Kamikaze (26 page)

Flamethrower

November 2, Now

Lyn Barrow felt liberated. She was almost free of the past. If not for the Japanese soldiers who had overrun St. Stephen’s during the fall of Hong Kong, what might her life have been? She would have been the only child born to Viv and her mother’s lover, Captain Richard Walker. Would they have married, settled in England after the war, and raised her as the daughter of a loving two-parent family? Would she, too, have met a dashing beau, and would they have enjoyed a storybook romance in exotic locales?

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.