The Pearl Harbor Murders (23 page)

With a sigh, Burroughs set the little L¸ger on the counter. The grocer did not take the weapon, rather he reached under the counter and swung out a sawed-off shotgun. Hully and his father exchanged glances-this was not going quite as planned.

"I hope you'll forgive me for eavesdropping," Morimura said, looking a little ridiculous in the golf outfit, though not enough so to take the edge off the weapon he'd stuck in the writer's neck.

“Til let it go this time," Burroughs said, as the cold steel of the spy's gun dimpled his flesh.

Morimura's expression was smug but his eyes had a

wildness, a fear, in them. "You should write detective stories, Mr. Burroughs. You put the pieces together very well."

The writer looked sideways at his captor. "What now, Morimura? You don't mind if I don't call you 'Yoshikawa'-I'm used to you the other way."

Morimura offered half a smile. "The ineffectual, buf-foonish ladies' man, you mean? I must give you credit, Mr. Burroughs-you never did accept that masquerade."

"By any yardstick, buddy, you're no diplomat. You'll face the firing squad, as a spy."

The half smile dissolved into a full scowl. "You're facing a firing squad right now, Mr. Burroughs-something I have no intention of doing."

"What
are
you going to do?" Burroughs did his best to show no fear; and he wasn't afraid for himself-but his son, at his side, that was something again. "You can't just kill us."

"Really?" Morimura laughed softly. "Do you see anyone around to be a witness? Mr. Harada and I will be on the tiny island of Niihau, by nightfall, and a few days later, a submarine will take us to ... friendlier waters."

Burroughs locked eyes with the spy. "Did you
know,
Morimura? Did you know today was the day?"

The spy smirked, shaking his head. "I suspected- all signs indicated that was the case... but it might have been next week, or the next. What was the difference, with your military so obsessed with fighting fifth columnists, and ignoring the real threat?"

Hully was looking at the little grocer, the big hollow eyes of the man's shotgun looking back at him. "How could you do it? How could you kill your own niece?"

Harada's features were impassive, even proud. "She was a traitor."

Hully's eyes were on fire, his nostrils flaring as he said, "She was a beautiful, talented girl, and you murdered her, you heartless son of a bitch!"

Harada shrugged.

Morimura's smile was pursed, like a kiss, and then he said, "Who was it said, 'War is hell'? Whoever that wise man was, he was so right, even if he was an American ... now if you will please to step in back, in the storeroom."

Burroughs put up his hands and so did Hully, and Morimura reached behind him and pushed the backroom door open with one hand, and with the other he kept the revolver trained on the writer, the grocer keeping a bead on Hully. Morimura motioned with the gun for them to follow him into the back.

The spy did not see Adam Sterling come into the open doorway behind him, and the grocer didn't see the FBI agent in time to warn Morimura, either. With a swift, vicious chop to the base of the neck, Sterling sent Morimura sprawling to the floor, the .38 tumbling from the spy's hands.

Burroughs caught the weapon in midair, and Hully snatched the L¸ger from the counter, while Sterling was pointing a .38 revolver of his own at the grocer behind the counter.

Though he had a shotgun in hand, Harada was facingthree guns, all trained on him, from various directions.

"Drop it," Sterling advised. "You can't win this game."

Harada thought that over; then he swung the sawed-off shotgun up and around and under his chin and squeezed both triggers, the explosion shaking everything-and everyone-in the small shop. What had been Harada's head dripped and dribbled and slithered down the weird jars of roots, herbs and skeletons, crawling like strange sea creatures. Then the mostly headless body slid down to the floor and sat, out of sight.

Hully was covering his mouth, horrified. Through his fingers, he said the obvious: "He ... he took his own life."

"You're going to be seeing a lot of that," Burroughs said, "in the coming days."

Sterling was hauling Morimura to his feet; the dazed spy, his perfect hair askew, looking fairly idiotic in the golf togs, gave the FBI man a bewildered look.

"Judo," Sterling explained.

Less than two hours after it had begun, the sneak air attack on Pearl Harbor was over. The silver planes again receded into specks on the horizon, taking off in varied directions, one more act of deception designed to confuse the enemy as to the attackers' origin point. The raiders left behind a Pearl Harbor that was a smoldering, twisted landscape of inconceivable devastation. The two pieces of the
Arizona
lay on the bottom of the harbor; the
West Virginia,
too. The
Utah
and
Oklahoma,
capsized; the
California
sinking; the
Cur-tiss, Helena,
and
Honolulu
damaged; the
Raleigh
barely afloat; the
Nevada,
the
Vestal,
beached. Fires raged on bomb-damaged ships-the
Maryland,
the
Pennsylvania,
the
Tennessee.

On Ford Island, the husks of dozens of planes lay in charred disarray, while hangars burned around them. On the oil-pooled surface of the harbor floated debris, much of it human. And along the Oahu shores, the pummeled air bases continued to ooze smoke.

Corpsman attempted, often vainly, to identify bodies and body parts at the Pearl Harbor Naval Hospital. At the base of Alewa Heights, just below the Shuncho-ro teahouse-where the Japanese vice consul had wooed geishas and perpetrated espionage-a makeshift morgue was set up.

The triumph of the Japanese, however, was not complete. Huge fuel tanks, holding millions of barrels of oil, had gone unsullied. The Navy Yard itself, that sprawl of repair facilities and shops, was secure. The Naval ammo depot went untouched, as did the submarine pens. Smaller warships by the score escaped damage; and the raiders had failed to find-much less destroy-the aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet.

The greatest miscalculation, of course, was the nature of the attack itself-the sheer villainy of such a peacetime assault To the Japanese military, this was a glorious day of victory, but just one day-a war, after all, was made of many days.

But December 7, 1941, was not just any day.

Americans would remember it

Epilogue

On the afternoon after the attack-in response to a radio request for help from all able-bodied men-Ed and Hully Burroughs were issued Springfield rifles and dispatched to patrol the waterfront in a civilian guard, helping to dig slit trenches along the shore.

With the help of his friend Colonel Kendall Fielder, Burroughs earned the distinction of becoming the oldest American correspondent to cover the Second World War, making three trips to Pacific war zones. He was vocal in his support for Hawaii's Japanese-Americans, though his stereotypical, propagandist portrayal of "Japs" in his WWII novel,
Tarzan and the Foreign Legion,
rivaled that of the Germans in
Tarzan the Untamed.

Colonel Fielder also became known for championing the rights of Japanese-Americans; possibly he'd been touched in some private way by the deaths of his son and his son's
nisei
fiancee. At any rate, largely due to the efforts of Fielder and a few others-including FBI agent Adam Sterling-99 percent of Hawaii's 160,000 Japanese-Americans remained free, unlike the widespread mainland interments.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Burroughs turned his hand to mystery writing, even briefly converting Tar-zan into a detective, though without particular success, including a wild crime story entitled "More Fun! More People Killed!" that
The Saturday Evening Post
turned down.

After suffering several heart attacks, Edgar Rice Burroughs died in bed, on March 19, 1950, slumping over the funny papers, which were open to 'Tarzan."

Ed Burroughs was very proud of his son Hully, who a few weeks after the Pearl Harbor raid enlisted in the Army Air Corps at Hickam Field; First Lieutenant Hul-bert Burroughs went on to be a distinguished aerial combat photographer. Toward the end of the war, Hully married Marion Thrasher; after his father's death, he took the reins of ERB, Inc., working with his brother John Coleman Burroughs to effectively administer the legacy of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Otto Kuhn and his wife were arrested at a beach house, and imprisoned at the Sand Island Detention Center; Tadeo Yoshikawa (alias Tadashi Morimura) was transported to an interment camp in Arizona and, in August 1942, exchanged for American diplomats held in Japan.

Kuhn and Yoshikawa were two of only a dozen individuals determined to have actively engaged in prewar espionage in Hawaii; grocer Tosbio Harada was another. All of them had been sent to Hawaii under false names and/or pretenses; none were representatives of any local fifth column of Japanese-Americans. No such fifth column was ever shown to exist.

Sam Fujimoto fought with the celebrated all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and later graduated from Yale Law School, becoming a successful Honolulu attorney.

Harry Kamana and a smaller version of his band toured the Pacific Theater for the USO.

After the war, Detective John Jardine was instrumental in the cleaning up of police corruption on Oahu; he retired in 1968, died a year later, widely regarded as the finest homicide detective Oahu had ever known.

Both Admiral Kimmel and General Short were forced to retire and a hurried government report in January 1942 branded them with "dereliction of duty." Though a later report absolved them of this charge, the stigma remains, and Admiral Kimmel's son Edward has made a concerted effort to have his father and General Short advanced on the retired lists to their highest wartime ranks of four-star admiral and three-star general.

General Short in his later years spent much time on his garden, cultivating flowers, not actively seeking rehabilitation of his reputation; he died in 1949. Admiral Kimmel-though on December 7, 1941, he seemed to blame himself, at least in part-spent the rest of his life trying to restore his good name, dying of a heart attack in 1968.

The exact circumstances of the attack on Pearl

Harbor, and the reasons for the success of that attack, remain the subject of controversy and debate, involving Congress, the president and media coverage, even sixty years after the fact.

What did the Washington High Command know concerning Japanese intentions and military targets prior to the raid, and why did Washington fail to pass along this information to Kimmel and Short? If the general and admiral had been privy to this information, would they have taken more seriously the Mori message and other evidence of espionage the FBI agent and the creator of Tarzan brought to their attention, the Saturday evening before that fateful Sunday morning?

This Pearl Harbor mystery remains unsolved.

A Tip of the Panama

This book is a combination of the factual and the fanciful. Details herein of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor-including espionage mat led up to that attack-are largely factual, although the murder case is a fictional one; and I make no claim, large or small, for this novel as any kind of definitive account of this pivotal event in our history. Any blame for historical and/or geographical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of conflicting source material.

Like my previous "disaster mysteries,"
The Titanic Murders
(1999) and
The Hindenburg Murders
(2000), this novel features a real-life writer as amateur detective. Edgar Rice Burroughs was a great childhood favorite of mine; I was an avid reader of both the Tarzan tales and ERB's science fiction, well into my teens. The narrative technique of separating two protagonists and following the adventures of each in alternating chapters-used in this book-is one I learned from Burroughs.
Tarzan the Untamed,
incidentally, was my favorite of the novels-and the controversy over that "anti-German" title is accurately reported herein.

Burroughs and his son Hulbert were indeed present on Oahu-and living at the Niumalu Hotel-on December 7, 1941; they were, in fact, playing tennis when the bombing began. My fictionalized portrayal of them is based largely upon two wonderful biographies: the massive, seminal
Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan
(1975) by Irwin Forges; and a book I found as compulsively readable as any Burroughs novel,
Tarzan Forever
(1999) by John Tali-aferro. Also helpful were the early Burroughs biographies,
The Big Swingers
(1967) by Robert W. Fenton, and
Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure
(1965) by Richard A. Lupoff. So was
Tarzan of the Movies
(1968) by Gabe Esso.

A number of characters in
The Pearl Harbor Murders
are historical figures and appear under their real names, including (of course) General Short and Admiral Kimmel. Colonel Kendall Fielder existed, but the character Bill Fielder is fictional; grocer Yoshio Harada existed, but Pearl Harada is fictional. Adam Sterling is a composite of several FBI agents, one of whom lived at the Niumalu and was friendly with Ed Burroughs. The Kuhns, Colonel Teske (name changed), Tadeo Yoshikawa (a.k.a. Tadashi Morimura), Fred Bivens, George Elliot, Joe Lockard, William Outerbridge, the Morton family, Nagao Kita, and John Jardine are historical figures; Dan Pressman, Jack Stanton, Sam Fu-jimoto, Terry Mizuha, Frank Kaupiko, and Harry

Kamana are not, although most have real-life counterparts. Marjorie Petty did visit Oahu shortly before the attack, but (to my knowledge) never dated Hully Burroughs; as a buff of pinup art and artists, I couldn't resist noting the presence in Honolulu of this real, live Petty Girl.