Astride a Pink Horse

by Robert Greer

  “I’m not wrong,” Buford said, slamming a fist into his palm.

  Impressed by Buford’s persistence, Cozy said, “Why don’t you sit right where you are while I go run your suggestion by my boss.”

  Buford looked surprised. “You mean you need somebody else’s approval on this?”

  “Sure do. The man who owns that plane we’re talking about. Just sit tight, okay?” Cozy said, quickly leaving his office.

  Buford remained seated, staring around the room and wondering how someone who’d been labeled a hero could have been assigned such unimpressive and cluttered digs. Although the furniture looked new, there was barely a picture on the wall, the laptop computer on Cozy’s desk wasn’t even open, and stacks of paper were piled four inches high and pretty much helter-skelter everywhere. To top it all off, the man the world was calling a hero didn’t even have his own secretary, much less an airplane.

  Thinking that he might have made a bad decision by coming to Denver to ask for Cozy’s help, he was considering just getting up and leaving when Cozy returned with Freddy Dames.

  Offering Buford a quick handshake and introducing himself, Freddy said, “How soon do you expect Kimiko Takata to head for Heart Mountain, Mr. Kane?”

  “Can’t predict.”

  “But you’d be able to let Cozy know the instant she takes off for the place? You’re certain of that?”

  “I sure would.”

  Freddy looked briefly at Cozy, then back at Buford. “Then you’ve got yourself a reporter, Mr. Kane.”

  Looking surprised, Cozy said, “But I haven’t talked to Bernadette yet, Freddy.”

  “She’ll be okay with it.” A sly, knowing smile inched across Freddy’s face. “She’s in love with you, Elgin. Besides, I talked to her first thing this morning. My dad’s been busy bending ears and having arms twisted in Washington. She’ll be done with the air force, and with a sterling record as her legacy, by week’s end. I’m sure she’ll be happy to help out Mr. Kane.”

  Freddy smiled and glanced over at Buford. “There’ll be a plane at your disposal whenever you call for one, Mr. Kane. Just let Mr. Coseia here know when you’re ready for him to roll. He’ll make certain Major Cameron gets him where you need him, and in a hurry. Right, Cozy?”

  “Yeah,” said Cozy. He’d always understood that there was a universe of difference between the world he lived in and that of his best friend, and he’d just gotten another lesson.

  “Good. I’ve got some TV execs from LA I need to teleconference with in a few minutes. Gotta go.” He shot Buford a parting glance. “Stay on Kimiko’s tail,” he said authoritatively. Looking at Cozy and grinning, he said, “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a fifth and final part for that series of yours when it runs, my man.”

  Kimiko Takata, who hadn’t slept well in weeks, rose a little before seven a.m. to face another disjointed day. She spent most of her waking hours now talking to FBI agents, people from half-a-dozen national security agencies, or Rikia’s lawyers, and she was tired. She knew she wasn’t thinking clearly, knew she was losing her sense of balance in a world that had turned especially angry and ugly for her since Los Alamos. She’d received enough hate mail to fill a Dumpster and so many venomous phone calls that she’d been forced to disconnect her phone, and she rarely now came out of her house. She wasn’t so tired or intimidated, however, that she intended to either put off or cancel her trip to Heart Mountain the next day. She’d planned the trip for two weeks, and the timing fit. Rikia was safe and on the mend, both physically and mentally, it seemed, even though he was locked away by himself in a federal supermax facility outside Florence, Colorado. Since Los Alamos he’d remained heavily guarded and very uncommunicative. “Name, rank, and serial number, that’s all they get from me,” Rikia would say to her whenever they spoke. And when she pressed him about when he was going to talk at length to his lawyers so they could begin building a defense, he said, as if it really didn’t matter to him, “I’ll get around to it.”

  She knew, although she’d only seen him twice, that he was recovering quite well from his shotgun wounds, facial lacerations, and broken left ankle and that he was eating well and reading magazines and books. His lawyers, who saw him more frequently, had confirmed as much. She also knew that he was exercising in the chilly, damp, unpainted cinder-block-walled room he was being housed in. She’d seen pictures.

  He’d told her more than once that instead of collapsing under the constant pressure and scrutiny of authorities, he planned to outread, outexercise, and outthink them all. What he wasn’t going to do was talk.

  Besides offering authorities his name, rank (professor), and serial number (his birth date), Rikia had spoken to almost no one besides his lawyers and her. He’d talked to an odd-looking man with a pencil-thin mustache and elephant ears whom they now knew to be FBI Agent Thaddeus Richter. Newspapers and TV stations had carried what he’d supposedly said to Richter while he’d lain injured in the woods, half out of his mind after his car crash in the forest outside Los Alamos. Supposedly he had uttered the now infamous words, “Don’t shoot. I’m hurt,” while Richter stood over him with an automatic weapon aimed squarely at his head.

  Unlike Kimiko, Rikia had been sleeping well. He was safe, sequestered in his cinder-block-walled room. And he knew the government wouldn’t dare torture him. After all, he was an American citizen, and, oppressive nobodies that they were, American government officials didn’t have the guts to do something like that. Although his mission had failed, the time for psychological warfare was just beginning.

  Walking over to one of two chairs in his twelve-by-twelve-foot room, he retrieved one of the two model planes that Kimiko had brought him a few days earlier from the metal seat. Seconds later he was in the midst of a dogfight, clutching an American Corsair in one hand and his A-6M in the other. The aerial fight had been waged for less than a minute when the door to his windowless room creaked open.

  “Your attorney’s here, Dr. Takata,” he heard someone outside the room say. Ignoring his attorney and the guard standing next to him, Rikia groaned and squealed and snorted the Corsair toward the ceiling, where it tried in vain to outmaneuver the A-6M. With the rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire reverberating off his tongue, Rikia smiled and whispered, “Justice.”

  Laramie had turned chilly and blustery, and by late afternoon, Kimiko had temporarily pushed aside thoughts of Rikia to concentrate on what she would pack and take with her on her trip to Heart Mountain the next morning. She’d take her father’s diary, of course, and assorted flavors of tea, and perhaps one of Rikia’s model planes. By six p.m. she had everything packed, and at eight she headed slowly toward her bedroom to read for a while before battling another night of restless sleep. As she entered the room, she thought briefly about Hiroshima and the man on his pink horse. The thought quickly passed, and for the first time in a month, after briefly reading from her father’s diary, she slept soundly.

  At nine the next morning, Rikia Takata, who had been formally charged by the U.S. attorney weeks earlier with two counts of murder; a single count of attempting to set off a weapon of mass destruction; and eleven lesser counts, including two counts of transporting radioisotopes across state lines without a permit, was found hanged in his room at the government’s supermax facility in Colorado. Within minutes of hearing the news, Cozy got a call at home from Buford Kane telling him that Kimiko Takata was headed for Heart Mountain. His voice spiked with nervousness, Buford said, “I watched her pack up her station wagon, and I’ve been followin’ her for the past half hour. I need you and Major Cameron to get up to Heart Mountain lickety-split.”

  Barefoot and dressed in an undersized air force academy T-shirt and running shorts, Bernadette was busy making coffee and listening to the news on a small television in Cozy’s kitchen, paying little attention to Cozy’s phone conversation.

  Three days earlier, with the threat of a court-martial behind her and her resignation from the air force official, she’d begun ten day
s of terminal leave. Leave she was spending in Denver with Cozy before taking the next step in her life.

  When Cozy spun the kitchen stool he was sitting on to face her and said, “We’re on the move, Bernadette. That was Buford Kane on the horn. He’s trailing Kimiko Takata to Heart Mountain right this minute,” Bernadette was less surprised than exasperated. She’d had enough of Tango-11, and it showed on her face.

  “How long’s the flight from here to Cody?” Cozy asked, turning off the TV.

  “Wheels up to wheels down, a little under two hours. I’ve told you that before. Add in time for getting from here to the airport, fueling Sugar, and filing a flight plan and we’re there in three and a half hours, tops.”

  With the clock in his head ticking, Cozy said, “Then it’s another thirty minutes from Cody to Heart Mountain, plug in twenty minutes for renting a car, and four and a half hours door to door about does it. That should put us there a little ahead of Kimiko.”

  “And where do we go from that point?”

  “I’m not sure. Buford said to make certain to rent a red SUV so he’d be able to see it parked off of the U.S. 14 alternate road. He said it’s the first road north of Corbett Dam, that he’d pick us up there and take us to Heart Mountain, and that he’d make certain that Kimiko wouldn’t spot him.”

  “Guess we’d better hope the rental car agency has lots of SUVs in red, then.” Shaking her head and slipping into her tennis shoes, Bernadette said, “This whole Tango-11 thing just keeps playing out stranger and stranger. We still don’t know who actually killed Sergeant Giles, and it’s cost me a career. I hope this is the end of it.”

  “And it’s put you on the path to a new one.”

  Bernadette frowned. “Chief corporate pilot for Digital Registry News? Cozy, come on. Freddy manufactured the title and slapped me on the payroll because money’s no object to him. Besides, with me on board as the ‘Black Amazon’ who stopped the mad bomber, Freddy’s got himself a way to add permanent sizzle to our stories.”

  “See, you said ‘our.’ You should have left the air force years ago. I’ve edited all four of the stories you’ve written, remember. You know how to string words together, Bernadette. It’s as if you’ve been doing it all your life. In baseball terms, you’re a natural.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing in the world of investigative journalism. I’ve always envisioned those kind of reporters as people who hid under rocks and only came out at night.”

  “Come on, Bernadette. Play the game. If only for a little bit. You might end up liking it. You’ve got a boss who believes in you, a jet plane at your disposal, a healthy paycheck, and a gimpy former baseball player who loves your dirty drawers. At least give it a try.”

  “But it’s so different. I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a reporter, Cozy.”

  “No more arguing with me, please.” Cozy rose from the stool. “If we plan to hook up with Buford in time, we need to get out of here now. Just remember to keep an eye peeled for a couple of rocks we can crawl out from under once we get to Heart Mountain,” he said, laughing.

  “I’ll remember that. Guess we’d better get going.”

  “There you go again with the ‘we.’ ”

  “Can’t help myself. I’m smitten,” Bernadette said, linking an arm in his and walking him out of the room.

  Kimiko couldn’t remember the last time she’d come to Heart Mountain without Rikia, but she guessed it had been at least fifteen years. After the seven-hour drive from Laramie, she realized what a blessing it had been all those years to have had Rikia do most of the driving.

  As the Volvo bumped down a rutted road toward her destination, she tried to come to grips with the fact that Rikia was dead, and by his own hand. She found herself thinking about all the times she’d forced him to travel to a place that had meant so much to her and so little to him. She couldn’t help but think that perhaps that was one of the things that had finally pushed him over the edge. One of the things that had made him cobble together a crude nuclear weapon and ultimately, as she’d heard on her car radio on the way to Heart Mountain, kill himself.

  She’d always known deep down that Rikia would one day devise a way to get even with America and the people who had for so long wronged him and dishonored his family. She also understood very well that no native-born American could possibly understand Rikia’s sense of traditional Japanese honor and justice. She’d never imagined, however, that Rikia would ultimately attempt to set off a nuclear weapon in retribution. She had cared about Rikia, understood his demons, and she knew he’d simply been a gifted math savant, adrift in an ugly, uncaring world that he’d never truly fully understood. A tongue-tied genius who, although he’d never suffered the psychological or physical pain of a Heart Mountain or a Hiroshima, had nonetheless internalized and swallowed the indignity of both places whole.

  Perhaps if she’d given a little more of herself, shown Rikia more trust, offered him more affection, things might have turned out differently. But Rikia was gone, and she had to deal with her own emotional burdens alone.

  She was used to drinking in Heart Mountain at either daybreak or nightfall, and it felt somehow out of sync to be paying homage to her internment camp experience in the cold, windy brightness of late afternoon. Ignoring the feeling, she parked the station wagon less than thirty yards from where she’d parked it the last time she and Rikia had been there, got out, carefully retrieved a four-foot-long cardboard box from the backseat, and started walking toward a concrete abutment that rose a foot or so above the gumbo plain.

  She’d come to a place she knew very well. The dark gray piece of pitted concrete she was looking at, which resembled a grave marker, had once housed a pump and a spigot from which she’d had to drink iron-tasting water. The three-foot-by-two-foot crumbling concrete slab was, in some twisted sense, a landmark that let her know she’d returned home.

  Clutching the cardboard box tightly under her left arm, she turned to face a stiff twenty-miles-per-hour breeze. Staring up at the sun and listening to the wind whistle, she thought about all that had happened in her life since her days at Heart Mountain. Looking somehow relieved, she laid the box on the ground, opened the lid, took out one of seven of Rikia’s model airplanes that she’d brought along, cocked her arm, and tossed the plane into the wind. She grabbed another toy plane from the box and tossed it into the wind as well, then another plane, and still another until, as she reached into the box to retrieve the fifth plane, she heard the rustle of something behind her. Until then the wind noise and her single-minded purpose had caused her to ignore anything but the box at her feet, the glorious brightness of the sun, and Rikia’s toys.

  As she looked around to determine the source of the noise, she saw three people approaching. They were only a few yards beyond the bumper of Buford’s truck, walking toward her in a single line. Buford Kane she recognized immediately. It took her a bit longer to realize that the woman and the man with him were the much-photographed and much-written-about air force major and newspaperman who’d stopped Rikia from setting off his bomb.

  As they came toward her across the stunted sagebrush, she looked down at her box to realize that only two of Rikia’s toy airplanes remained. Buford asked, “What are you doing, Kimiko?”

  “I’m tossing away the past,” she said, now face to face with Buford.

  “That can be a difficult thing to do,” Bernadette said, staring down at the box.

  “One can only try, Major.” Kimiko forced a smile. “Your newspaper photos don’t really capture you, Major. Nor you, Mr. Coseia. You’re both so much taller and younger-looking than I would’ve expected.”

  Bernadette stepped closer to the box and knelt beside it. Kimiko made no effort to stop her as Bernadette reached inside the box. “Just two planes left.” Bernadette handed both model airplanes to Kimiko before lifting a sawed-off shotgun from the box.

  “The planes were Rikia’s,” Kimiko said, tossing an American Corsair into the wind.

>   “And the shotgun?” Bernadette asked.

  “It once belonged to Thurmond Giles. He gave it to me a long time ago. For protection, he said. I should’ve used it on him back then.”

  “You killed my Sarah!” Buford yelled as Cozy restrained him by wrapping his arms around the other man’s waist. “Killed her in cold blood with that shotgun. Why?”

  Kimiko hesitated briefly before responding. “It was the only solution to a theft,” she said, sounding and looking finally absolved. “The absolute and only one. Thurmond Giles stole something from me. The same thing he stole from Sarah and Howard Colbain’s wife and Sarah’s mother. It was time he paid.”

  “So you, Howard Colbain, Grant Rivers, Rikia, and Sarah stabbed him to death and dropped him down a hole in the earth at Tango-11,” said Bernadette. “And you killed Sarah because her guilt had gotten the best of her and she was going to tell the world what the five of you had done.”

  Kimiko didn’t answer. Instead she turned away from Bernadette, cocked her left arm, and tossed the last Japanese Zero into the wind. The plane floated on a ribbon of air, briefly gaining altitude before stalling and plummeting nose-first to the ground.

  Epilogue

  The government’s case against Rikia Takata ended with his death, and although there was muted sympathy for what had been America’s plight, some in the world continued to whisper, You almost got what you deserved. Only Japanese and British responses to the events at Los Alamos remained overwhelmingly supportive, and while most Americans polled had wanted to see Rikia Takata swiftly executed, 15 percent, when asked whether a deranged person with a perceived and perhaps justified lifelong vendetta against America deserved to have his life spared, said yes.