Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  Probably not. That’s why romance fiction racked up the sales. If readers were actually living such exciting lives, there’d be no market for heartthrob fantasies.

  But maybe.

  If only she’d stood a chance.

  Instead, Genjo Tokuda had ruined Lyn’s life. A man she had never met had destroyed her mother, by raping her amid a pile of hacked-up bodies and then imprisoning her for close to four years in a brutal concentration camp that stank of never-ending fear. That had shackled Lyn with a chain of monstrous burdens she’d never been able to shrug off.

  But now she was almost free.

  Viv’s death had emancipated Lyn from her role as caregiver to a broken-down wreck.

  And Tokuda’s death had satisfied her craving for revenge.

  If only he had screamed!

  You’d think any man whose intestines had been spilled out in front of him would scream and scream and scream with horror, if not from pain.

  But Tokuda hadn’t.

  All he had done was grunt.

  And then he had died from loss of blood.

  And that was it.

  Oh, well, Lyn thought. At least he’s dead. And I have the comfort of knowing he died by my hand.

  So the only loose end was Tokuda’s son.

  And now he too had to die.

  For until her half-brother was gone from her life, Lyn knew she’d never really be free.

  It was supposed to happen like this.

  First, they would ambush Joe Hett’s son, Chuck, and hurl him from the kamikaze plane, which would then dive-bomb the war vets’ convention. But that was only meant to tear the heart out of that Yankee airman, to soften him up for the payback yet to come and to mask the motive for the attack until Tokuda and his Pacific War enemy were face to face. Abducting Hett’s granddaughter would be torture enough. Imagine the horrors that would eat at his mind after what had been done to his son. But that would be nothing compared with what the colonel would witness once he, too, was in the yakuza’s clutches. Having slit Hett’s eyelids off to make sure he couldn’t blink, the Sushi Chef would strip Jackie down to her bones. And finally—in an imitation of the Hiroshima bombing—the kumicho would use a blowtorch to fry the colonel alive.

  Smoked meat.

  But now the kumicho was dead, so it was left to Kamikaze, his new-found son, to find a suitable killing ground and char Hett’s aging flesh from his skeleton.

  The police car dropped Joe off at the front doors of the hotel. The excitement of yesterday had spiked his blood pressure into the danger zone, so St. Paul’s Hospital had checked in an unwilling patient for overnight observation. Here in the hotel lobby, Joe veered toward the conference area, which was cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape.

  The huge convention hall was all but deserted. The forensic techs didn’t want their evidence contaminated by a thundering herd, and those responsible for the structural integrity of the building didn’t want to risk a thousand-plaintiff lawsuit should the roof collapse.

  Ducking under the tape, Joe entered the hall.

  Like the pier on which it was built, the rectangular vault extended into the harbor from the south shore. The kamikaze plane had slammed into the west side, so that’s where a dozen clue hunters in white coveralls, hoods, and foot bags were looking for evidence.

  Strung about Joe’s neck was a police pass, which gave him the authorization to breach the tape.

  No one stopped him.

  The central and eastern two-thirds of the hall had been cleared as a path fit for contamination. That meant the techs had all they wanted from it. Joe paused inside the door to gaze at the kamikaze wreck before slowly making his way along the exhibit stalls lining the opposite side of the hall. The memories of an old man are the deeds of a man in his prime. So sayeth Pink Floyd, according to Jackie. Joe passed an eclectic mix of artifacts and re-creations from the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Mannequins wore uniforms from various combatants. Regimental and division flags flapped in an artificial breeze, thanks to the pins holding them up. Medals and patches and plaques and emblems from every unit were on display, as were weapons and anti-aircraft shells. A statuette of Douglas MacArthur, corncob pipe clenched in his teeth, dominated a booth headlined “I Shall Return.” Etched beneath his feet were the words “Gaijin Shogun”—meaning “foreign military ruler”—the nickname he earned while occupying Japan.

  Kamikaze looked like a man who’d just come in from the rain. Actually, his loose raincoat was stuffed with four Molotov cocktails in separate inside pockets. Each bottle was topped with a flammable wick. A flick of one of several lighters in the external pockets of the recently initiated yakuza’s coat and—foom!—fiery death would be at hand.

  The trench coat came with a pull-up hood. Staring out through the face hole, he watched Joe Hett duck under the crime-scene tape.

  The Pacific War convention hall.

  What better killing ground?

  At the far end of the hall—the far end of the pier—Joe stood in front of the podium where he was supposed to deliver that keynote speech. The lectern was backed by two photographs that encapsulated his and America’s involvement in the war.

  The photo on the left was the one from Life magazine. Staring up at himself, Joe recalled that defiant young man. With his dog tags flung out from his naked chest and his eyes flashing above the bloody streak in his shaving cream, the warrior blasted away at the Japanese Zero over his head.

  Now, a lifetime later, Joe thought back to what the world was like before Pearl Harbor—back to the reality he had known just an hour before this photo was taken. His country was minding its own business, and even the Nazis’ conquest of Europe couldn’t suck America into Hitler’s war.

  “Dad, I want to fight.”

  “Where?”

  “In Europe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Red,” his old man had said, shaking his head, “never provoke an enemy who’s willing to die for his beliefs unless you’re also willing to give up your life—yours, and not someone else’s—for what you believe. War is hell, son. I saw it in the trenches. If your enemy is willing to fight to the last man, you gotta be fucking sure that you are too.”

  “I am.”

  “Ichioku Sotokko,” Genjo Tokuda said when he and Kamikaze had talked of life and death the other night. “All one hundred million for Tokko.” That slogan was broadcast to the Japanese people in speech after speech during the Pacific War. Its underlying meaning was, “Every Japanese has the spirit to become a member of the Kamikaze Special Attack (Tokko) Corps.”

  “I knew a lieutenant in the army named Hajime Fujii. After he became an officer, he switched to the air force and volunteered to join the kamikaze. Three times, he was rejected because he was a father with two young children. One day, he returned to his home near Tokyo and found a letter from his wife on the table. ‘I know that because of us,’ she had written, ‘you cannot exert your utmost for the country. Therefore, allow us to take leave of the world before you join us. Please fight with nothing weighing on your mind.’

  “The next day, his wife and two children were recovered from the Arakawa River. She carried their one-year-old daughter on her back and had tied their four-year-old daughter to her wrist. All three wore their best dresses.

  “Freed of all impediments by the sacrifice of his wife, Lieutenant Fujii took off from an air base near Hiroshima and led nine attack planes in a kamikaze dive against the American warships off the coast of Okinawa.

  “I was there. I saw them die honorably. We called their squadron Kaishintai. ‘A spiritually satisfied unit.’ That was not long before the Americans”—he touched his scarred face—“did this to me.”

  So now Kamikaze stood behind the crime-scene tape and watched as the atomic bomber who had wiped out his ancestral line in Hiroshima faced his fate.

  The photo on the other side of the lectern was a shot of the m
ushroom cloud boiling over Japan as the Enola Gay made its sharp bank out of harm’s way. But the black-and-white shot didn’t capture the colors of hell.

  What Joe had told his father was the truth: he was willing to die for his beliefs. What he wasn’t willing to do, and had done unknowingly, was kill non-combatants for power politics.

  Now, confronting that accursed blast, he recalled what Chuck had once said about the Vietnam War.

  “Red?”

  “Yeah, son?”

  “I wonder why it took three decades for America to acknowledge the heroes of the My Lai Massacre? Back in ’68, when I was fighting in ’Nam, we heard about Lieutenant Calley going berserk at that village, and about how GIs had indiscriminately shot Vietnamese civilians. That was a pivotal point in ending the war. Calley got life in prison—until Nixon made sure he went free.”

  “War crimes happen.”

  “Sure, but why did we hide the flipside of the coin? What stopped the massacre was a single chopper crew. They flew over the bloodletting as it was under way, landing between those rogue GIs and the terrified villagers. They had to point their chopper guns at their own comrades to stop them killing. Two of them covered the pilot while he confronted the leader of the marauding forces, and that led to the ceasefire order. The crew coaxed some villagers out of a bunker for evacuation, then flew a wounded child to a hospital.”

  “They did the right thing, Chuck, and they got medals.”

  “In 1998! And only after a letter-writing campaign. It makes you wonder.”

  “What brought that on?”

  “Retirement,” Chuck said. “That’s the kind of American hero I wish I’d been.”

  Now Chuck was dead, and Joe faced the mushroom cloud that was really aimed at Russia.

  All those civilians slaughtered or slowly tortured to death through radiation sickness.

  How he wished he could take back the bomb.

  Joe would give his life to put that genie back in the bottle.

  “‘I’ll meet you at Yasukuni Shrine,’” Genjo Tokuda had said during that talk with his son. “That’s the farewell that the kamikaze—and the rest of us too—exchanged before going into battle. ‘A man must live in such a way that he is always prepared to die.’ Confucius teaches us that. ‘Only by reason of having died does one enter into life. The future life is the all-important thing.’ We learn that from Buddhism. Honor means fighting to the bitter end. Surrender equals dishonor. It is only at the moment that he determines to die that a man attains purity. The discipline required of all samurai comes down to a readiness for death. Followers of bushido must fight on until every sword is broken and the last arrow is spent. There, my son, is the difference between cowardly Western and honorable Japanese philosophies. The West tells its soldiers how to live. We tell ours how to die.”

  For the first time in his wretched life, Kamikaze actually felt like a man. What had Dickens written at the end of A Tale of Two Cities? “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

  His life was a tale of two cities, and he had lived it miserably in the wrong one.

  Tokyo.

  That’s where he belonged.

  Now, as he ducked under the crime-scene tape, Kamikaze focused on his father, who was waiting for him at the Yasukuni Shrine. In his mind, he saw the great bronze torii gateway and the broad approach lined with cherry trees, rows of stone lanterns, and statues of national heroes. Almost all of Japan’s fallen soldiers, sailors, and airmen were registered as kami—as gods—at the shrine, an apotheosis that Kamikaze yearned to experience. There, among the guardian spirits of their nation, Genjo Tokuda bowed toward his son.

  “I’ll meet you at Yasukuni Shrine,” Kamikaze said to himself as he lit the wick of the Molotov cocktail and began his run at the atomic bomber.

  They called them “Judy bombers,” back in the war.

  Yokosuka D4Y3 Suisei planes.

  Those diving devils that so plagued American warships.

  Kamikaze attacks were unlike anything ever experienced in the wars of the Western world. Shintoism had no taboo against suicide. Instead, it was the ethical duty of the kamikaze to “bleed the enemy white” in any way possible.

  Of the many Pacific War exhibits in the convention hall, none had the psychological lure of this kamikaze plane. Steps led up to the cockpit of a recreated Judy bomber, where vets could strap themselves in—as Joe was doing now—to relive what it would have been like to embark on a crash dive. The windshield in front was actually a video screen, and the headphones he clamped over both ears provided the sound effects. Joe punched a button and found himself gripped by the white-knuckle dread of a suicide run.

  So engrossed was he in this digital fantasy that he missed the real-life attack closing in on him.

  “Something’s not right,” DeClercq had said at Special X last night. He was debriefing Jackie on the deaths of Genjo Tokuda and his henchman, the Sushi Chef.

  “What, Chief?” she’d asked.

  “Every yakuza who flew in from Tokyo is dead, and each played a part in Tokuda’s revenge against your family. The thugs he brought with him were hand-picked to carry out a personal vendetta. Tokuda was retired. Gang power had already passed to the next generation. So what’s to be gained by killing him?”

  “You think it was an outsider?”

  “Could be the local yakuza. The goons who supplied the guns and the mountain house. Are they sending a message to Tokyo that they want independence?”

  “If so, what’s our move?”

  “First, I want to be sure we’re not missing something. Could it be that your grandfather is still in danger?”

  “The killer didn’t kill me.”

  “You’re not the target, Jackie.”

  “What would be the motive for killing both the yakuza godfather and his wartime enemy?”

  “I don’t know. But I want to be sure that the colonel is off the hit list. There’s only one way to determine that. After your granddad gets out of the hospital tomorrow, we offer the killer a chance to strike somewhere that fits Tokuda’s vendetta.”

  “Where?”

  “A shooting gallery we control.”

  So that’s why Red had walked to the far end of the convention hall pier, and why the forensic techs combing the kamikaze crash scene were really ERT cops, and why Jackie—the moment the hooded intruder exposed his criminal intent by lighting the wick on the gasoline bomb—had reached inside the pocket of her white coveralls and yelled, “Stop! Police!”

  Kamikaze heard the shout and knew that this was it. Chances were those forensic techs weren’t armed, but police who were would respond within minutes. By then, he’d have hurled his gasoline bombs at the American colonel. Frying him alive in the cockpit of the mock kamikaze plane was a fitting revenge for the war crime he’d committed against Hiroshima. Then Genjo Tokuda’s son would be worthy to meet his father and the samurai deities at Yasukuni Shrine.

  “Banzai!” the attacker bellowed, breaking into a run, his crooked arm ready to throw the flaming bomb.

  He never reached his target. There was only one defense to a kamikaze dive, and that was to fill the air with as much flak and shrapnel as you could, in the hope that something would hit the plane before it hit you. Because DeClercq was a tactician, that was his strategy, and every marksman lining the wall to Kamikaze’s side had earned the sharpshooter badge worn above the cuff of the red serge uniform.

  Several shots hit the bottles tucked inside the open coat, spewing a mist of gasoline about the charging figure, and the flaming wick on the Molotov cocktail in his hand ignited that halo in a whoosh of hellfire. Unlike his Pacific War counterparts, Kamikaze was dead before he hit the deck.

  Who?

  The morgue stank of burnt flesh, but unlike those wimpy TV cops who wore face masks, dabbed the skin under their noses with Vicks VapoRub, or dashed out to the john to hurl their Cheerios, the two Mounties t
oughed it out. If Gill Macbeth, the forensic pathologist, could stomach the smell, then Jackie and Dane wouldn’t shrink from their job either.

  “I’ve always wondered,” Gill said, probing the body she’d opened up with a Y incision, “if I’d get one of these.”

  “A cross-dresser?” Jackie asked, holding up an evidence bag containing a pair of women’s red panties that had been removed from the man stretched out on the autopsy table.

  “I heard a story once,” said Dane, “about a cross-dressing hit man in Japan. A gang war was raging between two yakuza factions. A pair of hoods schemed to go after the rival leader, a gangster named Akasaka or something like that. They hatched a plan to dress one of the hit men up as a woman and have him case the bar the gangster was known to frequent. Before long, the transvestite was popular in the bar, and he began entertaining Akasaka with his impersonation. One day, the boss walked in with just two bodyguards, so that’s when the assassins struck. The second hit man entered and shot the yakuza boss five times, then took out one of the bodyguards with his last bullet. The cross-dresser knifed the other bodyguard. When I heard the tale, neither had been caught.”

  “This is much more than that,” said Gill, pointing one of the tools of her trade at the open abdomen.

  The cops peered at the organs she indicated with the blade.

  “They don’t match,” said Dane.

  The face and hands of the remains were charred black from the flames. The eyebrows were gone, but hair in the hood had been singed or saved in patches. Some of the fabric was burned right into the skin. The unexposed flesh beneath the killer’s clothes had been mostly spared, and Gill had recovered fingerprints from the hand that had gripped the Molotov cocktail.