Fortunes of War (6 page)

Okada bought two square cakes of fried shark meat from a sidewalk vendor. The heat of the evening and closeness of the crowd made the smell of the cooking fat and fish particularly pungent.

He walked on, adrift in this sea of people. The lights and heat and smells engulfed him.

Somewhere on this planet there might be an occupation more stressful than that of a spy, but it would be difficult to imagine what it would be. A spy played a deadly game, was always onstage, spent every waking moment waiting for the ax to fall. In the beginning it had been easier for Masataka Okada, but now, as the full implications of his choices became increasingly clear, just getting through each day became more and more difficult. Every gesture, every word, every unspoken nuance had to be examined for a sinister meaning. Any slip would be fatal, so every choice came laden with stress.

The truth of the matter was that Masataka Okada was burning out. He was nearing the end of his string.

As he strolled and watched the crowd this evening, his thoughts turned to World War II. Every Japanese had to come to grips with World War II in some personal way. Every living person had lost family members in that holocaust—grandfathers, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, mothers, aunts, grandmothers—all gone, like smoke, as if
they had never been. Yet they
had
been; they
had
lived, and they had been cut down.

About 2.1 million Japanese had perished in that war, over 6 million Chinese and, however the apologists dressed it up, the fact remained that the war in the Pacific had begun with Japan's full-scale assault on China in 1937. Once blood had been drawn, Japan's doom became inevitable: the rape of Nanking, Pearl Harbor, the Bataan death march, the firebombing of Japanese cities, Okinawa, the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it was a litany of human suffering as horrific as any event the species had yet endured.

Okada had long ago made up his mind who was responsible for that suicidal course of events: Japan's government, and its people, for governments do not act in a vacuum. When you thought about it dispassionately, you had to question the sanity of the persons responsible. A crowded island nation about the size of California willingly had sought total war with the most powerful nation on earth, one with twice its population and
ten
times its industrial capacity.

And so, in a tragedy written in blood, an entire generation of young men had been sacrificed on the altar of war; the treasure of the nation—accumulated through the centuries—had been squandered, every family ripped asunder, the homeland devastated, laid waste.

All that was history, the dead past. As long ago and far away as the Mejii restoration, as the first shogun…and yet it wasn't. The war had scarred them all.

An hour's strolling back and forth through the neighborhood brought Okada to a small peep parlor. With a long last look in a window at the reflections of the people behind him, he paid his admission and went inside.

The foyer was dimly lit. Sound came from hidden speakers: Japanese music, adenoidal wailing above a twanging string instrument—just noise.

From the foyer, one entered a long hallway, each side of which was lined with doors. Small red bulbs in the ceiling illuminated the very air, which was almost an impenetrable solid: swirling cigarette smoke, the smell of perspiration, and something sickeningly sweet—semen.

The walls seemed to close in; it was almost impossible to breathe.

An attendant was in the hall, a small man in a white shirt with no collar. His teeth were so misshapen that his lips were twisted into a permanent sneer. A smoldering cigarette hung from one corner of his
mouth. He looked at Okada with dead eyes and lifted his fingers, signaling numbers.

Thirty-two.

Okada looked for that number on a door. It was beyond the attendant.

He turned sideways in the narrow hallway to get by the attendant. As he did so, the man behind him opened a door. For a few seconds, Okada and the attendant were isolated in a tiny space in the hallway, isolated from all other human eyes.

In that brief moment, Okada pressed the message into the attendant's hand.

He found booth 32, opened the door, and entered.

 

There were ten of them waiting for him to come home, but Masataka Okada didn't know that. They were arranged in two circles, the first of which covered the possible approach routes to the apartment building, and the second of which covered the entrances. Two men were in the apartment with his wife, waiting.

The man in the subway station saw him first, waited until he was out of sight, then reported the contact on his handheld radio.

Okada was nervous, wary. The sensations of Shinjuku had been wasted upon him tonight. He hadn't been able to get the message from Ju off his mind, couldn't stop thinking about the murder of the emperor, couldn't stop thinking about his mother's scarred back. Despite being keyed up and alert, he didn't see the man in the subway.

A block later, he did spot the man watching the side entrance to the building where he lived. This man was in a parked car, and he made the mistake of looking around. When he saw Okada, he looked away, but too late.

Masataka Okada kept walking toward the entrance as his mind raced.

They had come. Finally. They were here for him!

His wife…she was upstairs. Fortunately, she knew absolutely nothing about his spying, not even that he did it. So there was nothing she could tell them.

It shouldn't have to end like this. Really, it shouldn't.

He had done his best. He didn't want future generations of Japanese to go through what his parents had endured, and he had had the courage to act on his convictions. Now it was time to pay the piper.

Well, the Americans had the message from Ju, as well as all the others, all the copies of documents that he had made and passed on detailing the secret arms contracts and the buildup of the military that had been going on for the last seven years. They knew, and Abe didn't know they knew.

Abe would find out, if these men managed to arrest him. They would get the truth from him one way or the other. Okada had no illusions on that score. They would use any means necessary to make him talk; there was just too much at stake.

The dark doorway of the building loomed in front of him.

If he walked through that door, they had him. Some of them might be inside just now, waiting to grab him, throw him to the floor, and slap handcuffs on him.

Even if they let him go up to the apartment, they would come for him there. They would never let him leave the building.

These thoughts zipped through his head in the time it took for him to take just one step toward the doorway.

He would not go in.

He turned right, down the sidewalk, and began to walk briskly.

Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the man in the car looking his way and holding a radio mike in front of his mouth.

Even though he knew he shouldn't, Masataka Okada began to run.

He had had a good life, and he didn't want to give it up. Those fools who killed the emperor, committing hara-kari, voluntarily ended the only existence they would ever have. Ah, was life so worthless that a man should throw it away, as if it didn't matter?

He darted into the street and managed to avoid an oncoming bus. He made it to the sidewalk on the other side and swerved into an alley. Down the alley a ways was a brick wall, which Okada climbed over with much huffing and puffing, severely skinning his ankle.

He found himself inside a cemetery. The headstones and little temples looked weird in the reflected half-light of the city, sinister.
This
was Japan's future—he saw it in a horrible revelation: a nation of tombstones and funeral temples, ashes in urns, a nation of the dead.

Sobbing, Okada threaded his way through all this masonry and crawled across the wall on the other side. His ankle hurt like fire, but the collapse of his world and his vision of the future hurt worse.

His wife…what would she think? Oh, how he had abandoned her, poor, loyal woman.

He was now in another alley, this one lined with little wooden
houses, relics of old Japan. He thought about stealing a bicycle but couldn't bring himself to do it.

At the end of the alley was a street. Although he was severely winded already, he managed to work himself into a trot. As he rounded the corner, he met a man running the other way. Fortune favored Okada—he reacted first and got his hands up, bowling the other man over as he went by.

He didn't look back, just ran. Alas, his gait was a hell-bent stagger, his lungs tearing at him as he gasped futilely, unable to get enough oxygen.

Ahead was a subway station. If he could catch a train, he could get off anywhere, could lose himself in Tokyo, perhaps even make his way to the American embassy.

Those Americans, they said that someday this might happen. He had refused to believe, even when he knew they spoke the truth.

He was close to passing out from the exertion, almost unable to think. He smoked several packs of cigarettes a day, had done so for years, and he never exercised.

Okada could hear footsteps pounding the pavement behind him.

There—the stairs into the subway! He ran down them, grabbed the turnstile, and leapt over.

More stairs. He took them two at a time.

He could hear the running feet behind him, closer and closer, but he used the last of his energy, forcing himself to run even though he could scarcely breathe and was having difficulty seeing. Spots swam before his eyes.

A train was coming.

If they catch me…

The train was still moving at a pretty good clip when Masataka Okada did a swan dive off the platform, right in front of it.

He could see it above him, at least two miles up, a flashing silver shape in the vast, deep blue. Jiro Kimura used the handhold on the canopy bow to hold himself upright against the G forces. He grunted, kept his muscles tense so that he would not pass out, fought to keep his eyes on that flashing silver plane so far above.

If he lost sight of that plane, it might take several seconds to reacquire it, seconds he could ill afford to lose. The other pilot was undoubtedly looking down at him, watching him twist and turn, waiting for an opening when he could come swooping down with his gun blazing—like an angel of doom. Or the bloody Red Baron. To kill.

Jiro Kimura knew all of that because he knew the other pilot. His name was Sasai. He was just twenty-four, rarely smiled, and never made the same mistake twice. This was only Sasai's third one-on-one flight, but he was learning quickly.

Just now, Kimura wanted to make Sasai think that he had an opening when he really didn't.

Kimura rocked his wings violently from side to side, first one way and then the other. He was also feeding in forward stick, unloading the plane and accelerating, but Sasai couldn't see that from two miles above. All he could see were the wings rocking, as if Kimura had momentarily lost sight and was futilely trying to find his opponent.

Sasai turned to arc in behind Kimura and put his nose down, committing himself.

Kimura waited for several seconds, maybe four, then lit the afterburner and pulled his nose up. The G felt good, solid, as the horizon fell away. Jiro Kimura loved to fly, and this morning he acknowledged that fact to himself, again, for the thousandth time. To fly a state-of-the-art fighter plane in an endless blue sky, to have someone to yank and bank with and try to outwit, then to go home and think about how it had been while planning to do it again tomorrow—what had life to offer that could possibly be sweeter?

When he was vertical, Kimura spun around his longitudinal axis
until his wings were perpendicular to Sasai's flight path; then he pulled his nose over to lead Sasai, who was now frantically trying to evade the trap. Because he was slower, Kimura could turn more quickly than the descending plane, could bring his gun to bear first.

Jiro Kimura pulled the trigger on the stick.

“You're dead, Sasai,” Kimura said on the radio, trying to keep the satisfaction out of his voice. “Let's break it off and go home.”

Sasai rendezvoused on Kimura, who consulted his GPS display, then set a course for base. They were over the Sea of Japan above a broken layer of low clouds. Kimura checked his fuel, verified his course on the wet compass, then stretched. The silver airplanes, the sun high in the blue vault overhead, the sea below, the clouds and distant haze—if heaven was like this, he was ready.

If Shizuko could go, too, of course.

He felt guilty that he was contemplating paradise without Shizuko. Then he felt silly that he was even thinking these thoughts.

Well, maybe it wasn't silly. Real combat seemed to be coming, almost like a terrible storm just over the horizon that no one wanted to acknowledge. We make plans, for next week, next month, next year, while refusing to acknowledge that our safe, secure little world is about to disintegrate.

Jiro looked across the invisible river of air flowing between the planes and saw Sasai in his cockpit. He was looking Jiro's way. They stared at each other's helmeted figures for a moment; then Jiro looked away.

Kimura was the senior officer, and leader, of his flight. Then came Ota, Miura, and Sasai. They would fly together as a unit whenever possible.

Alas, Sasai was green, inexperienced. He knew how to use the new Zero fighter as an interceptor, utilizing the radar, GPS, computer, and all the rest of it, but he didn't know how to dogfight, to fight another aircraft when it was out of the interception parameters.

Neither Ota nor Miura was particularly skilled at the craft, either. The colonels and generals insisted that Zero pilots be well trained in the use of the state-of-the-art weapons system, that they know it cold and practice constantly, so all their training had been in using the aircraft's system to acquire the target, then fire missiles when the target came within range.

“What will you do,” Kimura asked the three pilots on his team, “if the enemy attacks you as you are taking off?”

His junior wingmen looked slightly stunned, as if the possibility had never occurred to them. Their superior officers, none of whom were combat veterans, reasoned that the plane's electronic suite was the heart of the weapons system, the technological edge that made the new Zero the best fighter on earth: the airframe, engine, and wings existed merely to take the system to a point in space where it could be employed against the enemy. The never-voiced assumption almost seemed to be that the enemy would fly along straight and level while the Japanese pilots locked them up with radar, stepped the computer into attack, and watched the missiles ripple off the racks and streak away for the kill.

The senior officer in the air arm had been quoted as saying, “Dogfighting is obsolete. We have put a gun in the Zero for strafing, not shooting at other airplanes.” Indeed, the heads-up display—HUD—did not feature a lead-computing gunsight.

Jiro Kimura didn't think air-to-air combat would be quite that easy. Whenever they were not running practice intercepts, he had been dogfighting with his flight members. They didn't get to do this often; still, they were learning quickly—even Sasai.

They should be able to handle the Russians.

Ah yes, the Russians. This morning at the weekly intelligence briefing, the wing commander had given them the word: Siberia, two weeks from now. “Study the Russian air force and be ready to destroy it.”

“Two weeks?” someone had murmured, incredulous.

“No questions. This information is highly classified. The day is almost upon us and we must be ready.”

Jiro raised his helmet visor and used the back of his glove to swab the perspiration from his eyes. After checking the cockpit altitude, he removed his oxygen mask and used the glove to wipe his face dry.

He snapped the mask back into place and lowered his visor.

“It will be a quick war,” Ota had predicted. “In two days they will have nothing left to fly. The MiGs, even the Sukhoi-27s, will go down like ducks.”

Jiro Kimura said nothing. There was nothing to say. Whatever was going to happen would happen. Words would not change it.

Still, after he had suited up in his flight gear, before he and Sasai went out on the mat to preflight their planes, he had called Bob Cassidy at the American embassy in Tokyo. Just a short chat, an invitation to dinner three weeks from now, and a comment about an alumni letter Jiro had received from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

He dismissed Russia and Cassidy from his mind so he could concentrate on the task at hand. The clouds ahead over Honshu looked solid, so he and Sasai were going to have to make an instrument approach. Jiro signaled his wingman to make a radio frequency change to air traffic control; then he called the controller.

 

Three men were waiting for Bob Cassidy when he came out of the back entrance to the embassy. At least he thought there were three—he arrived at that number several minutes later—but there might have been more.

As he walked along the sidewalk, they followed him, keeping well back—one behind, one on the other side of the street, and one in a car creeping along a block behind. The guy in the car was the one he wasn't sure of for several minutes.

This was a first. Cassidy had never before been openly followed.

He wondered about the timing. Why now?

The one behind him on his side of the street was about medium height for a Japanese, wearing glasses and some sort of sport coat. His stride proclaimed his fitness.

The one across the street was balding and short. He wore slacks and a dark pullover shirt. Cassidy couldn't see the driver of the car.

If there were three men he knew about, how many were there that he didn't?

Undecided as to how he should handle this, he walked the route he always took toward his apartment. When he'd reported to the embassy fifteen months ago, he'd had the choice of sharing an apartment inside the embassy compound or finding his own apartment “on the economy.” He chose the latter. Without children in school or a wife who wanted to socialize with other Americans, it was an easy choice.

These men had been waiting for him. They must know where he lived, the route he usually took to get there. They must have followed him in the past and he just hadn't paid attention.

Well, maybe his conversation with Jiro had made him apprehensive, so that was why he was looking now. Actually, he admitted to himself, he felt guilty. Jiro shouldn't have talked out of school.

Oh, he was glad he had, but still…Cassidy felt guilty.

A block from home, just before turning a corner, he paused to look at the reflection in a slab of marble siding on a store. The balding man was visible, and, just turning the far corner, the car.

Bob Cassidy went into his apartment building. He collected his mail at the lobby mailbox, then rode the elevator to his floor and unlocked the door to his apartment. He didn't turn on the light.

He sat in the evening twilight, looking out the window, trying to decide what to do.

They must be monitoring the telephones at the base, or at the embassy.

Jiro was the only member of the Japanese military who had ever told Cassidy anything classified. Oh, as air attaché, he routinely talked to Japanese military men, many of whom were personal friends. A dozen of his contacts even held flag rank. The things these soldiers told him were certainly not secrets. He collected common, everyday “this is how we do it” stuff, the filler that military attachés all over the world gather and send home for their own militaries to analyze. Finding out the things that the Japanese didn't want the Americans to know was the job of another agency, the CIA.

So did the tail mean the Japanese knew that Jiro had talked?

One of Cassidy's fears was that his report of the conversation with Jiro had been compromised—that is, passed right back to the Japanese. Alas, the United States had suffered through too many spy scandals in the last twenty years. Bitter, disappointed men seemed all too willing to sell out their colleagues and their country for money. God knows, the Japanese certainly had enough money.

He would have to report being tailed to the embassy security officer; perhaps he should do that now, and ask him if anyone else had reported being followed. He picked up the telephone and held it in his hand, but he didn't dial. This phone was probably tapped, too. If he called embassy security and reported the tail, it would look like he had something to hide.

He went to the window and stood looking at the Tokyo skyline, or what little he could see of it from a fifth-floor window. He checked his watch. Two hours.

He was supposed to meet Jiro in two hours. Jiro had mentioned Colorado Springs when he called earlier that day. Two days ago, when Cassidy had dinner at the Kimuras', he and Jiro had agreed that the mention of that city would be the code for a meet at a site they agreed upon then.

The code had been Jiro's idea. Cassidy had a bad taste in his mouth about the whole thing. Neither one of them was a trained spy; they were in over their heads. They were going to compromise themselves.
Even if they didn't, Cassidy had this feeling deep down that this episode was going to cost him a close friend.

He turned his mind back to the problem at hand.

Jiro had called, and a plainclothes tailing team had been waiting when he left the embassy compound.

Perhaps they were monitoring all the calls from Kimura's base and had intercepted this one, then decided to check to see if Kimura was meeting people he had no good reason to meet.

Or maybe they were onto Kimura.

Maybe they knew he had spilled some secrets to the Americans. Maybe they were trying to rope in Kimura's U.S. contact.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

Cassidy changed into civilian clothes while he mulled the problem over, then went into the kitchen and got a beer from the refrigerator.

Hanging on the wall was a photo of himself at the controls of an F-16. The plane was high, over thirty thousand feet, brilliantly lit by the sun, against a sky so blue it was almost black. Cassidy stood sipping beer as he looked at the photo. What he saw in his mind's eye was not the F-16, but the new Zero.

He had actually seen it. Last week. From a hill near the Japanese air base at Niigata. He had hiked up carrying a video camera in a hard case on a strap over his shoulder. He had videotaped the new fighters taking off and landing. Although the base was six miles away, on the climb-out and approach they came within a half mile of where he was standing.

He had also gotten some still pictures with a 35-mm camera from just under the glide path. He had driven into a noise-saturated neighborhood beside the base and snapped the photos from the driver's seat of his car as the planes went overhead.

The CIA had sent him a gadget to play with as the new Zero flew over, a device that resembled a portable cassette player and could pass for one on casual examination. It did, however, have a three-foot-long antenna that he had to dangle out the window.

Cassidy did all this high-tech spying in plain sight. Only one person had paid any attention to him, a youngster on a tricycle, who sat on the sidewalk four feet away and watched him fiddle with the cassette player and antenna as the jets flew over.

He remembered the sense of relief that came over him when he was finished. He had started the car and slipped it into gear while he took one last careful look around to see if anyone was watching.

It was amazing, when you stopped to think about it. The Japanese designed, manufactured, and tested the ultimate fighter plane, one invisible to radar, put it into squadron service, and the United States knew nothing about it—didn't even know it existed, until one of the pilots sought out the U.S. air attaché at the American embassy and told him.