The Samurai Inheritance (5 page)

As the Mercedes drove off a young Oriental man stepped from a shop doorway on the other side of the street. His eyes followed the car until it was out of sight and his lips barely moved as he spoke into a hands-free mobile phone.

At the same moment Jamie stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of a fifth-floor suite big enough to host a Premiership football match. He took a contented sip of weiss beer and stared out over the glittering waters of the Spree to Museum Island and the distinctive green domes of Berlin Cathedral. Behind it he could just make out the outlines of the museums complex, where tomorrow he would begin his strangest quest yet.

There were worse places to be, he reckoned. If Keith Devlin’s shrunken head was out there, he would find it. If not, the philanthropical tycoon could whistle for his next copper mine and Jamie would go back to Fiona where he belonged.

V

Bougainville Island, 1943

Signals Lieutenant Tomoyuki Hamasuna of the Imperial Japanese Army carefully plucked the hooked thorn from his faded green uniform shirt and pushed through the almost impenetrable wall of bushes and vegetation. To his left and right he could hear the other members of his twelve-man patrol cursing softly as they struggled to keep station in the thick jungle. Sweat soaked his peaked cloth cap and streamed down his face, the coarse material of the shirt stuck to his flesh and the pack over his shoulder chafed everywhere it touched. He would never have admitted it to anyone for fear of ridicule, but Hamasuna found the jungle an oppressive assault on the senses. The relentless buzz of clouds of black flies and countless stinging insects filled his ears, the air around him stank of decay and damp and the foliage was like a green curtain that wrapped itself around him to the point of suffocation. He tightened his grip on his pistol. The atmosphere wasn’t the only intimidating thing about the jungle. It wouldn’t be the first time a small patrol like this had been attacked by the filthy blacks who inhabited these islands at the instigation of their white masters.

Hamasuna had been searching for three torturous hours since he’d been alerted to the smoke the sentries had spotted from his little outpost at Aku, east of the former Catholic mission station at Buin. They reported a crashed plane south of the Buin road down towards Moila Point. Whether Japanese or American it was vital that it be checked for survivors and possible intelligence.

An hour later he was almost ready to give up when his nostrils detected a different combination of scents: aviation fuel and the distant, but still acrid smell of burning.

‘
Chūi, sā! Kono hōhōdesu
.’

The warning cry came from his left side and made Hamasuna’s heart hammer in his chest. He stumbled blindly through the bushes towards its source, shouting to the men on his right flank to follow and form a perimeter.

It wasn’t a clearing as such, more a scar in the jungle canopy and it took time to work out what he was seeing. He’d half expected an American plane from one of the formations that pounded Rabaul every day, but the little he could see was clearly Japanese. Some kind of bomber? One part of the jungle revealed the camouflage green and silver bar of a wing propped against the bole of a large tree, as if carefully laid aside by a giant hand, the blood-red roundel of the
Hinomaru
almost obscured by leaves. A few metres further and the bitter smell of petroleum filled his nostrils to the exclusion of all else. Amongst blackened grass and torn branches, the dark eye of a Type 99 cannon glared out from the wreckage of the plane’s tail assembly. He noted that the inside of the perspex turret almost identically matched the hue of the
Hinomaru
, evidence of the certain fate of its occupant. Beyond the tail, scattered across a scorched patch of earth and surrounded by splintered branches, lay three more bodies, crushed and broken. One of them was headless and their limp, boneless poses were indicative of a condition only permitted the recently dead.

Lieutenant Hamasuna approached them. Something wasn’t right here. His mind registered the main fuselage and one engine on a truncated, still attached, second wing, but his unease grew as he studied the uniforms of the dead men. Not air force uniforms, but navy. Tailored uniforms, with the insignia of high-ranking officers. This wasn’t a bomber, but a transport: a transport carrying important people. His breath caught in his chest. It must be reported. Hamasuna fought off panic as he tried to come to a decision. He knew he should secure the crash site, but logic told him not to split his patrol. He had few enough as it was to fight off an ambush and if he left two or three behind the likelihood was he’d return to find them with their throats slit. No. He must leave everything exactly as it was and return to Aku to call for help. But first he had to search the entire area for possible survivors.

He was drawn to the fuselage. What other secrets did it contain? Not the pilots who would have fought to bring the plane down safely even in this impossible terrain. They would still be in the crushed and shattered nose on the far side of the clearing. Despite the smoke he judged it safe to move closer. Whatever fires had been caused by the crash had long since burned out. He walked down the side of the plane, taking in the shattered windows, the bright silver splashes where cannon shells had torn through the metal. Then, from the very corner of his eye, he saw him.

Tomoyuki Hamasuna had served in Manchuria. He had seen death in every form and on countless occasions, but no individual death had affected him as this one did. His whole body started to shake. The man still strapped upright in his aircraft seat was instantly recognizable. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto sat with his head slumped forward as if deep in thought. His gloved left hand rested on the hilt of his ceremonial sword, the index and middle fingers empty of the digits he had lost at the battle of Tsushima. Hamasuna took a few hesitant steps until he stood over the still figure. The right hand dangled by the side of the seat, a broken length of thin chain hanging from the wrist. A bloodstained exit wound in the front of the admiral’s dress jacket indicated he’d been hit in the back. Dried blood streaked the right side of his face from a second wound above the eye. Belatedly, Hamasuna realized he hadn’t breathed for more than a minute and he gulped in a mouthful of fetid, fuel-heavy air. His hand reached out slowly to touch the pale neck above the collar, and he flinched as he felt the chill flesh. No sign of a pulse. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, father of the Japanese navy and victor of Pearl Harbor, was dead.

Hamasuna stepped back and bowed from the waist, pausing for a moment to say a silent prayer. When he finished paying his respects he collected his thoughts, consulted his compass and called his men together.

‘Sugino? Check the cockpit for signs of life,’ he ordered. ‘Murayama? Take the point. This way. Back to the road. We will blaze a trail so that we can find our way directly back to the crash site.’

‘Is that—’

‘Obey orders,’ Hamasuna snarled. ‘You saw a crashed plane. Nothing more. If I hear a single word before the official announcement I will have every one of you transferred to the tiniest fly speck in the Pacific. Understand?’

‘
Hai!
’

As they prepared to leave the clearing he noticed a leather briefcase lying in the thick grass ten feet from Yamamoto’s body. It was old and battered, made of unusual heavy hide, and blackened by fire. He moved to pick it up, but thought better of it. He imagined the wrath of his superiors if he tampered with the scene. More sensible to leave it exactly as he found it. The soldiers filed out of the crash site, hacking a way through the thick jungle.

Hamasuna waited until they were out of sight, struggling against the instinct that drew him back to the briefcase that had been attached to the admiral’s wrist. Surely one look would not matter? He bent over the scorched leather and reached for the straps. A few minutes later he cast a last dejected glance at Yamamoto’s body and followed his men down the track.

The Japanese had been gone for only a few minutes when a shadow moved in the bush to the south of the clearing.

It took another hour for the patrol to return to the main track and they doubled along it until they reached the camouflaged tents and grass huts at Aku. Hamasuna shrugged off his fatigue and ran to the radio hut where he breathlessly ordered the operator to call headquarters at Rabaul. Taking a pencil between shaking fingers he put together a coded message: ‘Found crashed G4M tail no 323 south-west Aku stop No survivors stop Await instructions stop’.

‘Send it,’ he snapped. The operator tapped out the unit’s call sign and then the message. He darted apprehensive glances over his shoulder as Hamasuna paced the little hut for twenty minutes waiting for the answer. Without warning the distinctive Morse signal echoed tinnily through the headphones. Hamasuna froze as the operator began writing.

‘Well?’

‘I must decode it, sir.’

‘Then be quick about it.’

He looked over the man’s shoulder as the words began to form. ‘Secure … crash … site … await … senior … naval … presence …’ There was a pause, as if the sender was awaiting instructions, then: ‘ensure … nothing … moved … stop’.

‘Acknowledge.’ Hamasuna threw the order over his shoulder as he darted out of the door already shouting for his men to reform with enough rations for three days. He left one man as guide for the ‘senior naval presence’ and hurried the rest back to the crashed plane.

As he made his way through the jungle for the third time that day, Lieutenant Hamasuna felt a griping in his guts that had nothing to do with the fact that all he’d eaten since breakfast was a handful of rice. Should he have secured the site with ten men and sent two back with the message? No, he was certain he’d done the right thing. He knew he was a man of little imagination, that was why he was still only a junior lieutenant at thirty, but he was methodical. The priority had been to inform headquarters about Yamamoto. Everything else was secondary to that fact. In any case, what was worth stealing? His heart stopped as he remembered the white-gloved hand resting on the sword hilt. Yamamoto’s sword. What if …?

‘Faster,’ he barked, breaking into a trot. ‘Get your lazy arses moving.’

They reached the crash almost before Hamasuna realized it and the first thing he did was rush to the admiral’s corpse. With a surge of relief he saw the sword was still in place. He closed his eyes and let out a long breath. When he opened them again they strayed towards the patch of scorched grass where the briefcase had lain.

It was gone.

VI

Central Berlin, Jamie reflected, was like the centre of many German cities: an illusion. The beautiful old buildings that looked as if they’d been built when it was the capital of Prussia were modern replicas, a legacy of April and May 1945 when Allied bombers and the Red Army turned the city into a gigantic rubble field. No matter what you thought of Germans, you had to admire their resilience. When the dust settled they’d gone to work with their celebrated efficiency to disguise the scars of war. Whether it was with a great, rust-stained block of workers’ flats as favoured by Walter Ulbricht or the initial restoration of the Reichstag by Paul Baumgarten, most of the ruins were replaced within a couple of decades.

It took less than five minutes to walk from the hotel, over the Liebknecht brücke to Museum Island, and across the grass of the Lustgarten into the shadow of the Altes Museum. As the name suggested, it was the oldest of the museums on the island. It held some of the ancient world’s greatest works of art and Jamie would have liked nothing better than to spend a couple of hours among the Greek statuary, but his destination was the nearby Neues Museum.

Museum Island had been east of the wall, in the care of the
Deutsche Demokratische Republik
. Fortunately, Jamie decided, if the leaders of the DDR were keen on one thing it was museums. It took a few years for their masters in Moscow to acknowledge that most of the contents of Berlin’s museums had ended up in the Hermitage or the basement of the Kremlin, but by the late Fifties they’d recovered most of their important exhibits. A few bits and pieces were still missing. Priam’s Treasure, the hoard of gold and silver Heinrich Schliemann dug up from what might have been Troy, was one. It eventually turned up in the Pushkin Museum, but the Russians decided they’d keep it as war reparations. Jamie thought this had a certain ironic symmetry considering Schliemann more or less stole it from the Turks in the first place. That was the thing about the early German archaeologists and anthropologists, many of them were little better than looters. Not far away, the Pergamon Museum owed its existence to an engineer called Carl Humann who had excavated a site in Izmir, Turkey. In 1880, Humann did a deal with the Turks to keep fragments of friezes he discovered, and ended up taking an entire Greek temple back to Germany, an act of cultural vandalism that made Lord Elgin look like a high-street hustler. Naturally, the Turks asked for it back, but the German authorities ignored the request, as they did Iraq’s for the return of the museum’s Ishtar Gate, a thirty-foot masterpiece of glazed blue brick that was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Priam’s Treasure had been the centrepiece of the New Museum collection. The original Neues had been built in the 1850s and, unsurprisingly, got its name from being slightly less old than the Altes. The Egyptian collection was probably the finest outside Cairo, but today Jamie had no time to spare with the star exhibit, an iconic limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti. He had other things on his mind as he followed his escort through the exquisitely painted rooms and past the glass cases to the Herr Direktor’s modest office on the fourth floor. When the Neues opened, it had been the repository for anything that couldn’t be displayed properly in the Altes, which meant just about everything not Greek or Roman. If the Bougainville head had been deemed of sufficient importance it could be here.

A secretary ushered him through a door and a tall, lean figure in a dark suit welcomed him with a grave smile and a formal handshake. ‘You would like some coffee, Herr Saintclair?’