Time of Attack (20 page)

Q
uinn woke to the sound of feet running back and forth on deck. Large winches fore and aft groaned and squealed, playing out heavy line as big as a man’s wrist as they made ready to offload and load cargo. Gruff voices barked orders in Japanese and Korean.

Quinn swung his feet off the edge of the cramped berth and sat up, rubbing the effects of exhausted sleep from his eyes. He was angry with himself for sleeping so deeply for so long. His plan had been to be ready to step off the boat as it came even with the pier. There was no way to know when Customs might pay a visit—and he wanted to be gone when they did.

The sun was still a pink line below the clouds on the eastern horizon when he stuck his head out of the captain’s cabin. Land lay off the port side of the vessel, but Quinn realized they were coming around the long barrier peninsula that protected the port from the more open waters of the Korean Strait. It was still dark enough for a covert arrival.

Quinn stepped out of the cramped cabin and popped his neck from side to side, breathing in the moist sea air. Standing along the rail, he could just make out the red outline of Hakata Tower looming ghostlike through the heavy mist, still two miles away.

Japan. He could smell the mystery of the place.

Though he spoke flawless Arabic and excellent Chinese, Japan’s culture had bitten Jericho more deeply than any he’d ever experienced. He’d taken immersion language classes in junior high and high school in Alaska, surrounding himself with all things samurai from food to martial arts. The Anchorage Rotary Club had sponsored him for a semester of high school in the Roppongi area of Tokyo his sophomore year.

That had been well before Kim came into the picture, and he’d met a girl there. Her name was Sayuri, and at sixteen, she seemed to him to be the embodiment of all that was feminine. Wise beyond her years, she had warned him that Japan had a way of getting into a person’s blood. He would return to Alaska, and, though memories of her would surely fade, he would forever be tugged back toward her country.

He smiled when he thought about it, ocean spray stinging his face. He was on a mission, sure to be deadly for someone, but in truth, he couldn’t wait to step onto Japanese soil merely for the thrill of being back.

A shuddering rumble from deep within the Korean ship drew him out of his reminiscing. Deckhands moved to the rail opposite Quinn, standing ready with boat hooks. The captain came out of the wheelhouse carrying a plastic tote heavily wrapped in duct tape. He whistled Quinn over as another boat, much smaller than the Korean ship, materialized out of the mist and pulled up alongside. Rigged for squid fishing, a long, overhead line with dozens of clear glass lamps like basketball-size Christmas ornaments ran down the center length of the smaller boat. Neither vessel came to a full stop, but matched speed and course at what Quinn guessed to be less than five or six knots.

The captain dropped the plastic tote to the waiting hands of two men on the squid boat and then pantomimed for Quinn to climb over and jump down with it.

Quinn nodded, understanding immediately what the captain wanted. The Korean ship would dock at the commercial pier—behind what would surely be a very tall fence and subject to search by Japan Customs. The squid boat, being a local vessel, would simply dock in Fukuoka harbor with all the other fishing boats. Both Quinn and whatever was in the plastic tote could quietly enter Japan without notice from any authorities.

Quinn gave the smiling Korean captain five more twenty-dollar bills and slipped over the edge with his leather satchel to drop down next to the pilothouse on the spray-soaked deck of the smaller boat.

The squid boat skipper was a short man with a wide, unsmiling face weathered by the sea and tension of smuggling contraband. A blue bandanna, tied at all four corners, dropped over his head in a functional but comical hat to keep water from dripping in his eyes. He obviously spoke Japanese, but since he was now carrying an illegal immigrant and tote full of what was probably illicit Chinese Ecstasy, the man kept his thoughts to himself.

Quinn spent the next half hour while the boat slogged toward Fukuoka Harbor standing under a blue-tarp bimini soaking up the spindrift from the breaking waves and the uneasy stares of the three-man crew.

The wind picked up as they chugged up next to the pier. Heavy spray washed across the concrete docks, blown by a steady wind from the east and open water. The crew deployed bumper tires and threw ropes to two waiting dockhands. Two Japanese Coast Guard cutters bobbed with the tide at their berths. Across the quay, a man in a blue uniform braved the elements and scrubbed the deck of a forty-foot police boat.

Quinn softened the squid boat captain’s glare with a series of polite bows and a wad of twenties—a good sum for a quarter hour ride. Then, slinging the leather bag over his shoulder, he stepped over the gunnel and into Japan.

Apart from a handful of stevedores smoking cigarettes while they waited on the other side of the Customs fence for the early morning arrival of the Korean car hauler, the docks were all but deserted. Spotlights chased back the shadows around two ships already at berth, glinting off car glass and chrome. There were no agents to greet him, no swarm of police—and so far, no assassin’s bullet. Light poles bristled with surveillance cameras, but most were pointed toward the other direction. For the time being at least, Quinn’s only company as he walked toward the quiet parking lot seemed to be a lonely seagull wheeling above in the wind and spray.

A shrill whistle turned his attention toward the narrow byway that ran along the commercial docks, adjacent to the blocky white building that contained the Fukuoka Port government offices. Twenty yards away, in the parking lot on the far side of a well-groomed hedgerow, a woman straddled a small yellow motorbike. A cigarette hung from her lips, glowing brightly against the gray of early morning. She tossed her head when Quinn looked at her, letting him know she’d meant the whistle for him.

The woman wore a shorty helmet that left her chin exposed. Painted rally-style, it was canary yellow to match the bike with a white stripe down the center. Wide goggles protected her eyes from the rain. It was difficult to tell much about her face. It did not smile, but Quinn thought that might be a function of her lips holding the cigarette. Despite the wet weather she wore a stylish denim jacket, darkened by rain at the shoulders. A black dress that stopped at midthigh and gray tights revealed strong legs. Flat-heeled leather boots that came halfway up stout calves rounded out her outfit.

White cotton gloves on the handlebars, she tossed her head again, beckoning him to hurry before looking back and forth over her shoulder.

“Welcome to Japan, Mr. Quinn,” she said in English when he got close enough to hear.

“Hai,” he said in Japanese.
Yes
. He was surprised Miyagi hadn’t told her friend to use Hackman, the name on his passport.

“I am Ayako,” she said. “Get on.” Her voice held the honeyed purr of a heavy drinker. She handed him a battered black helmet and white cloth mask worn by so many in Asia during flu and hay fever season. “The police would certainly stop us if you do not wear the helmet,” she said. “With the mask, people will have to look closely to see you are not Japanese. Americans are usually too vain to wear them, even if it would keep them from getting sick.”

“Sounds reasonable.” Quinn slung the leather bag over his shoulder and fastened the helmet under his chin. He pulled the elastic straps of the mask over each ear, concealing his face.

“I don’t want to stay here longer than we have to.” Ayako craned her head around to look at him, revving the little engine. It sounded more like a lawnmower than a bike. Dark eyes stared from behind the large goggles, making her look at once adventurous and comical. As with Emiko, it was difficult to tell this one’s age. Her damp hair and amber skin softened in the diffuse light of early morning, she could have been a college coed. But if she was a friend from Miyagi’s childhood, Ayako had to be at least in her late thirties.

Quinn climbed on behind her, scooting as close as he dared to keep from falling off the back of the little bike.

“I am not a clay doll,” Ayako said over her shoulder. “Please hold on.”

Quinn situated the leather satchel so it hung behind him and wrapped his arms around the woman’s waist. After sleeping with his face next to the Korean captain’s greasy pillow, he found the smell of strawberry shampoo and cigarettes that clung to Ayako’s damp clothes pleasantly intoxicating.

Quinn couldn’t remember the last time he’d ridden as a passenger behind a female rider. Anatomy made for any number of problems in such an arrangement. Though far from fat, Ayako was a girl with plenty of roundness. It was difficult to know whether he should keep his arms high, under her heavy bust, or low and risk brushing the lap of her skirt. She was a short-coupled woman, leaving little margin for error. She planted both feet on the ground to steady the bike and solved the problem by positioning his arms high, around her ribs, so her breasts rested on his forearms.

She chuckled out loud, giving the bike gas. “I don’t meet many men who worry about where they touch me.”

“Nice scooter,” Quinn said as she got under way, hoping to move the conversation away from the subject of his manners.

Ayako slammed on the brakes, stopping so abruptly she threw Quinn’s weight forward, shoving her against the gas tank on the little bike. Her chest heaved against his arms.

“This is not a scooter,” she corrected, using informal, almost confrontational Japanese. He could hear her teeth grating as she spoke. “It is a motorbike.”

Quinn grimaced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“One straddles a motorbike. On a scooter, one keeps their legs together . . .” Softening immediately, she looked over her shoulder to give Quinn a coy wink. “I have never been so good at that.”

She laughed out loud at her own joke and gave the little motorbike enough gas that is sounded as if it might fly apart as they melded into the honk and grind of the morning traffic of Fukuoka City.

 

L
ieutenant Colonel Paul Hunt shut the screen to his laptop computer and leaned back in his chair with a long sigh. He still wore his surgical scrubs. They were more comfortable than anything else in the up-and-down heat and cold of this miserable country.

In a fit of patriotism, he’d signed up for military service after 9/11. That also happened to be after he’d accumulated what his wife called roughly a bajillion dollars in medical school debt. The Air Force was happy to get a qualified doctor and, though they paid him with some parity to what a doc made in the civilian world, the school debts were still his. Frankly, until he’d been trapped in Afghanistan by this quarantine, the money he owed caused him more stress than the possibility of mortar attack or getting his foot blown off by a land mine if he stepped off the pavement on base.

He’d come into the military with an adventurous heart, thinking there was nowhere on earth that he wouldn’t want to visit on some level. One could learn something from every culture in every land. He still believed that, though the things one learned might just be to stay the hell away. Russia, the British Empire, Hannibal, Alexander the Great, had all tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan. America hadn’t really tried to conquer the place, just drive the Taliban out and rebuild it. But you had to
want
progress. You had to allow yourself to be rebuilt.

Hunt often thought how impossible it was to bomb a place back to the Stone Age when they were already there. Still, he had a job while he was here, and he did it well.

Behind him, two senior airmen stood over their lab duties, sterilizing hospital instruments and making certain crash carts were stocked with necessary supplies at the end of their shift.

Hunt didn’t know if the Skype chats with his wife made the time away from her easier or more difficult. In truth, it didn’t matter. The months ticked by, the kids passed milestones he’d never get to see, and the war dragged on—whether he missed his wife or not.

And now, they were telling him and everyone else in the godforsaken place that they had to stay indefinitely, at least until someone could figure out what was causing this new plague of boils. The young troops who’d been raised on video games had taken to calling the disease Epic Egypt or Pharaoh 2.0 and chanting “Let my people go” as they walked between their basic duties and the chow hall.

There had been three deaths on base so far—one soldier and two Afghan nationals who helped with road maintenance. The boils had been horrific enough, causing a near panic among the Afghani workforce, who saw it as a sign from Allah of some great sin. They’d been extra pissed when local mullahs banished them from their communities and sent them packing back to Bagram at the pointy end of a Kalashnikov.

At the insistence of the Afghan government, the base commander had put a hiatus on all traffic going outside the wire, leaving frontline troops not only denied their rotation home, but without a job of patrol while stuck in theater. Boredom had always been an issue at Bagram, but now, with fuses shortened by the lack of relief and this surprise imprisonment, tensions bordered on deadly. It was only a matter of time before someone—military, contractor, or Afghan—broke under pressure. Even the Kyrgyz barbers and massage girls were beginning to show signs of stress, wearing less makeup and not bothering to flirt for business.

In a show of sheer genius, the base commander had ordered photographs of the infected men, complete with their terrifying boils, to be placed in strategic locations so they could be seen by the maximum number of people. Instead of causing panic, as some feared the posters would, the grisly photographs served as reminders of why the dire orders were in place.

Though the sight of the boils was enough to induce another plague of chronic diarrhea and stomach tension, in the end, the pustules were only a symptom. All the deaths had been from respiratory distress. So far, the remaining infected were soldiers. One was on a ventilator and another was attached to a full-blown ECMO for heart-lung bypass. The other three sounded as if they had pneumonia. He only had one more ECMO unit, meaning the next person to get sickest was the one most likely to live the longest. Unless the military did some magic and brought him more units, the others would simply drown as fluid filled their lungs.

Hunt had gone over each patient’s chart a dozen times. The infected who’d made it stateside had all come from the 405th Civil Affairs Battalion based at Nellis. There had to be a connection there—but the sick who remained in Afghanistan appeared to be a hodgepodge of random units.

“There has to be something you all have in common,” Hunt said out loud. “Some little thing you share.”

“Colonel,” the older of the two Senior Airmen said from behind him. “Everything is in place. With your permission, we’d like to knock off in time to get a haircut.”

“You’re free to go,” Hunt said, smiling. The kid reminded him of his oldest son. “But your hair looks fine.”

“I know. But the girls are pretty.” The senior airman shrugged. “And it gives us something to do.”

Hunt tossed the last file on his desk and ran a hand through his own hair. He could do with a trim as well.