Kamikaze (17 page)

“That’s diplomatic.”

“And expedient.”

“Because the Special External Section handles all cases with links outside this country, political wrangling is a major part of my job. When something goes wrong, there’s always finger pointing, so memorandums of understanding are how I cover my ass.”

“Of course. MOUs are shields.”

“I have an MOU from you that covers the GPS tracker. Japan’s jurisdiction over it ends at Canada’s border, but technically, this was still a Japanese intelligence file. In a run-of-the-mill case, we’d have tracked Tokuda on the sly until he left Canada, and he would never have known that we were on his tail.”

“
Was
a Japanese intelligence file?” Yamada picked up the hint.

“Tokuda came here to smash that kamikaze plane into our convention center last night. That turns the case into a
Canadian criminal investigation, and given that it’s the yakuza that Special X is up against, Japanese nationals will be in the line of fire. I need a new memorandum to cover my ass.”

“How broad an understanding?” asked the diplomat.

“Carte blanche from Tokyo to deal with Genjo Tokuda in any way I see fit.”

Crowded Womb

In the hours before the sun came up, Lyn Barrow thought back to dialogues she’d had with her half-brother.

“How did that happen?” her brother had asked.

“Good question,” Lyn replied.

“I thought we were brother and sister, born a year apart.”

“So did I.”

“But we’re actually
twins?
”

“That’s what Mom told me,” said Lyn.

“I assumed that she’d had sex with some Asian guy just before the fall of Hong Kong. Then I was born in Stanley Internment Camp, after she was captured.”

“And I assumed that she’d had sex with some British prisoner while in Stanley Camp, and as a consequence, I was born in captivity a year or so after you.”

“What’s your first memory of me?”

“I can’t recall,” said Lyn. “You were always just
there.
I thought you were my sister.”

“I hated that!”

“What? Being dressed in girl’s clothes?”

“Yes.”

“Be thankful. That’s probably why you’re alive. Had the others in camp known you were the son of a Japanese soldier, you might’ve been killed and eaten for revenge.”

“You’re joking!”

“That’s what every mother feared would happen to her kid. And if it came to that—cannibalism to keep from starving to death—who better to consume first than the Japanese boy?”

“Mom told you that?”

“Yes. That’s why she started the rumor that you were her illegitimate daughter by a Chinese lover. Many called her a whore, but it kept you alive. Girls have lower status in the Far East. And whites can’t tell the nationality of an Asian face.”

“You were Mom’s favorite. She didn’t want me. That’s why she’s confiding in you.”

“She’s dying,” said Lyn. “It’s the drugs. Morphine has her revealing stuff that she’s kept locked inside.”

“Like what?”

“Mom finally told me the name of my dad. He wasn’t a captive in Stanley Camp. He was a British officer in the hospital where she nursed.”

“What was his name?”

“Captain Richard Walker. They had sex in a closet that Christmas morning, just before the Japanese stormed the building.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was killed by one of the Japanese soldiers. He was bayoneted in front of Mom.”

“No wonder she’s crazy.”

“Don’t say that!”

“Face it, Lyn. Can you remember a time when she wasn’t in and out of the loony bin?”

“You hold that against her?”

“Sure I do. You weren’t the one they abused in that foster home after the war.
I
was the Jap, remember? The one the old guy burned with his cigarette. The one the old lady locked in the crawlspace under the stairs. You heard me screaming. Alone and scared to death. We’d never have gone into foster care if Mom weren’t nuts.”

“You wouldn’t blame her as much if you knew the whole truth.”

“Which is?”

Lyn struggled with the pros and cons of revealing what Viv had told her.

“What?” pressed her brother.

“Mom was raped.”

“Raped!”

Lyn nodded sadly. “That same morning—Christmas. At St. Stephen’s. And the man who raped her was the Japanese soldier who bayoneted my dad.”

“You mean ...?”

“Yes. Mom was raped by
your
father. We were both conceived on Christmas Day, during the fall of Hong Kong.”

“How is that possible?”

“Apparently, it’s not that uncommon,” Lyn said. “There are several cases documented on the Internet. In a normal single birth, an egg from the mother is fertilized by a sperm
from the father to create an embryo that travels down the oviduct and lodges in the womb. That single cell then develops into a baby.

“With fraternal twins, two eggs from the mother’s ovaries are fertilized by two sperms from the father to gestate two embryos. Unlike identical twins, which develop when a single cell splits in two, fraternal twins have different DNA. Identical twins are always of the same sex. Fraternal twins can be brothers, sisters, or one of each, like us.”

“I’d say we’re more different than most.”

“Of course,” said Lyn. “Because ours was a crowded womb. Mom released two eggs in the way that usually results in twins. But one egg was fertilized by a sperm from my dad—Captain Richard Walker—while the other was fertilized by a sperm from your dad—the Japanese soldier who raped her.”

“Did Mom tell you his name?”

“Yes. Corporal Tokuda. She heard another Japanese soldier call him that when the corporal used his samurai sword to decapitate a baseball player.”

“
Decapitate!
Are you saying my father was a war criminal?”

“I’m just telling you what Mom said.”

“Did she know anything else about Tokuda?”

“Just the name of his sword. The other soldier—those imprisoned in Stanley Camp called him the Kamloops Kid—told the captives that if anyone tried to escape, Corporal Tokuda would return to the camp and hack off their heads with his sword, Kamikaze.”

That first exchange, Lyn now recalled, had led to a second one.

“I found him,” her brother had said a week or two later, waving a page of scribbled notes in his hand.

“Who?” Lyn asked.

“Corporal Tokuda.”

“How?” she inquired.

“Through British colonial records. After Hong Kong fell in 1941, government bureaucrats interned in Stanley Camp began keeping detailed statistics on births. Twenty-two babies were born in 1942, about twenty of whom were conceived before the Japanese attack. Ten were born in 1943. Thirteen in 1944. And six up to August 1945.”

“There’s a record of you?”

“Yes. That many births worried both the British and the Japanese. More mouths to feed, and more pressure on limited accommodations. In October 1943, the Japanese threatened to segregate males from females if there were any more births.”

“Sex in the camp disturbed them?”

“Marital sex was okay. What bothered the Japanese command was promiscuity.”

“Why 1943 and not before?”

“Women were giving birth to babies when their husbands weren’t in Stanley Camp.”

“So the Japanese did the math?”

Her brother nodded. “Guess what they did to stop it? The commandant decided that any woman who didn’t register the name of her child’s father would work as a prostitute.”

“That’s incentive.”

“I’ll say. Fail to register my dad, and Mom would have had to bed all the Japanese troops.”

“So she named Corporal Tokuda?”

“After that information was passed to the Japanese forces, they must have given the British registrar Tokuda’s first name, since it’s penciled into the camp’s birth records.”

“What was his first name?”

“Genjo.”

“How did you find this out?” Lyn asked.

“I queried Britain’s Public Record Office, and they checked their War Office and Colonial Office papers. Then I went looking for a Genjo Tokuda on the Internet.”

“And found him?”

“Most likely. A Genjo Tokuda was in the Japanese Imperial Army in Hong Kong in 1941. After the war, he lived under another name until the occupiers declared an amnesty for war criminals. By then, he was active in the Tokyo yakuza.”

“He’s a gangster!”

“Not anymore. He’s in his eighties.”

“You’re not thinking of contacting him, are you?”

“I have to, Lyn. I want to know who I am. I feel like I’ve lived my entire life in no man’s land. How often have I heard you complain about not knowing your father? If you knew he was alive, wouldn’t you feel compelled to seek him out?”

“Not if he was a gangster. What if he doesn’t believe you’re his son? That’s a good way to get yourself killed.”

“I’ll be careful. He lives in a tower above his old headquarters in Tokyo. I’ll write and offer a blood sample so he can test my DNA.”

But things hadn’t gone according to plan. Just days ago, her brother told her that his father hadn’t shown for a meeting he’d set.

“I thought he’d at least fly someone in to collect the sample of my blood. According to what I’ve read, he doesn’t have an heir. Chances are that I’m his son. How could he not care?”

Her brother was downcast. “Rejected by Mom. Rejected by Dad. At least I’m not rejected by you.”

“We’ve been through a lot together, and you’ve always been there for me.”

“I love you, Lyn.”

“And I love you. Forget about Tokuda.”

But he hadn’t forgotten. While their mother lay dying in the hospital, he’d tried again to make contact with his father. And that second time, he’d succeeded. Tokuda had come to Vancouver, and earlier tonight, father and son had finally met. What the gangster and her brother had talked about was a mystery to Lyn. For the first time since they were children, he was keeping secrets from her. But that was okay with her, because she had a secret of her own.

Lyn knew how her brother’s mind worked. He had an obsessive need to understand who he was and where he came from, and she had used that to achieve her own ends.
She’d told her brother his father’s name because she knew he’d go to the ends of the earth to find him. And he hadn’t disappointed her. He’d saved her the work of tracking her quarry, and had even brought the prey right into her backyard. Now all she had to do was strike.

Their mom was dead.

Her rapist—and the killer of Lyn’s dad—was in Vancouver.

He was the cause of all her family’s suffering.

Her mother’s insanity.

Her brother’s abuse in foster care.

And
her
own wretched life, which had been spent shouldering the burden of both their ordeals.

“Will you see him again?” she’d asked her brother.

“Lyn, I’m going with him to Japan. I want to learn the code of
bushido
—the way things used to be—and he’s going to teach me.”

“Don’t be absurd!”

“Oh, I’m deadly serious. My father is a samurai, the last of his kind. I want to learn everything I can from him before it’s too late. You know, all my life, I’ve felt as if I were shit on someone’s shoe,” he explained. “But no longer. I’m going back to a time when men were
men
and people lived with honor.”

“And when is all this meant to happen?”

“Tomorrow.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to waste any more time before I can
prove
to my father that I’m fit to be his son.”

Good, thought Lyn.

Today it will be.

I’ll use my brother as a Trojan horse and sneak right past the men guarding Tokuda.

The Big Bang

Tinian, Mariana Islands

August 6, 1945

The crewmen of this huge plane didn’t realize it, but they were about to change the world in what would soon be one of history’s three most famous aircraft, behind the
Kitty Hawk
and the
Spirit of St. Louis.

“Tower to Dimples Eight-two. Clear for takeoff.”

At 2:45 a.m., Colonel Paul Tibbets thrust four throttles forward and sent the sixty-five-ton
Enola Gay
down Runway A at the world’s largest airfield. Fire trucks and ambulances were parked every fifty feet along both sides of the airstrip, ready to respond if something went wrong. With twelve men, seven thousand gallons of fuel, and a single five-ton bomb onboard, the lumbering machine carried an overload of fifteen thousand pounds. If something did go wrong, there’d be hell to pay.

The runway ended at a cliff, where the ground gave way to black sea. The men were heading for Iwo Jima, more than six hundred miles and three hours away. In the spacious
area behind the cockpit, Sergeant Joe Hett was busily at work, as were the navigator, the radioman, and the flight engineer. Back of them, just below the long, padded tunnel that ran over the bomb bay, linking the front and rear compartments, there was a round, airtight door that accessed “Little Boy.”

Like the others, Joe wore a survival vest with fishhooks, a drinking-water kit, a first-aid package, and emergency food rations. A parachute harness with clips for both his chest chute and a one-man life raft were cinched over green overalls and covered by a flak suit that would provide protection against shrapnel. Strapped to his waist was a Colt .45. His only identification was the dog tags around his neck.

As a precaution, Col. Tibbets also carried a small metal box with twelve capsules of cyanide. At the first sign of trouble, he would hand them out so that each man—should he find himself on the verge of capture—could choose between the lethal poison and a bullet to his brain. The other alternative was no alternative at all. When they saw the bomb aboard the
Enola Gay,
the Japs would be determined to learn its secret, by whatever means necessary.

But that secret was something even the crew didn’t know.

That something big was up was obvious. On December 17, 1944—the forty-first anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first
Kitty Hawk
flight—the 509th Bomb Group had been assigned, under Tibbets’s command, to fly special single-bomb B-29s. But only Tibbets knew why. High-altitude drops were practiced back home in the States until the
group was deployed to Tinian, an island in the Pacific. Before long, the 509th had become the butt of jokes and the object of sneers by other fliers, who gave the crews a hard time because of their lack of combat blooding.

Finally, General Curtis LeMay—old “Iron Ass” himself—had issued the order for Special Bombing Mission No. 13. “The bomb you’re going to drop is something new in the history of warfare,” the men had been told. “It is the most destructive weapon ever produced. No one knows exactly what will happen when the bomb is dropped from the air. That has never been done before.” At midnight on August 6, they had gathered in the crew lounge at the Tinian airfield. Declaring that the weapon they were about to deliver had the potential to end the war, Tibbets had said, “Do your jobs. Obey your orders. Don’t cut corners or take chances.”

Then a truck had driven them to the
Enola Gay.

Joe’s first impression when he saw the scene at the runway was that he was Clark Gable at the Atlanta premiere of
Gone with the Wind.
The plane was lit up by klieg lights and mobile generators, and a crowd of about a hundred—including reporters and film crews—milled around the bomber. Had the MGM lion stuck its head out of the cockpit and let loose a roar, Joe would not have blinked.

“This way!”

“Smile!”

“Look serious!”

“Look busy!”

Reporters shouted as flashbulbs burst in the already blinding glare. Then, after one more group photo, Tibbets
had shut down the carnival with a simple order to his bombing crew: “Okay, let’s go to work.”

One by one, the men had clambered up the ladder to the hatch behind the
Enola Gay
’s
nose wheel, and now all were en route to hit Japan.

With what kind of bomb? Joe wondered.

As the plane burrowed through the inky night, Tibbets gave the tail gunner permission to test his weapons. The gunner had a thousand rounds to defend the bomber against attack. He fired off fifty shots in a jarring burst, filling the fuselage with the rattling noise of war and his turret with the stench of cordite and burnt oil. The tracers arced into the sea.

“Judge going to work,” Tibbets radioed back to Tinian’s tower at 3:00 a.m.

As agreed, the tower didn’t respond.

Time for the explosives expert to arm the bomb. There had been too many B-29 crashes at the airfield to chance detonating the weapon on takeoff. But now that they were safely in the air, the expert could get to work. He swung open the circular door and, followed closely by his assistant, lowered himself through the hatch that fed into the bomb bay.

Curious, Joe left his battle station and stuck his head into the hole to watch this critical stage of the mission. The “gimmick”—a term used for the bomb—was clamped to a special hook and dangled over the long doors of the bay. The bomb was about ten feet long and twenty-eight inches in diameter. Four thick cables like umbilical cords ran from
it to a control panel in the area aft of the cockpit, where the ordnance man could monitor the gimmick like a doctor does a woman in labor.

With their backs to the open hatch, the demolitions team looked like a pair of mechanics working on a car. The ordnance man stood ready to pass tools to the explosives expert while he carefully placed gunpowder and an electrical detonator into the open casing. Then, after sixteen turns had tightened the breech plate, he sealed the armor, and Little Boy was armed. That’s when Joe noticed the antennae sticking out of the nose.

What were they for?

Before the two men climbed out of the hold to check the circuits on the monitoring console, the beam of the flashlight swept forward into the dark of the bay. In Joe’s imagination, he saw this torpedo-like “fish” streaking through the water in Pearl Harbor, a moment before it slammed into the guts of a battleship.

Then he recalled that
Life
photo of him—outrage flashing in his eyes—shooting up at the Zero as it skimmed over Hickam Field. He knew that day had—relentlessly, inevitably—brought him to this one.

He couldn’t put it any better than “Iron Ass” LeMay, the man in charge of this mission, who’d said:

“We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

Half an hour before the plane was scheduled to reach Iwo Jima, at 5:52 a.m., Tibbets unstrapped himself from the
pilot’s seat, handed the controls to his co-pilot, and went back to spend a few moments with each of the crew. When he got to Joe’s station, the elevators gave a distinct kick to the
Enola Gay
as “George,” the automatic pilot, began to fly the bomber.

“Red, have you figured out what we’re doing this morning?”

“Colonel, I don’t want to get put up against a wall and shot,” Joe replied jokingly, referring to the unwritten commandment that the crew keep their mouths shut.

“We’re on our way now. You can talk.”

Joe knew that the plane was carrying some sort of new superexplosive. “Are we hauling a chemist’s nightmare?” he asked.

“No, not exactly.”

“How ’bout a physicist’s nightmare?”

“Yes,” Tibbets confirmed.

Joe recalled a phrase he’d once read—though with little idea what it meant—in a popular science journal. “Just a question, Colonel,” he said now. “Are we splitting atoms?”

Without responding, Tibbets returned to the cockpit. Switching off “George,” the pilot began the climb to nine thousand feet, the altitude at which the
Enola Gay
would rendezvous with two Superfortresses, the
Great Artiste
and
No. 91.
Outside the cockpit, to the east, a waning moon appeared in the banks of cloud. Ahead, the sky was deep blue with cirrus wisps as night gave way to dawn. By the time the bombers met up over the porkchop-shaped island of Iwo Jima, the world was an iridescent pink.

With the
Enola Gay
in the lead, the three B-29s formed a loose V heading up the “Hirohito Highway” to Japan.

It was 5:05 a.m., Japanese time.

An hour and a half later, the ordnance man again swung down into the bomb bay to unscrew three green plugs in the middle of the weapon and replace them with red ones.

Tibbets used the intercom to address the crew.

“We are carrying the world’s first atomic bomb,” he said, using the word “atomic” for the first time.

Several men gasped.

One let out a long, low whistle.

“When the bomb is dropped, we’ll record our reactions to what we see. This recording is for history. Watch your language, and don’t clutter up the intercom.”

Dead air hung in the fuselage, then Tibbets came back on.

“Red, you were right. We
are
splitting atoms.”

“It’s Hiroshima,” the colonel announced after hearing the weather report. The
Straight Flush,
one of three weather scouts patrolling over different cities, had gazed down on Hiroshima from six miles up through a gap ten miles wide in the clouds. Sunlight shone through the hole like a spotlight, as if to say of the target, “Here it is!”

Fifty miles out from ground zero—the Aioi Bridge—the world’s first atomic bomber was lined up to drop its deadly cargo.

In the nose, the bombardier leaned forward against the headrest that had been specially designed for this drop.

“IP.” Initial point, the navigator reported.

“On glasses,” Tibbets ordered through the intercom.

The crewmen had Polaroid goggles like those worn by welders, and they knew that the knob at the bridge of the nose should be turned to the setting that let in the least amount of light. By slipping them on, nine of the twelve were plunged into darkness. The pilot, the bombardier, and the radar monitor still had work to do. Before putting his goggles on, the airman who was keeping a log of the mission scrawled, “There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target.”

Thirty seconds to go.

“Hiroshima coming into view!” shouted the bombardier.

“Stand by for the tone break—and the turn,” warned Tibbets.

Eyes glued to his viewfinder, the bombardier spied dark buildings hunkered down on the fingers of land that reached into the deep blue of Hiroshima Bay. The six forks of the Ota River flowed brown and muddy. Roads across the city were metallic gray. A gossamer haze shimmered over the 300,000 souls below, but the bombardier could still make out the T-shaped Aioi Bridge as it moved inexorably into the crosshairs of his bombsight.

“I’ve got it!” he yelled.

He turned on the tone signal that filled the ears of the crew with a low-pitched, continuous hum, telling them that the B-29 had entered the automatic synchronization of the final fifteen seconds of the bombing run.

At eight-fifteen, the bay doors snapped open and Little
Boy dropped from its hook. When the umbilical cords ripped away, the tone signal in the plane was instantly killed. The abrupt lightening of the bomber bounced it ten feet up in the air.

“Bomb away!” came the shout from the nose as Tibbets swung the
Enola Gay
into a steep, right-hand power dive to hightail it out of there before all hell broke loose.

Forsaking his bombsight, the bombardier gazed down through the Plexiglas to watch Little Boy drop. The “gimmick” wobbled a bit until it picked up speed, then it vanished earthbound with a sonic shriek.

Inside the gadget, a timer tripped a switch. Juice zapped from the batteries toward the detonator. At five thousand feet above Hiroshima, a barometric, height-detecting switch activated a small radar set. Its transmitter bounced radio waves from the ground to the strange antennae that Joe had noticed on the bomb. The radar readings flipped the final switch in the chain at just under two thousand feet above the city, closing the circuit that sent electricity to the detonator.