in the car. It had to be his son, for the old man got up, shuffled out of the sushi bar, and disappeared up the stairs beyond the toweled threshold.

  No way would he be doing that for someone else’s son.

  Did that mean this was it?

  My turn to die? wondered Jackie.

  Meanwhile, the groping chef still had hold of her breast. From the way he eyed it—just as he’d eyed the fish—Jackie sensed that his mind was focused on presentation. Was the grate she’d noticed beneath the chair waiting to drain her blood? Would her pink flesh be reduced to slices on beds of glutinous rice? Would she be the guest of honor at some wartime cannibal feast?

  Red had once shocked her with tales of Japanese troops who’d run amok on the southern arc of their conquest, eating Australian soldiers and then, after their food ran out, killing and eating each other.

  Was this a vestige of that?

  Or was this even worse?

  Jackie was trained to unearth the motives buried within twisted minds.

  What if this was revenge?

  Revenge against whom?

  Red?

  If so, what revenge would be the most diabolic of all?

  Forcing pieces of her down the gagging throat of her captive granddad?

  Prisoner of War

  So it all came down to lies.

  When Chuck and Jackie were both kids, Joe had read “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to each of them. Now, as he exited the convention hotel and headed west along the seawalk bordering Coal Harbour, his mind rewrote that Hans Christian Andersen tale.

  Once upon a time, there was an emperor named President Truman. A haberdasher by trade, he concerned himself with outward appearances. In every news photo, Truman seemed to be a well-dressed, dapper little guy. The emperor was definitely a dandy, a man prone to flaunting fancy clothes in public.

  A front man, thought Joe.

  Unfortunately, the emperor fell in with a scheming tailor. A backroom puppet master by the name of Jimmy Byrnes. The tailor told the emperor that he’d make him a new suit of clothes from a special atomic material that would be visible to all but the most foolish and unpatriotic of his subjects.

  Visible to me, thought Joe.

  For there was no greater patriot than Red Hett, whose bloodline ran back to the American Revolution.

  And so the emperor donned his atomic suit and paraded in front of his awestruck subjects, all of whom—Joe included—oohed and aahed at his magnificent ensemble, for they all feared being branded foolish and unpatriotic.

  But as the parade made its way through the streets of passing time, a youngster on the sidelines saw through the atomic lie and cried out, for all to hear, “The emperor is naked!”

  Suddenly, those who had shared in the lie could no longer overlook the evidence before their eyes, and soon a chorus of voices began to say, “The emperor is naked!”

  But not, of course, the emperor himself.

  To admit publicly that he couldn’t see his own atomic clothes would expose him as the most foolish dupe of all. So until his dying day, Truman—like that emperor in Andersen’s tale—had continued parading about naked, in the hope that patriots would see truth where he himself knew there were only lies.

  Patriots like Joe.

  How could I have been so naive? he wondered now.

  “On that trip coming home from Potsd
am,” Truman had nakedly lied, “I ordered the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima. It was a terrible decision. But I made it.”

  Hook, line, and sinker, Joe had swallowed the lie. Japan was given the chance to surrender, and because the Japs didn’t take it, they got what they deserved. The bomb was a military necessity. It saved hundreds of thousands of lives that would have been lost in the invasion of Japan. The bomb was a weapon of last resort against an enemy determined to fight to the death.

  Bullshit, thought Joe.

  They were never given the chance.

  So we’ll never know if the bomb was a necessity.

  But I know that I’ve got innocent blood on my hands.

  And so does Tokuda.

  And he’s determined to make me pay with the innocent blood of my family.

  Damn you, Byrnes!

  Joe should have seen the lie when there was no mention of Japan’s emperor in the Potsdam Declaration. He knew that forcing the Japs to give up their emperor as part of their “unconditional surrender” was the same as forbidding Americans to worship God.

  When the post-Hiroshima surrender conditions made it clear that they could keep their emperor after all, it should have been obvious to Joe that the bomb was a setup.

  But he was cut from the patriotic cloth of his generation, and back then it was assumed that America never did wrong. As Lillian Hellman had once said, “It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell upon them.” Wrapping himself in the Stars and Stripes, Joe had embarked on the post-war peace exactly as Truman advised: “Never, never waste a minute on regret. It is a waste of time.” He had started a family and seen his service through; he had weathered the tumult of Vietnam and retired with his illusions intact.

  That’s how John Wayne did it.

  And so had Joe.

  It was only when he began preparing his address for the vets’ conference that Joe had actually read Truman’s secret Potsdam diary. Discovered in 1979, seven years after the president’s death, the diary set forth the reasons for his decision to drop the bomb.