Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  July 25: Truman’s order went out. “The 509 Composite Group, 20th Air Force will deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima.”

  July 26: The Potsdam Declaration.

  Which meant that the decision to drop the bomb wasn’t made after Japan was asked to surrender.

  It was made before.

  And Joe had done the killing.

  Instead of being a weapon of last resort, the Enola Gay’s atomic bomb was destined to drop, and the man who was really behind that decision—Jimmy Byrnes—had done everything in his power to see that destiny fulfilled.

  “My God! What have we done?”

  Who was the crewman who voiced that in the plane?

  Too many unanswered questions tumbled around in Joe’s troubled mind.

  Would Japan have surrendered if the Americans had agreed to preserve the emperor?

  Was Japan already too exhausted to fight on?

  Would Russia’s entering the Pacific War have been the tipping point?

  With Japan surrounded, would a naval blockade and conventional bombing have done the job?

  Why wasn’t the bomb dropped on troops massing on the southern island of Kyushu, instead of on a city so low on the list of military targets that it had yet to be attacked with conventional weapons?

  If targeting innocent civilians is the MO of terrorists, does that make the atomic bombing of Hiroshima a war crime?

  Ask New Yorkers, thought Joe.

  Whatever the answers to those vexing questions, the aftershocks of Hiroshima were crystal clear:

  America is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon.

  And Japan is the only country to have suffered one.

  And now the bomb had spawned a more ferocious atomic monster than any encountered in 1950s Japanese horror films. Joe was embroiled in a nightmarish rendition of “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” It had already cost him his only child, and it threatened to cost him his sole grandchild too. That would be the end of the long line of Hetts who had answered the call to serve their country, and Joe would be left to die alone.

  Or maybe not.

  Perhaps there was more?

  Wasn’t it more likely that this enemy from half a century ago was killing Joe’s family as a warm-up to the end-game: the annihilation of the atomic bomber himself?

  Then so be it, thought Joe.

  Take me on, Tokuda.

  That’s why Joe was out here on this foggy seawalk, feeling dumbfounded by how radically different the weather was from what he enjoyed in the Southwest. The rain overnight had dissipated to a Scotch mist, and that must have warmed the air above a cooler sea, for the ocean exhaled a lazy, pearl gray cloud. The thicker it got, the more the fog felt like a living entity. Clammy fingers brushed his skin, and the heavy air filled his lungs like smoke. Traffic he couldn’t see rumbled past, along with the disembodied voices of invisible people. Joe advanced slowly through this shadowy gloom, confused and disoriented by what he imagined was a real London pea-souper, and he felt a little like Sherlock Holmes being stalked by Moriarty.

  Footsteps.

  Coming toward him.

  Tires.

  Whispering behind.

  Shoulders hunched against the chill, Hett walked with his hands stuffed in his pockets.

  A figure loomed up in the fog.

  Car doors swung open beside him.

  They took the bait, Joe thought as he punched on the cellphone in his pocket.

  Then hands grabbed him.

  And he was snatched off the seawalk.

  “They’ve got him!” Craven said. “The cellphone’s on.”

  His words went out from a “control” car crawling through the fog on the downtown byway that ran parallel to the street that skirted the seawalk. Because Special O did double duty investigating bad cops for Internal Affairs and watching bad guys for the Mounted, it was literally kept at arm’s length from the rest of the force. Consequently, Oscar had something no other section could boast: its own cipher channel.

  A cipher channel is secure.

  For your ears only.

  And every wired ear on air was working this target.

  “Got ’em,” confirmed the “I guy” from the passenger’s seat beside Craven. The Special I cop had been selected because he was of Japanese heritage and fluent in several Asian languages. In complicated tails like this, there’d often be a specialist in the lead control car. Today, it was the Asian tech from Special I. At other times, especially in cases involving a foreign jurisdiction, it would be a cop from a visiting agency who knew their target’s lifestyle. He could then feed Special O quirks: “That’s typical. No big deal. He likes to go for a rub and tug back home too.”

  If Special O—the watchers—was the eyes of the RCMP, Special I—the electronic buggers—was the ears.

  “They’ve turned off Coal Harbour Quay. The signal’s going south on Cardero.”

  The I guy was gripping a gadget that looked like a remote control for a model airplane. In fact, it was a trap that captured cellphone signals. Around the city, towers fight to “pull” cellphone signals. The closest tower to your phone wins the signal, but the weaker ones track it too. Because more than one tower has a fix, the gizmo in the I guy’s hands could use triangulation to map the point of intersect and locate the phone within one or two car lengths. With so many cellphones around, the trap required proximity. It picked up every signal in the vicinity and displayed each number on its computer screen. In this case, Special I had supplied the phone in Joe Hett’s pocket, so the I guy knew which number to stalk.

  “Quite the receiver,” Nick Craven had said before the colonel was snatched.

  “Yeah,” said the I guy. “We’re always a step ahead. The bad guys use a device like this to clone phones. That’s how they steal your signal and stick you with the bill.”

  “But not like that one, eh?”

  “No. It’s state of the art. But tech stuff changes so fast these days that by the time you and I stop talking, this signal trap will probably be obsolete.”

  But now they were moving; they were on the hunt.

  And that was Cardero Street up ahead.

  “There,” said Craven.

  “Yeah, that’s them. The signal is coming from the vehicle passing in front of us.”

  Through the blur, they could just make out a car passing from the harbor on the right to the left-hand downtown core. As if on cue, the rear window lowered as it cut across Hastings—their intersecting street—and something got tossed out.

  “Houston,” said the I guy, “we’ve got a problem.”

  “I’m an old man,” Joe had said, “and I’m not afraid to die. I faced down that fear a long time ago, at Pearl Harbor. But my granddaughter is all I have left, and she’s too young to die, so I’ll sign whatever you need signed for me to be used as bait.”

  That was back in his hotel room earlier this morning, when he and the Horsemen had forged a battle plan.

  “It’s complicated,” DeClercq had said. “A lot can go wrong.”

  “Enough’s wrong now,” Joe had replied. “And something must be done! They killed my son. They’ll kill Jackie. Get me near them and I’ll take the fuckers with me.”

  “I’ve been in your shoes, Colonel.”

  “So I hear. And you did just what I’m proposing to get your daughter back. Do we have a deal?”

  The danger with technology is that it cuts both ways. If there had been time, they might have planted a tracking device in one of Joe’s teeth or injected a microchip into his body. The Japanese, however, are the top dogs of high-tech, and the yakuza would definitely be armed with the best signal scanners around. If they found Joe wired with a chip, they’d kill him then and there.

  And Jackie too.

  So in the end, Joe had ventured out without the bells and whistles. The only electronic signals he emitted were those that were part of everyday
life. And now that he had been snatched off the quay and hauled into the car, the American was a low-tech prisoner of war.

  “Search him.”

  Or at least Joe figured that’s what the thug with the mole on his cheek had barked in Japanese, for no sooner was the command given than there were paws all over him. And of course, the first item these goons found was the cellphone in his pocket.

  Easy come, easy go.

  By now, the redcoats had their fix.

  “Walk with your hands in your pockets,” Joe had been told by an Asian cop with a section called Special Eye. He figured the “eye” was like private eye, and that’s what made it special. In fact, everything about the Mounties seemed special to them.

  “The moment something happens, punch on the phone. It’ll appear to be dormant, waiting for a call, and I’ll be able to triangulate the signal and track you with this.”

  The eye guy—for that’s what they called him—had waved some sort of receiver.

  So here sat Joe, sandwiched between two heavies in the rear seat, where he was frisked by the Mole and a punk with a black-and-white samurai tattoo creeping up one side of his neck.

  In front, the wheelman turned the corner and crawled away from the harbor.

  The street sign read “Cardero.”

  The tough in the passenger’s seat navigated from a glowing digital map.

  A chill filled the car as the Mole lowered the back-seat window and tossed out the cellphone.

  Crunch!

  It was run over by the car behind.

  “Double trouble,” Craven said. “The target has a shadow. It just ran over the cellphone jettisoned by T1.”

  “How many in T2?” a voice asked through his earpiece.

  “Can’t tell, Chief. Tinted windows.”

  “The phone thrown out of T1—was it on your side?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Did they make you?”

  “I doubt it. The fog’s too thick. I couldn’t see in. The window’s a black hole into the back seat.”

  “Hastings T-connects with Cardero. That gives you a reason to turn. If they turn on Georgia, your backdoor takes control.”

  “Roger,” said Craven.

  As a kid back in the fifties, DeClercq had been a fan of the Hardy Boys. He’d read every Franklin W. Dixon book up to The Mystery at Devil’s Paw in 1959, when he had opened a Christmas present and—he couldn’t believe his eyes—found in his hands The Hardy Boys’ Detective Handbook, written in consultation with a cop named Captain D. A. Spina of the Newark (New Jersey) Police Department.

  Holy cow!

  That same day, he had founded the Gumshoe Detective Agency, staffing it with neighborhood kids who were hired out at twenty-five cents a case.

  Rover missing?

  Don’t worry.

  The Gumshoes would find your dog.

  Billy playing hooky from school?

  The Gumshoes would track down the truant.

  The success rate was remarkable—“If we can’t solve it, you don’t pay”—because Robert DeClercq used all of the Hardy Boys’ techniques. From their handbook, he learned how to put together a real fingerprint kit, and how to make casts and “moulages” of shoe prints and tire marks, and how to collect evidence at the scene of a crime, and how to talk the slang of the underworld—like using “do-re-mi” for money and “gun moll” for a babe who carries a criminal’s gat—and best of all, how to “shadow” a suspect.

  Now, half a century later, that enterprising Gumshoe was sitting in the rear of a mobile command van, with two lives depending solely on his judgment. Who’d have thought that in this age of state-of-the-art surveillance, the watchers of Special O and other surreptitious followers around the world would still be using the system laid out on page 246 of The Hardy Boys’ Detective Handbook?

  But they are.

  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

  Sitting in the middle of the back seat, Joe turned his head right to glance at Tattoo, the punk who’d come out of the seawalk fog and pushed him into the car.

  Tattoo was running a signal scanner up and down his body.

  The punk said something in Japanese, and the Mole said something back.

  Joe swiveled his head 180 degrees to stare at the kidnapper who’d thrown the cellphone out the window.

  For their part, his abductors were glaring at the hearing aids the old man had in both ears.

  “I’ve got the eye,” the backdoor said. “Just picked up the fare. I can’t see T1 through the fog. But T2’s east on Georgia.”

  “I’m VCB,” reported Craven.

  Visual contact broken.

  “Moving up as backdoor,” confirmed the double back.

  “Parallels?” DeClercq asked.

  “I’ll move into double back,” signaled one of the outriders.

  The terms used by Oscar weren’t the same ones the Hardy Boys had used, but the system was. In the “straightline surveillance system,” five cars move as a pack. Whoever’s being followed is referred to as the “target.” More than one target means they get prioritized. T1 for the primary. Then T2, T3, and so on. Some cases grow so huge that they require a target sheet. Each T refers to a suspect, and if an unknown male appears, he becomes U/M.

  Here, T1 was the car with Joe in the back.

  T2 was the car working counter-surveillance: yakuza hoods following yakuza hoods to see if they were being followed. That was the “double trouble” mentioned by Craven. T2 was the car that had crushed the cellphone seized from Joe.

  Ideally, the five-car pack would work like this:

  Target 1

  Target 2

  Buffer Vehicle(s)

  Control

  Parallel Backdoor Parallel

  Double Back

  Craven, who would be in the control car with the I guy and a “foot” (a cop who could hop out and follow on foot, if necessary), would track the target vehicles on a straightaway. As control, he’d be the one “with the eye,” and would call the changes. In a straight line behind him would be his backdoor and the double back, and flanking the backdoor would be the parallels (east and west parallels or north and south, depending on direction).

  The quickest way to get made is to ride “bare” on the bumper of a target, so the watchers let cover cars slip in between the target and the pack. That way, the bad guys see camouflage in the rear-view mirror.

  “Never turn with the target” is the Special O rule of thumb. If the bad guys turn, the control drives straight ahead. The backdoor closes up to fill the control position, then turns the corner with the target while the double back becomes his backdoor. One of the parallels changes lanes to become a new double back, and the original control circles the block to take that empty slot.

  The target turns, Oscar shuffles ...

  The target turns, Oscar shuffles ...

  “Any monkey can do surveillance,” they say in Special O. “But to do it well is an art.”

  It’s like ballet. There’s constant motion, and the fluid shifting ensures that all roles are covered. Ideally, the bad guys never realize they’re being followed, because what’s going on behind them seems to change at random.

  Ideally.

  But not today.

  Unluckily for Oscar, the fog was a wild card.

  Tossing out the cellphone was an ominous sign. That left only the hearing aids in Joe’s ears as fallback. At the moment, they were Oscar’s eyes and ears, transmitting images and sounds to the command van. Lose them and O would be reduced to physical surveillance. And if that failed in the fog ... Bye, bye, Hetts.

  By dead-end intersecting with Cardero, Hastings Street had given Craven a reason to turn. But no buffer cars had appeared before T2 vanished into the haze, so he had no option but to ride bare on the counter-surveillance car. When both targets then turned left on Georgia, Craven relinquished control to his backdoor and, listening to the shuffle through his earpiece, drove on into the West End.

  “What’s g
oing on in T1?” he asked the I guy.

  The Asian translated the intercepts that were passing from Joe’s hearing aids to DeClercq’s command van.

  “One guy says, ‘The scanner shows the hearing aids are giving off signals.’

  “Another guy replies, ‘Of course. They’re electronic.’

  “The first guy argues, ‘If we toss them out, the old man won’t hear her scream.’

  “The other guy responds, ‘Get rid of them. It’s not worth the risk. He can’t be totally deaf. And she’ll be shrieking.’”

  “Is that it?” Craven asked.

  “The bugs are picking up noise.”

  “What kind of noise?”

  “Static.”

  “You mean interference?”

  “More likely a hearing aid being removed.”

  “Damn,” said Craven.

  “The second voice is back. ‘Turn here,’ it says. ‘Let’s see if we’re being followed.’”

  “The last thing we need.”

  “Now more static.”

  “The other hearing aid?”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What?” said Craven.

  “The intercepts just died. But I think I heard the second guy say, ‘If we’re being followed, then I’ll claw his eyes out, and you cut his throat.’”

  Heads or Tails

  How long had it been since that came bouncing down the stairs?

  An hour?

  Several hours?

  She had lost track of time.

  Her wristwatch was hidden under the sleeve of her sweatshirt, the material lashed to the chair by the bindings around that arm.

  So what had gone on up there?

  And who’d made those grunting sounds?

  Shortly after the mystery car had driven into the garage and Genjo Tokuda had left this sushi bar to greet his son, the Sushi Chef, cocking his head and listening as if something wasn’t right, had released his grip on the Mountie’s breast and followed the yakuza boss up the steps.

  Thump!

  What’s that? Jackie had thought.

  Someone taking a tumble?

  Then ...