Kamikaze (12 page)

Why?

By the time DeClercq and Macbeth had dried off, got dressed, and rushed out to the chief’s car, the traffic along Marine Drive and up Taylor Way was completely stalled. That left them no option but to hoof it.

All the way down Sentinel Hill to the gridlocked approach to the bridge, DeClercq and Macbeth were busy on their cellphones. He was directing the Mounted’s response to what bore the hallmarks of a terrorist attack, while she was informing ambulance crews to carry in their stretchers from wherever they were bottlenecked. It would be hours before vehicles on the Lions Gate Bridge could move an inch.

Boom!

Boom!

Boom!

The show must go on, so as the pair huffed up the incline to the crest of the bridge, where headlight beams from the piled-up wrecks stabbed in all directions, the storm overhead fractured into pyrotechnic shards. The blasts turned the blood on the bridge redder, and the sky, as if torn asunder by the fireworks, opened up and poured down rain.

Boom!

Boom!

Wee-ooh! Wee-ooh! Wee-ooh! ...

The night was full of screaming sirens, some responding to Halloween hijinks and others to the plane crash, but up here the screams were human. Screams from injured drivers trapped until the Jaws of Life could extricate them. Screams from pedestrians pinned to the bridge by cars that had jumped the sidewalks. Screams from those laid out on the roadway and receiving first aid. And screams from two trick-or-treating kids—one the Frankenstein monster, the other the wicked witch—being hauled from the back seat of a smashed-up car at the hub of the carnage.

A car with a driver slumped at the wheel and a body smashed on the windshield.

“Daddy’s hurt!” wailed the witch, the dye in her black rat’s nest of backcombed hair trickling down her anguished face.

“Is he dead?” cried the monster, struggling to break loose from the hold of the good Samaritan who had pulled him out of the car.

The bawling witch was going into hysterics.

Weaving his way to the wreck, DeClercq crouched down to face the traumatized pair.

“Hello. My name is Robert. I’m the policeman who’s going to see to your dad. Are you hurt?”

“Daddy’s hurt!” the witch sobbed, then she threw herself into the chief’s arms.

“Are you okay, son?”

“Yes,” the monster sniveled, shivering from shock and his rain-soaked clothes.

“What’s your name?”

“Stuart.”

“And your sister’s?”

“Sarah.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“At home. We don’t live with Dad.”

Over the girl’s shoulder, DeClercq caught sight of several uniformed cops and ambulance workers sprinting through the curtain of rain from the North Shore. He forked his fingers at two of the constables and motioned them over.

“Sir?” said the female, recognizing him.

“Stuart, Sarah, I want you to go with this constable. She’ll phone your mom and get you home. I’ll take your dad to doctors at the hospital.”

The female cop scowled. She obviously thought babysitting duties were beneath her.

“Get over it,” DeClercq warned beneath his breath. “And find your heart.”

His eyes dropped to her name tag, and her flinch said that she knew she’d just blown any chance she might have had of joining Special X.

The male constable caught on. “I’ll take them, sir,” he said.

“No. She’ll do her duty. We don’t need shirkers here. We have a crime scene: the hood of this car. Find a way to build a tent to preserve forensics. And pass me your flashlight.”

The chastised officer took both kids by the hand and gently tugged them away.

Crawling into the back seat of the car, the chief reached forward to check the neck pulse of the driver. Nothing. The head-on collision had caved in his face. No airbags.

DeClercq switched on the flashlight.

What a mess!

At 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, it takes an hour to cremate the human body. This cadaver had burned for only as long as it took it to plunge from the plane, so while the body squashed on the windshield was charred black on the outside, it was as pink as ever within.

The beam of the flashlight caught something strange. Preserved in the mash of internal organs in a way that reminded DeClercq of a fossil caught in amber were the brittle, charred bones of one scorched hand. It struck the Mountie that one of the fingers was missing, and he recalled yesterday’s discussion with the Japanese diplomat about
yubitsume,
the yakuza finger-cutting ritual.

But this wasn’t a pinky.

It was a missing ring finger.

What, if anything, did that mean?

Then the flashlight beam picked out something else. Patches of iron were stuck to the corpse, which was also dusted with white powder of some sort. From those clues and the brilliant glare he’d seen in the sky at Macbeth’s, DeClercq deduced that whoever had taken this dive had been wrapped like a mummy in something that bound thermite to his flesh.

The chief had seen thermite used to weld railroad tracks in place, and he also knew that it had been used during the Second World War to purify uranium for the Manhattan Project.

These were the residues.

Okay, the Mountie said to himself, think this through.

Someone seeks revenge against a fingerless man. No one dumps a body this publicly unless he’s making an important statement. So up goes a plane with a human thermite bomb aboard, and down comes the charred victim onto the Lions Gate Bridge. Then whoever committed the crime crashes the plane into a convention center that’s playing host to Pacific War vets.

Why? wondered DeClercq.

“DeClercq.”

“Chief, it’s Dane. I’m at the crash site.”

From the hump of the Lions Gate Bridge, the chief superintendent had a bird’s-eye view of the sergeant’s location. He gazed southeast along the seawall walk, over the figurehead of the
Empress of Japan,
and past the Nine O’Clock Gun to Canada Place.

Vancouver’s answer to the Sydney Opera House, the landmark on the south shore of Burrard Inlet was Canada’s pavilion for Expo 86. Seen from afar, it resembled a sailing ship, with its bright white fabric sails billowing along what appeared to be its hull but was in fact a pier extending into the harbor. The Pan Pacific Hotel soared at its landward
stern. A domed IMAX theater was the figurehead at its prow. And in between was the convention center, whose long docks were home base for cruise ships doing the Alaska run. Tonight, however, those docks were bare, and instead of sea traffic, a kamikaze plane had struck Canada Place amidships.

“How bad is it?” DeClercq asked.

“It could be worse,” said the sergeant. “The plane was too light to do major damage. It slammed into the west side of the main meeting hall and broke apart. The pilot hurled out of the cockpit and smashed in through the jagged glass. I’m standing over the upper half of him. The lower half must be back in the plane. A smear of blood runs across the floor. Tonight was only a rehearsal, so the hall was all but empty. The only person dead is the Japanese pilot.”

“Japanese?” said DeClercq.

“Yeah, there’s one of those kamikaze scarves around his brow. And guess what? During his flight from the cockpit to this final resting place, he must have lost his prosthetic finger. I’m staring at a missing pinky, Chief.”

No sooner had Dane punched off than his cellphone jangled.

“Sergeant Winter.”

“It’s Rusty Lewis. Transport Canada has tracked the plane.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s from a small airfield down near the border. I can’t get hold of the owner, but it’s called Mud Bay Airport.”

“Corporal Hett.”

“Jackie, it’s Dane. Where are you?”

“Air Services. It’s nuts here. They’re waiting to respond to a crash downtown. Chuck won’t be able to land.”

“You’ve spoken to him?”

“No. They’re keeping the airwaves clear.”

“I don’t know what it means, but there’s something you’ve got to know. The plane that crashed tonight was from Mud Bay Airport. Chuck wasn’t the pilot. I’m looking at the guy as we speak. He’s Japanese. And he’s missing a finger.”

“Yakuza?”

“Looks like that to me. We can’t reach the airport owner, so we don’t know who rented the plane. If you’re out of contact with Chuck, you’d better get down to Mud Bay. A worst-case scenario would be that he got hijacked for his plane.”

Whup, whup, whup ...

As the RCMP Eurocopter approached the blacked-out airfield, the pilot kicked in FLIR—forward-looking infrared—to pick up any heat signatures. That would tell them if there were bad guys lurking about.

“Body heat,” the pilot told Jackie through the headphones. “Only one. In the open. On the ground.”

“Check it out,” said the corporal.

Not Dad, she prayed.

As the helicopter traversed the airfield, a string of lights flashed red-blue, red-blue on the roofs of the patrol cars that were speeding down the rural road to secure the airport’s perimeter.

“Light him up,” Jackie said, and a spotlight knifed down, pooling around a man sprawled in a bloody puddle near the gate.

“There!” said Joe, pointing. “In the shadows.”

The pilot keyed the chopper’s mike to switch on the airport’s ramp and runway lights, and there, beside the line of buildings, with its doors open, sat Jackie’s car.

“Set us down,” she said.

The overhead rotor blew waves of rain out in concentric circles, so the pilot jockeyed the Eurocopter far enough away from the car to preserve forensic clues. As cops from the patrol cars swarmed toward what appeared to be a run-over security guard, Jackie jumped from the cockpit and sprinted to her car.

By now, she knew that a body had been dumped on the bridge, and that the ring finger seemed to be missing from its right hand. So the instant her flashlight beam glinted off her dad’s signet ring—a ring that bore the insignia of the U.S. Air Force—she knew her father had died a death too horrible to comprehend.

The ring was still on his finger.

And the finger was on the dash.