Tengu (35 page)

Yoshino said an
ancient Shinto prayer; a prayer for long life, for guidance. Then, with great
care, he backed the van over Commander Ouvarov’s head.

There was a
moment when Commander Ouvarov felt as if his skull could actually withstand the
vehicle’s two-ton weight. But the pressure built up until it was utterly
intolerable, and then his skull collapsed with a snap like a breaking
terra-cotta bowl, and his eyes bulged out of their sockets and tumbled bloodily
onto the road, promptly followed by a long squirt of brains. He died thinking
of nothing but pain. The words “Nancy, the beads...” never even occurred to
him.

Yoshino shifted
the van back into drive, and sped off, leaving behind him a high trail of
drifting desert dust and the body of a man who had betrayed himself more than
his country. For twenty or thirty yards, the van left a repeated smudge of
blood on the road, a telltale tireprint that would have inevitably brought
Yoshino to Death Row if his intentions hadn’t been different.

After six or
seven minutes of driving, he reached a small Exxon station next to a use-car
lot, and parked a half-mile out of Apache Junction. He pulled across the road
and parked in front of a pump. An old-timer with grizzled white hair and a
sport cap was washing the windshield of a Chrysler pickup on the other side of
the island. He called out, “Be with you in two shakes there, son.”

Yoshino climbed
calmly out of the van, unhooked the handle from the nearest pump, started the
pump’s motor, and dragged the hose across to the van. Then, while the old-timer
was busy making change for the driver of the Chrysler, Yoshino sat in the
driver’s seat, pointed the nozzle of the gas pump toward his chest, and began
to splash gasoline over himself, gallons of it. It gushed out all over his
clothes, over the seats, over the floor.

It took a
moment or two before the old-timer realized what was happening. Then he
shouted,

“Hey! Goddamn
it! What you doing there, son? Hey, stop that!”

Yoshino
scarcely heard him. He was already entering the first gate to another world. In
his mind he was gliding weightless through one of the torii that stand by the
shores of the Inland Sea. He lifted the .45, muzzle upward, and tightened his
grip on the trigger. This would be an ecstatic way to die.

The old-timer
was only five or six feet away when Yoshino fired the automatic, and the
interior of the van exploded in a soft, superheated furnace. Yoshino felt
nothing but a wave of heat; the old-timer shrieked as he was hurled, blazing,
onto the roof of his own gas station.

There was
another explosion, louder, as the van’s tank blew up. Chunks of burning metal
were tossed into the air. A fiery tire careered across the forecourt, bounced
across a stretch of grass, and lay there flaring and smoking. Then the
station’s 500-gallon underground storage tank went up, a blast that demolished
the building in a ball of glaring orange fire and set fifteen parked trucks
alight in the used-car lot.

The fire burned
for hours, sending up a rolling black column of smoke. The police who attended
the scene of the explosion were unable to determine the cause, since there were
no recognizable survivors. They couldn’t even tell that Yoshino was Japanese–not
at first, or they might have grasped the irony that all the burning trucks in
the lot were Toyotas.

W
hen Mr. Esmeralda arrived at the house in Laurel Canyon, a few
minutes after nine o’clock, he was admitted immediately to Kappa’s inner
sanctum. Kappa was suspended from a ceiling beam in a basket lined with scarlet
silk and padded with cushions. His tiny deformed body was still shining with
the scented oils with which his young female attendants had been massaging him,
in an attempt to ease his scores and to conceal the odor of his oozing wounds
and purulent, convoluted genitalia. He was wearing a different disguise today,
a burnished ivory-colored mask that was almost smiling; a face that looked as
if it were about to react to a happy surprise.

Mr. Esmeralda
was not fooled. The more cheerful the mask Kappa wore, the fouler his temper
was likely to be. He had only once seen Kappa wearing a mask that actually
laughed, and on that day Mr. Esmeralda had been lucky to escape from the inner
sanctum with his life.

He noticed that
there were six or seven Otti guards in the room today, two or three more than
usual, as well as Kappa’s half-naked girl
assistant
.
There were scores more candles, too; burning bright and hot in row after row of
wrought-iron holders. It was like High Mass in hell.

“Good morning,”
said Mr. Esmeralda.

Kappa watched
him, without blinking, through the eyeholes in his mask. “You have failed me,” he
said. His voice was more chirrupy and insect like than ever. “You have failed
me disastrously.”

“Kappa, I said
right from the very start that I didn’t think it was a good idea to go for
Admiral Thorson.”

“Thorson knows
about the Tengu. Thorson must die.”

“You’ve heard
that all the violence in Thorson’s room woke him up from his coma?” asked Mr.

Esmeralda, perspiring from the heat of the candles.
“We’re
worse off now than we were before.”

Kappa was
silent, although Mr. Esmeralda was sure that he could hear a grating sound
inside the mask, as if the creature were grinding his teeth.

“We could try
to get in to Thorson with just a regular hit man,” Mr. Esmeralda suggested,

“
although
I expect that he’s pretty heavily guarded at the
moment. Or we could just ignore him.”

“We cannot
ignore him,” Kappa whispered. “Fortunately, the Tengu’s body is still at the
hospital. I have already spoken to Doctor Gempaku, and Doctor Gempaku is sure
that he can work the necessary rituals.”

“The necessary rituals?
The necessary
rituals for what?”

“Leave Admiral
Thorson to Doctor Gempaku,” said Kappa. “I have had enough of your
incompetence.”

“To be fair,
Kappa...”

“To be fair,
you and our meddling assistants have almost destroyed my dream! Where is
Commander Ouvarov now? Where is Gerard Crowley? Who is keeping a watch on Nancy
Shiranuka? Your assistants are all as bungling and treacherous-as you are. The
only reason I am not going to direct my Oni to kill you now is because I have
no time to find anybody else to replace you. Commander Ouvarov has vanished,
nobody knows where, but there is no doubt that he was responsible for murdering
Kenji. Yoshino has apparently fled with him.”

“They’ll be
back, I’m sure,” said Mr. Esmeralda, trying to sound confident.

Kappa let out a
harsh, high-pitched noise that could have been a snarl or a mocking laugh.
“If you believe that.
Mr. Esmeralda, then you
are
a bigger fool than I have always thought you to be.

They’ll never
be back. They’ll run and hide, in fear of their lives, as very well they might.
The influence of the Circle of Burned Doves reaches everywhere, financed and
supported by some of the greatest of Japanese businesses. Many of Japan’s most
eminent financiers and politicians have relations who were deformed or killed
by the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Twelve thousand people a year are still
dying in Japan as a direct effect of America’s brutality. The Circle of Burned
Doves is the richest secret society in the world after the American order of
Freemasons.

We can never
forgive, and we can never forget. Usually, our energies are devoted to bringing
the United States to her knees economically. All the research that went into
microjapanese shipbuilders and electrical manufacturers receive funding from
our central bank. Our influence reaches to Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.
So wherever your precious Commander Ouvarov tries to hide
himself
,
he will be found and summarily executed for what he did.”

Mr. Esmeralda
said, “I am impressed. I also regret what occurred. But I did respectfully try
to warn you that using the Tengu to assassinate Admiral Thorson was not a good
idea. It would have been just as easy to send somebody in to finish him off
with a knife.
Quiet, no mess, effective.”

“What is easy
and what is just
do
not always coincide,” whispered
Kappa. “Admiral Thorson was in charge of the mission called Appomattox, to
discover the training center for the Tengus in 1945 and direct the first atomic
bomb onto it, in order that the Tengus might be utterly destroyed. It was
simple justice that Admiral Thorson should be killed by the very being which he
tried to wipe out forever, especially when you consider how many innocent lives
he considered it necessary to extinguish or maim at the same time.”

Kappa paused,
and then said throatily, “If Japan had possessed the atomic bomb and had
dropped it on San Francisco–if that bomb had been exploded in the sky over
Telegraph Hill, the most powerful bomb ever used, two thousand times more
powerful than anything that had ever been dropped before, the explosive force
of 20,320 tons of TNT, coupled with heat and fire and gamma rays that could
penetrate the thickest concrete wall as if it didn’t exist–what would Americans
think today? Even today, thirty-eight years later, they would spit at Japanese
in the street. I doubt if the United States, even now, would have resumed diplomatic
relations with Japan. Well, many of us Japanese feel the same way, but our
nature is less demonstrative than yours. Our emotions and our memories tend to
be suppressed, although never forgotten. We borne your occupation of our
country with dignity, we accepted the infiltration into our traditional ways of
your trashy culture...”

“Please, I am a
native of Colombia,” said Mr. Esmeralda, embarrassed but firm. “What the
Americans did has nothing to do with me.”

Kappa watched
him in silence. Then, quietly, he said, “We will have our revenge, Mr.

Esmeralda.”

“What do you
propose to do now, if I might ask?” said Mr. Esmeralda, glancing uncertainly at
the black-masked Oni guards.

Kappa said
something in Japanese to the girl who was standing close by. She came forward
with a jar of jade-colored ointment, and began to massage it into the grayish
folds between his legs.

Mr. Esmeralda
felt distinctly nauseated as he watched her slender, well-manicured fingers
disappearing into the crevices and dewlaps of Kappa’s deformed.genitalia, but
he swallowed hard and tried to think of Colombia in the summer, the jasmine and
the bougainvillea. He tried to think of cigars and good wine, and his father
laughing loudly on the balcony.

Kappa said,
“Because of your carelessness and your incompetence, I have brought forward the
Day of Fate to the day after tomorrow, fifty-eight hours from now. I have
talked to Doctor Gempaku, and he assures me that he can have another Tengu
ready by then. I would have liked to have had more than one. I wanted to make
absolutely sure that my plan was a success. But we will have to take the risk.
The Day of Fate must come.”

“If you say
so,” said Mr. Esmeralda.

“Don’t try to
mock me,” snapped Kappa. “You have angered me enough already to warrant death.
And you can be well
assured,
your incompetent and
untrustworthy colleagues will die on the same day.”

Kappa spoke
quickly to one of his guards, and the man came forward with a roll of
blueprints.

Mr. Esmeralda
knew what they were: he had obtained them himself, for $2,500, from a
disgruntled secretary at the California Center for Nuclear Fusion. They were
the detailed plans of the new fusion reactor and power station on the shoreline
at Three Arch Bay, just north of Salt Creek and Capistrano Beach, where the
southbound Santa Ana Freeway sweeps in a southward curve from San Juan
Capistrano toward the Pacific Ocean.

Three Arch Bay Fusion Reactor, one of the world’s most advanced
nuclear-energy centers,
was fueled by deuterium and tritium, processed
from the waters of the Pacific itself. Unlike light-water reactors, or their
advanced cousins the fast-breeder and thermal reactors, the fusion reactor did
not require uranium or other fissionable materials. Deuterium and tritium are
both forms of hydrogen, and are present in the world’s oceans in an
inexhaustible supply, free. All that was required of the Three Arch Bay reactor
to tap that was that it should fulfill the two major conditions necessary for a
fusion reaction: produce intense confined heat as high as million degrees
Celsius, and sustain that temperature for one second.

Kappa had
chosen this particular reactor as his target because any intererence in its
fusion process would produce an explosion far greater than anything that had
ever been witnessed in the world before. He had calculated, with the help of
Japanese physicists sympathetic to the cause of the Circle of Burned Doves,
that to destabilize the fusion process during the one critical second of
100-million-degree heat would lead to a nuclear detonation with a force
equivalent to 150 million tons of TNT–50 million tons greater than the largest
hydrogen bomb that the United States or the Soviet Union had ever produced.

Southern
California would be devastated. Los Angeles would die instantly. And the winds
from the Pacific would carry the radioactivity far across the Midwest,
polluting the crops, poisoning the air, and destroying countless millions of
Americans for not only months but years to come.

^T Tengu Three
Arch Bay, however, was only intended to be the start. Kappa planned to attack
one nuclear-power station after another, year by year, until America’s spirit
was broken and her lands were glowing with radioactivity. She •would never rise
again. What Kappa wanted to do was to release so much nuclear energy into her
atmosphere that her children would be born dead or deformed for centuries to
come. It was the least he could do to avenge his mother. It was the least he
could do to avenge himself.