Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02]

by Fire in a Faraway Place (epub)

Mizoguchi ran his finger across the raised surface of one of the cards. “Senior Executive Managing Director?”

  “Sounds impressive as hell, doesn’t it? After the sun comes out, we’ll buy some vehicles and give your reporter acquaintances a call.” He looked at his watch. “We’d better get back. I have Aksu waiting about a klick outside of town.”

  “Where did you camp?” Mizoguchi asked, suddenly suspicious.

  Coldewe fluttered his hand nonchalantly so that Mizoguchi would feel the movement of the air. “Up in the hills. Not too far from here.”

  “Here?” Mizoguchi twisted his head and said in a hoarse whisper, “You landed in Ise Park?!”

  “We were looking for something far from the maddening crowd. There aren’t that many untenanted sites on the Pacific seacoast of Honshu, and we didn’t want to pick a place that somebody had just built on.”

  “It is .., somewhat sacred,” Mizoguchi said awkwardly.

  “I know. According to the guidebook you have about a hundred and seventy-nine shrines up there, including the grand shrines. I stopped on the way in and left a donation on behalf of the battalion.”

  Mizoguchi began nibbing his temples in short, circular motions.

  “I also picked up one of those little, cloth-and-paper traffic amulets. You know, with the suction cup to stick it to your windshield.” Coldewe made little movements with his hands.

  “The way Prigal drives—you remember Prigal?—I figured we might need one.”

  As they stood up, Mizoguchi’s cousin timidly stuck his head in the door. “Is everything all right?”

  “Very fine,” Mizoguchi said. “More than fine.”

  L-Day plus one

  MIZOGUCHI BORROWED A BATTERED TOYOTA FROM HIS COUSIN.

  After daybreak, he and Aksu went to a bank in Ise and added money to the account Mizoguchi had invested for Vereshchagin. After picking up three Japanese-looking drivers that Coidewe sent, they went to a local car dealership and dickered the price down on three minivans in assorted colors.

  The vans were seven-passenger models, with the usual modular seating and smoked glass on the side and rear windows. Mizoguchi asked the dealer to install privacy screens between the driver’s seat and the passenger compartment, and extra rear seats in two of the vehicles.

  The dealer balked at the extra seats, explaining apologetically that he had none in stock, but that he could guarantee delivery in three days. Responding to a touch on the elbow from Aksu, Mizoguchi expressed his sincere thanks for the dealer’s efforts despite the current recession, and his deep regret that they would not be able to conclude the sale.

  The dealer immediately pulled seats out of the last minivan he had on the lot. Mizoguchi and Aksu put 25 percent down and financed the balance over four years. They politely declined an offer to put a corporate logo on the vehicles for what was alleged to be a nominal price.

  Aksu then motioned his drivers to get the minivans off the lot, whereupon Recruit Private Prigal, who had been made up and deodorized well enough to pass for a Hokkaido native, promptly climbed in on the passenger side of the vehicle and began looking for the steering wheel, having forgotten that Japanese drive on the left-hand side of the road.

  Aksu covered. “It is indeed fortunate that Buddha looks out for the weak-minded.”

  The dealer responded with a knowing wink and a penetrating observation about the wits of country bumpkins. Prigal, of course, was a country bumpkin, although from a different country, and the wounded look on his face as he slid across the seat transcended cultural barriers.

  Renting a utility trailer for the third mini, Aksu and Mizoguchi sent the three of them to Coldewe, one at a time, together with an assortment of road maps and boxed bento lunches.

  “What’s next?” Mizoguchi asked.

  Aksu smiled. “We buy ourselves a subscription to the evening edition of Nihon Keizai Shimbun and radio the access code to Timo Haerkoennen. Then we make a few phone calls and go to the library to validate information about some people and buildings.”

  After paging through some books on Tokyo architecture and reading up on who was who in the current government, Aksu made a dozen phone calls and radioed Coldewe to tell him to put refueling plan two in effect. He had Mizoguchi set up a meeting with his journalist acquaintances in the lobby of Tokyo’s New Akasaki Prince Hotel at seven the next morning.

  One serious problem surfaced when Aksu discovered that Osachi Abe was off campaigning in his home city of Niigata, on the Sea of Japan.

  “Niigata is another one hundred kilometers north of Tokyo as the bird flies,” Coldewe said. “Frost and damn. I will have to get back with you, Resit. Coldewe out.”

  Thinking quickly, Coldewe said to Chiharu Yoshida, “If we gave up the Ministry of Education, we could get Zerebtsov up there in a Sparrow, but he’d have to steal some fuel to get back. That’s no good. Is there some other politician worth taking down instead?”

  Yoshida had been tasked to interact with the reporters and explain Suid-Afrika’s reasons for rebelling. “None that fits our purposes so closely,” Yoshida responded. “It is clear from what Aksu told us that he is the only politician of his generation who is still entitled to an opportunity to become UDP secretary general, and his campaign appears designed to cultivate greater exposure to the electorate.”

  “Hmmm, I wonder what policies he’s promoting up there?” Coldewe said aloud as he thought through the tactical problem.

  Yoshida gave him a puzzled look. “Why would Abe have policies?”

  “Well, yes. Damn! I wish we could get him, but I can’t figure out how.”

  “Please allow me to do it, Hans.”

  “What?” Coldewe stared at Yoshida in surprise.

  “It is not as if I had to lead a company, I would only be responsible for myself. I have one of die internal passports that Timo adjusted to fool the Ministry of Security’s central data base. From Nagoya, I could take the train.”

  “How are we going to pick you up?”

  Yoshida reached up and took Coldewe’s hand in a very un-Japanese manner. “That is not a problem. After all, this is my homeland.” He smiled, his face appearing surprisingly young. “I would like to take a recoilless gun. The security devices will not recognize it for what it is.”

  “All right,” Coldewe said softly. “We’ve got an extra one somewhere. Mizo and I can handle the reporters. Get Thomas to fix you up. It’s been a while since you’ve handled an eighty-eight, so ask Miinalainen to check you out.”

  When Yoshida left, Coldewe said conversationally to Platoon Sergeant Soe, who had overheard the exchange, “Mizo never liked Chiharu much. He’s changed a lot since then. For the better. Some people do. Remind me to tell Mizo if he calls Chiharu ‘Tingrin,’ that blind or not, I’m going to pop him one. Oh, and get Thomas on the line—there’s a change to the plan for the Ministry of Finance.”

  “Why?” Soe asked.

  Coldewe grinned. “Aksa says the Minsistry isn’t where it used to be.”

  While Coldewe and Aksu were busy with this, in a forested part of the Ise-Shima less than half a kilometer from a tourist trail, Danny Meagher’s assault group set up a work area to modify the minivans. Rapidly and quietly, they equipped the two eight-passenger minis with a miscellany of curtains and opaque glass panels to conceal the fact that the rear seats would be full of armed soldiers. As an added touch, they made holographic images of the vans’ interiors—empty—and used them to back the side and rear windows. It had taken them most of two weeks to refine the technique on Suid-Afrika, and it was with deep regret that Coldewe dumped the photographic equipment in the lake.

  Meagher’s group then attached sections of composite sheeting to the interior panels to make them bullet resistant, and fitted equipment brackets and mesh under the seats to hold weapons and bergens in place. Finally, they reinforced the noses of the two eight-passenger minis with lengths of molybdenum steel rod to withstand frontal impact.

  After loading the third mini
’s utility trailer with water, cases of rations, communications equipment, and extra fuel bladders for the Sparrows, Coldewe transmitted a coded message to Vereshchagin to say that they were on schedule. Then he and Platoon Sergeant Soe, an Indonesian mortarman from No. 8, concealed their uniforms and weapons in the back and drove off to deliver drivers for the two panel delivery trucks that Mizoguchi and Aksu were renting. On the way, they stopped at a rest area to throw away the packaging from the box lunches. “Always leave a tidy battlefield” Coldewe explained.

  Because Coldewe had deemed the delivery trucks to be too conspicuous to drive through the park, Snyman and Karaev and their thirteen-man assault groups bicycled through the forest to the outskirts of Uji to rendezvous with them. Well aware that a panel truck affords limited amenities, the last thing that Snyman and Karaev did before they left was to make sure their men used and then carefully concealed the tiny latrine they had dug.

  Shortly before the park closed for the evening, Aksu and Mizoguchi returned the Toyota to Mizoguchi’s cousin, and the five vehicles individually began the long drive to Tokyo-to along the Ise Expressway. Ten men and five Sparrow aircraft remained behind in the forest under Lieutenant Victor Thomas’s command.

  As Soe put Coldewe’s vehicle into the computer-aided “speedo” lane and let the vehicle head itself north on the expressway, Coldewe asked Mizoguchi, “How long is it going to take us to get to Tokyo?”

  “A few hours to Nagoya. From Nagoya to Tokyo on the express highway is five hours more.”

  “Good. That’s about what I thought. Factor in a rest stop or two, and we’ll have half the night left for mischief and sightseeing before the fun starts.

  “That sounds very ambitious to me.”

  “The alternative is to hole up for a day, which we really don’t want to do.”

  “I would offer to drive, but I cannot,” Mizoguchi said. His English was improving by the minute. He gestured to Aksu, who was already dozing off in the seat in front. “I feel as though I am useless.”

  “Useless? You’re not. Aksu is good at looking and acting Japanese, but he’s obviously not a local boy. If you hadn’t come along, somebody might have blown his cover before we got started. Where did you get the notion you were useless?” Mizoguchi inhaled deeply. “At times, some of my former

  academy classmates would call to ask why I have not committed suicide to avoid being useless.” He added bitterly, “Some of my neighbors have asked the same.”

  Coldewe sighed. “I’m sorry, Mizo. It’s a nice bunch the Academy attracts. Although I was annoyed at the time, I’m glad that they were running separate classes for Japanese and gaijin officers when I went through. Otherwise, I might have gotten myself kicked out for breaking stuffy Japanese noses, and you wouldn’t have enjoyed the pleasure of my company. As Schiller used to say, ‘Mit der Dummheit kdmpfen Gotter selbst vergebens,’ which means, ‘With stupidity the Gods themselves struggle in vain.’ ”

  “You are reading Schiller now? I had thought that you mostly liked Westerns.”

  Coldewe gave Mizoguchi a very hurt look that Mizoguchi was in no position to appreciate. “I was filling in some of the holes in my education,”

  Mizoguchi sniffed. “I do not believe that our education system is very good. All the higher civil service positions and best jobs go to Todai graduates, but if you do not go to the best high schools and primary schools, they will not allow you to apply. We select our leaders based upon whether they pass examinations well as children.”

  “How did you ever end up as a soldier, Hiroshi?”

  “I failed the examination to get into a certain high school,” Mizoguchi said bleakly. “My father was very disappointed.” To change the subject, Coldewe said, “I’ve always thought that girls tend to be better students than boys.”

  “For women here, it is even harder. Virtually none of them are admitted into the higher civil service anymore. I think that we have fallen into bad practices.” Mizoguchi stared sightlessly into the night. “My wife did not listen. She felt she should have been accepted to Todai. She was very outspoken about it. This caused problems when her parents tried to arrange marriages for her.”

  “Oh,” Coldewe said lamely.

  £‘She is still very unhappy, so I feel that she will understand what we are doing. I wish I could tell her what are our chances for success.”

  Coldewe coughed. “Let’s see. If we hang around Tokyo long enough to do the reconnaissance we need, there’s a high probability that we’ll attract unwelcome attention, so basically we’re trusting to luck and long experience at this sort of thing.

  In sum, our operations plan is so truly hare-brained that I wish I owned stock in a carrot company.”

  He grinned. “We do have one thing in our favor. The Variag attended staff college here about twenty years ago, and one of his classmates offered to bet that Tokyo was impregnable to attack. Anton poked around most of the buildings we plan on visiting and cheerfully paid up—after filing away some ideas. So the Imperial Government truly ‘nursed the pinion that impelled the steel.’ ”

  Mizoguchi looked impressed. He leaned his head against the window frame. “I wondered why didn’t you bring your own vehicles.”

  “The models and styles aren’t the same, even apart from the fact that Suid-Afrikan models have the steering wheel on the wrong side. We would have stood out like Christmas trees. Also, we couldn’t come up with a way to register them without attracting suspicion. It would have been embarrassing to have some policeman run our plates through his computer and haul us in for auto theft.”

  “There was also a slight problem with space in the shuttle,” Soe added from the driver’s seat.

  Mizoguchi nodded and stretched. “So. Where are we staying tonight?”

  “At the New Akasaki Prince Hotel.”

  Mizoguchi sat up. “What? That is a very expensive hotel.” “It’s a nice place,” Coldewe explained. “The Variag had dinner there about twenty years ago. It sits on a little hill right off of the Hanzoman subway line, and you get a beautiful view of the city from the upper floors.”

  Aksu stirred. “We are renting two rooms, and we have use of the roof-top ‘Top of Akasaki’ lounge after it closes for the night. I told them that we had a very new company and a very important business demonstration very early in the morning. They were very understanding—business is slow. They promised to have the lounge cleaned and the furniture moved out of the way by three o’clock.”

  He studied Mizoguchi’s face. “Please trust me, sir. You do not wish to know what it will cost.”

  Coldewe grinned. “Don’t worry. They’ll earn every sen.” He reflected, “I kind of liked alternate refueling plan five, which was the Aoyama Cemetery. A cemetery is such a peaceful, quiet place to spend the night.”

  Aksu answered Mizoguchi’s question before he even asked it. “No, sir. He has not changed.”

  Back in the Ise-Shima, Timo Haerkoennen and Quartermaster Sergeant Vulko Redzup logged onto the evening paper and proceeded to read the closing stock prices into a data file. Shortly after dusk, the two of them flew north in a Sparrow. A few hours later, Thomas’s other four Sparrows followed.

  Central Tokyo, Earth

  TOKYO-TO—THE GREATER TOKYO METROPOLITAN AREA—IS A HUGE

  area whose dense population spills over its boundaries into the neighboring prefectures. In the glare of the great city’s lights, Vulko Redzup traced the mouth of the Sumidagawa River and began looking for the Imperial Palace’s Outer Garden.

  Spotting it, he quickly located the Babasaki Moat and used it to identify the wide sidewalks of the Marunouchi District, Japan’s center of finance, and the uninspiring flat-roofed tower of steel and stone that was the Daikichi Sanwa Bank Building. Tilting his Sparrow’s nose into the wind, Redzup gracefully landed on the roof, where he and Haerkoennen cautiously exited and covered their tiny plane with a lightweight gray tarpaulin.

  Haerkoennen watched Redzup lay sensors to check for securit
y systems. “You know, Vulko, I’ve always wanted to rob a bank.”

  “This is just the headquarters. They don’t keep any money here. Maybe some securities.”

  Haerkoennen shook his head. “It’s a lot easier to rob a bank with a briefcase than a gun. How does it look?”

  Before switching to logistics years ago, Redzup had been, successively, a recon trooper and a combat engineer. He tapped the roof with his cutting bar. “There’s a big air duct here. Once we get through the roof, we can crawl through the duct to get to one of the main corridors.” He studied his readout. “The duct is clean, but it looks like they’ve got motion sensors in the corridors.”

  “Can you take them out?”

  “Piece of cake,” Redzup said as he pulled out a small battery-powered industrial saw to cut through the roof.

  SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, AFTER POSTING LETTERS FOR

  Vereshchagin and stopping at the Sengakuji Temple to leave a “promissory note” at the museum dedicated to the forty-seven ronin, Soe parked Coldewe’s van in the New Akasaki Prince Hotel garage, where they checked in.

  Refusing assistance, the burly Soe carefully checked the communications equipment and fuel bladders packed in cardboard boxes and then manhandled the boxes upstairs himself. “Delicate equipment, highly sensitive,” Aksu explained smoothly. Coidewe and Soe unpacked their uniforms and collapsed onto the futons. Aksu accepted the spare key to the open-air “Top of Akasaki” lounge from the hotel manager and went up to inspect it.

  On his return, he pronounced himself well pleased. “The dance floor will make an excellent runway.”

  Coidewe lifted one eyelid. “Anything else worth knowing?” “It is a karaoke bar.” Observing the expression on Coldewe’s face, he added, “Apparently it is popular again.” “Most people sing badly to begin with, and they sing worse when they get drunk, so it is compounding a felony,” Coidewe observed. He told Mizoguchi, “We have about two hours yet, so we might as well sleep.”

  “I am too nervous,” Mizoguchi protested.

  Coidewe winked. “Mizo, I am shocked. An infantryman can sleep anytime, anywhere.” A soft snore from Soe helped establish his point.