Black Wind

by F. Paul Wilson

  After weeks of arguing and cajoling, they finally prevailed upon their superiors to make a try at picking him up at the designated spot. Meiko convinced them to let her go, arguing that a sampan had a better chance of slipping past the American shore patrols if it was piloted by a woman rather than a man.

  And so here she was. Naval Intelligence had used one of its last remaining reconnaissance subs to bring her to the eastern edge of the Philippine Sea, off Saipan. They had surfaced before dawn this morning, freed the inverted sampan from its lashings on the afterdeck, set up the mast, and set her to sail in the dark. She had food and water for a few days, and a compass and sextant hidden away in the prow. After she picked up Matsuo off the north end of Tinian, they would sail to a specific latitude and longitude where the sub would meet them.

  Meiko saw a patrol boat speeding along outside the reef line. She continued her tack and hoped it would hold its own course.

  It didn't. It swung toward her and picked up speed. Meiko closed her eyes and wished it away, but when she opened them again the boat was closer. It pulled alongside and a sailor signaled to her that she was going to be boarded. She smiled and nodded as she angled the sampan into the wind, but her insides were knotted up tight.

  "We lookee see, lady," said one of the sailors in pidgin English as he stepped into her boat. "No hurtee. Just lookee see."

  Meiko kept smiling and nodding. "Yes-yes. Lookee-see okay."

  "Fishy-fish?" another American said from the boat. He looked like some sort of officer. "Where fish?"

  "Just sail," Meiko said.

  That did not seem to sit well with the officer. She should have foreseen this. She cursed herself for not thinking to bring along some fresh fish to show.

  "Oh-ho!" said the sailor on her ship. He was reaching into the prow. "What have we here?" He brought out the compass and sextant and held them up. "Not your usual sampan gear."

  The officer on the patrol boat drew his pistol but didn't point it at her.

  "Mine! Mine!" Meiko said, trying to hide her panic. "To sail far!"

  He shook his head. "I don't buy that, lady. Not one bit."

  They took her on board the patrol boat and towed her sampan into the harbor. She was taken to a Quonset hut and left in a hot, stuffy, bare room furnished only with a battered table and two chairs, where she waited all day. They fed her lunch, then dinner. They let her use the bathroom down the hall. At times she dozed in the chair, resting her head in her arms on the table. Darkness fell and they lit the single bulb hanging over the table, yet still she remained confined, alone.

  What were they doing? Were they going to hold her forever? She had to get to Tinian to meet Matsuo. They had to let her go.

  Then the door opened and she heard a male voice in the hall. It sounded like the young officer from the patrol boat.

  "—all we've got on her. The instruments are Japanese make, but that doesn't mean anything. This island has been in Nip hands forever. Everything left over is Japanese make. We didn't find anything else worth mentioning on her boat."

  "You think there's nothing to her, then?" said another voice. It sounded thick, tired.

  "I don't know what to think. Your group ordered the extra patrols. You wanted a search of every single boat we found and you wanted to question anyone the least bit suspicious. I'm just following orders."

  "So you are. Wait out here. I should be through in a couple of minutes."

  An officer entered and closed the door behind him. He was thin, sallow-complected, with loose bags under his tired eyes. He looked bored. But that boredom vanished when he saw Meiko. He stood statue-still in the center of the room and stared at her with wide blue eyes. Meiko wanted to cry out with anguish as she recognized him.

  It was Frank.

  TINIAN

  Matsuo had spent the day in a state of intense agitation, expecting the Americans to come storming out from the island any minute to search the Indianapolis for the missing U-235. But the harbor remained peaceful and quiet as the cruiser refueled through the underwater pipeline from the tank field at the north end. Around dark, when the refueling was complete, Matsuo knew it was time to leave.

  He sneaked forward to the anchor chain locker where he had hidden the inner cylinder of uranium. As he held it in his hands, he wondered, Can I do this? Can I possibly succeed? The odds against him were astronomical, yet the one thing that kept him going was the knowledge that, after what he had seen in the New Mexico desert ten days ago, nothing he did could possibly worsen the fate the Americans had planned for his country.

  He tied the cylinder to his back with strips of sheet he had torn from his bed, then slipped through the anchor port and shimmied down the chain. The water was warm as he slipped into it and he began a silent breaststroke toward Tinian.

  He smiled to himself. Mariano Cruz had jumped ship and disappeared. Matsuo Okumo would emerge onshore with the soul of an atomic bomb strapped to his back.

  Soon, if luck and all the gods and all his ancestors were with him, he might be able to cut a bargain with the armed forces of the United States of America.

  SAIPAN

  It seemed to take forever to find my voice.

  Meiko… really Meiko, sitting on the other side of the table, looking like she hadn't aged a day since I'd last seen her. She looked as shocked to see me as I her. I managed to make it to a chair and sit across from her. I was shaking like a guy with malaria. Somehow I got a cigarette between my lips and lit it.

  "My God, what are you doing here?" I said when I could speak.

  She seemed to find her own voice with equal difficulty. "I did not intend to be here and I don't wish to be here. Beyond that, I can say no more." She looked at me with those eyes, those soft, brown, almond-shaped eyes. "Have you been sick, Frank? You don't look well."

  Christ, I needed a drink.

  If I hadn't known better, I would have thought she was genuinely concerned.

  "Oh, I'm doing just fine," I said, letting just a tiny fraction of the pain and grief and bitterness seep through.

  I wanted to scream, to get up and throw my chair through the window, to take her by the throat and throttle her until her face turned blue. But I sat there and kept my voice calm.

  "I'm eating well, getting plenty of exercise, and at night, if I'm restless, I lull myself to sleep with thoughts of all the thousands of men my wife helped kill at Pearl Harbor a few years ago."

  She seemed to cave in at that. I watched her composure crumble as tears rolled down her cheeks.

  "Oh, Frank! I'm so sorry for that. But you—"

  She didn't fool me. "Can it! What're you doing here, Meiko? Working on another sneaky way to kill a few more of us? Aren't you satisfied with your score from Pearl?"

  Her face suddenly hardened. "And aren't you satisfied with the women and children you incinerated in Tokyo last March? Must you go from city to city slaughtering more and more?"

  That hit home. I had talked to a few of the men who'd been on the March 9 run. They told me they could smell the burning human flesh all the way up in their B-29s, thousands of feet over Tokyo. It got so bad some of them puked in the planes.

  But I wasn't going to let her sidetrack me like this. I'd had nothing to do with that, but she’d been directly involved against Pearl.

  "Lieutenant?" said a voice from the door as I was about to speak.

  I looked and saw Crowley, an ensign from communications poking his head through the door.

  "What?" I didn't want to be disturbed now.

  "Word's just come from Tinian. There's an emergency of some sort. They want all intelligence personnel over there on the double."

  "I'm busy now."

  "This is top priority. All intelligence. No exceptions. The shuttle leaves in twenty."

  "What sort of emergency?"

  "They wouldn't say. But it's a big one. Somebody's pretty shook up on Tinian." He smiled. "And Captain Abrams said to tell you that you're riding with him."

  Oh, God, I t
hought. It's a wilt.

  "When do we leave?"

  "Yesterday," he said, and was gone.

  Of all times to get called away. I wanted to wring the truth out of Meiko. If she were here on Saipan, I knew Matsuo could not be far away. And more than anything else in the world, I wanted to get my hands on Matsuo Okumo.

  But I had no choice. I was the Navy's greatest living authority on the wilts. After a long lull, they had started up again. Most of the recent wilts had been around Okinawa, but that didn't mean they couldn't return to the Marianas.

  Reluctantly, I gave Meiko over to the Marines for safekeeping until I got back, then headed for the helipad.

  "A wilt?" I whispered to Abrams when we were airborne in the chopper.

  He shook his head.

  "Then what's so big that the Tinian people can't handle it themselves?" I asked in a louder voice. The half dozen other intelligence officers aboard turned toward us.

  "Glad you asked." He pulled a sheet of paper from his breast pocket. "This was hand-delivered to me from Tinian Command half an hour ago."

  He paused to let the significance of that sink in. It wasn't lost on us: The matter was so sensitive that it wasn't going on the air in any shape or form. Tinian Command didn't even want the rest of the US forces to know it had trouble. I was beginning to get a sense of how big this really was.

  "What do they want?" someone said.

  Abrams scanned the paper. "They want us to find two things: a man and a fifteen-inch metal cylinder. Preferably both, but they'll take either."

  He went on to explain what he knew. The cylinder had been shipped to Tinian within another cylinder aboard the Indianapolis. It had been off-loaded this morning. Sometime tonight Tinian discovered that the inner cylinder was missing. By that time, the Indianapolis had set sail for Guam. A group from Tinian intelligence took a seaplane out to the cruiser and discovered that a galley helper who had been in the same room with the cylinder numerous times was missing. He was last seen on board in Tinian Town harbor. The Tinian intelligence group was still searching the Indianapolis but was pretty sure the galley helper had jumped ship at the harbor.

  "We have a photo of this guy?" I asked.

  Abrams shook his head. "No. All we know is that he's a bearded Filipino named Mariano Cruz."

  "What's in the cylinder?"

  "I don't know. They won't say."

  "Swell," someone said. "We'll be combing thirty square miles of tropical island in the dark looking for a thief with no face who's stolen something we're not allowed to know about. Good luck."

  I leaned back and thought about this. Something had clicked when Abrams said "Filipino." I thought of Meiko being found off Saipan in a boat with a compass and sextant hidden in the prow; I pictured Matsuo with a beard and maybe some darkening pigment on his face. I put the two together and realized that Matsuo had the balls for this kind of stunt.

  "He's not a Filipino," I said. "He's a Jap."

  They all stared at me.

  "You a psychic now, Slater?"

  I didn't want to let on that I actually knew the guy posing as Mariano Cruz. They might think it could influence my judgment, and I most definitely did not want to be taken out of this search.

  "Call it a hunch," I said. "Just remember what I said when we catch the guy."

  TINIAN

  Matsuo smiled at the sight of all those Americans running around in

  mad confusion. He crouched in the lush vegetation and watched through his field glasses from atop Mount Lasso. Not much of a mountain—less than six hundred feet high, he guessed—but it sat dead center on Tinian and gave him an excellent view of the island's activities. He had a clear view of the four parallel runways, each over a mile and a half long, that took up most of the north end of the island.

  And now they had finally discovered that the uranium projectile

  was missing. He had waited all day for that. If they had not found out on their own, he would have been forced to go down there in the morning and tell them himself.

  He had changed his plans. He could not meet his contact off the north end tonight. He had to go about this another way. With security in such a state of alarm now, he doubted he could escape the island anyway.

  He watched a helicopter land and disgorge half a dozen Navy officers. As they walked toward one of the buildings, Matsuo began to turn his attention elsewhere, then snapped back to the group. Something about the way one of them walked. He focused his field glasses on that particular officer—

  By all the gods, it was Frank—Frank Slater.

  Matsuo followed him until he disappeared behind the door of the Quonset hut. He smiled ruefully.

  So, old friend, our paths cross once more.

  Could all these crossings be pure coincidence? Matsuo sensed more strongly than ever the workings of unseen forces. Was some sort of destiny at work here, nudging him and Frank and perhaps even Meiko along convergent paths toward a common fate? He could only wait and see. Right now he welcomed Frank's presence. He owed him an apology. And he wanted to ask a question that had been nagging him since his last stay in San Francisco.

  He settled back and waited for Frank to emerge.

  It wasn't long.

  * * *

  I headed down Broadway past the central bomb dump.

  I usually liked Tinian. A unique place. Still plenty of jungle and even a few sugarcane fields left that hadn't been plowed under to make airstrips. For the most part, though, we had made it over completely since taking it from the Japanese. Whoever had been in charge of the design must have been a New Yorker—one with a sense of humor. He must have seen some resemblance between this oblong island and Manhattan, and he must have been homesick too, because the island now had Broadway, Eighth Avenue, and West End Avenue running north and south, streets numbered in sequence from 42nd to 125th running east and west, and even a Canal Street and Wall Street far below at the southern end.

  But tonight at 2:00 A.M. the humor palled. I was beat. Sailors, Air Force men, and marines—everybody who could be spared—was out beating the bushes all over the island. Even a few scientist types were roaming around with little boxes that clicked and buzzed and rattled. The louder the clicking, the more excited they got.

  I didn't understand it and I was too tired to try. I wanted to call it a night but knew I couldn't. Even though I didn't know exactly what I was looking for, I knew it was damned important. I hadn't realized just how important until we'd had our briefing on arrival. The Big Man himself, General Curtis LeMay, just promoted to Chief of Staff of Strategic Air Forces, had come over personally from his headquarters on Guam. A brigadier general named Groves, wearing the Army Corps of Engineers insignia, had done most of the talking, all about how important this mysterious cylinder was to the war effort, how many thousands of American lives it would save, but it was LeMay's presence that had really lent the briefing weight.

  This was Big.

  I needed a drink and a bed. I had no hope of getting the latter but I was looking for Abrams to see if maybe we could do something about the former.

  I was walking south along a relatively deserted stretch near the foot of Mount Lasso's dark rise when I heard a rustle in the bushes to my left. Suddenly someone was walking beside me. I glanced up and knew him instantly.

  Without thought, without the slightest hesitation, I launched myself at Matsuo's throat. All I could see was the smoke, the flames, the diving planes, the floating bodies in the burning water at Pearl. Their blood was on his hands. I wanted his on mine. A .45 automatic sat forgotten in a holster on my belt. I flailed at him madly, wildly. Hoarse screeches rasped in my throat as I pounded my fists against him.

  The pummeling backed him into the brush. I followed, throwing lefts and rights and even kicking him when I had the chance. He partially deflected some of my more vicious blows, but he allowed most of them to land. I began to realize that he could defend himself far better than he was, that he was taking the punishment willingly, as if
he thought he deserved it. As if he wanted it.

  That stopped me cold.

  We were off Broadway now, in the foliage. I couldn't see Matsuo's face. He was just a darker shadow within other shadows. I was breathing like a guy who had just run the Boston Marathon.

  "Hello, Frank," he said in his perfect English. "I'm sorry about what I did to your arm. That was unforgivable."

  I wanted to kill him. I started for him again but he shoved me back. Easily.

  "Tell me something," he said. "When did you break our diplomatic code?"

  "None of your fucking business."

  "What can it matter now? It's of no strategic importance. We don't use that code anymore."

  "Then why the hell do you want to know?"

  "Because if the answer falls after a certain date, I'll invite you to beat me within an inch of my life. If it falls before that date, I won't let you lay a hand on me."

  I wondered what he was getting at. Then I remembered what Sam Knapp had told me on Balajuro on the last day of his life.

  "Nineteen forty," I told him. "Sometime in the late summer or early fall."

  I heard a sharp intake of breath. "You're absolutely sure?"

  "Of course. We had machines that could decipher Purple—that's what we called it—faster than your own people could."

  After a moment of silence, Matsuo spoke. His voice was strained. "If that is the case, then don't you dare raise your hand against me again. If you do, I will break your arm." I could tell he meant it. "And don't you ever call the Pearl Harbor raid a ‘sneak attack' in my presence! Ever."

  "Now just a goddamn minute—" I began, but he cut me off with a voice like ice.

  "The first thirteen segments of the Fourteen Part Message were transmitted to our Washington Embassy more than fifteen hours before our first plane appeared over Oahu. They left little doubt that we were breaking off diplomatic relations. The final part, containing the formal break, arrived more than six hours before the attack."