Assignment Tokyo

by Edward S. Aarons

  “I don’t care about public opinion,” Bill said. “I don’t care about America’s image, really. I just want to do the right thing.”

  “As of now, the decisions must be yours. In Durell’s absence, you are in charge of Tokyo’s K Section Central.”

  “That’s not my job,” Bill objected. “I’ve been in Japan for five years now doing architectural work. I only signed on with K Section for occasional tasks of relative unimportance. I’m not one of General McFee’s butcher boys.”

  “Do you think of Durell that way? As a butcher?”

  Bill took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m a little mixed up this morning.”

  “Yes. Well.” Dr. Freeling moved again, his long body brittle and angular. The light from the lamp splintered on his gold-rimmed glasses. In the background the rotund figure of Melvin Cummings breathed heavily. Freeling pushed a folder across the desk toward Bill. “Read these. You’ll understand the problem better.”

  Cummings spoke harshly. “Churchill is really a civilian, sir. Those are classified documents and he is not authorized to see them. They’ve been decoded and in clear—”

  “We need Mr. Churchill’s cooperation,” Freeling said softly. “I do wish you would keep silent, Mr. Cummings.”

  Melvin Cummings breathed harder, made a quietly explosive sound, and subsided.

  “Please read the documents,” Freeling said to Bill. “Then you may be more willing to help us. I understand your compunctions, even your revulsion at what has happened at Hatashima. To the best of my knowledge our country is innocent. But we will be crucified throughout the worldunless we make use of every minute, every second of the thirty-six hours we have left.”

  Bill Churchill opened the folder and read:

  Sugar Cube to ComSoPac Des25 Falcon:

  URGENT: DIRECT: 55 / KAPPA 78 Ref: Kappa A/13/51

  Immediate determine fate Sigma Sigma Six Two Six

  Naha to Umatilla last posit. 29°16' N x 144°12' W

  Muko Jima Parry Group X No contact Bonins since

  0230 hrs X Urgent dispatch Falcon Search X

  The next memo read:

  PASS to Sugar Cube via EMPI-88

  No trace Six Two Six Sigma Sigma on Scan VI XX

  Rushing photos Storm Dagmar winds velocity 140 mph

  direction NNW diameter 200 miles of disturbance X

  Wreckage two trawlers indistinct X No response radio

  signal KorG bands X Continuing effort XX

  Memo to Sugar Cube from Umatilla 5:

  Canister markings Sigma Sigma Six Two Six as follows:

  156-99 LAB CHARLEY Batch Two-Two-Three Slant

  Ajax Pearl Q Four

  U.S. A.

  DANGER ! ! DANGER

  PROHIBITED TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL

  5593472

  Dr. Freeling put his bony hand on the folder across the desk, and Bill Churchill looked up. The CBW man said, “What do you make of that so far?”

  “Not much,” Bill admitted. He felt calmer. “I haven’t been in the business except on peripheral jobs, so to speak. Still, some of it makes sense. Is ‘Sugar Cube’ the White House?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “ ‘Sigma Sigma Six Two Six’ is a ship?”

  “Yes. A special Defense Department vessel.”

  “All right. This SS 626 sailed from Naha, in Okinawa, and found herself tangled up with Typhoon Dagmar just north of the Bonin Islands. Attempts to make radio contact with the weather station at Muko Jima in the Parry Group have failed. It’s a bad storm. Our weather satellite EMPI-88 has taken photographs of the storm and the area, and so far has only picked up wreckage from two trawlers. The communications system on your special ship has been destroyed by the storm. You can’t get any word from her at all. She’s carrying Chemical and Biological Warfare Department canisters, presumably germ warfare viruses, to Umatilla in the States, for detoxification.” Bill Churchill paused. “You’re afraid the canister that washed ashore at Hatashima is one of ours from that ship?”

  “It could be,” Freeling said brittlely.

  “Have we got an inspection of the canister at Hatashima?"

  “Not yet.”

  “You ought to,” Bill urged. “If the markings match those in the third memo, then we’re to blame.”

  “Read some more,” Dr. Freeling said.

  “You also have a special Falcon Search Group trying to locate the SS 626, and so far nothing has come of it. The ship is probably sunk. The wreckage could have floated to the Hatashima beaches.”

  “Try again.” Freeling turned to the next memo and pushed it at Churchill. “Go on, Bill.”

  From: Blockbuster

  To: Kappa King, Dishwasher

  Subject: Depot V Storage Lab 26 Bogozavodsk

  Since 22/8 double security of L26 is being maintained,

  and since 2/9 is tripled X No chance penetration X

  Monitors Moscow are negative and Code Whiskey

  unbroken repeat not broken, but traffic urgent X Pebbles

  Three and Five taken and crushed X Need more

  concrete X Advise XX

  The fifth item read:

  From: Pigeon to Kappa King, Dishwasher

  Subject: Peregrine 223 Flight from Kunlun Taktu no

  reported landing. Peacock Branch ably represented as

  preening feathers on actual flight. Water Carrier to

  Black House spilled the load and must go back for

  more. Apologies.

  “Well?” Dr. Freeling asked quietly.

  Bill Churchill saw there was one more sheet of paper in the folder. He did not turn it over yet. He said, “I told you, I’m not regularly in the business. But these last two reports from K Section people directly to General McFee—he’s ‘Kappa King,’ I suppose—-and ‘Dishwasher’ is the program title—of these two, the first report is from the Soviet CBW laboratory station near Vladivostok, at Bo-gozavodsk, to be exact. Something has happened there, obviously, and they’re using a new code, called ‘Whiskey,’ for urgent transmissions to Moscow; they’ve increased their security and ‘Blockbuster,’ our man near there, has lost two agents, ‘Pebbles Three and Five,’ in an attempt to penetrate the area. He needs more help.

  “As for the second report, it’s from someone we’ve planted out in Kunlun Province, where the Chinese have been testing medium range rockets with warheads and other specialized nose cones. Al Charles was telling me about that a month ago. ‘Pigeon’ is head of our espionage people out there, and apparently a missile shot named Peregrine 223 has either misfired or gone haywire in flight, and is down somewhere with no reported landing. The Chinese People’s Republic agency called the Black House, and its Peacock Branch especially, has been throwing up a smoke screen—‘preening its feathers.’ Or maybe taking credit for the flight. One of our men—‘Water Carrier’—was lost trying to get information on this, or at least failed to get the information he was sent for, and he must try again. He ‘spilled the load and must go back for more.’ ” Bill paused. “It’s all much too coincidental.”

  “What is?” Freeling asked gently.

  “That both the Russians and the Chinese are in doubt about some of their biological warfare items at the same time that we may have lost a shipload in the Pacific.”

  “Coincidences make history,” Freeling said.

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “The plague at Hatashima could have been started by either us, the Russians, or the Chinese.”

  “We’re guilty, and you know it,” Churchill said. “And if you think you’re going to use my girl, Yoko, for your whitewash scheme, you’re mistaken. She’s not a laboratory animal to be tested and needled and taken apart for analysis, just because she seems to have recovered from this disease.”

  “If we don’t do it,” Freeling said quietly, “the Soviets or the Chinese will. She’ll be better off in our hands than in theirs. That’s why we need your cooperation, Bill. You know this girl better than anyone else. In th
is, we’re fortunate. You know her habits, her tastes, her whims, and most important of all, the way she thinks. You’ve gone off with her on holidays together. You know her favorite places. You can tell us where, given the fact that she is confused and frightened and perhaps suffering a brief phase of amnesia due to her fever, where she might run, where she might hide, what part of Japan she might turn to in order to find safety and give herself time to think.”

  Bill Churchill was mute.

  “We must find her first,” Freeling said. “In thirty-six hours. After that, Pandora’s box is really wide open. Read the last letter.”

  Melvin Cummings spoke from the shadows of the semicircular room. “My letter is classified, Dr. Freeling.” “Nothing is classified between anyone in this room.” “It’s a matter of security. Churchill is not authorized to read it. He’s only a part-time employee—”

  “You’re a damned fool, Cummings. I’ll take all the responsibility. Read it, Bill. It’s a real can of worms.”

  Churchill scanned the letter. It was a breakdown of Cummings’ estimate of the international situation. There had been urgent representations by the Japanese Ministry of Health to the Emperor and the Diet, and Foreign Minister Hideki Nagano had been sent on an urgent flight to Washington. A diplomatic break was imminent. Urgent requests to the World Health Organization at New York’s UN headquarters were being prepared. Medical resources were being mobilized quietly and desperately everywhere, but some enterprising newsmen in Paris, Moscow, Rome, and Tokyo were already asking probing questions. It was as if a sleeping dragon had been stirred to angry wakefulness. A suspiciously accusatory editorial in Pravda ranted about the trickery of America’s announced renunciation of chemical and bacteriological warfare, denouncing it as an imperialist, capitalist trick to lull the peace-loving nations of the world into a false sense of security. An article in Peking’s newspaper agency, Hsinhua, accused the Russians of firing test missiles filled with toxic material into the thinly populated western provinces of the Chinese People’s Republic, near the town of Taktu. Washington maintained total silence on the matter. Cummings’ letter, summarizing the warning flags that were going up everywhere, urged prompt and across-the-board denial even before the Japanese Ministry of Health reached its time deadline and announced the plague at Hatashima to the world press. There were signs of panic in Melvin Cummings’ letter. Churchill, looking at the stout diplomat, saw the uncertainty in his round face. He looked at Dr. Freeling’s thin, brittle features and pushed the security folder aside.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  “We want you to help Durell find the girl.”

  “Will you hurt her?”

  “We can’t tell. Right now, she’s our only hope of quickly stopping the plague. It won’t be contained in the Hatashima area. There’s a problem with a shipment of fish from the cannery there. And there are thousands of tourists moving about the islands ever since the Osaka International Expo. There is more traveling than ever before. It’s too much to hope for, that quarantine measures at Hatashima will remain effective for more than a few more hours. We’re faced with a terrible disaster, Bill, whether it’s our fault or the Russians’ or the Chinese’. It doesn’t matter. Yoko Kamuru, at the moment, is a kind of Typhoid Mary in reverse.”

  “She carries a natural immunity?”

  “We know she was ill and escaped from Hatashima. We’ve traced her to the spa and to the railroad station.” Dr. Freeling looked at his watch. “We haven’t known where she is for the last hour. Durell hasn’t checked in yet either. If Yoko is still free—and we’re not sure of that, because a Colonel Cesar Skoll of the KGB Third Department, and a man named Po Ping Tao of the Black House Peacock Branch, have both been spotted by Major Yamatoya’s security police in the area. It’s a three-cornered race, not counting the Japanese agents under Yamatoya’s command. We want to find Yoko first. You’re the ace up our sleeve, Bill. You must help us.” “What will you do with Yoko when you get her?”

  “We’ll need the antibodies in her blood to develop an injection serum to halt the spread of the disease. It’s urgent. Whatever it is—we’re still calling it Pearl Q, since the symptoms are similar, unfortunately—the victims live usually less than twenty-four hours. This virus has an unusual virulence. We’ve received word that the symptoms are high fever, pneumonialike infection of lung and heart, severe mouth ulcers, and extraordinary kidney damage. I have a medical team all set to go to work on Yoko, when we find her.”

  “What you do to her might kill her,” Bill said flatly.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “You’d sacrifice her life, if necessary?”

  “Yes, we would. To save millions, perhaps.”

  “And it’s all guesswork on your part?”

  “An intelligent estimate, but—yes, guesswork. Hopeful assumptions, let us say. Where can we find her, Bill?”

  Churchill frowned. “I don’t know. I can’t really tell where she might go, or what she might do. She’s a very serene person, as I’ve known her. She lives in a quiet world of beauty, of her work, of art. I’ve never known her under stress. I can’t say what she might do.”

  He stood up, and Freeling said, “What are you thinking about?”

  “The places I’ve taken her. Her favorite places.”

  “Name them.”

  “I want to think about it,” Churchill said. “She’s very precious to me.”

  “Would you give up your own life, if you had to, in this matter?”

  “I think I would. That would be my choice. But I can’t make such a decision for Yoko.”

  “The choice may be made for you,” Dr. Freeling warned.

  “How?”

  “If the Russian, Skoll, or the Chinese, Po Ping Tao, pick you up in connection with their hunt for the girl, they won’t be particularly gentle in questioning you as to her possible whereabouts. They won’t hesitate to torture and kill you, if necessary.”

  “That’s a chance I’ll have to take,” Bill said, “I still want to think about it.”

  Dr. Freeling looked at his watch.

  “Don’t take too long about it,” he said.

  15

  DURELL stood in the center of the disarranged room, at the Kokusai Ohnaya Inn above Hatashima, and listened to the distant chattering of the sweeper-women, like the faraway cackling of old crows. His face was a mask of anger. He seemed bigger and taller as he stood motionless amid the wreckage of the Japanese furniture. Two of the wall screens to the bedroom had been smashed and torn. A low table in the center of the room was crushed, as if someone heavy had fallen on it. Finally, he walked to the open door at the rear and touched a dark stain on the redwood. It was blood. Almost hardened, but not quite. He looked at the broken window and his blue eyes turned very dark. He sniffed the air, walked into the bedroom, flipped aside the closet screen. It was empty. He searched the entire suite. Nothing. He went through the wreckage in the living room swiftly, expertly. Nothing. Just the silence,

  the smashed window, and the broken furniture spoke to him, but he couldn’t quite make out the message.

  “Sam?” Liz Pruett asked.

  “She was here, certainly.”

  “Do you think she came looking for Bill?”

  “I suppose so. She was taken, though. Either by Po Ping Tao, or our friend, Colonel Skoll.”

  Liz Pruett said, “Why not Major Yamatoya’s men?”

  “I doubt if she would have fought so hard against the Japanese police.”

  They had trailed the girl from Fuyakuro’s small railroad station, down the coast, then had found the local taxi driver back at the depot beyond the Kokusai Inn. It hadn’t been too difficult, so far. A miasma of panic was slowly spreading through the area as rumors about Hatashima grew and multiplied. A porter at the Fuyakuro railroad station had remembered Yoko simply because she had boarded the local going back toward Hatashima, when everyone else was clamoring for tickets to travel the other way.

  They
had been only two hours behind her.

  Durell looked at the telephone, which was off the hook, and nodded to Liz as she asked to go out. The operator took ten minutes to verify that Yoko had made several calls to Tokyo from this room.

  “Just to Tokyo? No others?”

  “No, sir. The management requests to ask, sir, who will pay for these charges?”

  “You’re sure she made no calls to other areas?”

  “Quite sure, sir. I must ask you—”

  Durell hung up. Down in the courtyard of the inn, Liz Pruett was talking to a male gardener in a white happi coat. The man was pointing toward the wooded mountain slope above the spa. A waterfall gleamed up there among the russet leaves, beside a rustic path and two romantic little bridges of red lacquered wood. Durell went down the back stairway to join Liz and the gardener. Liz allowed her prim face to look pleased.

  “Sam, she got away from them.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “This gardener says he saw her running away up the path into the woods up there.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “That’s what this man says.”

  “No one followed her?”

  The man in the happi coat bobbed his shaved head and grinned and pointed again. His Japanese dialect came too fast for Durell to grasp, but Liz understood him with apparent ease.

  “Two Chinese, he says. They followed her a few minutes later. Yoko was running. He says she broke a window and came out on the balcony and down the steps. The men were in a hurry too, he says.”

  “When did he see all this?” Durell asked.

  “Less than an hour ago.”

  “None of them came back?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s go. We’re getting closer.”

  They followed the mountain trail for twenty minutes. There was no way to get off it, since it hugged the face of a sheer cliff on one side and twisted along a drop into a ravine on the other. White water tumbled and roared down into the sea at Hatashima. The trail was deserted. Ordinarily, there would be several strolling couples, lovers, in evidence. But they met no one on the occasional bridges over the stream. Now and then they glimpsed the seacoast and the plague-ridden fishing village far below. The barbed wire that enclosed the quarantine area was plain to see from up here. In the noonday glare the islands offshore rode like dark blossoms on the tranquil ocean. Durell did not spare Liz on their rapid upward climb, but she did not complain.