Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  Push ...

  Shove ...

  Push ...

  Shove ...

  Craven threw a punch with his good hand.

  “Back up,” ordered the Assassin in the passenger’s seat. “This fight will attract the cops.”

  Honnnk!

  A car appeared in the fog behind them, blocking their retreat down the narrow street.

  “Who’s driving?”

  “Some Chinese bitch I can barely see over the steering wheel,” the thug in back answered.

  Honnnk!

  Honnnk!

  Honnnk!

  The back-seat thug was trying to wave off the tailgater through the rear window.

  Honnnk!

  Honnnk!

  “Deal with her,” ordered the Assassin in front. “The crash scene is drawing a crowd.”

  The man walking his German shepherd reappeared on the far side of the street. Either he’d circled the block on his regular walk or he’d been lured by the commotion.

  Coming up behind the Assassins’ car on this side of the street, and passing the bitch who—

  Honnnk!

  Honnnk!

  —wouldn’t let up on the horn, were a pair of beefy guys nuzzling each other in what would have been broad daylight were it not for the murk seeping through the swirling haze. Not only did the two have their arms draped across each other’s shoulders, but the homos wore identical white jackets, as if to announce to the world that they were on the same team.

  That’s what happens, the back-seat Assassin thought as he began to open his door, when a degenerate country like this allows butt-fuckers to marry.

  Honnnk!

  Honnnk!

  Honnnk!

  Okay, bitch. Either you back up the fucking car, he said to himself as one foot hit the ground and his hand crossed to the shoulder holster just inside his gaping jacket, or I’ll back it up with you dead on the floor.

  Constable Cynthia Oh of Special O hit the horn again. Her left palm was on the steering wheel, and her right hand gripped the Smith & Wesson in her lap. As the least likely looking cop in the five-car plan—she was, in fact, the fifth wheel—she was chosen to pinch in T2 from behind.

  “If they think something’s up,” DeClercq had warned, “they’ll call T1 or Tokuda on their cellphones, and it’ll be game over for Corporal Hett and us.”

  “Yes sir,” Oh had said.

  “We need that car in one piece, so an ERT Suburban can’t ram it. With all this fog, an intersection collision won’t be suspicious. But once a car pulls up behind, T2’s survival instinct will kick in, and you’ll be on your own.”

  “Yes sir,” Oh had said.

  “You’re far from the stereotype, Constable. You’re the best hope we have. I’m depending on you to dispel their suspicions and then open up their car.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Yes sir,” she had said.

  So here she was—

  Honnnk!

  Honnnk!

  —playing picador, and about to find out if she would get gored.

  “It’s going down,” Craven muttered to the cop he was pushing around.

  “Want more?” he shouted to keep up the ruse.

  “Tell me when,” mumbled the cop who had his back to T2.

  Both itched to go for their guns.

  The foot across the street was a dog master in the Mounted. A Mountie and his dog, they fit the stereotype. Except that this stubble-faced old fart on the verge of retirement didn’t look like Sergeant Preston. He could be—and was—a granddad.

  Crouching down, the foot fed the dog a biscuit.

  Then he unhooked the leash.

  With a simple command, the dog would be off for the kill.

  The Assassin in the passenger’s seat was protected by bulletproof glass. Just beneath the bottom rim of the passenger’s window, his index finger curled around the trigger of a Steyr pistol. These three killers were into firearms, and they knew quality.

  In the side-view mirror, the Assassin watched the gay men approaching the car. Behind him, the man in the back seat was half in and half out of the interior.

  “Watch the queers,” the passenger warned as the hit man exited to deal with the bitch.

  They never knew what hit them.

  The “gay” man closest to the curb had one hand in his pocket and his other arm pointed away across the shoulders of his “lover.” From the corner of his eye, the Mad Dog caught enough of a peek inside the gaping jacket of the yakuza emerging from the car to sign his death warrant. As the embracing pair drew parallel with the open door, the ERT cop tapped his partner lightly on the far shoulder.

  The other “gay” man flicked his eyes left. Because he was left-handed, Ghost Keeper had taken the inside position, resting his glove on his buddy’s curbside shoulder. That flick of his eyes had allowed him to sight along that arm to the glove, which was pointing at the yakuza’s head. Instead of a human hand, the glove was filled with the grip and barrel of the SIG P210 the Cree had just received as a birthday gift.

  The tips of the fingers were open ...

  Bam!

  To let the bullet fly.

  The problem with bulletproof glass is that it protects both ways. The Assassin in the passenger’s seat was immune to any pistol shots fired by the “queers,” but they were also shielded from any return fire he might be contemplating.

  Behind the passenger’s seat, however, the door yawned open, and even before the goon with the new third eye in his forehead could drop to the curb, the Mad Dog had deftly lobbed a stun grenade into the car.

  BAM!

  It exploded like an atom bomb.

  Inside the car, the din blew both Assassins’ eardrums. While the armed thugs were lost in the confusion, the Mad Dog dove headfirst into the back seat. Aiming up to do as little damage to the vehicle as possible, he—

  Bam!

  Bam!

  —shot both Assassins through the head.

  Constable Oh shifted into reverse, then retreated down Jervis Street so the yakuza car was free to move again.

  Crawling out of the back seat and holstering his weapon, the Mad Dog helped Ghost Keeper shove the curbside corpse back into the car. The inspector jumped into the back seat as the sergeant circled around to the driver’s door. Pushing the dead wheelman across the dead passenger’s lap so he could squeeze in, the ERT cop tailed Constable Oh through the fog.

  In the end, the fog had been a blessing. The takedown was hidden from public view, and the crowd that eventually gathered was dispersed with a simple “There’s nothing to see, folks. Just an auto accident caused by the fog and some firecrackers set off by a pair of troublemaking kids. Hey, it’s Halloween.”

  Only one civilian—a pedestrian on his way to the store to buy a pack of smokes—had witnessed the action. The guy was about to call someone on his cellphone when a foot stopped him.

  “Sir, what you saw is only part of this crime. If something goes wrong, hostages will die. There will be an investigation to see if there was a leak, and as the only civilian here, you’ll be the prime suspect. The call you’re making will lead to your standing trial, and chances are you’ll spend a couple of years in jail. So for your own protection, I want you to come with me. We’ll have a cup of coffee while you record your witness statement. By the time you’re finished, the police response will be over, and I’ll be witness to the fact that you did nothing wrong. Well, what do you say?”

  “Depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “Will you buy me a doughnut?”

  War Memorial

  Tinian, Mariana Islands

  August 6, 1945

  “The party’s on!” the mess officer bellowed when news reached the Tinian airfield that the mission was a success. The 509th’s kitchens buzzed with activity as hot dogs by the thousands plopped into cooking pots, and crates of beer and lemonade were put in the fridges to cool, and pies by the hundreds were ba
ked for a pie-eating contest. It would be the biggest “blowout” Tinian had ever seen ... A poor choice of words, given the much bigger blowout that had rained down on Hiroshima.

  The program read:

  509TH

  FREE BEER PARTY TODAY 2 P.M.

  TODAY—TODAY—TODAY—TODAY—TODAY

  PLACE—509TH BALL DIAMOND

  FOR ALL MEN OF THE 509TH COMPOSITE GROUP

  FOUR (4) BOTTLES OF BEER PER MAN—

  NO RATION CARD NEEDED

  LEMONADE FOR THOSE WHO DON’T

  CARE FOR BEER

  ALL-STAR SOFTBALL GAME 2 P.M.

  JITTERBUG CONTEST

  HOT MUSIC

  NOVELTY ACTS

  SURPRISE CONTEST—YOU’LL FIND OUT

  EXTRA ADDED ATTRACTION: BLONDE,

  VIVACIOUS, CURVACEOUS STARLET DIRECT

  FROM ???????

  PRIZES—GOOD ONES TOO

  Wear Old Clothes Wear Old Clothes Wear Old Clothes

  6 AUGUST 1945

  WELCOME PARTY FOR RETURN OF ENOLA GAY

  FROM HIROSHIMA MISSION

  At 2:58 p.m., after twelve hours and thirteen minutes in the air, the B-29 Superfortress touched down on Tinian’s runway. Two hundred officers and men were crowded on the macadam. Several thousand more lined the taxiways. A cheer went up as the Enola Gay’s crew came down from the hatch behind the nose wheel, and cameramen set off flashbulbs almost as bright as the explosion over Hiroshima. General Spaatz walked up and pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on Tibbets’s chest. They saluted. Photographs of the bomb exploding were rushed to Washington for worldwide distribution. The crew was debriefed with shots of bourbon and free cigarettes, and the party got into full swing.

  A great day, Joe thought, to be an American.

  Vancouver

  November 1, Now

  Now here was Joe sixty years later, taking a one-way ride between two Japanese thugs with his hands tied behind his back, his past about to catch up with him. Of the almost three million Japanese people who died in the Pacific War, Joe had personally destroyed more than a hundred thousand.

  That was a lot of guilt for one old man to carry.

  Joe couldn’t blame Tokuda for wanting revenge. If the shoe were on the other foot and the yakuza boss had fried Joe’s family in the war simply to give Japan a little leverage with the pesky Russians, Joe would’ve strapped on the six-guns, and watch out! No matter how long it took—as the saying went, “Revenge is a dish best served cold”—he’d have hunted Tokuda down.

  Wasn’t that the American way?

  Joe was raised on westerns.

  When he was young, he’d been a fan of Chester Gould’s square-jawed detective. From the early 1930s on, he had followed the celebrated cases of Dick Tracy in the comic strips of his hometown newspaper. There had never been a rogues’ gallery like that, with Tracy up against villains like the Mole—not this Mole, but one that resembled a rodent—B-B Eyes, Pruneface, the Brow, Flattop, Mumbles, and Sketch Paree. They were, of course, no match for the police, thanks to Tracy’s scientific arsenal, which included state-of-the-art devices like the Voice-O-Graf for comparing speech patterns and his best-known marvel, his two-way wrist radio.

  Man, did Joe feel old.

  It was hard to fathom how an airman who’d once dropped an atom bomb on Japan—ushering in a future of nuclear dread that drove the pre-Hiroshima innocence into the past—had become so out of touch with technologies that were just ordinary to modern young people. No two-way wrist radios for them. Nosiree. They moved about with iPods, BlackBerrys, Palm Pilots, and cellphone cameras that were basically two-way wrist TVs.

  Like the gizmo the Navigator had just pulled out of his pocket and was switching on.

  “Made in Japan.”

  Joe winced at his own arrogance. He’d been around in the 1950s, when Japanese technology was a national joke. He remembered laughing along with everyone else at that scene in The Fly where the scientist transports a bowl from here to there in his atomizer, and it arrives on the far side with “Made in Japan” inscribed backwards on the bottom.

  Joe wasn’t laughing now.

  He was doomed.

  But even in the face of death, his mind went to one of those little nuggets of trivia that later seem so ironic.

  The screenplay for The Fly was written by James Clavell.

  The guy who later wrote Shogun, set in feudal Japan, and King Rat, based on his own imprisonment in a Japanese POW camp.

  Since they’d tossed his cellphone and hearing aids out of the car, Tattoo, the Mole, the Wheelman, and the Navigator had made no move to communicate with the outside world. That made sense to Joe, despite his unease with technology, for if they’d jettisoned all his electronics to keep the cops from zeroing in on them with tracking devices, it would be foolish to emit signals of their own.

  So why now?

  Joe figured it had to be so these hoods could survey for traps. Not traps back there, for their wild ride through the fog of the West End had surely left Special O breathing their fumes. First, they had zigzagged down to English Bay, where rolling waves of mist came billowing in from the sea, curling clawed fingers around the windows of his mobile prison. Then they had hugged the shoreline, heading west toward this forest, which Joe assumed was Stanley Park, and where, suddenly, it began to rain.

  Now, as the miniature screen in the Navigator’s hands shimmered green, they circled around a huge pond—towering trees on the left, rain-pocked lagoon on the right—and that’s when the goon riding shotgun wrenched around in the passenger’s seat.

  Whatever the gizmo in his hand, he passed it back to the Mole.

  And as the screen went skirting past, Joe got a look at the digital horror show.

  Joe was right. His captors weren’t communicating with the counter-surveillance car. No, the Navigator was checking ahead for traps at their destination, and that’s why he had linked to a hidden camera aimed across what seemed to be a sushi bar at an executioner’s chair that held their other captive: Joe’s granddaughter, Jackie.

  If the cops were there, they’d have freed her.

  Jackie was still tied up, so shouldn’t that indicate the hoods were safe?

  Well, it didn’t.

  For while Joe’s eyes were damned by the sight of Jackie’s naked breasts surrounded by a serving tray of torture knives—What had they done to her? What did they plan to do?—the Mole’s eyes widened at the sight of what was at Jackie’s feet: the severed head of the Sushi Chef.

  “The rack is on the track.” One of the old guys from Oscar’s early years.

  “Rack” was their term for a car.

  The new guys called a car “wheels.”

  “Where?” DeClercq asked from the command van, which was already on the move to the West End takedown scene.

  “T1 came along the road behind Lost Lagoon and just entered the underpass beneath the causeway.”

  “They’re going into Stanley Park?”

  “Affirmative, Chief.”

  “By which fork? Up through the rose garden or along the seawall shore?”

  “The seawall.”

  “What’s traffic like on the causeway?”

  “Slow and thin. The fog has kept a lot of cars off the road. There’s one lane open going north and one coming south. No cars in the middle lane. It’s changing direction.”

  “Where’s your vehicle?”

  “Back a bit. I’m on foot.”

  “Here, Chief,” reported the driver. “I’m near the cherry trees at the entrance to the causeway.”

  “Regroup and take the shortcut up past the aquarium. I want you waiting for them at the intersection with the seawall drive, close to the figurehead of the Empress of Japan.”

  “And tail them?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Consider it done, Chief.”

  The command van neared Jervis Street as DeClercq turned from the bank of TV screens and asked Winter to call the Stanley Park causeway patrol.


  “Have them keep the middle lane clear for us, and block all traffic to the Lions Gate Bridge. Make sure there’s a gap at the south end, where the park drive accesses the causeway.”

  Right away, the sergeant got on the phone.

  “The ERT Suburban is coming up on the right,” the driver radioed back from the cab of the command van.

  “And T2?” asked DeClercq.

  “It’s parked in front, Chief. Ghost Keeper, the Mad Dog, and their team are at the curb.”

  Inside the car that was still in play, the hoods were breaking out the hardware.

  Outside the windows, the rain and fog were fighting a new Pacific War.

  As a recent convert to libertarianism—what was good enough for Clint Eastwood was good enough for him—Joe was an even more ardent advocate for the Second Amendment. All his life, he had known his way around high-powered guns, but it shocked him to see the firepower these goons had onboard. It was bad enough that Tattoo pulled out a Kahr P45, a polymer pistol that smashed the .45 barrier, but then both the Mole and the Navigator fetched Beretta Storm Carbines, black, ugly-looking semi-autos related to swordfish.

  These guys meant business.

  The Wheelman hunched over the dash, squinting out into the weird weather for signs of anything untoward up ahead, while Tattoo twisted around to make sure that no cop car was hugging their ass. The fog cloaking them degenerated into beggar’s rags as the rain tore through the fabric of the mist. Crawling counter-clockwise around Stanley Park, the vehicle ventured deeper into the surreal. Before they could see the Brockton Point Lighthouse, past the Nine O’Clock Gun, they angled north into a creepy quagmire of gigantic monsters. Stacked one on top of another up into the smothering shrouds, a gang of totem carvings crowded in for a final look at Joe before he was executed.

  The West End runs up to the south shore of Lost Lagoon, where Stanley Park stretches north to the Lions Gate Bridge. From Jervis Street to Lost Lagoon was no more than seven city blocks, so now the Suburban—with four cops inside—hightailed it along the deserted center lane of the bisecting causeway. The traffic both ways had snarled to a halt, an everyday bottleneck that clenched the teeth of commuters.