Kamikaze (21 page)

Prisoner of War

So it all came down to lies.

When Chuck and Jackie were both kids, Joe had read “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to each of them. Now, as he exited the convention hotel and headed west along the seawalk bordering Coal Harbour, his mind rewrote that Hans Christian Andersen tale.

Once upon a time, there was an emperor named President Truman. A haberdasher by trade, he concerned himself with outward appearances. In every news photo, Truman seemed to be a well-dressed, dapper little guy. The emperor was definitely a dandy, a man prone to flaunting fancy clothes in public.

A front man, thought Joe.

Unfortunately, the emperor fell in with a scheming tailor. A backroom puppet master by the name of Jimmy Byrnes. The tailor told the emperor that he’d make him a new suit of clothes from a special atomic material that would be visible to all but the most foolish and unpatriotic of his subjects.

Visible to me, thought Joe.

For there was no greater patriot than Red Hett, whose bloodline ran back to the American Revolution.

And so the emperor donned his atomic suit and paraded in front of his awestruck subjects, all of whom—Joe included—oohed and aahed at his magnificent ensemble, for they all feared being branded foolish and unpatriotic.

But as the parade made its way through the streets of passing time, a youngster on the sidelines saw through the atomic lie and cried out, for all to hear, “The emperor is naked!”

Suddenly, those who had shared in the lie could no longer overlook the evidence before their eyes, and soon a chorus of voices began to say, “The emperor
is
naked!”

But not, of course, the emperor himself.

To admit publicly that he couldn’t see his own atomic clothes would expose him as the most foolish dupe of all. So until his dying day, Truman—like that emperor in Andersen’s tale—had continued parading about naked, in the hope that patriots would see truth where he himself knew there were only lies.

Patriots like Joe.

How could I have been so naive? he wondered now.

“On that trip coming home from Potsdam,” Truman had nakedly lied, “I ordered the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima. It was a terrible decision. But I made it.”

Hook, line, and sinker, Joe had swallowed the lie. Japan was given the chance to surrender, and because the Japs didn’t take it, they got what they deserved. The bomb was a military necessity. It saved hundreds of thousands of lives
that would have been lost in the invasion of Japan. The bomb was a weapon of last resort against an enemy determined to fight to the death.

Bullshit, thought Joe.

They were never given the chance.

So we’ll never know if the bomb was a necessity.

But
I
know that
I’ve
got innocent blood on my hands.

And so does Tokuda.

And he’s determined to make me pay with the innocent blood of
my
family.

Damn you, Byrnes!

Joe should have seen the lie when there was no mention of Japan’s emperor in the Potsdam Declaration. He knew that forcing the Japs to give up their emperor as part of their “unconditional surrender” was the same as forbidding Americans to worship God.

When the post-Hiroshima surrender conditions made it clear that they
could
keep their emperor after all, it should have been obvious to Joe that the bomb was a
setup.

But he was cut from the patriotic cloth of his generation, and back then it was assumed that America never did wrong. As Lillian Hellman had once said, “It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell upon them.” Wrapping himself in the Stars and Stripes, Joe had embarked on the post-war peace exactly as Truman advised: “Never, never waste a minute on regret. It is a waste of time.” He had started a family and seen his service through; he had weathered the tumult of Vietnam and retired with his illusions intact.

That’s how John Wayne did it.

And so had Joe.

It was only when he began preparing his address for the vets’ conference that Joe had actually read Truman’s secret Potsdam diary. Discovered in 1979, seven years after the president’s death, the diary set forth the reasons for his decision to drop the bomb.

July 25: Truman’s order went out. “The 509 Composite Group, 20th Air Force will deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima.”

July 26: The Potsdam Declaration.

Which meant that the decision to drop the bomb wasn’t made
after
Japan was asked to surrender.

It was made
before.

And Joe had done the killing.

Instead of being a weapon of last resort, the
Enola Gay
’s
atomic bomb was destined to drop, and the man who was really behind that decision—Jimmy Byrnes—had done everything in his power to see that destiny fulfilled.

“
My God! What have we done?
”

Who was the crewman who voiced that in the plane?

Too many unanswered questions tumbled around in Joe’s troubled mind.

Would Japan have surrendered if the Americans had agreed to preserve the emperor?

Was Japan already too exhausted to fight on?

Would Russia’s entering the Pacific War have been the tipping point?

With Japan surrounded, would a naval blockade and conventional bombing have done the job?

Why wasn’t the bomb dropped on troops massing on the southern island of Kyushu, instead of on a city so low on the list of military targets that it had yet to be attacked with conventional weapons?

If targeting innocent civilians is the MO of terrorists, does that make the atomic bombing of Hiroshima a war crime?

Ask New Yorkers, thought Joe.

Whatever the answers to those vexing questions, the aftershocks of Hiroshima were crystal clear:

America is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon.

And Japan is the only country to have suffered one.

And now the bomb had spawned a more ferocious atomic monster than any encountered in 1950s Japanese horror films. Joe was embroiled in a nightmarish rendition of “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” It had already cost him his only child, and it threatened to cost him his sole grandchild too. That would be the end of the long line of Hetts who had answered the call to serve their country, and Joe would be left to die alone.

Or maybe not.

Perhaps there was more?

Wasn’t it more likely that this enemy from half a century ago was killing Joe’s family as a warm-up to the end-game: the annihilation of the atomic bomber himself?

Then so be it, thought Joe.

Take me on, Tokuda.

That’s why Joe was out here on this foggy seawalk, feeling dumbfounded by how radically different the weather was from what he enjoyed in the Southwest. The rain overnight had dissipated to a Scotch mist, and that must have warmed the air above a cooler sea, for the ocean exhaled a lazy, pearl gray cloud. The thicker it got, the more the fog felt like a living entity. Clammy fingers brushed his skin, and the heavy air filled his lungs like smoke. Traffic he couldn’t see rumbled past, along with the disembodied voices of invisible people. Joe advanced slowly through this shadowy gloom, confused and disoriented by what he imagined was a real London pea-souper, and he felt a little like Sherlock Holmes being stalked by Moriarty.

Footsteps.

Coming toward him.

Tires.

Whispering behind.

Shoulders hunched against the chill, Hett walked with his hands stuffed in his pockets.

A figure loomed up in the fog.

Car doors swung open beside him.

They took the bait, Joe thought as he punched on the cellphone in his pocket.

Then hands grabbed him.

And he was snatched off the seawalk.

“They’ve got him!” Craven said. “The cellphone’s on.”

His words went out from a “control” car crawling through the fog on the downtown byway that ran parallel to the street that skirted the seawalk. Because Special O did double duty investigating bad cops for Internal Affairs and watching bad guys for the Mounted, it was literally kept at arm’s length from the rest of the force. Consequently, Oscar had something no other section could boast: its own cipher channel.

A cipher channel is secure.

For your ears only.

And every wired ear on air was working this target.

“Got ’em,” confirmed the “I guy” from the passenger’s seat beside Craven. The Special I cop had been selected because he was of Japanese heritage and fluent in several Asian languages. In complicated tails like this, there’d often be a specialist in the lead control car. Today, it was the Asian tech from Special I. At other times, especially in cases involving a foreign jurisdiction, it would be a cop from a visiting agency who knew their target’s lifestyle. He could then feed Special O quirks: “That’s typical. No big deal. He likes to go for a rub and tug back home too.”

If Special O—the watchers—was the eyes of the RCMP, Special I—the electronic buggers—was the ears.

“They’ve turned off Coal Harbour Quay. The signal’s going south on Cardero.”

The I guy was gripping a gadget that looked like a remote control for a model airplane. In fact, it was a trap
that captured cellphone signals. Around the city, towers fight to “pull” cellphone signals. The closest tower to your phone wins the signal, but the weaker ones track it too. Because more than one tower has a fix, the gizmo in the I guy’s hands could use triangulation to map the point of intersect and locate the phone within one or two car lengths. With so many cellphones around, the trap required proximity. It picked up every signal in the vicinity and displayed each number on its computer screen. In this case, Special I had supplied the phone in Joe Hett’s pocket, so the I guy knew which number to stalk.

“Quite the receiver,” Nick Craven had said before the colonel was snatched.

“Yeah,” said the I guy. “We’re always a step ahead. The bad guys use a device like this to clone phones. That’s how they steal your signal and stick you with the bill.”

“But not like that one, eh?”

“No. It’s state of the art. But tech stuff changes so fast these days that by the time you and I stop talking, this signal trap will probably be obsolete.”

But now they were moving; they were on the hunt.

And that was Cardero Street up ahead.

“There,” said Craven.

“Yeah, that’s them. The signal is coming from the vehicle passing in front of us.”

Through the blur, they could just make out a car passing from the harbor on the right to the left-hand downtown core. As if on cue, the rear window lowered as it cut
across Hastings—their intersecting street—and something got tossed out.

“Houston,” said the I guy, “we’ve got a problem.”

“I’m an old man,” Joe had said, “and I’m not afraid to die. I faced down that fear a long time ago, at Pearl Harbor. But my granddaughter is all I have left, and she’s too young to die, so I’ll sign whatever you need signed for me to be used as bait.”

That was back in his hotel room earlier this morning, when he and the Horsemen had forged a battle plan.

“It’s complicated,” DeClercq had said. “A lot can go wrong.”

“Enough’s wrong
now,
” Joe had replied. “And something must be done! They killed my son. They’ll kill Jackie. Get me near them and I’ll take the fuckers with me.”

“I’ve been in your shoes, Colonel.”

“So I hear. And you did just what I’m proposing to get
your
daughter back. Do we have a deal?”

The danger with technology is that it cuts both ways. If there had been time, they might have planted a tracking device in one of Joe’s teeth or injected a microchip into his body. The Japanese, however, are the top dogs of high-tech, and the yakuza would definitely be armed with the best signal scanners around. If they found Joe wired with a chip, they’d kill him then and there.

And Jackie too.

So in the end, Joe had ventured out without the bells and whistles. The only electronic signals he emitted were those that were part of everyday life. And now that he had been snatched off the quay and hauled into the car, the American was a low-tech prisoner of war.