Tengu

by Graham Masterton

  Yoshino climbed into the van and started the engine. Lying on his side by the road, Commander Ouvarov shouted, “No! Don’t leave me!” But Yoshino had no intention of leaving him. Instead, carefully watching Commander Ouvarov in his side mirror, he shifted the van into reverse and began to creep back toward him, until Commander Ouvarov could feel the hot gasoline breath of the exhaust on his neck, and smell the oil and rubber and hydraulic fluid.

  With all the precision of an expert driver, Yoshino backed the van up until its rear tire was resting against the side of Commander Ouvarov’s head. Commander Ouvarov could feel the wheel pinching his hair, and he wildly tried to heave himself out of its way. But his paralysis was complete. His brain thought heave, and nothing happened. His arms remained tangled side by side on the road; his legs seemed to have disappeared altogether. The only feeling he had left was in his face and his head, resting against the gritty pavement.

  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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When 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.

  Mr. Esmeralda asked, “You have worked out a way for the Tengu to break in?”

  Kappa’s mask nodded on his shrunken shoulders. “The Tengu will walk straight through the perimeter fence, across the main yard, and break down the doors that lead into the observation room. It is possible that he may be seen by security guards, and it is possible that he may be shot several times. But Doctor Gempaku has promised me that the Tengu he is creating now is his most powerful so far. Nothing short of utter destruction will be able to stop him; a few bullets won’t even make him flinch.” Mr. Esmeralda said nothing, but lowered his eyes. Kappa went on,

  “The Tengu will start the fusion process. He has been trained how to do it. At the critical moment, he will short-circuit the power supply by ripping out the main control cables–here, and here–and joining them together with his bare hands. The fusion reactor will go into wild imbalance, and within thirty seconds it will explode.”

  Mr. Esmeralda took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead. It was infernally hot and rancid inside this room; and his equilibrium wasn’t helped by the fact that he was so hungry and that Kappa was so repulsive to look at. Neither was he consoled by the thought that Kappa’s wild and malevolent scheme to blow up a nuclear-power station was only two days away, and very real. When he had first met Kappa in Japan, all that time ago, it had seemed like a joke; at the very worst, a nuclear scare like Three Mile Island, with hardly any real damage to be done to anyone. But here, today, Kappa was talking about blowing up Three Arch Bay the day after tomorrow, in a 150-megaton nuclear blast, seven thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima. It was absurd, and unimaginable. He couldn’t even think what a 150-megaton blast could possibly look like, or sound like, or do. Yet Kappa fully intended to set one off: not just once, but over and over again.

  “I gather you’re leaving Los Angeles, then,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “You were
afflicted by one nuclear blast; I’m sure you wouldn’t want to go through another.”

  “I want you to rent me a private boat,” said Kappa. “It should be comfortable, well appointed. I will take the minimum of crew with me and sail northward to San Francisco, in order that I may witness the devastation from a safe distance.”

  “What time are you planning on letting the Tengu loose?”

  “At nine o’clock in the evening, the day after tomorrow. It will hinder rescue services even more if it is dark.”

  “When will you pay me the money that you promised me?”

  Kappa was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Do you think I should pay you at all?”

  ‘‘You should, unless you want me to call a SWAT squad the moment I walk out of the door.”

  “You are trying to say that I must either pay you or kill you?”

  Mr. Esmeralda took a deep breath. “You could put it like that, if you so wish. But, if nothing else, I have always taken you to be a man of your word.”

  ‘‘Very well,’’ said Kappa. “You will be paid. All the remaining money that I agree to pay you will be credited to your bank account by tomorrow morning. But I expect you to remain in Los Angeles until the Day of Fate to make sure that the Tengu goes and that all possible arrangements for the destruction of the reactor have been completed. If I were you, I would arrange for a private plane to fly you out of Los Angeles as soon as the mission begins. You can fly far enough and fast enough in a single hour to avoid the main effects of the blast.”

  “I suppose there is some comfort in that.”

  Kappa said, “You have no word of Sennett yet?”

  “The boy is still being held at Pacoima Ranch. But, no, his fahter hasn’t responded yet.”

  “Gerard Crowley is supposed to be in charge of capturing Sennett, is he not?”

  Mr. Esmeralda nodded. “He would have succeeded immediately if Sennett had been at home.